Looks like your average Uber passenger and their typical respect for an overworked, underpaid driver. Who could have guessed that participating in predatory, union-busting capitalism would allow bad behavior to cross all racial lines? Nice job voting for Prop 22, California. Stay classy.

I mean, not really. The city was not in this to make a buck, and the medallion market was determined entirely by private owners. I blame the city for failing to regulate this better but that’s not a ‘pump and dump’ in the traditional terms at all. As for Uber and Lyft, yes, they failed completely to keep them in check.…

Yeah, although I think the analogy here would have to be some kind of asset that seems to always come up, and provides the illusion of safety, rather than necessarily some get-rich-quick scheme. These cabbies though they were buying into gold, or Manhattan real estate; something that had steadily climbed for decades…

Yeah, that comparison occurred to me while I was writing about it too. So, do you blame those borrowers back then? I think it’s a mixture. I tend to think the banks deserve more blame, and the funds all levered up on gambles they knew were too good to be true deserve the most blame.

Reading other articles; seems like they have been agreeing to reduce the debts if a lump sum of $20k is provided as initial remittance on the loan. From WSJ: “In many cases, Marblegate has reduced loans by $250,000 or more, the spokesman said. Typically, a medallion owner pays Marblegate a lump sum of about $20,000 to…

A decent analogy would be to truckers who wanted to become owner-operators, were promised that the value of their trucks would be relatively predictable over time, and that the demand for trucking would remain. Then, overnight, highways perish, there is no interstate travel, and everything is delivered by drone. Or…

I agree with you this article doesn’t go a very good job, and the proof that it does a bad job is that it’s leading to a response like this. That’s not to point fingers at you – it’s a natural response to the article, which makes this serious issue complicated.

This is a pretty unhelpful guide to a fairly complicated issue. I am mostly in agreement with you about the weakness of the city plan, but to simplify it so much and present it as a no-strings attached bailout to hedge funds, complete with some demonstrably untrue statements about the city (city officials are not…

Speaking as somebody who has been a card-carrying socialist at various points in my life, and who frequently sports a dreadful beard, you sound humorless.

This made me think of only one thing.

Sure – so I’d call them centrists and moderates. I know I’m being difficult, but there’s been this kind of ahistorical effort among many on the left (including many of my close friends) to conflate liberalism and neoliberalism, and to cast ‘liberalism’ as a necessarily centrist, even reactionary compromise effort at…

I think a more factual answer is that he was popular among centrists and moderates, including a firm base of support upstate. I know it’s in vogue to tar ‘liberals’ as some sort of Democrat-in-name-only, but electorally and ideologically it isn’t really true. Signed, a progressive liberal who voted against Cuomo in…

It’s a bold take from the Honda Fit community, I will say that. 

Fan of Japanese Breakfast myself (saw her in concert years ago), but why do I suspect we’re in this stage of the Jalop-under-new-bosses editorial experience:

Gotta get cold brew somewhere!

Haha, that’s a scene and a half. That’s phenomenal. Yeah, generally same experience here. The majority of cross-country trips don’t resemble the plot of Deliverance. I pulled into a mechanic out in Amarillo once (for some reason I always break down or run into trouble on the Texas/New Mexico border), and I got a whole…

Worth noting that there’s a whole coterie of firms that sue any major company after a large fall in their stock price. Seems like the Wall St. equivalent of ambulance chasers – you see this a lot in the tech and biotech fields, volatile companies that lose 20% of their value in a day. There’s a lawsuit out within a…

Yeah, this was my thinking too. Driving cross-country if you’re straight and white is...pretty fine, actually! Cause, you know, a lot of America is designed that way! And then it’s less nice if you’re not straight, less nice if you’re not white, and then you can rack up your combo score from there on it. So if you…

This comment checks out. I’m surprised at this article, because if you’re white and straight, driving cross-country should, basically, be a pleasure. It’s a world designed for you. It’s when you’re not, in any combination of ways not familiar to the prototypical jealous white American male, that it gets far, far…

In my experience nobody cares about your NY plates – too big of a state. However I wouldn’t hazard a Biden bumper sticker. I had a friend in Tennessee who was repeatedly run into the shoulder for his Obama sticker in 2008. NY plates + Tesla might get some attention.