I always understood the business reasons that brought about coordinated vulnerability disclosure & I've been forced to toe this line at employers, but I've always been firmly in the full disclosure camp. I am so ready for this.
In the 2010s it was so bad that I gave up on the subway and either walked, Ubered or took the bus everywhere.
When the MTA bus is better than the subway, things in NY are grim -- it was like the 80s & early 90s again.
The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up. So yeah, still a hard pass.
In the mid 2010s i had a reverse commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn and there was a few months where 3 days a week my full commute would take 2hr+ (midtown to sunset park) because the train just sat multiple times not moving. Especially on the bridge where it could be up to an hour just stopped.
The absolute worst time that I ever remember though was maybe in '89 or '90. The Lex-53rd st E/F station had a ton of ongoing construction and on weekends it was being used as a transfer station only that summer. All the staircases were closed and you could only get in/out via train -- this idea seems insane to me but that's NYC sometimes and especially in that era.
Anyway, my family and I were on a train passing through that station one Saturday or Sunday morning on the way to Queens and they made us exit the train inside the station as it was going out of service. Apparently a pipe had burst (I think?) and no trains were in service. The AC in the station was not working and it was maybe 90+ degrees underground. Plus water was leaking from everywhere. And there were hundreds of us trapped on a crowded, wet, dirty platform for like 4-6 hours while no trains were running and there was no way to get out.
Aside: that Belt Parkway story is why people from NY who live/work in Manhattan try to never fly out of JFK. That's the real solution. So much easier to get to EWR/LGA.
> The reliability has improved a bit, but the subway crime is also way, way up.
Eh, it’s all relative, I think you’re in less danger of experiencing issues on the subway than you are getting hit on the road. I take the subway all the time and have never had any problems.
Subway assaults went up 3x between 2009 and 2025 and violent crime in general in the subway has had nearly a 20% spike just in the first two months of this year alone. Assaults by repeat offenders are up 2x from 2019 to 2025.
I'll take a minor fender bender every now and again over someone hitting me in the head with a brick ever.
I can't believe the suggestion is that property damage and/or low-speed collisions would be preferable to being assaulted. And I've been tapped by cars and walked away from it several times. Plus the "well it never happened to me" is just survivorship bias. Over enough decades and enough rides something fucked up on the subway _will_ happen to you eventually.
> I'll take a minor fender bender every now and again over someone hitting me in the head with a brick ever
You're more than 7x more likely to die in a car in New York than on the subway. If you're the kind of idiot that voluntarily trespasses onto the tracks, you're 2x more likely.
In 2023, 112 motor-vehicle occupants died in New York [1] "97 people were fatally struck by subway trains" [2], nearly half (49%) of which are suicides and 33% of which are accidents, almost all of which involve voluntarily trespassing onto the tracks [3]. Five people were killed by assault [4].
In 2023 exactly two Uber passengers died in NYC. One from jumping out of their moving vehicle onto the LIE and the other from being rear-ended by a drag racer on the Whitestone Expressway.
The alternative to taking the subway for the vast majority of NYC residents is not driving to work.
And as an Uber passenger living in NYC I overwhelmingly spent my time on roads that were not highways.
I can't find exact taxi passenger deaths but between 2019 & 2023 there were 23 passenger fatalities across all rideshare services and taxis. At least one of those was a fatal drug overdose (2022).
> between 2019 & 2023 there were 23 passenger fatalities across all rideshare services and taxis
Which is way more than the total number of homicides on the subway system. All of this is before adjusting for trip frequency. (Uber and Lyft do about a fifth of the trips as the subway.)
I lived in New York for 10 years and go back frequently. I take Ubers and cabs (and Blade) all the time. It's convenient. And sometimes, yes, I just want a quiet space in which to relax. But pretending it's safer is simply untrue.
Wait we went from simple assault to comparing it just to homicides now? I just don't want to get attacked or slashed by somebody.
Okay you lived in NY for 10 years, I lived there for over 40. The subway is shit compared to where it was only a handful of years ago. In the last years that I was there, Uber was way safer.
Also I said "fatalities", which isn't just murder and isn't even necessarily a crime. There were 39 homicides in the subway[1] during that same period. So it's not less. But also those are murders whereas the 23 were mostly from accidents.
2009 was a historic low point for subway crimes. Only looking at relative numbers from then is misleading.
There were 573 assaults on the subway in 2024, up from something like 150 in 2009. There were something like 1.9 billion journeys taken that year. Avoiding the subway because of the 1 in 2,000,000 danger of assault is not rational.
Exaggerated paranoid thinking is indeed the thing that leads a lot of people to unnecessarily leave NYC.
573 _felony_ assaults. Misdemeanor assault is still a thing. That includes people fighting you with their fists or groping you.
Also anyone in NY with a functioning brain knows just how underreported subway crime is. You can either get where you're going and go about your day or end it by trying to find a cop and then trying to get them motivated to even take your report.
2009 being a low point for crime should just be normal. I lived through all the bad decades in NY and you're not there yet but certainly trending towards it.
I like how multiple years of "hey why does all of this fucked up shit keep happening to me?" is "exaggerated paranoid thinking". Truly stunning and brave. Being repeatedly victimized by random crime is just a mindset, bruh.
> you’re in less danger of experiencing issues on the subway than you are getting hit on the road
For what it's worth, I lived in New York for ten years and was in one car accident (cabbie, distracted by whatever phone all they're all constantly dialled into, blew through a stop sign) and zero even closer calls on the subway.
I used to do a few different versions of this for most of the 30+ years I lived in NY. I used to love walking all over manhattan alone late at night. I would do like 10 mile walks just for the heck of it with music going. Or I would hop on the bike and do similarly.
When there would be friends involved, we'd usually be at Chinatown Fair all night until close, then walk down to Elevated Acre and hang out there (this was pre-9/11) until 3 or 4, then walk our friends from Staten Island to the Ferry. If the mood was particularly good, we'd take the ferry with them and then ride it back and everyone go their separate ways.
There used to be houseboats around lower manhattan back then and it was a nice (albeit sketchy) walk from Chinatown down to the tip of the island. There was also pretty briefly this wild hole-in-the-wall DUMBO nightclub projecting porn on the walls that we would frequently stumble into on our way down there.
Things like that were honestly the best part about living in NY, but also it's long in the past.
Summer 2020 I was out there after creating as much shareholder value as I could at my then-WFH 9-5. First it was delivering postmates on rollerblades, then I did it on my bike (working better and better apps every time to offset the depreciation inherent to riding a bike), then I'd just do a 4 boro bike tour Brooklyn over the Pulaski bridge up to Astoria, get souvlaki, take the Triboro to the Bronx and then head to Manhattan on a different bridge every time (High Bridge is still my fave). Just putting up like 40–60 mile rides noodling around that town. There's no better way to see the city, and no better place to bop around on a bike, in my experience.
> The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.
Except it is both true AND it works. Keeping your foot down on who can produce weapons-grade fissile materials is working out pretty damn well so far.
And the Russo-Ukranian War is proving any idiot with a few rubles can cobble together incredibly efficient combat drones. We need to be probing the limits of that yesterday.
It can both feel bad and be the right thing to do because the alternatives are worse.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
nah, it loves to absorb water out of the ambient air.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
It's worse than that. Developers themselves are drunk. They'll be cut off from tools right when they no longer understand the underlying code they're responsible for.
We're already here even. I know of a company that was doubling their Codex spend and hitting the cap week over week and finally they had enough and stopped increasing. Then they maxed out on credits and had a week of no Codex. A large percentage of the engineers loudly refused to work for the rest of the week. They were managing the Codex managing the codebase and were totally incapable of dealing with its output without it.
It's one thing to subvert everything that your fanbase loves about a franchise, but if you don't give the audience any narrative payoff for doing so don't be surprised when they come to burn your house down.
I'm excited for INDX but going to wait a year or so.
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