> now that fentanyl, meth, and heroin are legal

Do you seriously think that's true?

What's an MTA Fed?

Maybe try raising the issue with your neighborhood’s community board. They can sometime be pretty effective at this sort of thing.

10/10! There were a couple I had to take educated guesses on.

Paris still has multiple lines where you have to manually open the train door at stations. But no, outdated tech is a uniquely American issue, apparently.

I'm sorry that us ignorant Americans have such low standards compared to you enlightened Europeans.

Ehh, I wouldn't say that London's is objectively better. It's cleaner, sure. But it doesn't run overnight, and is more expensive (sometimes substantially so) for all but the shortest trips.

Yeah, it's easy to take for granted (particularly when there's a delay, or someone's acting annoyingly on the subway, or something like that) but it really is one of the great things about living here.

Airbnbs of a month or more are permitted in NYC. This law prohibits only short-term rentals of less than a month. So it seems like it satisfies your concerns.

So this was PATH, not the MTA?

If this was the MTA, the current status is that fare evasion citations are treated as administrative violations, sort of like a traffic ticket. They don't go on a criminal record. But I don't know for sure that the same is true with respect to PATH; for example it might depend on whether it was NYPD or Port Authority Police who issued the ticket.

Unfortunately I don't think that's enough time to leave the airport. It's about an hour from JFK to Manhattan, so leaving enough time to responsibly make sure you're back at the airport for an international flight would leave very, very little time to do anything.

I guess you could go somewhere closer to the airport, like Rockaway Beach, but this time of year, when it's cold and dark by 5 p.m., that doesn't sound very appealing.

Cost of living is notoriously high here, and is currently exacerbated by inflation, though that's true everywhere. Hopefully your employer is paying you commensurately with cost of living; if not, ask them to.

Renting can be fine, or not. Finding an apartment is painful, but it's very possible to find one you can be happy in long-term. And a nice thing about renting is that if you do end up in a bad spot, you're not locked in there.

Eating is a good thing if you wish to live. I highly recommend it. There are lots of good places here for that.

"critical opinions on the state of NY itself." I don't quite know what you mean by this, but if you're referring to crime, well, crime is up a bit recently, as it is everywhere. But it's not nearly as bad as you've probably heard from the media, which has a vested interest in making crime sound worse than it is, because ratings/sales. This is still a great place to live. It's not perfect for everybody, and maybe you'll find that it's not right for you, which is fine, but literally millions of people happily live here. If you give it a fair shot, rather than starting off with "tell me what sucks about NYC," you might really like it here also.

> but the people who listen to him will.

They already are.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/banner-kanye-right-los-angeles-freeway-antisemtic-group-rcna53653

Make your voice heard in the Democratic primaries. There's a wide diversity of opinion within the Democratic party on this issue, and there will be candidates down to the most local elected offices who agree with you on it. They'll move in the direction you want on crime, without handing the state over to the racists/homophobes/etc.

Just for some additional perspective on what a governor can do even without a friendly legislature, the far-right governor of Virginia recently issued new directives to schools mandating the persecution of transgender students. This was done without legislative approval, because he claims that he doesn't need it to set that sort of policy; the courts will ultimately decide. This is the sort of thing that Zeldin will do if he's given the power to. He's not going to fire DA Bragg then just sit around for four years. He's going to use whatever power he can to implement his far-right agenda.

And there are still a lot of things a governor can do on their own. Executive orders, funding decisions, political appointments... what happens when he declares that abortion is a public health emergency, or that he's defunding the NYC school system because they teach tolerance of gay people, or that he's dismissing all Democratic district attorneys statewide? Do you think it'd be above a Trump cultist to declare that any future elections that don't go the way he wants were fraudulent and must be tossed out? As governor, he could at least try.

Like I said, it's shortsighted to think that you can send a message by voting for Zeldin without serious collateral consequences. There are better paths to what you want to accomplish.

> He would win only because of crime and declining QOL.

Do you think he would constrain his governance of the state to those areas? I don't. I think he'd do whatever he could to persecute minorities, destroy people's rights, and undermine future elections.

I think the Democrats have already realized that, based on how close the race is. And I think that four years of a Trump-sycophant governor would be way, way too big a price to pay to hammer that point home just a little harder.

Make this a message in the next Democratic primaries if you want (I think a lot of people will do just that), but I think it's incredibly short-sighted to be willing to turn the state over to a far-right extremist whose party is actually a genuine threat to the future of American democracy.

It's more shitposting than sarcasm. That poster has a long and prolific history of it.

I get why it's tough, when this sub has long been a target of brigading by people who have no connection to NYC but have tied the validity of their political views to shitting on us. The mods seem to be outnumbered, particularly around election season. I agree, it sucks, but I'm not sure I blame the mods, I blame the bad-faith commenters.

Also worth noting, this particular thread probably should have been deleted regardless. It was a single person's personal complaint, which is explicitly against the sub rules. If those were allowed, and every time a person wanted to vent about crime, or rent prices, or whatever else it would stay up, this sub would be utterly unusable. There should be a higher burden for the removal of threads about specific news articles or things like that, but personal complaint threads really don't do much to improve the conversation here.

To be fair, this sub can't seem to have a good-faith conversation on these topics. Within minutes, it's shitposts everywhere. There are just too many bad-faith posters trying to disrupt reasonable discussions.

You definitely misunderstood something. They did not attempt to overcharge you. You either managed to exit without paying the Airtrain fare, or paid it without realizing (did you swipe your Metrocard at any point)?

Newark’s isn’t free either. It’s built into the price of a NJ Transit train ticket. If you take the NJ Transit train to that station, there’s a surcharge you pay when buying the train ticket.

Okay, I see what’s going on here. The way the Airtrain is set up, you’re supposed to pay when you exit, not when you enter. So you’re supposed to pay $8 for the Airtrain ride, plus the $2.75 for the subway. If you didn’t pay the $8, by leaving through an emergency gate or something like that, you actually (unintentionally) scammed them, not the other way around.

The Airtrain shuttle? That’s definitely not free. It’s $8. And I’m quite sure that the MTA hasn’t decided to close subway entrances to trick people into entering the Airtrain instead (if for no other reason than that that fare goes to the Port Authority, not the MTA).

Again, I think you just messed something up. It’s understandable, it’s a confusing setup they have there.

I don't think it does? I was there fairly recently, and I recall that the layout was fairly confusing. I think there were two sets of exits from the Airtrain area into the subway fare zone, one that cost $10.75 to swipe, and one that had a set of turnstiles for $8.00, then an exit, then separate $2.75 turnstiles (so that you could use a monthly/weekly Metrocard if you had one). It was somewhat confusing, and I wouldn't blame you if you went the wrong way, but I suspect that's what happened.