The NYC Pride March was yesterday. It’s a big deal in New York and even stuffy bureaucracies like the MTA join in, with seriously amusing subway Service Notifications
Reminder: It’s 2018
Travel Alternative: Sashay away
https://twitter.com/carrasquillo784/status/1010905832236699648
The answer is obviously yes. Kim Thong Un? Only the NY Post…
I know most Uber drivers use a different maps app than the official Uber app, but this amuses me no end. My daughter regularly has to take an Uber home after late volleyball practice. I have the Uber family plan, so I get notifications for her rides, which I really like. But invariably, about halfway through the ride I get a message that her ride is taking longer than expected.
If I check the app I usually see something like this:
Yes, that would be longer than expected. Brooklyn traffic can be bad, but I promise you that over two hours from that spot is inconceivable. 15 – 20 minutes is normal. And it always fixes itself after 5 minutes or so.
But honestly.
While I’m obviously biased, the Brooklyn Bridge is the coolest bridge in the world and the story of its construction is fascinating. Washington Roebling fell ill from what was then called Caisson Disease but is now simply referred to as the bends, and his wife took over. In 1883. Not sure about the rooster…
https://twitter.com/NYHistory/status/999758505727885312
https://twitter.com/DUMBOBID/status/999667523074260992
https://twitter.com/surfseek/status/997896288636108805
https://twitter.com/HISTORY/status/999754644564971522
If you’ve scrolled this far, I’ll say this is one of my favorite pictures also…
My flight to Chicago yesterday was cancelled due to the storms passing through, but I feel lucky compared to folks stuck in Grand Central Station:
https://twitter.com/barb_leung/status/996500148464300033
But storms do have their beauty…
This is in Dumbo. The Instagram account is great. I recognized a lot of the pictures, but there were tons of places I didn’t know (Brooklyn being ginormous). Like this shot in Williamsburg…
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhCNfaVn87g/?taken-by=brooklynbybike
I recognize this, but not the vantage point. It’s right by my office…
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgNk0K_j09J/?taken-by=brooklynbybike
My youngest daughter has an early school bus and my older daughter has a 7:38 bus. So every morning I get my youngest to her bus first and then I take my oldest to her bus stop (on the corner) and walk to work. So my schedule is quite regular. I can walk to work different ways, but I always start by walking two blocks down Atlantic Avenue. So that’s about 7:38 – 7:42 every day.
Pretty much every morning, three things happen in those two blocks.
After about a half a block, I hear little kid style running footsteps. A small girl passes me sprinting. I hear more footsteps and her slightly older brother passes me. She’s always first so I’m thinking he gives her a head start. The first time it happened I instinctively turned around to make sure a parent was watching, but now I know their mom is right behind. And they always wait at the corner before turning right.
Then a short boy walks past me in the opposite direction. I originally thought he was about 12, but he’s actually heading to my daughter’s bus stop and must be 15 because they are in the same grade. He’s always late. The bus is usually a little late too, but occasionally the bus has left. But since it comes in his direction he flags it down and the driver is nice and stops for him. He plays hockey and is occasionally carrying a bag of hockey equipment as big as he is.
In the second block a guy walks past me walking his short stocky dog. It’s a cute dog with a bandana around his neck. He must walk his dog at exactly the same time, we literally pass each around the same spot on the block every morning. It’s one of those things where we’ve started doing the silent head nod acknowledgment, even though we’ve never spoken and probably never will.
Mornings in Brooklyn…
WeWork is now the second biggest private office tenant in NYC, second to only JPMorgan Chase. It could easily be #1 by the end of 2018. New York makes up 1/5 of WeWork’s 13 million square feet of global real estate.
I work in the lowest yellow dot on the map, previously working at the one right above it. They simply do a very nice job of providing shared office space. I can’t imaging moving.
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I’ve been enjoying the relatively new podcast by Preet Bharara. Most people probably don’t know who he is, but he’s the former federal prosecutor from NY’s southern district (i.e. NYC) who was fired by Trump a while back. He’s very smart, level and reasoned, and he gets smart interesting guests.
I would recommend all of the episodes, but the most recent with the NYPD police commissioner was very interesting. It’s obvious from the interview that Preet as a prosecutor has worked with the NYPD and has a ton of respect for them. Commissioner O’Neill comes across as a very smart and savvy commissioner.
https://twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/974412347078004736
One stat from the interview really leapt out at me. The NYPD has about 36,000 active cops. That’s not counting traffic enforcement, administrative, etc. These are active working cops. For many years the NYPD has been super stats oriented. It’s their whole CompStat program which they credit with the dramatic reduction in crime over the past 20 years. Whether that’s the primary cause is debatable, but it makes the NYPD a very data driven organization, and much of this data is public.
So given 36,000 cops in NYC, how many times in 2017 do you think there was an incident where a police officer fired a weapon in an adversarial situation? The “adversarial situation” caveat is meaningful because apparently there’s a fair number of animal attack and those are a different stat. They also track accidental discharge and suicides (the latter a small number, but not small enough).
So how many times in crazy NYC did the ginormous NYPD have an occasion to fire a gun against a criminal in 2017? Go ahead, guess.
23.
That’s it.
That’s down from 810 in 1971. Which I only know because the NYPD publishes all of this. Though that number includes animal attacks and other types, the data wasn’t broken down back then apparently. The 2017 numbers aren’t online yet, Commission O’Neill stated that number on the podcast, but it follows the trend, down from 37 in 2016.
Anyway, check out the podcast, Preet is very interesting.
Bret Stephens, the NY Times token conservative has a very good article about yesterday’s attack in NYC.
Few of us may go to church or own a gun, and hardly any of us voted for the president. But we are good friends to our neighbors, look out for their children and feel nothing but gratitude for the people who protect us. And we choose to live in a place that we know is a target for fanatics because fanatics will always target the things we prize most: openness, diversity, sky-high ambition and the belief that we are more than simply our racial or religious identities.
Something unreal, as people say, happened in my neighborhood on Tuesday. But we stayed real, and trick-or-treating proceeded on schedule.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 