# 15 Jun 2020, 09:50AM: Proposed New York City Budget:
This blog entry is time-sensitive and is meant for people who live in New York City and want to learn more about the city's budget, and maybe suggest changes. It's kind of quick - you'll be following some links if you're interested.
When I want to dig into NYC government info, I try to remember: these are old systems and there exist finding aids, news sources, etc. surrounding them. Gotham Gazette has a tag for news about the city budget; also check out City and State NY, The City, and City Limits (I use RSS feeds to subscribe).
The Mayor's Office of Management and Budget has a Frequently Asked Questions page. It's worth reading. Also dig around their publications page and read a description of what each publication is.
Every year, the mayor proposes a budget (here's this year's announcement), and the City Council negotiates with the mayor and then votes on it. They're supposed to get it all settled by June 5th because the new Fiscal Year starts on July 1st. Here's the 19-page slide check summarizing the proposed Fiscal Year 2021 budget. On June 7th, the mayor announced that there will be budget changes to shift funding from the NYPD to social services programs. As far as I can tell, that is not yet reflected in any concrete changes in the budget proposal; on June 12th, Gotham Gazette reported:
With three weeks to go before the budget for the next fiscal year is due, the City Council is putting pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to spell out planned cuts to city agencies to fill a $9 billion projected budget gap. But the administration missed a Monday deadline set by the Council to propose new cuts, balancing the budget in a way that reprioritizes social services and investment in youth and education.
Here is the OMB page listing all the detailed documents for "April 2020 Executive Budget, Fiscal Year 2021" (the budget proposal we're talking about). If you want to know more about the NYPD, the Budget Function Analysis Agency Summary and the Expense, Revenue, Contract Budget have mode details. You can also use the open data visualization tools to fairly quickly get some pie charts of agency spending.
I called my councilmember and a staffer called me back. One question I had: how come the Budget Function Analysis Agency Summary and the Expense, Revenue, Contract Budget seem to say the NYPD budget is in the $5.3-$5.9 billion range, but the numbers I see in the press say it's over $6 billion? Might be because pension obligations are accounted separately. Those pension obligations, as I understand it, are set in the negotiations with the police unions, and yearly budgets can't change them.* I haven't followed up on this yet.
If you want to share your thoughts on where your tax money goes in the next fiscal year, find your councilmember and call them or email them with a quick message. Tell them you're a constituent of theirs, tell them your name and ZIP code, and whether you support the proposed budget or you think it should be changed. If you agree with them, tell them that so they know they have support. The more distinct constituent voices they hear, the more they can operate accordingly.
* Police union contracts are a whole other matter and have a huge impact on policing. I searched around and looked at government employee union contracts in New York and couldn't find the current Police Benevolent Association contract -- because NYC's contract with PBA expired in August 2017 and they're currently in contract arbitration. Or they would be, except the pandemic has put arbitration hearings on hold. ("PBA President Patrick J. Lynch ... is opting for arbitration for the fifth time in seven contract rounds since he was first elected 21 years ago," notes The Chief-Leader, which is "a New York City-based weekly newspaper focused on municipal government and civil servants, as well as issues affecting New York State and Federal employees." Like I said, New York City is a big and old system; whatever you just got interested in, there's probably already a fairly established communications hub for it.)
# 15 Jun 2020, 04:17PM: Hosted Alternatives To Proprietary Monopolistic Services:
Videoconfencing:
Currently I use a mix of Jitsi, Whereby, Uberconference, Google Meet, Zoom, Signal, and probably something else I am forgetting. I aim to move as many of those as possible toward free services and away from proprietary ones.
Document editing and sharing:
I wrote to the tech-coop list talking about what I need in a Google Docs replacement, thus kicking off a thread where a few people recommended various NextCloud arrangements. I found out that a Dutch host named The Good Cloud is offering "its services, including the privacy-friendly Nextcloud Talk, free for 3 months for all companies, organizations, government institutions), schools and organizations."
Currently I use a mix of Etherpad, GitHub, Google Docs, GitLab, Dropbox Paper, HackMD, and probably three other things I'm forgetting. Again, I aim to move as many of those as possible toward free services and away from proprietary ones. At some point soon I should probably get a Nextcloud instance, either paying someone else (preferred) or doing it myself, and see how it does for this sort of thing.
(Followup to a related post in March.)
Edited the same day to add:
Oh yeah, another few things I had in my open tabs:
Sourcehut: "Git and Mercurial hosting, mailing lists, bug tracking, continuous integration, and more".
Several projects at switching.software.
Collective Tools is one of the co-ops offering Nextcloud hosting and support -- as well as Rocket.Chat and Deck (a kanban board application).
# 17 Jun 2020, 10:19AM: Gonna Be Vulnerable For A Sec:
I saw this tweet by Julia Evans, advertising the newest in her questions to help people learn things series:
questions about git branches https://questions.wizardzines.com/git-branches.html
and I was able to notice that my heart briefly sank. I bounced back, and clicked, and learned things, but let's go into why I had that momentary reaction. What the voice of "oh no" was saying, if I listened.
- Oh no, a thing to do. A thing I am expected to do, another task, I have so much I need to do. But I should do this too. Because I want to learn everything and knowing that there are things I don't know hurts. Especially about a complicated tool like git that I use every day and that I need to be able to help other people use, that I could use better, which would be so useful.
- Oh no, another list of things to memorize, of ways I will feel bad when I don't know things that I should know already.
- Dammit, Julia's put out ANOTHER great thing, she's pulling ahead, I have been so delayed in the things I want to make and publish, I am jealous.
It is so easy for me to call these counterproductive feelings, or to say "ok well I will sit with those for a microsecond and then Go Learn To Be Better and have More Useful reactions I will replace those with instead!!" but right now I actually just want to acknowledge this glimpse into the muck in my own head. (And I know Julia well enough to trust that she won't make my spurt of jealousy her own problem. It's on me and she and I both know that.)
Filed under:
Introspection
# 21 Jun 2020, 07:58AM: Quick Book Recommendations:
A few timely book recommendations.
- To repeat my 2013 review of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson: SO GOOD. READ THIS. Ta-Nehisi Coates agrees with me. Want to understand the US in the twentieth century? Want to think in real terms about exit, voice, and loyalty? Read Wilkerson's narrative history of black people who decided to stop putting up with Jim Crow and escaped from the US South (sometimes in the face of local sheriffs ripping up train tickets). Riveting, thought-provoking, and disquieting in the best way. My only nit to pick: I think if her editor had cut repetitions of things she's already told the reader, she coulda cut about 15 of the 500+ pages. But that's really minor, and as a scifi reader I'm accustomed to absorbing world-building at perhaps a higher clip than expected.
- To quote from my 2018 review of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press): it is simply excellent. Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's her Twitter.
It's a book that makes scholarship accessible to a non-academic reader. It's a book that uses the author's experiences -- as a student, as an admissions sales rep, as a teacher, as a researcher, as a black woman, as a friend and daughter -- to vividly illustrate and bring the reader into theoretical understandings of systems, policy, and economic forces. It's sociology, it's investigative journalism, it's memoir, it's a lens on something I see every day (those subway/bus ads for education). It's witty and no-nonsense.
- And: I recommend Robin Einhorn's 2006 book American Taxation, American Slavery (University of Chicago Press) on the effect of slaveowners' tax avoidance on the structure of the US Constitution and government. It's brainbending and dense and academic and full of astonishing anecdotes. Einhorn discusses how:
- the Southern colonies had much less competent tax-collection infrastructure than the Northern colonies did, partly because going into someone's home to count and assess their slaves was seen as much more invasive than walking on or near someone's property to assess their real estate
- damaging "taxation=slavery" rhetoric (which continues through today) was projection by slaveowners
- the negotiations around protections for white supremacy affected national policy from the late 1700s through the early 1900s
I took a great class with the author, Robin Einhorn, when I was in undergrad, and I think not nearly enough people know of her work. Here's an special essay by Dr. Einhorn, "Tax Aversion and the Legacy of Slavery". This book also gave me more preparation to get a lot out of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.
Wilkerson and McMillan Cottom are black; Einhorn is white.
Dreamwidth's "Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge" community crowdsources reviews of books by people of color, in case you want to diversify your reading along that dimension.
Filed under:
Reading Taxes
# 22 Jun 2020, 12:29PM: Streamable For A Limited Time:
A couple of stories about black women's lives. One fictional but based on fact, and one nonfiction.
Right now, till 7pm British time on Thursday June 25th, you can watch the drama Small Island on YouTube, thanks to the UK's National Theatre.
It's about Jamaica and the UK, about a particular historical set of migrants who moved from Jamaica to England starting in 1948 (are you "immigrating" if you are a British citizen, moving from a Crown colony to the empire's headquarters? what does that say about "immigrant" as a legal or social label?), about pride and discrimination and how you keep going in bad circumstances. I absolutely loved Hortense, one of the main characters, and the staging is cool. And here's the learning resource guide with two fascinating essays and a helpful timeline. One of the essays is by Andrea Levy, who wrote the book that the play's based on, and who based Hortense on her own mom.
BBFC rating is 15 due to some strong language, discriminatory behaviour, occasional sexual references and mild violence. Please note that, as part of depicting the experience of Jamaican immigrants to Britain after the Second World War, some characters in the play use racially offensive terms.
I started a conversation with my mom based on some experiences I saw in Small Island and that conversation's not over and I'm learning new things about my parents' experience.
Also (via Kottke): till 14 July, in the US, you can watch Recorder: The Marian Stokes Project online via PBS's Independent Lens. Leonard and I were lucky enough to see this on the big screen last year; here's his review. As he notes:
Content warning: this film includes harrowing recorded-live TV footage of 9/11, which is how I ended up seeing the second plane hit the tower after 18 years of successfully not seeing that footage.
Marion Stokes was an amazing, visionary activist, super-difficult to be around, eloquent, and driven, and her story was astonishing to learn. If you haven't seen this, I recommend it. Absorbing and moving.
[Main] You can hire me through Changeset Consulting.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sh@changeset.nyc.