>Those magic constants on lines 4 and 5 are what get your total to the full marginal rate (at least, once you are 50k above the new bracket starting point).

I don't think that's true. These numbers are relatively tiny and they certainly cannot have the effect that you are describing. All they do is slightly modify the overall dollar amount on which the tax debt is calculated using the usual bracket math.

>As for the top rate claim, that one is spelled out the most explicitly. Look at tax computation worksheet 6.

Well, sure: "If your New York adjusted gross income (line 33) is more than $25,000,000...". While not poor, I am still a wee bit away from that.

The numbers aside, I do find it strange that at this income state tax becomes flat at the marginal rate.

>Are you less than 50k above the start of a new bracket (and a bit different single vs married).

It's more than 50k in my case. I actually just noticed that yesterday I was looking at the married table rather than the one for head of household. That only changes where each bracket begins and ends however. My effective tax rate in NY still does not correspond to any of those rates and is below the marginal one.

You seem to have done some research on how it works but I remain doubtful that what you were saying is true. I am looking at tax computation worksheet 2 (from https://www.tax.ny.gov/forms/html-instructions/2022/it/it203i-2022.htm#tax-computation) which makes references to recapture base amount and incremental benefit amount. I suspect these numbers are used as a sort of mini-progression within the marginal bracket of 6.25% whereby your taxable income gets adjusted a bit depending on how much your income was above $161,500. That multiplier from line 8 is at most 1 which means that the taxable income will not get reduced if your income is $50k or more above the entry amount for that bracket.

If it was really as simple as you said (above $107,650 you pay a flat tax on all income) then this convoluted calculation wouldn't be required.

These calculations however to me look like they're still the traditional marginal tax rate brackets, only spelled out per each marginal tax rate that exists.

It doesn't change anything about Uber's flawed business model. They've been subsidizing both sides of the coin so far: subsidized ride fairs to ensure there's demand and somewhat inflated compensation for their drivers to ensure there's supply. This cannot scale and Uber knows this.

They are now tightening the screw on both ends, trying to raise fares as well as pushing down driver's compensations. Since Uber has a not insignificant corporate overhead it means rides will be more expensive than those of yellow cabs since those have much a lower overhead. This will instantly reduce their pie of the market to very little. Uber is a dying business and no driver should stake their fate on its survival.

>Surely you understand though that some people, through no fault of their own, aren't in a position to be making those changes? Should they be left out to dry?

That's not Uber's problem to solve even though they so far were allowed to thanks to ill-informed venture capitals. Since VC has finally dried up, Uber will go out of business and that will force the drivers to look for something else.

So what I find is this claim here: "New York is one of only two (2) states that have a “tax benefit recapture”. This is where the top tax rate of 10.90% is applied to all your income if it exceeds the top tax bracket (the other state is Connecticut)."

However, I can't easily find that corroborated in the instructions for form IT-201.

I always knew that NYC income tax is essentially highway robbery since you pay on your whole income with no deductions whatsoever. I was however under the assumption so far that I'd be paying state income tax according to usual marginal tax rate rules.

I am looking at my 2022 W-2 right now, and the numbers don't make any sense to be frank. It comes out to an effective tax rate of 7.37% which doesn't correspond to any of NY State's marginal tax rates but is at the same time higher than the marginal tax rate I should be paying (which in 2021 was 6.25%). I didn't include earned interest and dividends but I somehow doubt they account for over a percentage point in this discrepancy.

These numbers don't make any sense to me.

EDIT: Alright, I think I've figured it out. The effective tax rate was not in fact 7.37% because I didn't consider what NY State had paid me back last year. Somewhere in the vicinity of $5k as I recall which would put the effective tax rate below the marginal and refute OP's claim that the marginal tax rate is the effective one above certain incomes.

Flushing is another good option. It's a genuinely cool neighborhood and you can commute out to Old Westbury via Northern Blvd. The LIRR in morning rush hour can suck west of Clearview Expwy.

>The City is capable of building housing tho, right? They have outsourced that to private companies via incentives, but they COULD right?

With what money? Neither municipal, nor state nor federal have any. The US at the federal level alone is approaching a trillion dollars in interest payments this year. It's the least productive way to spend money and yet, everyone constantly looks at the administrations to solve problems. Every time they do it, that slice gets bigger.

>I guess the other target audience are companies etc. that want to remind you that they are NYC-based. I can very easily imagine seeing one of these on the wall in the common area of a Bay Area office of an NYC-based company.

Oh, yeah, a total gimmick. But it's the kind of thing that corporations love to put into their common office areas to appear cool and edgy to guests.

>There's another company out there that's selling offering for pre-order more realistic looking signs that are probably not much internally different than the one in this article. Only they have nicer looking cases and cost upward of $1K.

Interestingly, they seem to be targeting more of a corporate environment which I reckon is more lucrative. Their Integration section at least seems to imply this.

But at the same time, they do present themselves as a quirky etsy project which won't help with what they seem to intend to be the target group.

On a side note: Why does the MTA not provide such devices and services? I reckon every corporate office in Manhattan would put in one of those. They could charge $20k for an installation and that wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket for corporate enterprises.

Hmmh, yeah, maybe. Should be said that I registered my car during that pandemic, too. But as explained, that wasn't because I consider it a viable conveyance in NYC and it was in preparation of a move away.

I reckon the weird migration streams that the pandemic created (I have a new pair of neighbors in my house that moved here from South Carolina and so far own a car) are skewing the numbers a bit. Once everything settles down, I reckon the numbers will be roughly what they were before.

> While TLC plates make up a ton of cars on the road, the increase in personal car ownership has made parking a nightmare.

Has personal car ownership actually increased?

I am asking because back like eight or so years I ago I foolishly took a friend's car (she had just moved from Woodside to Manhattan on that day) and drove it back to Astoria to park it there at like 1:30 AM. I wound up driving around for 45 minutes like an idiot until I finally found a spot where I could park it.

End of July of 2022 I bought I car myself as I am in the process of moving out of the city and I don't find the parking situation in Astoria to be any worse (nor better) than it was back then. I wouldn't have wanted to own a car back then and I still don't want to and subsequently don't use my car unless I absolutely have to.

>The reality is that the nyc food scene is much less adventurous and interesting than one would imagine.

The reality is also that Philippine food isn't actually that interesting and crazy flavorwise as it's occasionally made out to be. I had a Filipina girlfriend for two years like 15 years ago. She lived in Jamaica, I lived and still live in Astoria and over those two years we visited countless times pretty much every Filipino restaurant in Woodside.

It's not a particularly challenging cuisine to even the most milkbread Westeners that you could think of. Their spices tend to be on the bland side and the best you can hope for is for rather satisfying dishes like crispy pata (I'm German so I am obviously well-versed in different preparations of pork hog so that was good) and pig blood stew which mostly presents the eater with a mental challenge to overcome their disgust while it actually tastes not controversial at all. The most curious dish I came across, interestingly, was tortang talong (a fire-roasted eggplant French toast of sorts). It tasted great (nothing out of anyone's comfort zone, mind you) but it struck me as remarkable because upon eating it for the first time I couldn't figure out its main ingredient. I then learned it's just eggplant that you roast on top of your gas stove in the fire until it's black, peel, pound flat, dip into eggs and put it in a pan with plenty of oil.

It's what I would describe as the essence of Filipino food: abundantly available cheap local ingredients prepared in a manner that is advantageous to a home cook who has to feed eight people on a budget. That's why it doesn't make for good restaurant food: It's too efficient and utilitarian and thus it won't appeal to foodies.

It is a however a goldmine for home cooks because their cuisine employs surprisingly simple hacks to make your life easy and convenient while cooking their and other food.

The food in the Philippines meanwhile is not much different. I visited my girlfriend's family with her in Cebu and spent three weeks there. Both the home-cooked as well as restaurant meals were all fine but clearly done with a sense of economy and efficiency. And that's what you would find in NYC because the people that make it out of the Philippines and move to the US started out firmly as daughters and sons of their middle class (there's literally a million Filipino nurses here in the US) and they love in a very aspirational way the American culture. They are the only people here in the US that I have met that are still into shopping malls for that reason. They subsequently americanized a lot of their food.

If you want an authentic representation of Filipino food, go to a Jollibee and gulp down their weird concoction of cut up hotdogs smothered in some sort of ketchup-based sauce over spaghetti. That is as authentically Filipino as it gets in the modern days.

This isn't to say that they don't have cool and genuinely weird food items. Someone here mentioned balut and those are the vestiges of a former distinctive national cuisine. There is very little left of it nowadays. I am not even sure you can get balut at a restaurant. For that you probably need to go to the Phil-Am grocery/bodega in Woodside.

For the record, I am not dissing their food. It is an absolutely unique food culture but it will never lend itself well to be served in a restaurant.

In my experience, the two places whose front is never cleared of snow and ice are the post office and municipal parking lots.

Private businesses tend to be on top of these things since they want their customers to be able to enter the store.