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And if someone splits past you at 20-30 mph, guess what? You’re not a cop. Unless he’s pulling wheelies and riding like a squid, he’s probably just trying to get somewhere.

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Think about it this way: this stuff needs to work. 100% of the time. Or big bucks are lost.

The salaries are high, but not as inflated as you’d like to imagine considering the financial cost of failure.

Besides, Carnegie Hall is a private non-profit supported by donors. Who cares?

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Really difficult to answer this. I’d say on average, costs other than housing in NYC are 1.25-1.5x those of San Diego.

“Normal” housing in Manhattan (i.e. not condos bought by magnates and Russian heiresses) is probably 3-6x as expensive per sq ft than San Diego, depending on whether you rent or buy, but most people don’t have as much square footage, simple as that.

Housing in convenient/nice parts of NJ is actually about the same as San Diego as far as monthly nut if you buy. Higher taxes in general (with a few exceptions that I won’t advertise to vultures here 🙂 ), but lower purchase price per sq ft.

$400k would probably mean $250k take home after taxes. You could do pretty nicely with this, the more if you bought housing 20 years ago when it was cheap and have it mostly paid off by this point. Those are stagehands in the sense of senior management, not errand boys after all — they’re probably been there a while 🙂

If those people bought a brownstone in what used to be a bad area of Brooklyn for a few hundred thou 20 years ago, it may be worth north of a mill now, and they’ll still be paying $200/mo in property tax (property tax for houses in the city is actually super cheap).

I’m not sure if this really answers anyone’s question, because the NY area is so damn diverse that it all depends where exactly one chooses to live. And moving a mile in one direction or another can result in a significant difference in costs.

Upper East Side — it’s actually cheaper than some trendier areas of Manhattan these days. It’s never been trendy, it has only one subway line (changing ca. 2015-6) and it’s considered a bit of an older area. And there’s a big difference between what’s west of Park Ave and what’s east of 2nd or 3rd Ave as well.

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Sounds like a hell of a sweet guy. Still, he has a wife and family.

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Based on what I have read and seen, totally agree. I am curious what the long-term repercussion is going to be. Are people going to be less patient and tolerant with these flashmob-on-wheels in the future?

Probably some police harassment of people on certain kinds of bikes for a while, then nothing. NYC doesn’t have a long memory in that sense.

As to the biker who was hurt and who will probably never walk again, I do have some sympathy. It’s not clear if he was involved in the beating — what if he was just along for the ride, so to speak.

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Flu- I don’t think the local media has much sympathy for those thugs.

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I’m sick of asians getting their ass kicked when it comes to social issues.
I don’t understand how people can possibly turn the table around and even begin to remotely connect that possibly Alex could be a victimizer.

I assume a lot of people here ride and have had experience with being almost run into by a brain-dead, texting driver in an expensive SUV. I think that’s where the questioning comes from, not because Mr. Lien is Asian.

In any case, most people in New York are pretty damn horrified with the whole thing. Including motorcyclists, which it gives a bad name to.

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thanks to another fvcking liberal policy to cut funding to NYPD patrol because too many people were complaining about police “frisking them too much”)

Funding to NYPD was NOT cut. “Stop and frisk” was reformed for good reason — cops in some areas were going for easy targets, frisking grannies on their doorstep and kids walking home from school. They could rack up the contact reports they needed to be seen as doing their jobs, without endangering their candy asses frisking people who actually looked and acted like gang members. See the testimony of Justin Schoolcraft, please.

Another example was asking people to turn out their pockets. If the person was white and they had pot, they’d typically get a $100 ticket for possession, no record. Whereas minorities would be more often slapped with a bullshit (since they were FORCED to display the same to the cop) “public display of marihuana” charge which carries an arrest record, a higher fine, and possible jail time.

This is NOT a liberal vs conservative issue. This is an arsehole, wannabe stunt-men, bully issue. Yeah, the bikers acted like garbage. But please do not use this as a platform to condone police abuse and laziness (yes), in a city in which you don’t even live.

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You’re presuming that these bikers are troublemakers like the other bike gangs you saw on tv. There are lots of presumptions and few facts only analysis.

I ride both bicycles and motorcycles. I know exactly what you’re talking about — this wasn’t the case here. The bikers were making a giant pain in the arse of themselves well before the altercation broke out.

Amusingly, even the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels has called those idiots for being out of line.

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Yes the bikers are asses. But Lien likely did something to antagonize them. Lien probably felt big in his SUV and bumped into one of them.

That was my first reaction, but from all I hear, the bikers really were that bad, while not 100% blameless, Lein was the innocent party here.

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This wasn’t an bikie gang in the sense of the Hell’s Angels or Bandidos (who probably tend to be on the conservative side). This was multiple bike-stunter clubs riding around NYC raising a ruckus, and pissed off because the cops wouldn’t let them into Times Square.

Come to think of it, this was probably what the gangs were like in the 50s and early 60s, before they got older, organized, and into real crime rather than petty crap.

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50% truth, 50% sensationalism, as usual.

To be clear, the salaries are high as compared to the other employees. But … the people in question are the property manager, two electricians, and two carpenters. They’re likely more like department heads than the people who move props around a stage when the lights go out. Combination of a skilled manager and a skilled tradesman who has the skill to deal with creatives and a lot of expensive equipment isn’t easy to find…

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/10/carnegie_hall_strike_stagehand_salaries.php

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Won’t work in NY — felony murder only applies to the course of a few specific felonies (not including assault or mayhem) and is pretty rarely applied out here anyway.

In any case, lawyering up in a civil suit is totally separate from whatever criminal charges the city DA may bring.

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Yuck. I ride, and I normally wouldn’t take the side of an SUV driver in a bike-vs-mastodon dispute (I at first assumed that he must have done something stupid to provoke this), but in this case, sounds like the bikies were completely out of control and out of line. Word had it that even before the chase and beating, they were blocking streets, racing down SIDEWALKS, and making general asshats of themselves.

And Gloria Allred – ugh. She has a way of picking the most sensational cases even if the folks whom she represents are mostly in the wrong.

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Probably a clueless PR-drone type — conflated 5 million total hits to pages with 645,000 discrete visitors.

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