The NYC subway system has electronic message boards in stations, presumably so a central office can communicate service interruptions to passengers. The boards run generic messages that seldom change. News about outages are hand written with magic markers and taped to the walls. This is so typically New York, a city run by amateurs, where systems don't work, where inefficiency is the norm.
Anywhere else you buy food in a supermarket; there are no supermarkets in NYC. There are no Wal-Marts either. Instead they have small boutique stores with poor selection and high prices. Anywhere else you can rent a one bedroom apartment for $600-800; in NYC it costs $2,500, and you have to pay a broker one month's rent to set up the deal (assure the owner you're not low class), pay first and last month plus two months as deposit. You need $12,500 up front to move in. (I'm not exaggeraging, I've done it.) Anywhere else you park your car in the lot for free; in NYC you lease a parking spot for $400/mo. In most cities you take a train to the airport; NYC has no trains to two of its airports, they recently built one to the third, JFK.
You're paying for proximity to high paying jobs, right? Wrong. NYC jobs used to pay more than elsewhere; now they pay about the same. If you don't like it, you can live in Jersey for cheap and sit on the train for an hour, twice a day, same as your co-workers.
In 1955, NYC was headquarters to 31% of the Fortune 500. It is now down to 10% and falling. The only big industries left are finance (stocks) and publishing/media. Big Pharma is in NJ; computers are in the SF Bay area; defense contractors are in DC; telecom is all over the country; manufacturing moved to Asia.
Long Island is worse than NYC because it has none of the positives -- culture, things to do -- and the same negatives -- inefficiency, incompetence, people with a know-it-all attitude, high prices, the worst traffic congestion in the US and sky high property taxes.
