How unfortunate

Hang in there.  Although I am not personally one to believe in miracles, but it seems like the stars and the planets have aligned (BLM, Corvid-19, Exposing of Bad Trump to all eyes except for a dwindling hardest of hard core) that you and many of the multi-millions of people should not have to wait much longer for this nightmare to end. 

 

2021 will be the beginning of a journey back to America's value of empathizing with the those who are being their beautiful selves.

 

Just 15 weeks until the General Election (12 weeks before early voting can begin)

Unfortunately, removing him from office will not instantly cure the deep threads of transphobia in American society but it would at least defang it a bit and stop it from being actively, constantly pushed by the highest office in the land. So that little bit of relief, I would take.

Also the administration is now passing around a memo explaining how to "identify" women like me, which will almost certainly lead to a bunch of us being targeted for abuse and worse.

I don't know how I'm gonna make it through 2020 y'all

Kool-Aid comes in many different flavors. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid exclusively coming from Trump's enemies; the Democrat Party and the bias mainstream media. Trying reading articles from Trump's supporters and his allies occassionally. Only when you have read from both sides can you be educated enough to come to a fair decision.

 

Do you mean the supporters and allies who are totally A-OK with his administration doing things like making it legal for doctors and EMTs to deny people like me health care because they just think we're gross? Because yeah...that and many other things make me not want to hear from them. If you're gonna deny my basic freaking humanity and right to exist then don't be shocked when I don't want to listen to a word you have to say.

The operative word here might be "eligible". Not every person over 18 years of age who pays electric and phone bills is eligible to vote. The Election Administration need to be more sophisticated than that! As discussed above, there are long-proven registration and voting systems in other states utilizing the USPS (a vital and required part of the national infrastructure) that is easier to protect from "hacking" than electronic systems. Early voting via the postal system (as in Iowa where I sleep most nights) works fine for me...

 

*waves in Oregonian* Yeah, I just...it's surreal to see all the hand-wringing and accusations about how evil mail-in voting is when it's *so* common and routine and safe here.

That's incredibly disappointing, though unfortunately I can't say it was a surprise. 

Like this?

 

https://www.cruisint...on/NewportBeach

 

 

We have multiple houseboat/floating home marinas on the Willamette and Columbia rivers here but it's a little different kinda culture in the PNW I'd wager than in North Central Texas, plus somewhat more sizable bodies of water, so idk what to expect from houseboat sales by the TCC campus.

 

Not only the connection to navigable bodies of water, but there's actual industry and commerce being conducted on those waterways in Portland.  There's a port there.  There's a fishing industry.  Widespread personal use and even the use of houseboats is kind of a natural extension of that.  I'm not so sure that paddle boats and kayaks and water taxis on a 30 acre body of water lends itself to progress to houseboats and marinas.  Hey, maybe it's a novelty I'm discounting, but going down the avenue (or waterway in this case) of novelty given its current status is why the project has a bit of a credibility problem.

I'm also just wondering, like...how big do they expect the "houseboat district" to be exactly? Because even w/ an adjusted water level that is going to be a tiny body of water, and like...most of the residential marinas I know around here have *at least* a dozen or two slips, usually more. It's almost like if you put enough slips in to make it into "a thing" you'd be blocking the effective use of the rest of that section of the river.

I could totally be wrong but it just seems like a very out-of-left-field thing to *still* be promoting after all the ludicrous problems and mismanagement of this project.

We have multiple houseboat/floating home marinas on the Willamette and Columbia rivers here but it's a little different kinda culture in the PNW I'd wager than in North Central Texas, plus somewhat more sizable bodies of water, so idk what to expect from houseboat sales by the TCC campus.

I feel like the new stadium is just hideous. It's a jumbled mess of incoherent design elements capped off with a cheap-looking, obviously value-engineered sheet metal warehouse roof.

Spending half a billion of public money on this thing is a crime.

you can honor the people who served in later wars without even mentioning the Confederacy

Good

The convenient connection of major cities to link up with the interstate highway system necessitated the construction of inner-city highways. 

I just want to point out that connecting cities with highways did not in any way necessitate building highways *inside* the cities, destroying low-income neighborhoods in the process. The highway system originally was not intended to enter and pass through cities - in other words, it was meant originally to be more like its inspiration, the German Autobahn.  It was a massive mistake in American planning to do so.

Eisenhower himself didn't even want them inside cities:

"[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way"

https://seattletrans...through-cities/

 

Yeah I think the city of Portland is smaller in population but it is also smaller in land area and wedged in between hills and the Willamette River which always makes a city more dense.  On the western side of the PDX there isn't as much area to sprawl towards which is what FWs main issue is, sprawl.  If you took FW's 800k and crammed it into 180 sq. miles our density would look a lot different.

I think the Metro Area of Portland and Fort Worth (sans Dallas) are around the same size however the one difference is context.  Portland is by far the largest city in Oregon and most of the businesses and visitors to Oregon are focused in and around Portland.  Fort Worth is not even the largest city in it's Consolidated Metro Area and so we are always in a battle with Dallas for business and tourists which does have an effect on our skyline and density IMO.

 

Yes, I know, I live here. There are also significant policy differences and zoning differences and attitude differences that fuel the difference beyond the physical location.

Many of which are not unique to here, and can be adapted elsewhere.

Zoom was already significant in corporate settings, but now it gets a lot more press. We use a combination of Zoom and Microsoft Teams for things at our company, depending on the nature of the video needs. I've been here nearly two years and that's been our standard but the pandemic definitely brought out the stragglers at the company who had not gotten a handle on how to operate those platforms.

Largeness of skyline or density of city can both affect how "big" a city feels.

We're a significantly smaller city population wise than FW but a wildly higher density so urban PDX feels, to me, huge and contiguous (especially w/ all the new growth in the last several years). You don't see undeveloped, non-park land around here.

Never been there, but interesting to visit.  I take it this is a combination restaurant and residence.  Is this common in Portland?  Don't they have zoning laws that prohibit a restaurant or other commercial retail in a predominantly residential neighborhood, which is what this appears to be?  I like economic growth but I don't think I would like to see this kind of blending as a norm in Fort Worth neighborhoods.

 

Out of curiosity - why? Whether this particular form or just this mixing of residential and commercial.

Nobody would be saying this needs to happen every block but what's the problem with this proximity of use interspersed occasionally? It's not *that* far off from existing historic commercial buildings already in the middle of neighborhoods like Fairmount (whether they are used for that purpose or not in the present day, they were at one point, even if today's residents would fight their existence).

This particular arrangement is not common but it happens sometimes - there are other examples of it on this particular street. Portland zoning has a mixture of residential, commercial, mixed-use, neighborhood commercial, etc. that is woven together. This street passes through multiple residential areas that are mostly but not entirely residential, but itself features a blend of historic single-family homes, mixed-use structures, small commercial buildings, etc.

These are some of the neighboring blocks around this pub.

EDIT: for the deeply nerdy amongst us, this is the zoning map for this particular area of the city:

 

If you read the ordinance (I admit I've been so curious I've labored through the painful document over the years), you'll notice that it treats commercial properties like the wolf and single family residential like the innocent victim.  It does not appear to even contemplate that it is totally possible to have the two right next to each other and have a very graceful coexistence.  There are very few local examples of this, I'm sure in large part because it is forbidden in the ordinance to put them that close to each other, unless in a MU or form based code district. 

This is very true - something I tried to do for my whole run of writing in FW was to at least show people there are other ways of doing things since FW in many cases has very few surviving or good examples of this sort of thing. When one looks outside of the Metroplex one can find *massive* varieties of blending different types of uses in close proximity.

(This obviously isn't the norm in a lot of places but I've always loved this funky little arrangement up here.)

It's depressing that the worst elements of our political system have tried to reframe the lockdowns as "people who LOVE FREEDOM!!1" vs. "these people want to stay home indefinitely" - that is absolutely NOT the case. Do these people think those of us who support the mitigation procedures are ENJOYING this? I haven't seen my second-closest human being to me in coming up on two months. It sucks. But the lockdowns were supposed to buy time for the government to set up the rest of the systems we need to reopen safely - massive increases in testing, extensive contact tracing, huge new supplies of PPE, increased masking policies, etc. - and instead we just winged it without a plan, failed to do anything meaningful with the time in lockdown, and said "reopen anyway - be a warrior."

I cannot say fully how livid I am with certain stripes of our leadership on here because I am trying my best to remain civil. I can't even *begin* to imagine how terrified I'd be in a state that didn't even do as much as we did here.

(Not that we in PDX are reopening anytime soon - while Oregon's rural counties are beginning, Multnomah and the surrounding counties have declined applying to open because we know we haven't reached all the contact tracing and PPE requirements. At least the state thus far has a small and manageable caseload.)

I think Road diets are pleasing aesthetically but I have yet to see any of them, here in FW, result in more pedestrians which is unfortunate...  Berry St. has definitely had more pedestrians since Social Distancing went into affect but I think more people are out in more areas of the city

I lived just off Magnolia Avenue for a decade before leaving town and the road diet absolutely made a difference as to the pedestrian activity on the street.

Keeping the fence there is...awkward. I don't mind the building setback but I'd like to see the fence and its associated concrete ledge get removed.

It's not like a huge thing but it just feels a little off to me.

 

Literally everybody should be wearing masks all the time outside of the home. 

 

I think that's taking it a bit far.  If I leave my house and go for a walk, I should have a mask on?  No thanks.

 

Yes, I absolutely always wear a mask even when going for walks, because I believe it is important for us *as a society* to normalize the wearing of masks until such time as we have an effective vaccine against the virus. I want people seeing me wearing one, if it means even a few other folks will feel comfortable starting to do the same.

Also it is absolutely false that younger people have "effectively zero risk" from the virus - we've seen evidence that otherwise healthy younger people can die or suffer terribly because of COVID-19 related strokes even when displaying no other symptoms, to name just one example. And even if the risk is low, they can become carriers and spread the disease unknowingly to other people.

The way we can start to put the brakes on that kind of thing? Everybody wearing masks when they're out of the house. Normalize it. Make it a part of day-to-day life.

I'm a liberal and I will not wear a mask.  They, from what I have read, are not effective 

 

 

We should all wear masks. It's not about being "effective" at blocking *you* from getting the virus - it's about people with the virus and not knowing they have it (either because symptoms haven't manifested yet or because they are asymptomatic carriers) being prevented from spreading it to others. All of us wearing masks should be the norm and a sign of respect for our fellow citizens.

Literally everybody should be wearing masks all the time outside of the home. There's a study coming out that I just saw an article on that if 80% of Americans would just wear facial coverings at all times when out and about, the infection rate of the virus would plummet. This is how countries like Japan have been avoiding the worst outcomes of the pandemic while also not shutting down to nearly the same extent.

But, Americans somehow believe being considerate of others and covering their face during a literal viral pandemic is some kind of oppression, so we'll just roll with thousands of deaths per day.

It's a re-zoning, so changes would be reflected in new development happening along the street.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered after the fact that I had moved from one city with a repurposed Montgomery Ward building to another:

No driveway in this one, though.