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In this video from the Portland City Council, local Portland business owners describe the daily nightmares they deal with when running a business in 2025.

This is not hyperbole. It’s not ‘fake news’. It’s the real life stories told by local shop owners and workers getting guns and knives pulled on them, being assaulted, calling in people having serious mental health crises (screaming, stripping, masterbating, assaulting passerbys/employees, or standing nude in front of their shops) and the city police and services do nothing. Their shops experience regular break-ins they must pay for out of pocket, rampant shoplifting and violent confrontations, homeless campers right in front of their businesses that scare customers and employees, spending thousands out of pocket for emergency repairs, being dropped for insurance, cleaning up drug paraphernalia, vomit, human feces, and urine on a daily basis.

They report customer foot traffic dropping more than 50%. Workers are regularly threatened to the point the owners decide to close their downtown shops because they no longer could keep putting their workers in harms way. It’s probably why Portland now has one of the highest commercial vacancy rates in the country.

As someone that volunteers at a local public entity downtown in NW, I can confirm all of this is true. We had to deal with this on a DAILY basis. We often had to do twice daily sweeps around the building to clean up multiple piles of human feces, drug paraphrenia such as needles, foil, bloody bandages, etc. All of which are serious biohazards. Local “harm reduction” groups gave out free drug paraphernalia and open-air drug dealing was a daily morning ocurance – all within 100 feet of an elementary school. Even when filming drug dealers and submitting daily reports – police and harm reduction groups would not come by or do anything.

Children there would see open air drug use right outside the windows of their school – and it was all legalized by Measure 110. Calling cops or city services did nothing. Police response for dangerous individuals was upwards of an hour – if they came at all. Other city services would pander, victim blame, and ultimately never do anything. The problems have been going on for months to years now – with little end in sight.

The semi-repeal of Measure 110 helped – but Portland is still a deeply troubled city that I cannot recommend to anyone. This is especially true for anybody looking to start a local business.

Wild. Besides reading my favorite Compute! magazine and typing in programs in the 80’s and 90’s, Byte magazine was the source of computer information in that era. I was pretty young, so a good bit of it went over my head, but a lot of it was fascinating.

This website provides a visual, zoomable map that shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue to the last page of the last issue at the bottom.

Winning the lottery doesn’t seem like it would be up there in the ‘worst things’ category, but it turns out to be one of the worst thing that ever happened to most folks that win big lotteries. Even already wealthy people who ran multi-million dollar companies find their lives completely destroyed. Murder, constant lawsuits, and bankruptcy.

What are some of those statistics?

Large jackpot winners face double digit risk increases versus the general population to be a victim of:

1. Homicide (something like 20x more likely)
2. Drug overdose
3. Bankruptcy (how’s that for irony?)
4. Kidnapping

And triple digit increases versus the general population in:

1. Convicted of drunk driving
2. Being the victim of homicate. That rate goes up by a startling 120x at be killed at the hands of a family member
3. A defendant in a civil lawsuit
4. A defendant in felony criminal proceedings

In a surprising discovery, the worst enemy is usually yourself. Winners often suffer from drug overdoes, tax issues, dissolute and dangerous living that leads to death, or simply frittering it all away. Family, friends, and acquaintances will become an ever-present risk as well. If you win the lottery, you are 120 times more likely to be killed by a family member than before you won.

Even people that don’t know you will come out of the woodwork to sue you. In one case, a man settled multiple claims because husbands in his town had their wives leave them. Even though the lottery winner didn’t even know them. The ex-husbands sued the lottery winner simply because they claimed ‘jealousy’ of the lottery winner made their wives leave them for better prospects. Instead of fighting the frivolous cases, it was simply cheaper to just settle out of court for a few $10,000’s.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s a bunch of more real stories.

Articles:

• Luck of the Draw: True-Life Tales of Lottery Winners
• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vzgl/comment/chba4bf/

Low Level does a very brief but decent introduction to reverse engineering binaries (on linux).

He doesn’t discuss it, but when reverse engineering it’s always good to start with what your goal is. There’s a variety of reason to reverse engineering at the binary level:

1. Learning how an algorithm or binary works
2. See what assembly code your compiler is generating (for optimization, performance analysis, etc).
3. Trying to debug or fix an issue without source
4. Trying to discover vulnerabilities in enemy systems
5. Trying to hack in/out behavior (copy-protection removal, remove checks that cause crashes, etc)

This is important, because each goal often focuses on a different set of reverse-engineering skills.

Real world reverse engineering also carries many possible legal dangers. In the past, companies reverse engineered mechanisms to compete against companies that had monopolies and ended up in massive lawsuits. Atari vs Nintendo lawsuit and Sega v. Accolade are good examples. The methods of doing legal reverse engineering is a complex legal topic that requires very carefully monitored and documented clean-room procedures.
It’s a fascinating world in which big companies to nefarious hackers engage in.

If there’s one thing James Bond has been known for – it’s his style. From cars, to clothes, to watches. Want to live like a modern day James Bond? Now you can at JamesBondLifesytle.com!

In Oct 2021, Turkish TikToker @dr.frex posted a screen recording of messages with a friend where they vocalized a song in the style of the game at different speeds. the ‘oiia oiia’ sound was born. Add a spinning cat, and you’ve created an massive internet meme.

As I have written about before, Bitcoin and similar digital currencies days are numbered with the increasing stability of quantum computers.

A renewed debate has started on exactly when quantum computers will be able to undermine the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and SHA-256 hashing algorithms that secure Bitcoin wallets and transactions. Some suggest may be just a few years while others believe we have several decades – but one thing is certain – the clock is ticking.

Scientists, financial analysts, and economists are watching quantum computing developments very closely as a quantum computing breakthrough would make crypto-currencies, NFTs, and other digital assets worthless overnight.

A nefarious organization/country with a quantum computer functional enough to crack even partial amounts of crypto currency might be able to steal billions in assets in hours or days – before anyone knows what is going on nor have any way to stop them. The effect would be nearly instantaneous drop to 0 for the value of any assets secured in this way.

Six blind people from around the world were given a camera and asked to take photos. The film explores perception, resilience, and creativity.

I think it also clearly challenges the modern excuse that disabled or disadvantaged lives are not worth living.

Not one of them is over 21 years old, and they were already turning out stuff like this.

People today can replicate their sound perfectly, but nobody then (nor really now?) was innovating new sounds at the velocity they were in the 80’s. Every one of their songs were incredible and had all kinds of technical innovations in them.

Who would have thought they would grow up to this:

Remember kids – those ‘boomers’ many young people blame for everything were often much cooler than you and made a lot of the same choices you’re making now. And it’ll happen to YOU:

“At the Drive-in” is a free movie on Youtube about a group of quirky movie buffs work to save a dying drive-in theater. They end up sleeping on the floor, jury-rigging solutions, and holding it together all with their free labor.

Besides saving a theater, it speaks more about a group of individuals that become serious friends and fight to regain a sense of community and simpler times that is increasingly lost. We may be connect to the entire world by the internet but people feel more lonely, isolated, and anxious than ever. One of the folks working there even calls it feeling closer to God – even though he doesn’t know what that is.

Parish communities fill this need for community and belonging – but maybe they should engage social events like this even more. I know that the weekends my parish puts on picnics and events together – they become some of the most joyful and rewarding parts of my week.