Portland Tech conferences: https://dev.events/NA/US/OR/Portland/tech
List of various tech networking aggregators: https://www.macslist.org/working-in-portland/join-portlands-tech-community-local-networking-opportunities
The Tech Transition Hub connects you to free career support, training, and resources designed to help you move back into stable, meaningful work: https://www.pcc.edu/opportunity-center/jobs/tech-transition-hub/
Since 2020, Oregon has ranked in the bottom half of U.S. states for real GDP growth. While companies aren’t fleeing en masse, some are building new facilities and hiring additional workers elsewhere, citing higher costs, longer permitting timelines and a complicated path to growth in Oregon
Nearly a quarter of 400 Oregon businesses surveyed in a 2025 University of Oregon study said they had been contacted by out-of-state recruiters since 2021. Dutch Bros, the Grants Pass–founded coffee chain now valued in the billions, shifted 40% of its corporate staff to Phoenix last year.
The statistics are sobering and damning.
14% of US college students read at the level of a 10 year old.
15% of US college students cannot do math at more than a 10 year old level.
Professors at Berkeley find 20-30% of students taking early calculus courses turn up displaying “severe preparation deficits”. Instructors are begging for standardized testing as they find they have to reteach middle-school mathematics in shocking numbers of college students. UC faculty are now in ‘open revolt’ demanding the return of standardized skills testing. Vanderbilt has also reinstated standardized testing requirements. Many more are quietly following.
The jury has spoken – lowering the bar and lowered expectations leads to failure. It only opens doors to even greater failure – with much higher student loans.
It’s not just the US, a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted across 38 high-income, predominantly affluent Western countries, shows that this trend is spread across all the member states.
All of this is has combined to the disturbing fact that Gen Z is the first generation that is provably less cognitively capable than their parent’s generation. Since standardizing and measuring cognitive development since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents – until now.
The reason?
Cognitive neuroscientist studies show the decline coincides highly with the introduction of screens in the classroom, which started around 2010. Across 80 countries, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly.
Compounding the issue is that besides just throwing out graduation requirements like Oregon has done, standardized testing has been adjusted to accommodate lower expectations and shorter attention spans. After misguided attempts to link test scores to teacher engagement and provide accessibility, some are now calling the lack of testing the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ and even linking calling it a policy that makes racism worse, not better.
This isn’t a US problem, it’s a world problem. Countries like Denmark are starting to act decisively. Severe limits on computer use, and returns to physical book reading and phonics has created turnarounds like the Mississippi Miracle.
‘Modern’ education methods have had their opportunity – and they have now clearly demonstrated they have failed a generation worse than has been done in any time in the last 200 years. That’s astounding.
Some of the best years of my life were spent here
Want to go see a bunch of old steam engines – many of which were used in early local farming and logging? The Great Oregon Steam-Up occurs in Brooks, OR at Powerland Heritage Park on July.
If you have the $2.5 million reserve, you can get into the estimated $6.5 mil DecaroAuctions.com auction for an Oregon fairy-tale castle.
Melissa McPhail was the author of the expansive epic-fantasy series A Pattern of Shadow & Light. She originally imagined a place where she could write and create, with the longer ambition of welcoming artists from around the world into a setting that offered the same freedom—a castle for creativity.
Sadly, she passed away in 2022 before it was completed in 2023. The estate is now being put up for auction by her surviving husband.
I find it interesting how many of these kinds of grand capstone projects are started by wealthy individuals that often never see them completed. Steve Jobs started his famous yacht. It’s a reminder to treasure each day because the plans of tomorrow may all come to nothing.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
Psalm 146
on that very day their plans perish.
Links:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In historical context, particularly regarding WW II, this phrase is used to emphasize that atrocities did not happen overnight but began with seemingly small, ideological steps.
The massive advancements of the early 1900’s had filled the world with optimism that we could finally solve the world’s problems. Humanity had gained enough mastery over nature that it could cure diseases at rates never before seen, feed massive numbers of people, and improve lives with electricity, automobiles, airplanes, safe water, and vaccines. Academics, philosophers, artists, and politicians were swept up in this Modernist movement. This however, lead to ideas like eugenics that sought to elevating the human race by deciding who was worth living and which people should be reduced. Social and economic policies like Socialism that ended up killing more people in 70 years than all other political systems in history.
The point is, good intentions and ‘compassion’ can often end up creating a hell on earth. The 20th century witnessed 2 World Wars and the most disastrous forms of government in the history of the world.
Portland Oregon is now re-learning that lesson. This chart is from the 2025 Drug Overdose Crisis report. Can you tell where Oregon legalized drug use and when it ended the practice? Despite offering completely free drug rehab programs to anyone, free narcan, and every possible free support system to get clean – deaths skyrocketed.
And the unpopular part: the history of putting people in jail for drug offenses clearly saved more lives than allowing free drug use in the streets. That’s a policy failure that free drug advocates continue to ignore. A policy failure that cost literally thousands of people their lives in just 5 years.
Compassion is a road to hell if there is no wisdom behind it.
Not a bad little display in downtown over the last weekend.
Despite being ranked 45 out of 50 states as one of the worst performing school systems in the country, Oregon’s ultra-progressive teachers’ union is threatening to pull support for Democrats who finally decided to force them to fix their failed education policies and actually enforce the diversity goals they claim to stand for. Goals that red states like Mississippi are doing better than Oregon.
The [teacher’s] union has opposed successful strategies used in Mississippi and other states that have boosted reading scores, including a statewide reading curriculum based on the “science of reading”; mandatory standardized testing that measures student growth; and funding targeted at the neediest schools rather than just by student head count.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2026/04/22/one-of-oregons-most-powerful-unions-is-rebelling-against-democrats/