If you spend much time in Portland, you’ll hear lots of people claim the recent woes are ‘just like this everywhere’ and because of national policy. While nationwide macro policies do make a difference such as tariffs that are causing broad price increases, many other metrics do not.
Recent data from Oregon’s labor market shows a recent very high spike of unemployment and under-employment.
Oregon’s unemployment rate has steadily climbed for 2 years – now up to 5.0%. The U-6 rate (under-employment rate which consists of full-time employees that have had to take part-time jobs or recently given up looking for work) is at 9.3% – the highest level since Covid.
Sean Cunningham, the director of Friday the 13th, is very vocal that Friday the 13th’s theme is not the one that many pundits and horror ‘experts’ have claimed – namely that “sinners must be punished”. They often cite the fact many of the teens that are engaging in sex or other activities die, while the one that did not survives. Instead, Cunningham saw the whole story as “bad things happening to good people for no apparent reason.” He also rejected Gene Siskel’s complaint that the film was “misogynistic”. Cunningham said the film is not meant to be sexist, and both males and females get punished equally in this movie.
John Carpenter was similarly dismissive when critics complained that Halloween was pushing an old testament puritanical sex-must-be-punished-by-death moral code on the audience. Debra Hill, his co-producer and screenwriter on the project said in response: “I think people are reading moral and sociological messages into a simple horror story that has no agenda to lecture the audience in any way.”
So, all those pundits and critics that say early horror movies were puritanical are just projecting their own interpretations on something that was never intended to be the case.
Vector Databases for Semantic search and AI application
Windows Developer does a decent job of covering different Windows UI frameworks such as WinUI, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, Avalonia, React Native, and Progressive Web Apps.
The reality of running a business in Portland 2025
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.
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.
Nathan Baggs wanted to play a retro version of Jurassic Park, but found it was busted due to DRM. He then proceeds to walk through how to hack it with a debugger and binary/disassembly tools such as Ghidra, x64dbg, CFF Explorer, and PE Bear.
It’s a great video on how people go about hacking old programs.
In 2023, Portland schools saw an astounding 17.3% enrollment decline. Parents simply pulled their children out of the failing, dangerous school system into private schools or moved elsewhere. What’s worse, is this trend has not only not stopped, but continues to see loss of students. This, all despite some of the highest spending per student and 30 years of complete Democratic party control.
Part of this may be due to the steady, 3 straight year population decline of Portland as people leave some of the highest taxes in the country, one of the highest property crime rates, and some of the least affordable housing due to urban growth restrictions. How bad is this decline?
The 2015 forecast, for example, predicted about 55,000 students for the 2028–29 school year. The latest forecast predicts PPS will dip below 40,000 that year, enrolling 39,945—about a 27% decline.
This means that Portland schools are about to see their funding dramatically cut since it’s based on student population – probably by about 30%.
