If trashing a library is what it takes to give them that hope, then so be it.

Except he didn’t say anything of the sort. He said protests gave him hope. At no point did protests need to damage the library. There have been ongoing protests that have been garnering attention. Hell, they could have had a building sit in, sure, why not. Classic protest tactic. They didn’t need to damage the fire alarm system or spray paint every surface within reach to do it.

It’s only property.

So if protesters randomly burnt down your housing, would you say the same thing? The same logic should hold, no? It’s just property.

I hate this oft repeated retort. No one here is minimizing the suffering of the people of Gaza. But trashing a library on the other side of the planet is not going to stop the IDF from raining down bombs.

The protesters damaged systems that are vital to operation of the building, like ripping out the fire alarm system. Windows are smashed and there is graffiti everywhere.

Sure, but this is Mastodon, not murders. Much lower stakes.

Fandom was exactly what I was thinking of. Just maybe without having more ads than content. That I’m not a fan of, especially for volunteer supplied content.

Extra thought on search: add a weighting option so individual servers can be searched, but don’t come up as high in the rankings. So keeping with the superhero theme, have the Flash comic wiki with a 1 weighting and the more general DC comic and Arrowverse wikis with 0.8 weightings.

I think this would be immensely helpful for niche topics, but I don’t really see it as much of a direct competitor to Wikipedia. Interwiki links have been a thing for a long time, but they’re not really used that much. They also are used by specialized shortcut syntax instead of using a more intuitive domain name syntax. So let’s say you have a wiki for the Flash TV show and you want to link to an article in the Flash comic wiki. This would be great for that. Maybe have “search related wikis” as an option to search some hand picked wikis?

But for going head-to-head with Wikipedia, I don’t really see it so much. Part of the success of Wikipedia is that it forces editors to work in a single namespace, debate the contents, use a common set of policies, and so on. There is also a lot of policy, process, human knowledge, and institution built up over the years geared solely towards writing an encyclopedia. If you go to Wikipedia, it may not be perfect, but it will have gone through that process. Trying to wade through hundreds of wikis to find a decent article does not sound like a treat, especially if effort gets spread across multiple wikis.

Like with Lemmy, I am excited to see where this goes. And nutomic, congratulations with your daughter!

Wow, I am not sure how I missed this. Usually I am pretty dialed into such happenings in Portland. This is awful. At least Smith is behind bars, but unfortunately there are plenty more out there like him.

Biden signs bill averting rail worker strike despite lack of paid sick days

President Joe Biden signed a bill into law making a rail strike illegal, preventing workers from walking off the job weeks before the holiday season.

The Democrats basically didn’t want to have a holiday rail strike on their hands. It would have been a disaster, politically. Unfortunately, railway union workers got the short end of the stick, much like in earlier rail strikes. I’ve been watching the /r/railroading subreddit since then. There has been some progress, but it hasn’t been the grand bargain that was desired out of a strike.

“Fun” fact: Reagan’s little stunt with the air traffic controllers left the government with a severe shortage in talent and experience in air traffic controllers for a good decade afterwards. Turns out you can’t just fire everyone in the country who does a given job without consequences, particularly with a job that is high stress.

Nice of WWeek to point out that this is Republicans. The KGW article just referred to “lawmakers,” which is a touch misleading.

This is really unfortunate for people living downtown. Target is one of the few retailers of its type in the downtown area. Less so for the Hollywood location, but that’s a prime location right next to the Hollywood Transit Center.

Lemmy devs may have controversial political views, but their software is written with a good intention. KiwiFarms on the other hand use it to target instances.

Not just that, in all interactions with them, I’ve never found the devs to be anything but respectful.

I wonder if there’s a machine learning technique that can be used to detect bot-laden instances.

This is why I voted for Jo Ann Hardesty, despite some reports that she insulates herself from contradictory opinions and criticism. She was the real mover and shaker behind Portland Street Response in City Hall. I fear that the program will go nowhere without a forceful, powerful champion, as this article reports on.

A 100 year old apartment building downtown, The May on SW 14th and Taylor, caught fire on May 16.

Why it matters: More broadly, there is a housing shortage in Portland. More specifically, this apartment building housed a large number of tenants who had pulled themselves out of houselessness.

RIP: The building is so badly damaged that it will be demolished.

Silver lining on every cloud: The May is unreinforced masonry, which would collapse during a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake. This forces Portland to get rid of one more killer structure.

Also this: The owner’s name is “SkyNat”.

I think Burntsushi’s comment is helpful laying out the situation. He always seemed like a pretty level headed fellow and has a considerable personal stake in the Rust community.

Okay, so I’ll give you the basic rundown. First of all, rural Oregon and Portland are very, very different places on par with Austin and rural Texas. The difference is that politically the state is reversed, with Portland’s liberalism outvoting rural Oregon’s conservatism. But just like with rural Texas, rural Oregon is a lovely place with its own appeal.

Portland and Austin have a very similar feels to them. They have a strong tech industry, good food, are of a similar size, and have areas that are great to raise kids in. I have a cousin who is raising his two sons with his wife in Austin and it seems like a great fit for them, but many of the same factors that are present there are available here.

I’m not sure how important non-car transportation is to you, but Portland proper has very good transit as long as you’re not out too late. It’s quite bike friendly due to a commitment dating back to the 1970’s, outdoing most North American cities, though many European cities easily are much more comfortable. It’s to the point where an older kid can safely bike to school along one of many predesignated bikeways.

Portland has a strong emphasis on proximity to nature. Very close in, the city parks are one of the prides of the city. Mt. Tabor is a large park built on a cinder cone with views overlooking the city. Laurelhurst is another park nestled in the neighborhood that bears its name. The accurately named Forest Park is the largest park within city limits in the US, with 70 miles of trails virtually adjacent to downtown Portland.

Now for some of the problems. Like in Austin, Portland hasn’t been building out housing at anywhere near the level it needs to. That has led to skyrocketing housing prices, both for renters and owners. From there, we get more pressure on household incomes, pushing more people into houselessness. There’s a whole discussion around that that I’m not nearly qualified enough to have, but suffice it to say that it sucks for homeless people and it sucks for housed people like myself who have our beautiful city trashed out. That and COVID-19 have contributed to a hollowing out of the downtown core, though there are signs of it coming back to life.

Are there any specific questions? I would be happy to answer those.

Edit: LOL, someone is going through my comment history and downvoting everything. How ridiculously petty.

I’m just noticing this post. Are you still thinking of moving to Portland?

I would hope that people can get beyond the feeling of vigilantism being seen as a vital feature. Not that I’m opposed to them taking on bigots, but if creating Twitter drama is a deal breaker then it feels like they might have their priorities in the wrong order.

Okay, thanks! Assuming it gets added, I hope it sends a message that Fediverse developers are listening to the wishes of people in the Black Twitter diaspora, even if it goes against the traditional stance of the Fediverse developers.