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skeptictank's comments:
on Gadgets, Gizmos & Grey Matter
I guess kids have really good eyes... those iPod touch screens are really small. How do they read for long periods of time on those things?
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Gadgets, Gizmos & Grey Matter
Wait a sec... recording your voice is not the same as writing.
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Carrie Brownstein and Portlandia
Minorities? In Portland? Kidding. Mostly. Portland is one of the whitest cities around. It's ironic, really, Portland is very liberal minded and yet Portland is very white and seemingly unfriendly towards minorities.
Beaverton (a city often reviled by Portland hipsters) is a lot more ethnically diverse.
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Carrie Brownstein and Portlandia
Actually, that "Dream of the 90's " song is very catchy. If music radio stations were still locally run instead of run by computers somewhere in LA that song would be getting a lot of airplay here.
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Staff Pick: Quarter-Life Crisis
So it sounds like us GenX-ers with our perennial pessimism and cynical outlook turned out to be more resilient because we didn't expect too much ;-)
posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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on Spore to Spoon: Mushrooms in Oregon
Given their texture and toughness, I always thought that eating bracket fungi would be like eating wood.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Spore to Spoon: Mushrooms in Oregon
I love hunting for chantrelles or boletes (I generally just stick to those two types as I feel comfortable that I won't mistake them for poisonous varieties). But prices this year have been so low that it would cost more for the gas to go out to the coast range or the Gorge for a hunt. New Seasons had Chantrelles for $5.99/lb the other day, for example. Still, 'shroom hunting is a heck of a lot of fun - a treasure hunt.
Oh, and where are those hedgehog 'shrooms? I'd really like to find some of those and never have in all my hunting.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on How Religion and Politics Intersect
Service to our fellow man was taught by many religions long before there was Secular Humanism.
Unfortunately, in the case of Christianity, "service to your fellow man" was forgotten when the Church decided that it wanted political power. Separation of Church and state is good for the Church because without it the Church loses it's way as it becomes too intertwined with Politics (this is what happened to the Evangelical part of the Church in the US over the last 40 years or so). The Church lost it's way and now is more closely associated with a certain political agenda.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on How Religion and Politics Intersect
"And he said that they reject the teachings of Jesus"
If someone claiming to be a "Christian" says that they reject the teachings of Jesus (the founder of the faith), well that person is (at minimum) terribly confused. It sounds like that person was actually articulating a type of Odinism (Norse religion which emphasizes strength - lots of white supremacists fall into this camp) instead of Christianity. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that there are a lot of folks out there claiming to be Christians who have no idea what Christ actually taught.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on How Religion and Politics Intersect
Season of Service and similar activities are, I think, a genuine effort on the part of some Christians to distance themselves from the whole "Religious Right" movement that hijacked Evangelicalism for the last 40+ years. It's an effort to re-articulate the idea that service is one of the main parts of Christ's teaching. Unfortunately, Christianity has become synonymous with Right Wing politics in the US - a lot of us Christians don't want to be associated with that anymore.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on Self-Injury
Is there something about our society that's making this worse? Have we developed such a meida-saturated, "Survivor" culture that makes people feel inadequate in order to get them to buy stuff - with the side effect of making some people feel so inadequate that they resort to this kind of behavior?
I tend to think that this is a symptom of how dysfunctional our culture has become. When the subtle yet constant message pumped out by popular media sources is that you are inadequate without "our products" what effect does this message have on the psyche?
posted 2 years, 8 months ago
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on Bracing for Bad Budget Numbers
I hope the state economist is prepared for the probability that we aren't even close to halfway through this - there could easily be several more years of recession (dare I say Depression).
posted 2 years, 8 months ago
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on Foreclosing in Oregon
As far as the economy being better here goes... Well, that seems laughable. We've got a higher than average unemployment rate and job growth is stagnant at best. I'd like to know where job growth in the Portland area will come from in the next few years.
posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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on Foreclosing in Oregon
I think the "banks sitting on shadow inventory" comment has to do with the idea that banks have been sitting on foreclosures in the hopes that prices would increase at some point in the near future so that they could then put the homes on the market. Banks have also been hesitant to write down the losses - when they sell a foreclosure off their books they have to record that loss. Now the banks need to get those houses off the books and they're realizing that the prices aren't coming back anytime soon.
I recently heard from a realtor that BofA is planning to target Oregon this Fall as one of the markets to clear foreclosures from it's books. If he's right, look for a lot more foreclosures this Fall.
posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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on Getting Back to Work: Jobs and Identity
I'm a software engineer. I was laid off last month because management decided that they could save a lot of money by sending my job overseas (no one in the group really thinks that will work, but that's another topic).
I choose to think of myself as between gigs. In the meantime I'm working on the yard and the house. It seems like either you have a job (and money) and no free time, or you have no job and plenty of freetime. So for now I'm trying to enjoy the free time.
One advantage I think that people in my field have is that we can work on Open Source projects during our time off. That keeps our skills up to date and allows us to feel productive even if we aren't being paid to do the work. I really enjoy the challenges of software engineering and generally it's a lot more fun when you do it for free... not that one can afford to do that for very long, of course, but it does often lead to paid gigs.
posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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on RX: Health Care by Christmas?
Couldn't we pay for universal healthcare by ending our military adventures around the world? Iraq, Afghanistan, hundreds of military bases around the world.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on RX: Health Care by Christmas?
$8500 is a Cadillac plan? Family insurance plans are easily $1000/month now.
The Senate bill seems like the worst of all worlds. Taxing insurance plans over $8500 at 40% seems excessive. The House plan seems much more reasonable: tax individuals that make over $500K or couples who make over $1Million, instead of taxing a lot of middle class folks who supposedly have "Cadillac" insurance plans provided by their employers.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on Faith in the Recession
I think the recession offers us a wonderful opportunity to help each other and to reconsider what's really important in our lives. When times are good we get to thinking that we're great because look at all the stuff we can afford to buy; we become self sufficient.
When times are bad we remember the importance of community and we re-evaluate our internal values and change them to be more in line with our stated values. We realize that stuff isn't important at all. We realize that people are important.
When you talk to people who survived the Great Depression one of the things they often mention was how it drew the community together to help each other out. So it seems that bad economic times can actually help us if we let them.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Faith in the Recession
I get the impression that everyone is anonymous in a mega-church. I wonder, do you think it would have been different had you been involved in a much smaller church where you knew everyone?
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Northwest Passages: Donald Miller
scottmil - yes, there are certan non-negotiables in the Christian faith. There is a set of common core beliefs. Indeed, as you say, eventually you hit a bedrock of intolerance - as in something that won't be tolerated as compatible with the faith. But that's not a unique characteristic of religion. Politics is very similar, for example. Complete tolerance (the kind you seem to want) does not seem attainable. In fact your tolerance sounds intolerant to those who do hold to any faith.
My comments were in regard to various changes in what is considered the "emerging" (maybe we can call it Post-Evangelical) Church. Not everyone in that movement will agree on what's happening. There is a wide spectrum of viewpoints as to what needs to change (or perhaps, what needs to revert to an earilier version), what IS changing and what HAS changed. Yes, there seems to be a historic shift in progress. It's probably not at the level of THE Reformation, but it is a reformation of sorts - a recognition that in recent times large parts of the Church (let's call it the Evangelical Church) in the West were emphasizing things that probably shouldn't have been emphasized or didnt' need to be. At any rate, it will take a hundred years or more to determine what actually happened.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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