It’s been nearly two months since Commissioner Steve Novick raised eyebrows in Portland City Hall with a memo urging his colleagues to consider millions in additional cuts to the police bureau’s budget—leading with a call to cut the bureau’s mounted patrol, but tacking on an equally sensitive call to whack back its drugs and vice […]
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Posted inNews
While We’re Just Beginning to Talk About the Minimum Wage, Check Out Seattle
If you’ve read this week’s cover story on Portland’s nascent minimum wage debate, you know there are a lot of uncertainties surrounding the $15 wage activists are pushing. And you also know Seattle’s wading through many of those questions as it takes concrete steps toward raising its own minimum wage (probably to $15). That’s both […]
Posted inFashion
This Week’s Style Events
Another clean and lean week of select opportunities to spend that money right. Spring cleaning at my house this year means scraping out the crap that’s cluttering up the wardrobe (naked lady parties + wine = crap) in order to see the cracks. Next comes filling them: • Mink is celebrating seven years of business […]
Posted in$$$
Rich Man Writes Bullshit “Apology” for Saying Liberals Are Like Hitler
Yesterday, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone Godwinned all over himself on the topic of economic fairness: …if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy. Last night, Langone “apologized” for making that […]
Posted in$$$
How Many Americans Support Themselves on Less Than $10.10 an Hour?
Over at the spiffy new FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman crunches the numbers on a minimum wage hike. Casselman finds that while a relatively small number of Americans actually earn the minimum wage, a whole lot of Americans are below President Obama’s proposed national minimum wage of $10.10 an hour. According to the survey, in 2013 more […]
Posted inBikes
BLESS x Table of Contents: Bike Accessories Gone Fancy
Due propers to the all-weather cycling community, but for many, more sensitive riders the bike season is just arriving. Dovetailing with that is the launch of a collaboration between Berlin/Paris-based BLESS (“a multidisciplinary project that is consistently difficult to define… the elusive designers behind the brand are indifferent to the media and focus on quietly […]
Posted inNews
Budget Office Raises Dark Possibility: No Surplus This Year After All
After a bonanza of funding requests from Portland’s varied bureaus last month—some $32.3 million worth of asks, mostly for well-intentioned, vital, and noble programs—the city’s budget office this week has come back with some extremely bitter medicine. “In total,” says a letter by budget director Andrew Scott, “we recommend $2.1 million in ongoing and one-time […]
Posted inFashion
This Week’s Style Events
If you wanna spend some money, honey, here’s what’s happening this week on Portland’s independent fashion and retail front: THIS WEEK’S STYLE EVENTS • As part of the monthly Shop the Block, Adorn is throwing a trunk show for one of their favorites, Prairie Underground, with exclusive pieces available through the week, 10 percent off […]
Posted inNews
City Club Committee Says Vote ‘No’ on a New Water District in May. But Change is Needed.
Dirk VanderHart The question of whether the city’s water, sewer and stormwater utilities are mistreated is endlessly complex—far more nuanced than the talking points you’re likely to hear as a vote on the management of the utilities draws closer. Those will include the city’s bad decision to build a Water House with utility money, and […]
Posted inArtsy
Kickstarter, Games, and Portland
Monday morning, Kickstarter announced that the crowdfunding platform has received over $1 billion in pledges for projects around the world. $215 million of that has gone into games projects. That’s so much money, you guys. Kickstarter loves sharing its data, especially this data—but we went ahead and broke down some Portland-specific stats for you. First […]
Posted inFashion
This Week’s Style Events
The steady-ish stream of design showcases that have already come and gone in these early days of 2014 seems to be taking a slight pause, but there are still a few things kicking on this week’s calendar for those in search of the new, the discounted, and the shopping experience that includes free booze: THURSDAY […]
Posted inTech
The Coffee Pod People Are Getting Creepier
Keurig, those coffee-pod people, have somehow created a market full of people who are willing to pay $60 for a pound of coffee. But that’s not enough for Keurig: Now they’re working on some sort of a digital rights management scheme involving coffee makers that would only use Keurig-branded coffee pods. Karl Bode at Techdirt […]