Welcome To Your New Ballot (Please Do Not Panic)
One of our best pirate media outlets, Oregon Citizen, dropped this jaw-dropper into its Instagram feed…
…a facsimile of the ballot that will be reaching you soon. This is for just one of the new Portland city council districts. From this morass of names you’ll have to evaluate, research, think carefully about, and otherwise ponder the mob of politicians and arrange them carefully and then wait for the election computer to crunch your rankings and come up with three “winners,” each of whom will get 25-percent plus one vote—no more, no less.
Got that?
The dewy-eyed proponents of RCV (most who live out of state but have gobs of money to spend on the hillbillies in Oregon) have done their best to indoctrinate us about using the system—here’s a typical one…
…notice any difference?
We’ll have more to say on this as the election creeps closer…but, for now, good luck! And remember how the Oregonian actually got something kinda-sorta right about this newfangled thingy…
…and so will dinosaur media, which has crowned “leading candidates” and does slapdash “entrance interviews” with council candidates.
Missing the Point Dept.
You’ve got to wonder if the city’s editors are reading their news budgets when they run this…
…as a meat-n-potatoes story without once referring to the well-known “affordable housing crisis.” Or using the words, “rent control.”
…which might be known as cognitive dissonance, a special bonus for paying your taxes. Just one example from WillyWeek (which also saw no irony in their story)…
Short version: no one can make any money by threading through the city’s opaque bureaucracy, fees, codes, and political interference by pols who have never built anything to put up affordable (whatever that means) apartments, only to have any upside potential robbed by the state…so why not lobby our local bureaucrats to take some of the crummy stuff off our hands.
For the benefit of local editors, here’s just one of many articles on rent control…
…which notes…
Among the unintended consequences are a reduced supply of housing, higher rents in uncontrolled units, reduced quality in the controlled units, and reduced residential mobility.
…but not in Oregon, of course.
Robots Coming for the Tribune?
Dr. Robert Pamplin1 recently dumped the Tribune and a host of other local rags on a Mississippi bottom-feeder named Carpenter Media Group, which has been scooping up local (read, “failing”) newspapers nationally. The company says much about “Empowering heroes and fostering community,” but the formula is as old as the one pioneered, ironically, by S. I. Newhouse, whose descendents now own the tottering Oregonian: get rid of the old high-paid hands, cut costs and cut more costs.
Carpenter didn’t lose much time in cutting costs at Pamplin and some shoes hit the street. The web pages are pretty drab, filled with follow-the-crowd stuff—when it’s actually operating. Here’s what popped up when I tried to log in today…
Is there worse to come?
Maybe here’s a headline from far off Hawaii…
…which starred two bots…
…created far, far away by an Israeli company named Caledo. One local observer said…
There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James’ hands can’t stop vibrating. Rose’s mouth doesn’t always line up with the words she’s saying.
Carpenter’s reply: “AI is here, and you can either embrace it or you can be scared of it.” And made it clear that the bots will be coming to more of their 1000 titles.
We can hardly wait to see what avatars will be cooked up for Portland (tattoos, nose rings, trans?), especially since most of our TV anchors (stranded here when they couln’t follow fellas like Bill O'Reilly into bigger markets) look like mannequins waiting to go out in the recycle bin.
Pamlin just turned 83 and is probably tired of being a punching bag for WillyWeek’s Nigel Jaquiss before Nigel decamped for the quixotic Oregon Journalism Project.
As my daughters used to say long ago when they were teenagers, “FIO, Dad, FIO.” Except now we can’t figure it out, and that’s the way the creators designed it.
Jesus, this is a mess...