pdxfed

Who breaks through their ceiling and becomes a superstar? Who was solid or strong last year that may not see any playing time based on their performance or new team composition?

These man children playing with their toys and what is the punishment, only 5 years? The victim's child, who will now be 7 has no mother for the rest of his life.

Here is the original story of the homicide https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/09/street-racer-gets-5-year-prison-sentence-in-crash-that-killed-26-year-old-woman-waiting-at-portland-bus-stop.html

You'd get 5 years for trying to hold up a plaid pantry and not hurting anyone, but plow through a bus stop at godknowshowfast while street racing and cream a young mother and alter her child's life forever? 5 years. Appalling.

Yes Tier 1 was abused by many when you look at final payout as a percentage of final years' earnings--but then you look at their final salaries.

I'm not a public employee, PERS recipient, or even near retirement age (I hope) as of yet, just curious. I looked up school teachers and felt absolute pity for their final salaries after decades of service--and that's WITH the help of a union. I'm talking people who retired in the early 00s with 30-40 years of service and final salaries of 50k who with their stretching of tier 1 rules might get a 60k retirement benefit. Imagine how much of that has evaporated in the last 5 years with inflation.

Definitely better paid state employees who made off like bandits, but my heart goes out to teachers seeing some of these numbers for people who challenged me and helped shape me. Some select high quality news outlets like to pretend that state retirements are so uniformly, unimaginably generous, but reality is certainly different for anyone after 2003 PERS reforms in Oregon where most of the exploits were nerfed. Also, fuck those news outlets for trying to condition people into thinking requisite fingernail biting until retirement is necessary. It's all historically recent when corps saw the opportunity to offload managing retirement funds...and your security. An incredibly small portion of humans even in the age of technology have the analytical skills to manage the intense web of financial byproducts of not having a guaranteed pension system managed by professionals. 401k this, IRA that, investment tranches...it literally takes paying a professional to complete it...that of course you get the privilege of paying. The median not average or mean amount 50-year-olds have in retirement accounts in the US currently is 57,000. If that isn't a damning indictment of the abdication of duty it was to push retirement management on the populous, just wait. Come back to this thread every 5 years for the next 3 decades as the myth of "retirement" collapses and is slowly replaced in news headlines with "elder engagement" and "stay-fessional" and "senior-career opportunity".

Parting thought; people stopped going into education decades ago and that was when tier 1 exploits were still available. We had a related conversation when former secretary of state Shana Fagan was shown to be completely corrupted working for someone she should have oversight of...but her salary is $90k as #3(2?) in charge of the state. Lack of integrity has no excuse, good riddance but the salaries are APPALLING. We have one of the lower performing education systems in the country now, I think doubling salaries for educators would be a starting point in Oregon.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Everyone knows the debate ended a few years ago for most companies and positions where it was possible, and leaders felt company performance was more important than their physical ego stroking. Wheeler is asking businesses to require people to do what most workers who can, don't want--mandate required office presence. I think we can all agree that different companies may enjoy a different balance of days and times for their operation to work...some might want 1, some 3, some zero, but requiring presence...what's behind it? As always, follow the money and interests entrenched in current downtown infrastructure and real estate:

1. commercial real estate (CRE). Its bleeding nation-wide, as are tax receipts for cities who sold out the core of their cities to developers over the past 100 years. City, read wheeler, only cares about his tax budget, not you or your life. Or your added commute costs, added time out of your life, added exposure to a problem the city helped create by allowing CRE to dominate cities so. Those could have been apartment buildings with mandated affordability...people could be experiencing WFH from downtown apartments en-masse, but the city made its bed and now wants you to sleep in it.
2. Another Oregon live article today indicates the city is going to spend additional millions on additional security for the city's parking lots. Meanwhile, many past and present transit riders avoid transit now when possible as it's fucking filthy and unsafe. Where are the millions to make people want to use MAX or the Train? Public transit is much more affordable in most cases than owning and insuring a car, but it has to be safe and convenient--it's definitely not the first and often isn't the second thanks to item #1 above where our populace is spread out instead of densely concentrated in apartments. I thought Portland was all about reducing car trips? An "inner boundary" toll ala London was even floated in the last 10 years, yet we're going to spend additional millions to get folks to drive? Talk about a death rattle for the "progressive" city. What a joke, it's all about tax receipts from downtown businesses that Wheeler is worried will leave if people continue to avoid downtown.

Both of these are breathlessly short-sighted and go against so much of the marketing bullshit Portland likes to paint on itself. Much like 08-09, instead of letting big bastard wall street tycoons and wealthy investors take the haircut on their shitty investments when they turned over, lap dog governments are propping them up instead. CRE should be allowed to crater, be razed, and build cities where people don't have to own a car if they don't want to. Holy crap insurance is usurious.

I saw the movie on an airplane which is why I'm having trouble remembering it.

A dramatic film that centers around a couple, man and woman, released somewhere between 2007 and 2016 I believe. They don't seem too happy and argue a lot, the man is immature and unhappy. The key thing is that midway through the movie, the man realizes he has control over, or made a wish or something and the woman now agrees with whatever he says and follows his decisions or instructions. The guy loves it at first and then slowly realizes the loss of his partner's free will kills the energy of a relationship and he wishes he had back his girl who could argue with him. The movie ends and he's still unhappy. I don't remember the female role hardly at all, the male actor I believe might have been like a B+/A- actor at that point in his career, I remember thinking I was surprised how good he was. Might have been someone who had done more comedy and tried a serious role?

I've tried scrolling through IMDB for those years looking at top few hundred films released in a year, lists of dramas by year, etc. and have come up empty.

I don't remember many other plot points but appreciate any leads and will answer any questions that might help you help me!