Posts — Page 800

Limited tickets remain for the Vanishing Seattle Variety Show next Tuesday, September 15th at 8pm in the Clock-Out Lounge. The show features local legend Cliff Barnes doing comedy, Cynthia and Shannon doing a presentation about Seattle history, a raffle with prizes, Stevie’s Famous pizza available to order and closes with a short set by The We 40’s. It’s all over by 10pm for an early bed time and tickets are under $20 including the fees. Grab yours now and come hang!

Paul Patu wanted more funding and authorities "working with community". Media reports that a February shooting happened because Patu promised the victim's grandmother he would be given a ride home from school, then failed to do so. Patu's sibling Matelita “Marty” Jackson executive director of SE Network SafetyNet. In October 2024 Jackson was indicted for using her taxpayer-funded safety organization as a pass-through entity to launder illicit profits for the Jackson Drug Trafficking Organization, a multi-state cartel linked to the distribution of over 846,000 fentanyl pills. That same report mentions that the violence interrupters from Community Passageways assigned to Garfield were entirely absent from campus the day in Oct 2024 when a student was shot while intervening during a fight. They had left campus to attend an anti-gun violence conference at Lumen Field. During public comment Davis denounces an earlier caller who questioned whether there would be so much concern for the perpetrators if most weren't "black or brown". Davis took offense at the perpetrators of gun violence being referred to as "urban terrorists". An AP article from 2022 detailed Community Passageways work. The director of research at John Jay College of Criminal Justice is quoted as saying that "without rigorous evaluation, it’s difficult to assess the effectiveness of community violence intervention or determine which strategies work best.". The city council resolution, which Patu and Davis are discouraging, involved working with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Some previous posts re Davis and Community Passageways: In 2020 Community Passageways CEO Dominique Davis bragged about getting youth with serious gun related charges released to community. Today KUOW states at least shooter was a client of his organization : r/SeattleWA Community Passageway's Dominique Davis bragging about keeping youth involved in gun violence "in the community" in 2020. Since then, his organization has been given over $51 million dollars, mostly by the city and county. : r/SeattleWA

I’m from California. A Democrat. Lost 2 family members to addiction. It’s insane to me when you bring up that the city needs to quit enabling drug addicts by supplying them, you’ll get back lash from the craziest people of our own party. It’s really making me lose hope for the city. It’s like each day I’m just starting to agree with the right about the city being a shit hole. I love Seattle. I want the best for it and its people. But the far left will mist it feel like a nazi for Saying maybe people shouldn’t be naked in public. Stop the open air drug use. Stop enabling them. Recognize the homeless vs drug addicts. We need a new mayor man. Please convince me other wise.

Or are there any flat, easy walks my parents can go on?

In all of my life, I've never encountered such desperation from the companies known to hire H1Bs by the thousands. In the past month, I've had recruiters calling me multiple times on a Saturday, I've had recruiters reaching out to me at 7am on a Sunday. This is illegal; FTC rules forbid it. Four recruiters from Norwin Technologies called me about the same job in the span of 360 seconds last week. I'd take one call, yell at them, hang up, phone would ring, different recruiter, same job, rinse/repeat. I had an Indian recruiter tell me straight up that they'd place me in a job that I: had zero experience with the technology I had never interviewed I had never spoken to them We had not negotiated a rate (This wasn't Norwin BTW.) A few months ago I even accepted one of these roles, but I told them EXPLICITLY that I would not relocate, that I would only WFH, and that my rate must be $10 per hour higher than what they offered. When the client wanted me to move for the role(!) I told the client it wasn't going to happen. That ignited a shitstorm, where I learned that: the recruiting agency had lied to the client the recruiting agency was so desperate to hire me, they were losing money on every hour that I worked. They were basically stealing money from H1B developers that they'd already paid, to give me the rate that I demanded, and lying to the customer about whether I would move. To give you an idea of how shitty the rate was, the job was in San Jose CA and the rate was $70 an hour. The company in San Jose had expected someone to come sit in a cubicle for about $100K a year, in a city where the median priced home will cost you $8333 per month. Yes, they expected me to move to a place where housing would consume 100% of my paycheck BEFORE taxes. GTFO Baffled by this unethical, slimy and downright BIZARRE behavior, I went to [the usual suspects] to work through the problem, and I think I learned what is going on: Basically, due to all of the FUD over H1Bs, the clients themselves are refusing to sponsor them. So you have these contracting agencies whose entire business model was erected on the foundation of H1B labor, and now their customers are scared to hire H1Bs, because they fear the financial consequences. It's not a skills gap; it's that the companies don't like uncertainty, and until the H1B fight is sorted out, particularly the cost of sponsorship, the corporations themselves are unwilling to hire them. That leaves a bunch of opportunities for people recently laid off, who do NOT require sponsorship. (I was laid off from a Giant Megacorp in 2025 when they outsourced 30+ roles offshore.) But it gets stranger. I dug into the numbers, literally pulling up the categories of where H1Bs are getting hired now, and they're absolutely EXPLODING in electrical engineering. I've spent most of the last 30 years working in finance (the place I was laid off from last year is a financial institution based in New Jersey; I've never even seen the office or visited the city.) I think we may see a repeat of what happened to Savings and Loans in the 1990s. Today, many don't even know what an S&L was , but back then, they were everywhere. Today, the number of banks has been reduced to 16% of what it was 40 years ago. Same thing appears to be happening to the trades. Private equity is gobbling up small companies doing this type of work, smashing them together into larger companies, and then creating the economies of scale where H1B sponsorship makes sense. The number of EEs who've received sponsorship in the last year has gone up by 160%. For now, Apple and Microsoft are leading the charge, with hiring concentrated in California and Texas.

I may need to board my two kitties soon and am curious if folks have had generally positive experiences with this company. One of my cats is literally everything to me so he needs to be well tended to. Thank you in advance!

Recreational, something casual and beginner friendly. Winter is coming so just want to be prepared

This came into my inbox today and I thought it well worth sharing https://michaelrhatch.substack.com/p/the-city-that-doubled-down?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

I am doing some long-term planning and figuring in the next 10 to 15 years I want to move to Seattle. I grew up in Washington Southwest of Seattle about 2 hours but I know Seattle is where I want to be. It will be me and my wife and our two kids who will be teenagers then. I work as a school counselor and make pretty standard salary. Right now in the Seattle area I would be making about $95,000. I am trying to adjust for inflation for the future and everything to figure out where exactly we would like to move to in seattle. We love being close to things and going to museums and awesome new restaurants. Also we must stay close to the Children's hospital due to my son's cerebral palsy. I am also trying to take into consideration the cost of living in the Seattle area and my salary not being that great. My wife gets paid to take care of our son at home but it isn't much. In Washington they pay about 22 to 25 an hour for that. Combined as of now we have about 95,000 salary living in arizona. If we were to move to Seattle right now that would jump up to about 120,000 a year. Some neighborhoods that I've been looking into are Ballard, Magnolia, Laurelhurst, Lake City, Queen Anne. Like I said I understand that these places are expensive. I'm just putting out there what I'm looking for and trying to get some feedback. Maybe there is somewhere that checks all the boxes I'm looking for that I'm overlooking? I would appreciate any positive feedback and or tips on relocation and geography. I also would assume that purchasing a house would be out of reach for me at this time and I am okay with renting. Please let me know your thoughts thanks!

Looking for ways to bike from the downtown Bellevue light rail station to the tech offices in downtown Bellevue (Microsoft, Amazon, Snowflake, etc). Do you know of good protected bike lanes (PBLs) or low speed roads that are safe to ride on? All the routes I found on Google Maps - even the ones shown as "bike routes" - are actually unprotected ( example ), next to high speed cars in wide lanes, and don't look safe at all.