cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39883316

Cities: Eugene and Springfield, OR

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39835035

Privacy is worth fighting for.

If so, which party are you registered to vote for? Is it the same one you vote for in the generals? What would be your top issues for the governor's race? Looks like we have 15 candidates already registered for the next governor's race alone (2026).

No judgement, I want to hear from all perspectives and all neighbors.

Some fun facts:

• Primaries determine who everybody else gets to vote for
• Less than 10% of the population votes in primaries
• You must select a party to vote in their primary
• You can change parties as often as you'd like
• Your ballot for the primary will arrive via mail just like normal ballots

Want to pick or change your party? Go to the SoS website, takes 60 seconds. https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/vr/showVoterSearch.do?lang=eng&source=SOS

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/26140998

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Tim Lewis discovers an employee of Eugene Police Dept acting as press

“In this instance, as shown in the video, police officers allowed a police PIO sporting a vest marked ‘press’ to record them from close range even as they threatened to arrest another person for the same activity. This disparate treatment would be evident to anyone on the scene — undermining trust in the police. Meanwhile, viewers of the video taken by the public information officer would be in the dark about this double standard.”

Two years ago, Oregon cherry growers hoped that above-average yield and creative marketing would end a string of damaging seasons largely caused by snow and heat devastating the fragile crop. But the cherry market crashed that year and was so harmful to Oregon cherry farmers that they received federal aid as a result.

This year may prove to be just as challenging for farms growing Oregon’s fourth most valuable fruit, after wine grapes, blueberries and pears.

“It’s going to be a disaster of a year,” Chandler said, “but not a natural one, a manmade disaster.”

Many cherry farmers started the summer harvest last month with a labor shortage, as farmworkers delayed traveling to Oregon out of fear of immigration crackdowns.

In 2023, cherry farmers sought a disaster declaration from Gov. Tina Kotek after the price retailers paid them per pound dropped to about 55 cents.

This year, cherry farmers are estimating they’ll make 30 or 40 cents per pound, said Ashley Thompson, an associate professor of horticulture at Oregon State and a cherry expert.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/32328151

Major components of the surveillance network include the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, and monitoring of social media through “sock puppet” accounts. Meanwhile, Jackson County is using a third-party lease to make its publicly owned building available to ICE for its Southern Oregon field office, creating another “backdoor” for local government resources to be utilized by ICE despite Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary state.”

Our latest trove of public records total 313 pages. Below is an overview of the records, which were obtained through public records requests to the city of Medford, the city of Grants Pass, and Jackson County. We provide a downloadable copy of the records at the bottom of this blog post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/26314754

Not OP, but x-posting from reddit for visibility

...

March 29 is the #TeslaTakedown global day of protest. The goal is 500 protests in one day. If you have felt like you want to DO something but didn't know what, here's something you can do! We will be peacefully exercising our first amendment right to show Eugene what we all think of Tesla, Elon Musk, and DOGE to continue driving Tesla's share price (and Elon Musk's wealth) down.

There are no Tesla showrooms in Eugene but there is a supercharger station at Oakway center. We'll picket at the northeast corner at the intersection of Coburg Rd and Oakway Rd (in front of PF Chang's).

Event link: https://actionnetwork.org/events/tesla-protest-march-29-global-day-of-action

Striking workers and their families should not be pushed into poverty for exercising their legally protected right to strike. This policy helps level the playing field, helps put money back into the local economy during a labor dispute, and helps ensure negotiations happen sooner rather than later.

Take action today and send a letter to Oregon lawmakers asking for them to support SB 916 / HB 3434 and by doing so, protect working people who are using their legal right to strike.

They've gotten 2,125 of their 3200 letter goal so far.

Super brave Caucasian commissioners decide committee they do not directly benefit from does not have a purpose, in a wise and comprehensive evaluation showing exactly who is a member of their community worth investing in.

Program had no funding and cost nothing other than ~4 hours of each program member's time related to the program each month.

Please keep this in mind when thinking about where you will travel, vacation, live and do business with. If you'd like to share your thoughts with the county commissioners: board@deschutes.org

Senate:

Merkley (D) Yes, Wyden (D), No

House:

Republicans: Bentz: Yes, Chavez-DeRemer: Yes

Democrats: Blumenauer: Yes, Bonamici: No, Hoyle: No, Salinas : Yes

Not sure which rep is yours? Find out in one click https://myreps.datamade.us/

President:

Biden (D) - Voted Yes by signing the bill/not vetoing

My personal take (please put your own thoughts in the comments):
I don't use TikTok, I think it's trash, but the democrats handed Trump an absolute win on this for no good reason. The TikTok ban was initially Trump's idea, while he was president, but he couldn't get congress to pass it. But when Biden and dems gained power, they passed it, with a provision set so that the ban doesn't actually come into effect until the start of Trump's turn, where he can cancel it and look like a hero to fans of TikTok and free speech more generally.

The TikTok ban is one of the biggest attacks on free speech I have seen in my lifetime. The government should not be able to dictate how you get your news, period. It's your right to read, view, and speak what you want, even advocating for the overthrow of the government, that's why we have the first amendment. It is one of the few issues that has me considering voting R over D even though I voted straight D last election. Our right to free speech protects all our other rights, this is an incredibly dangerous precedent and the democrats taking an absolute L for no reason. And it won't help them get the youth vote they so desperately need to win elections.

Banning TikTok isn't fighting China, it's becoming China. It's using the same "foreign interference" and "protect the children" line used by despots globally from Xi to Putin as they ban newspapers, websites, and anybody critical of their regime. "But China does it" isn't the great defense people seem to think it is, we don't want to do the same things China does.

We can lose our right to abortion or privacy and use free speech to get it back. If we lose our right to free speech, there's no other right that works the same except possibly the second amendment. The road to tyranny is paved by the loss of individual liberties.

The last thing I want is for the incoming administration to have a nice, legal pathway to clamp down on speech which is critical of them, and platforms which allow that speech. And dems just rolled out the carpet for them on this.

Source for votes:

Senate: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll/_call/_votes/vote1182/vote/_118/_2/_00154.htm#state

House: https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/202486

Ziply was a dumb pipe with decent rates for symmetrical fiber with moderate usage. No good can come of this for customers, hope Kahn blocks it.

I posted about this 3 months ago and it was $750--glad to see the measure is going for it. The $1,600 is per person, not household. Minors count.

Large corps ($25m in revenue minimum) pay.

Seems most of the people I know have gotten sick within the past month. This is an excellent overview of the new COVID boosters, Flu shots, and vaccines. All insurance plans cover all of these vaccinations. Most will cover them at any pharmacy, but Kaiser will require you to go through them.

FLU

• Aside from good diet and exercise, the #1 thing you can do to reduce your chance of a heart attack is to get a flu shot. Flu is a common cause of heart attacks. It cuts your risk by 25%!
• Hate needles? There is a nasal spray version of the flu vaccine, just ask your doctor about it

COVID

• If you have been avoiding boosters because the side effects are rough, check out Novavax. The MRNA ones took me out for 24-48 hrs, Novavax didn't even give me a sore arm. Just as effective. I have seen it at Rite Aid.
• Boosters will not completely prevent infection, but they make infection less likely, reduce symptom severity, and are extremely effective at preventing death. Reducing your chance of infection and symptom severity also reduces your risk of long covid and myocarditis.
• Even in cases of mild infections in healthy people, long covid can cause these symptoms for months or permanently: loss of smell, loss of mental acuity, exhaustion and fatigue, shortness of breath, etc. Your chance of getting long covid is 1-10% depending on how you define it and what study you read. The more times you get covid, the higher your risk of developing long covid.
• If you got your last booster 6+ months ago, your booster is basically doing nothing to prevent infection or symptom severity at this point. But the protection against death is quite durable.

For more information and FAQ, I highly suggest this article:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-fall-2024-vaccines

Kroger wants to buy Albertsons, a major competitor, who also owns Safeway, which Albertsons somehow was approved to buy 3-4 years ago. The attached is a good representation of what "choice" would look like if the merger were approved by the FTC for SE metro area of Portland; 6/10 larger grocers would be run by Kroger (WinCo, Costco, Grocery Outlet and New Seasons the only exception).

This is a big deal because:

• Kroger has already been price gouging like crazy since the pandemic as we all knew but has been recently confirmed by Kroger themselves (https://www.newsweek.com/kroger-executive-admits-company-gouged-prices-above-inflation-1945742)
• This would make bullet #1 above worse with that scale of market dominance
• Kroger was among the most appalling for worker and customer safety during the pandemic. They had sneeze guards up in their 172nd location in May of 2021, a full 1.5 years after the pandemic started, never enforced masking and refused to take any returns during the pandemic for any reason, but mainly to pad their bottom line.
• Kroger's local workers are currently on strike for the crap wages and conditions they have endured. A larger corporate entity would only grow the awful employment and labor practices Kroger has.
• Pharmacy services are already under-served and with Rite-aid and Walgreens closing hundreds of locations nationwide, it would force more medically dependent customers to Kroger, who demonstrated its absolute indifference to worker and customer safety before, during and after the pandemic.

If you want to slow grocery price gouging, support better conditions for customers and employees, be able to choose other companies when one isn't meeting your needs, I highly recommend sharing your thoughts with the FTC and boycotting Kroger/Safeway/Albertsons as much as you can.

I'm pretty sure this is a new sentence for me: I'm glad I haven't been to the zoo in a few years.

LED screens designed to show the current Powerball Jackpot were affected in seemingly random locations, including billboards in Coos Bay, Albany and Portland between Aug. 12 and 14. Roughly four of the affected billboards were in the Portland area.

One of the affected billboards was recorded by Reddit user “HanginWithMrPooper” near the intersection of 68th Ave. and Halsey Street in Northeast Portland.