Posted on 09/16/2014 9:08:05 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
Like many residents of Northwest Portland, Matthew Hale doesn’t own a car. Instead, he prefers to walk or ride the bus to the city’s innumerable coffee shops and breweries and live-music spots. On weekends, he and his wife have no problem hitching rides to the Pacific Coast or the Cascade mountain range. Everywhere he looks, Hale told me, there are people just like him — bearded, on skateboards, brewing kombucha. “It’s really chill,” he says.
Portland has taken hold of the cultural imagination as, to borrow the tag line from “Portlandia,” the place where young people go to retire. And for good reason: The city has nearly all the perks that economists suggest lead to a high quality of life — coastlines, mountains, mild winters and summers, restaurants, cultural institutions and clean air. (Fortunately, college-educated people don’t value sunshine as much as they used to.) Portland also has qualities that are less tangible but still likely to attract young people these days, like a politically open culture that supports gay rights and the legalization of marijuana — in addition to the right of way for unicyclists or the ability to marry in a 24/7 doughnut shop. “It’s really captured the zeitgeist of the age in a way that no other small city in America ever has,” said Aaron Renn, an urban-affairs analyst who writes the Urbanophile blog. According to professors from Portland State University, the city has been able to attract and retain young college-educated people at the second-highest rate in the nation. (Louisville, Ky., is No. 1.)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
in case some idiot hasn’t yet found a village....
Would any of that exist without the welfare state?
Slackers utopia
I don't give the NYT any clicks so I'm making an assumption that the Portlandian cited in the article snippet is married to a woman. If so, the problem will start if they decide to procreate and their idiocy is added to the next generation. They also may find that being without a car is very limiting when it comes to child-rearing. I'm also betting the parents of these idiots are waiting for that "I told you so" moment of clarity.
a friend who is lifelong Portlander always said that Portland is where the yuppies who are too stoned to find Eugene end up.
People in Portland who have actual businesses are getting concerned, as the rest of the world increasingly thinks of them as a bunch of weird hippie slackers.
How dare you ask such a question, these people only desire a better life for themselves. Whats next? you don’t want to pay for it??
Is someone not noticing that with their urban planning they will eventually have a city where no one can afford housing within the city limit? Step over the city limit and land is cheap. That will be where the middle class will move.
Hope they enjoy their coffee and kombucha because they will eventually join the ranks of every other old decaying city.
If these "graphic designers", and other "creative" types actually had skills, they could get jobs where they worked remotely, or if there was such a pool of "creative" talent in Portland, companies would be building design studios there.
Neither is happening.
Conclusion: These "creative" people are actually undertalented and deluded. See the Dunning–Kruger effect.
I’ve lived here most of my life. But my house is way out west in washington county. Beautiful part of the country but Portland itself is getting really gross we never go downtown.
Portland is where the city council outlawed the use of “brown bag” because it could also mean black person and “citizen” because it hurts illegals feelings.
Portland is a clear example of Survival of the Unfit.
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (often referred to as The Theory of Survival of the Fittest) describes the positive effects resulting from any “pressure” on an animal species that removes the least fit among the species and allows only the most fit of the species to reproduce. Many of us are well aware of this “Survival of the Fittest” theory, but few are aware that Darwin also makes mention of the negative effects resulting from unlimited reproduction of a species’ least fit when the weak, the lazy, and the stupid are left unchecked.
We like to think otherwise, but our species, Homo sapiens, isn’t that long “out of the trees” and the same laws of nature that affect all of God’s creatures apply equally to us. If we were to observe any other species that had been allowed to reproduce without limitations, we would know immediately what the consequences will be.
Whenever the weak; lazy; and stupid of a species are allowed to reproduce unimpeded by predators that feed off the weak; lazy; and stupid, they soon outnumber the strong, productive, and intelligent. When the weak/lazy/stupid dominate the gene pool, the entire population becomes weak/ lazy/stupid, and then the population collapses.
In the past, when these collapses occurred within human populations, they have been referred to as a “Malthusian Collapse.” Thomas Malthus, a Nineteenth Century Economist, thought these collapses were caused simply because past civilizations had reached a point where human populations could no longer produce sufficient food supplies to feed themselves, but he never pinned down the exact reason for the food shortages.
We now think some of these collapses of past human civilizations may have occurred when the unproductive weak/lazy/stupid greatly outnumbered the strong/productive/intelligent of the population. In other words, the majority of the population became too lazy to perform the work necessary to provide for themselves and what was left of the strong/productive/intelligent refused to continue to do it for them.
These collapses have occurred at frequent intervals throughout human history, and Western Civilization is, in my humble opinion, currently on the cusp of one of these collapses.
D.J. Taylor
I’ve had periods in my life where owning a car was useful and other times where it would have been a PITA. When circumstances changed it was amazingly easy to buy, rent, or sell/dispose of a car.
The main reason to not have a car in NW Portland is because finding a parking space is just about impossible. So much for that urban planning.
I’ve been hanging around Portland for a little bit now. It seems like an extraordinarily clean and mellow town, especially compared to the hellholes in California. In what way is it getting gross?
Portland is the place where Stupid thrives, is nurtured, admired. Imagine a city that doesn't question the conspiracy of chemtrails, or global warming, thinks you can get black lung from trainloads of coal, that if they just raise the minimum wage high enough, everyone will be intellectually equal.
If Ebola were only to strike the Stupid, Portland would be empty.
Trustafarians
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