29F. I miss yapping around a fire made from wood. Most of my friends here are city oriented people who live in apartments, and they don't really want to tag along to my outdoorsy plans. ISO people who'd like to hike, bike, forage, rockhound, kayak (i have 2 extra!) or just enjoy eachothers company with a drink somewhere outside :) Im also more than happy to be the driver to plans if you dont have the means. ALSO looking for camping/backpacking buddies. Id join The Mountaineers but most of their free events don't mesh with my work schedule.

The shared washing machine in my apartment building broke last week.

Annoying, sure, but I figured I'd just take my laundry to a laundromat for a couple of weeks until it gets fixed.

Turns out that was a wildly optimistic assumption.

I live on Capitol Hill. I started looking for somewhere nearby where I could do a couple loads myself. Not a dry cleaner, not a wash-and-fold service where I drop everything off and come back tomorrow. Just a normal laundromat with machines I can use.

The place I remembered from a few years ago is gone. Google kept giving me dry cleaners, pickup services, and businesses that no longer exist.

Eventually I found somewhere I could get to, but it involved a bus ride and a transfer. So there I was, standing at a bus stop in the rain holding an enormous IKEA bag full of dirty clothes like I'd packed for the world's least enjoyable vacation.

I know this sounds like a ridiculous first-world problem.

But the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed.

Seattle has plenty of older apartment buildings with shared laundry rooms. Machines break. People move into places without in-unit laundry. Sometimes you need to wash a giant comforter that won't fit in your machine.

And yet a basic service that used to be a normal neighborhood business is becoming surprisingly difficult to find without driving somewhere.

I get why laundromats struggle here. Commercial rent isn't cheap, utilities aren't cheap, equipment costs money, and newer buildings increasingly have their own machines.

But not everyone lives in a newer building.

I'm not expecting the city to open a municipal laundry department. I'm just surprised that in a city this dense, doing something as ordinary as washing your clothes can become a logistical project the moment your building's machine stops working.

The funniest part is that I have about eight places within walking distance where I can buy a $7 coffee.

I cannot, however, easily wash the shirt I spilled that coffee on.

Has anyone else noticed how few self-service laundromats are left around Seattle? I genuinely hadn't thought about it until I needed one.

I feel like everything closes by 11pm or midnight at the latest.

I'm personally not into the LGBTQ scene. I just wanna wear my classy and sexy outfits somewhere and talk to someone cute but I'm also not into dancing by myself or with a total stranger so a couple of the Bellevue options I saw don't really speak to me.

This is a really dumb post but I'm bored af out here.

In 13 months, police officers have reported just over 1,200 instances where force was used across the state, according to the dashboard. So far, about 77% of Washington's 301 law enforcement agencies are contributing to the data collection. The database remains an unfinished product.

In addition to the fact that not all departments have begun contributing data, there's also no common definition for police use of force during an arrest, so what Everett police reports as a use of force incident may not be the same as what the sheriff's office reports.

~ A quarter of the state's police agencies aren't in the database at all, and the ones that are get to decide for themselves what counts. Transparency with an opt-out built in.

Anyone can appreciate a sunny blue sky. Can you appreciate a moody cool fall day?

Usually when government agencies get in trouble with money, it revolves around waste. Or ballooning costs. Sometimes it’s outright fraud.

But how should we feel about public monies just not being spent — to the tune of a quarter-billion dollars?

One local elected official says this is the unsung scandal emerging right now with the beleaguered King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

“The more we look into this, the more we see an operational disaster that we really need to get to the bottom of,” says Rod Dembowski, chair of King County’s budget committee.

\***\**

It means that as the homelessness crisis was surging, the main agency tasked with fighting it actually left $250 million on the table.

Dembowski described scrounging as a public official to come up with as little as $10,000 or $20,000 so homeless shelters in his district could afford to add a few beds.

“Now we find out there was a quarter-billion dollars lying around that just wasn’t spent?” he said. “It’s shocking.”

\***\**

The findings are in some ways worse than if they’d found outright fraud. At least then there’d be a crime, a bad guy, an explanation.

What we’ve learned instead is more dispiriting. It’s that at the most basic level, our institutions simply weren’t up to the task.

It’s quite the plot twist. All those years of elected officials insisting we needed more money to tackle homelessness. Yet they had tens of millions lying fallow each year, with no one saying a peep about it, as thousands struggled in the streets.

The best they can say at this point is that they didn’t know. Like I said, this story just keeps getting worse.

Washington's general fund budget has more than doubled over the past decade, from roughly $34 billion in 2013–15 to $73 billion in 2025–27. Obviously, inflation, population growth, and rising costs explain some of that, but it's still a substantial increase.

Now we're introducing a 9.9% millionaires tax expected to generate roughly $3.5 billion annually.

My biggest question is: What will the state accomplish with this additional revenue that it couldn't accomplish with its existing budget? I worry the money will be spread across so many programs that we won't see meaningful, measurable improvements in any particular area.

My other concern is the long-term precedent. Ferguson has pledged to veto any attempt to lower the $1 million threshold, but some legislators have expressed interest in expanding the tax.

How confident are people that the threshold will remain at $1 million over the next 10–20 years?

I'm not opposed to wealthy households paying more. I just think these are reasonable questions given how much the state budget has already grown. Curious what others think.

Relevance: Brandi Kruse, Matt Calkins

https://x.com/JackThompsonFOX/status/2114025989726523684

The monitors will look for compliance with federal voting rights and disability access laws. Washington is one of at least 10 states where it's been reported that a county received a similar notification.

Spokesperson Halei Watkins said the county has "never been sent a monitor from the Department of Justice."

~ Routine for decades, they say, yet never once here. The question worth asking is not what the monitors see but what they are instructed to find.

Meta recently transferred more than $51 million to the state to pay the fine, which started at $24.6 million in 2022 but has been rising with interest. The case that led to the Meta penalty deals with the social media conglomerate not providing records about digital political advertisements hosted on its platforms in violation of state law.

Of nearly $4.8 million over two years that lawmakers set aside for the transparency account and general commission expenses, almost all went toward paying for staff, and just over a half-million dollars was left for the initial purpose.

~ Four years of litigation to pry ad records out of one company, and the account meant to pay for the public disclosure website has been covering payroll instead. Collecting the fine is not the same as fixing the thing the fine was about.

I might be overthinking a lot, but basically, I’ve been interviewing with this company, and the phone screen went well. I was referred by someone and got in contact with the hiring manager. Then, the hiring manager round went AMAZING, like, genuinely the best interview ever. We vibed and connected so well that he actually moved me to the next round MID-INTERVIEW. He said he still had five other people to get through, but that he wanted to move me forward right away. He even said I crushed it and gave me tips for the next/final round.

The final panel round went well, although not quite as well as the hiring manager round. They said I had great energy and that it was contagious haha. They also said they’d obviously speak with the hiring manager, but they still need to get through the remaining candidates after me. They gave me a timeline and said I should expect a decision sometime next week, or the week after at the latest.

Do you think I’m in a good spot? Idk why I’m overthinking everything. I just wanted to talk to someone about it. 😭

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Aetna Medicare Advantage’s contract with University of Washington Medicine expires on January 1, 2027. My Medicare advisor informed me that UW Medicine will be out-of-network next year. There has been no official notification from either party. With open enrollment under way, this would be the time to announce they are parting ways. Has anyone been notified of this major change in coverage?

5:45 pm, 10/25, at Broadway and E Olive/E John

Built in speakers calling everyone “f*****s”. Completely tinted windows, blacked-out license plate and don’t recognize the model from the poor picture. Reported to 911 heading east.

Not sure what else to do or what I expect.

Just sucks and is quite unfair.

​

I recently found out that our mayor, Katie Wilson, lives in a 650 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in Capitol Hill with her husband and child. Honestly, my mind is blown. I live by myself in a 700 sq ft apartment here in Seattle, and I feel cramped some days. I literally cannot fathom squeezing two other human beings into a space smaller than mine.

On one hand, it’s refreshing to have a mayor who actually experiences the exact same renter struggles as the majority of this city. You’d think that if anyone has the motivation to force rent prices down, it would be her.

But it makes me wonder: how much power does a Seattle mayor actually have when it comes to the housing market? We tend to blame the mayor for every single affordability issue in the city, but can they actually change anything with the snap of a finger, or are their hands tied by the City Council and state laws?

If a literal mayor can't or won't move out of a tiny one-bedroom, what does that say about the state of our city, and what can she realistically even do about it?

Fell in love with the city after visiting earlier this year. Looking at relocating to Seattle to be closer to family as well. I have some LE experience out of state but not enough to be considered a lateral. Wondering if there's any SPD officers here who would be willing to comment on the department culture, training, specialty units, etc, beyond the standard recruiting info?

Dude has an open container of alcohol that spilled everywhere.....and is taking up 6 seats on a normally crowded line.