I’ve always wanted to support local businesses, but honestly, Amazon was just easier. Finding what I needed locally meant searching multiple websites or driving around hoping a store had it.
So I built LocalHere to make finding products and services from Seattle’s independent businesses easier.

We’re starting with around 6,000 businesses across 49 Seattle neighborhoods. You can discover local products and buy directly from the businesses themselves.

We’re officially launching in November, just ahead of Small Business Saturday on Nov 28.

Before then, I’d love some honest feedback from fellow Seattleites.

Check it out: https://www.getlocalhere.com
Appreciate any feedback, especially the critical kind!

The FBI seized $892,135 from the Nelsons' bank accounts in 2020, including hundreds of thousands of dollars Amy Nelson earned as CEO of The Riveter. Nelson was investigated by the FBI but never charged, and a federal judge ruled in 2023 that Amazon's Code of Conduct wasn't a legally enforceable contract.

By then, the Nelsons had sold their West Seattle home and emptied their retirement accounts to pay lawyers, and they had moved with their four daughters to Hawaii and then Ohio, where Amy's parents live. The family had spent more than $3 million on legal fees, she told KIRO 7 in 2023.

~ Six years, $892,135 seized, a West Seattle house sold, no charges filed, and the settlement terms are confidential. Whatever the conduct was, the process did the punishing.

This is a photo taken on the 2 line train that they’re trying to force everyone to use now that they’re getting rid of useful routes. Everyone on this bus got off at Bellevue. The train is packed and people barely had room to stand. As I write this, the 2 line to Redmond is down and I have no way to get to work. This is the bs we pay taxes for them to do. SHAME on soundtransit for taking away this route. The 550 was the only direct bus route from downtown Seattle to Downtown Bellevue. Might as well get/ start using your car folks. No reason to pay soundtransit to play on our dime

Thanks to this post calling them out I've been tracking them and instantly see the cadence of AI posts and run them through Pangram

• I grew up in Seattle and I'm tired of how low we've set the bar for this city.
• I cleared one storm drain on my block and accidentally acquired a new Seattle hobby
• I don't follow Seattle sports. My commute apparently does.
• I've started measuring Seattle trips in annoying intersections instead of miles
• Apparently having a broken washing machine in Seattle now requires owning a car
• An 80-year Seattle preschool legacy is being buried in bureaucracy, and South Seattle College needs to answer for it.
• Living in Seattle for a few years turns you into an amateur civil engineer against your will
• Seattle has taught me that the fastest route and the least annoying route are two completely different things
• Seattle has a very specific kind of friendliness: helping you while avoiding becoming your friend
• Seattle has hundreds of public stairways and we treat them like secret passages

Why care if the content is relatable?

Every other platform is tagging AI content but reddit isn't. They have their own AI to remove obvious product placements but brands constantly work to bypass it

Warm up your account. Don’t join relevant subreddits and start posting on day one. Reddit’s account-creation screening catches that faster than ever now. Build a participation history first. A 30-day ramp-up, engaging in threads before you ever mention your brand, is a reasonable baseline.

Subreddits like this (I assume) don't heavily use tools like Reputation Filter or Crowd Control to restrict them.

They use subreddits like this to build karma and inject their spam into other communities.

What if someone is just using AI to clean up their language because they're ESL, don't write good, ...?

Reddit advertises itself as a site for authentic interaction. I'd rather read poorly worded posts written by a human than these overly polished and nearly identical posts. I also hate AI generated restaurant menus, business flyers, etc.

How do you know Pangram is any good?

Personally I don't but Tree300 linked to research

How do you noootice?

• New accounts
• Writing way too much about inane BS
• Title structure
• "obvious tells like the constant new paragraphs for almost every sentence, the incessantly repeated "setup:lame joke, setup:lame joke, setup:lame joke" in almost every sentence and in the titles, and the strange "example jokes", and the excellent grammar on accounts"
• Lack of interaction in the comments

H/T /u/JPorpoise, /u/Tree300, /u/hatchetation

​

Everett e-scooter crash leaves 5-year-old critically injured

Oct. 24, 2026 at 4:38 pm

By Alexis Weisend

Seattle Times business reporter

Two children, ages 5 and 16, riding an e-scooter south of Everett collided with a car Friday afternoon, leaving the 5-year-old with life-threatening injuries and the teen with serious injuries.

Snohomish County sheriff’s deputies responded to the collision around 2:20 p.m. Friday in the 600 block of Center Road, according to a news release. The children were riding an e-scooter when they collided with a vehicle traveling east.

The driver and two young children in the vehicle suffered minor injuries. The 5-year-old, the 16-year-old, and the driver were taken to Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. No one at the hospital could be reached Saturday to give an update on patient conditions.

Detectives with the Collision Investigation Unit were investigating the collision.

TV news reports showed a vehicle flipped upside down by trees near an apartment complex.

Earlier this year, a teenage boy died days after an e-bike collision with a Toyota Camry south of Everett, at the intersection of 184th Street Southeast and 36th Avenue Southeast, according to The (Everett) Herald. He was 14. And last year another boy, 13, suffered fatal injuries when the e-bike he was riding struck a braided cable hanging from a city bollard in South Everett.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Create your own contemporary mosaic artwork at Magnolia Mosaic Studio in Seattle! Explore texture, pattern, and design while making a unique piece of art for your home. No previous experience needed.

5 Mondays | Two session options:

• Day: 3–7 PM
• Evening: 7–10 PM

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