I've visited Bruce and his home as well, and it's almost startling how welcoming he is. When I went, it was the middle of a nice afternoon, and so he already happened to be outside conversing with some other guests, but if you poke around on his website, you'll find that he essentially says "if you come for a visit and I'm not around, climb up on the wing and come bang on my airplane until you wake me up."
Was only there for a few minutes, but we got in a short and pleasant conversation about housing scarcity and the future of AI. Really interesting character, clearly living his best life.
Really does insist that if you show up (even unannounced) to climb up on his airplane and bang on it/yell until he comes out: "Please do wake me boldly sans any regrets."
I might have to head out there as it's basically a suburb of Portland where I live.
Yes, but it's also next to the Evergreen Aviation Museum, which is absolutely worth stopping at if you're in the area! And, actually, is worth most of a day to visit.
I was there earlier last year and we took the time to go through the Hughes HG-1 (aka "Spruce Goose"). It's an excellent museum on the west coast!
It's amazing how over-spec'ed (in some categories) for housing plane is: air-tight, heavy thermal and noise insulation, built to withstand winds of hundreds of miles-per-hour. It's a shame we can't build something like the iPhone or Tesla of housing.
Can you elaborate on the toxic materials? I'm curious to know more. I am aware of Skydrol hydralic fluid and perhaps some other oils/lubricants. Is there anything else that might be toxic?
Amazing to see that the plane belonged to Olympic airlines. This was an airline started by Aristotle Onassis which later became tha national carrier of Greece, and finally merged with Aegean airlines. How it ended up in oregon ... another matter.
This is literally the airplane that carried Onassis’s body after he died. The owner of the plane won’t let you sit in the seat where Jackie sat during that flight.
It's probably not that strange. Once the plane hits the end of its life the airline looks to sell it off to some scrapper, so all he has to do is show up at the auction with cash in hand. As for getting it to Oregon, well, it is an airplane.
With an old airplane, one thing I'd be worried about is Kapton wiring[1]. A lot of these older planes were wired with a type of orange insulator that breaks down very easily over time and under mechanical stresses. A handful of planes went down because of it; Bruce would still need to think about the fire risk and should consider replacing the wiring if he hasn't already.
More Bruce Campbell Oregon trivia: Bruce the actor, from Evil Dead and various and sundry other 'B' movies and TV shows like Burn Notice also lives in Oregon, near Ashland.
I've been to this guys place. Nicest guy. But he is absolutely surrounded by "Trump Nation" people (their flags are everywhere out there) who hate him. Every time he leaves home his place is vandalized. Just before I visited someone had waited till he was gone and then dumped truck loads of some kind of poison all over his grounds. He was going through and sifting it out of the soil by hand. It is incredible how cheerful and optimistic he remains in the face of all the surrounding hate. I'd definitely recommend going and visiting his place if you are ever in Portland.
I live in Portland but spend most weekends at my gf's house in the country, near Chehalem, about a 15 minute drive from where the airplane is. It's a weird mix out there, because it's also wine country, so you have a lot of very wealthy landowners - some of whom aren't quite "locals" and are more socially liberal. The locals can really get into your business, though. Among other things, in our situation, some of the neighbors don't believe in Covid and during the lockdowns they went out of their way to have parties, and show up and try to spook us by getting close up in our faces. Ironically, once they found out we were vaccinated they stopped showing up, because they think the vaxed can spread proteins that will sterilize them.
I've seen and heard them practicing with paint ball guns in the woods on nights prior to when Trump caravans rolled into Portland and shot BLM protesters with ball bearings.
During the fires last summer, when it went out that the Bureau of Land Management was starting back-fires, they misinterpreted "BLM" to mean "Black Lives Matter", and set up illegal armed checkpoints on the roads, stopping cars at gunpoint to "check for antifa". Law enforcement did nothing about it.
The Newberg school district is currently in hot water for banning all "political clothing" - defined as LGBTQ colors and BLM shirts, but, of course, not MAGA or Jesus stuff.
At a bar there recently, someone told me that California had just legalized child abuse.
A woman I know says the best sushi in Newberg is from the Fred Myer. Her son won't drink bottled water because it's heavier than normal water and designed to make you thirsty.
I tried going to an accountant out there and when I walked into her office for the first meeting, she was wearing a large gold swastika necklace. I don't know if she knew I was Jewish or she just wears that all the time.
That being said, there are all kinds of people out there - horse trainers, winemakers and others in the industry, five-star chefs, doctors, weirdo hippies, and the wealthy landed class, who are just like anyone you'd meet in Portland. There was even an unheard-of, pretty well-attended LGBTQ rally in downtown Newberg a couple months ago. Of the lower class there are only about 1/3rd I'd say who are actively hostile, as opposed to just curious. It's manageable as long as you never get into conversations about politics and treat everyone with respect. The only black person I know of who lives out there says he prefers it because he knows where he stands (as a curiosity) and he has no trouble with anyone. That's pretty much the attitude you have to adopt.
> I tried going to an accountant out there and when I walked into her office for the first meeting, she was wearing a large gold swastika necklace.
> It's manageable as long as you never get into conversations about politics and treat everyone with respect.
I mean, I'm going to have a hard time treating a person wearing a swastika necklace with respect - I'm going to let them know that I will not be using their services and the reason why. I hope you walked out of there and found the services of a different accountant.
(I live in Beaverton and once you get out of the Portland metro area things get pretty maga-hatty. We were planning a trip to Coos Bay a few months back and decided against it partly because COVID was raging down there then but also because of concerns of potential political violence in some of the areas between here and there. Oregon is definitely a state with some pretty wide extremes.)
> I mean, I'm going to have a hard time treating a person wearing a swastika necklace with respect - I'm going to let them know that I will not be using their services and the reason why. I hope you walked out of there and found the services of a different accountant.
It's probably good to have a dialogue about it, and you should note the person's ethnicity as well.
Try Google imaging "hindu lucky symbol." I'm not entirely convinced that a people should be forced to entirely give up on a symbol they were using first, before it got misappropriated.
sure, if the person was Indian it would be another story - given the location I doubt they were talking about an Indian accountant. Then again, I've worked with a lot of Indians and never saw any of them wear a swastika necklace.
> given the location I doubt they were talking about an Indian accountant
Possibly. As an Indian I'd just appreciate it if people were given the opportunity to have a dialogue around this. I agree that there are many cases where such dialogue is not warranted, of course.
A reply to your comment is perhaps not the best place for this, since I don't disagree with you, but am merely trying to have a somewhat relevant yet ultimately orthogonal discussion.
Personally, I've been forced to give it a wide berth for obvious reasons, as I imagine many Indians you know have too. However, if you came into my home you'd be able to find a few swastikas — I'm not even religious, it's just on gifts from friends and family.
> I've worked with a lot of Indians and never saw any of them wear a swastika necklace
Most Indians don't wear it, but that still leaves a lot who do. I'd also imagine that there's some selection bias going on when you consider only the people you've worked with. If you googled it you'd have noted that most images are clearly of pendants.
We went to Pacific City a few months ago and ended up in a bar that had some huge "thin blue line" flags hanging inside. Got into a conversation with a guy who seemed to be a nice old pot-smoking hippie who'd moved out there to grow weed. Until about halfway through the conversation he started asserting that the "storm" was coming and Trump was the real president, and Biden was probably already in jail, and we'd just wait and see, any day now.
Personally, I prefer Astoria. No beach, but it's a cooler vibe.
[edit] Just to add, I have a (non-Jewish) uncle who retired to Coos Bay. He's become one of the most extremist and racist people I've ever met, in addition to being a hardcore anti-vaxer. He wasn't like that when I was a kid. Living in that environment changed him radically for the worse.
re: the accountant, I left. I wrote her an email explaining why I couldn't work with her. She apologized and said she didn't realize what it was, that it was a gift from her daughter, something about their Finnish heritage, and it was supposed to be horse heads. I found a nice Jewish guy to do my taxes.
> re: the accountant, I left. I wrote her an email explaining why I couldn't work with her. She apologized and said she didn't realize what it was, that it was a gift from her daughter, something about their Finnish heritage, and it was supposed to be horse heads. I found a nice Jewish guy to do my taxes.
I moved to Coos Bay a little over ten years ago, and I am still as leftist as when I moved here. I think social media has a lot to do with people changing for the worst, whether here or anywhere else.
I agree Astoria is a much cooler vibe, I don't think I could handle the kind of rain that they get. In fact when it rains really hard here I call it a "Goonies Day" and put on an old VHS of The Goonies and point out all the familiar places in Astoria to my daughter.
It all sounds so depressing and off the rails. Armed checkpoints, swastikas, outlandish beliefs. You hear about '2 americas' and see that people voted for trump, but hearing details like this makes the divide seem much starker.
> but hearing details like this makes the divide seem much starker.
I'm in a deeply red part of the country, most of my neighbors (all of whom are non-white) are hardcore Trump supporters. Exactly zero behave or talk like this. I am not saying what the grandparent described is false, rather I would suggest that the current political zeitgeist is exceptionally reactionary. In a state like Oregon, in a small town just outside Portland, a legendarily kooky Left-wing enclave, that the folks who are on the Right are significantly more "out there" than is typical. Meanwhile, I'm in a heavily red area of a heavily red state and nobody feels the need to be "out there" because the localized norm is being on the Right.
So, I won't say that the divide isn't quite stark, but I think it's easy to look at the most extreme examples from each side and see the chasm that separates, which can lead to imagining a much bigger divide than actually exists. Political zealotry operates on a bell curve like pretty much anything else involving people.
Any rapprochement must focus on the relative moderates on either side of the spectrum. Trying to bring together people more than one or two standard deviations from the mean is likely impossible and also likely unnecessary in the grand scheme.
It's true that if you tell anyone out there that you live in Portland, their first response is "I'm so sorry," followed up with "it's turned into such a shithole". This is always said to imply that it's not as white as it used to be, and people will get more specific if you let them. But most of them only know this from watching TV. They never go to the city even though it's less than 45 minutes away.
So being close to Portland might explain part of their allergic reaction to hippies. But I'm not sure if it's the whole issue. Oregon isn't just a red state with one dark-blue enclave. It also has a history of extremist white nationalism going back well over a century since its foundation a whites-only state. Then, in the 1980s and onward it became a destination for white nationalist groups, along with Idaho and eastern Washington. Grant's Pass and Medford, in particular, are hotbeds of extremism.
Another little anecdote. When I was relatively new to town, I struck up a conversation with an intelligent, pretty woman sitting outside a bar one day. She grew up in Grant's Pass. We hit it off and chatted for almost two hours before I mentioned I was Jewish. She got a stricken look and said, "oh - that's the one kind of person my Dad would kill me if I ever brought home." I asked why and she said, "He loves Adolf Hitler". She went on to explain that her father kept all of Hitler's speeches around the house. She said she wasn't into "any of those politics". Well, so much for that one.
> it's turned into such a shithole". This is always said to imply that it's not as white as it used to be
Well, I live in Portland and they aren't entirely wrong. When I first moved here many decades ago it was a very clean city. Now, every vertical surface (even including highway signs) is entirely covered with graffiti. Nearly every horizontal surface is covered with homeless camps. I would still want to live in Portland over anywhere else I have lived, but I don't know how anyone could argue that the city has not gone way downhill over the past 5-10 years.
I'm assuming you only meant to quote the first part of GP's post but including the second part followed by "they aren't entirely wrong" makes it look like you're agreeing that it being less white than it used to be is why it's turned into a shithole. Do you really think those two things are connected?
I mean, there are plenty of outlandish stories of people from the other side. Doxxing, finding out where you work and getting you fired, burning and looting small businesses, setting up your own “autonomous zone”, getting incredibly worked up to the point of near mental breakdowns on Twitter over very minor issues, vandalizing property over “environmental crimes”, innocent people being accosted, harassed, and assaulted for wearing a red baseball cap with white letters on it or having a Trump bumper sticker, and so on.
It goes both ways but the media tends to sugar coat and/or gloss over one side more than the other.
> It's manageable as long as you never get into conversations about politics and treat everyone with respect.
"Manageable" in the sense that you avert the aggressivity of the lunatics in daily logistics.
But respect is clearly not an outcome being achieved either at the local or the national level. You cannot respect a lunatic, and a wilful, broken mind will not respect reality.
> But respect is clearly not an outcome being achieved either at the local or the national level
This is true in the large picture, and certainly any respect or trust you might build is being undermined daily by both the tone and content of what people see online. But on a personal level - not just tactically or logistically - I do think there's a chance of finding common ground if you talk to each person you encounter as an individual worthy of respect. The range of what I consider lunatic beliefs in this country runs the full gamut, and people who can't make sense of the stew of (mis)information end up treating it like a buffet. But individual crazy beliefs can be gently corrected.
For instance, when the woman told me that child abuse had just been legalized in California, I said "that doesn't sound right." She insisted. So then she, her husband and I all googled it on our phones until we found the source of the rumor she had heard, and read through the actual law it was referring to. It's a new law which gives judges more latitude as to whether someone convicted of a sex offense has to be put on a life-long sex offender registry. I suggested it probably has to do with "Romeo and Juliet" situations in which it's unfair to put an 18 year old on a sex offender registry for having consensual sex with a 17 year old. Suddenly a light went on over this woman's head. Turns out, they have a son who just turned 18, whose girlfriend is 17, and they've been "real worried about it". Well, now this law doesn't seem so bad, and just maybe Gavin Newsom isn't drinking the blood of babies. Maybe she'll even tell her facebook friends that's not what it's about. But how would that happen if I'd just told her she was an idiot?
My Dad had this rule in the house that if he ever used a word we didn't know - which happened frequently - we had to take out the dictionary and look it up together. Once or twice, he even had to acknowledge that he had used something imprecisely. The pattern was: Admit if you don't know something; looking it up; acknowledge if your assumptions were incorrect; always seek out reliable sources to back your argument. This was so ingrained in me, and I took it so much for granted that others knew how to do that, that I often feel like a stranger in a strange land now. It took me a long time to realize that people just never had that experience. No one ever showed them that, so they could never get past the first part, admitting they don't know something. It's not that people are too dumb to do it, they just don't have access to that part of their intellect or the emotional capacity for self-doubt. Often because they grew up surrounded by people for whom acknowledging a lack of knowledge or admitting a mistake was seen as being weak.
This is why the people I'm talking about use phrases like "I did my own research" by which we know they mean something diametrically opposite to actual research. And why the dark patterns in social media that amplify echo chambers have such a stunningly asymmetrical effect in propagating lies over facts. "Confirmation bias" only exists when you're right and someone else is wrong - an in-group only exists when there's an out-group. So I think that showing the way past that first admission of possibly being wrong, and going straight to sources, whilst treating people with respect and not as a member of some other "group" just because they say foolish things, is how each of us can have the most impact in beating back the crazy.
I respect your kindness and I too believe in the value of education.
Your situation is comparable to that of a sane person in a madhouse. But I would call this strategy wariness in passage. You must respect them the way you would respect a rattlesnake on a hiking trail or a bear in bear country. The animal is unpredictable and you bargain to stay alive.
These people could be mad or their minds could be ruined by circumstances (e.g. incompetent parents, rejection of education). How the mad became so, and how their madness is perpetuated, is perhaps as simple sociologically as their never facing any material consequence for their ignorance. They have managed to earn money and reach advanced adulthood with a total mess inside their heads.
And do what with it? Send the data to the police to do what with? Their job? You never know if the LEOs might not just feel the same way and are deliberately looking the other way.
It's property crime. They'll write up a report and you can give it to your insurance company. They're not going to investigate it in-depth or serve as your personal security force.
The most effective solution is probably to put up a fence and cameras.
In an area surrounded by "Trump Nation" flags, the police very likely have those flags on their property too. They may well do nothing if you are reporting their friends, and they will definitely do nothing if the perpetrators are actually officers.
Reporting property damage to the police is never useful. Where I live, they won't even send an officer out.
I have a few friends who own property in West Virginia, so probably similar vibes to rural Oregon. A report to the police out there for something like this would probably be counter-productive. At best.
While this is starting to get into flame war we don’t want on HN (so I wont comment further on it past this)
The police in “Trump Nation” areas of our country tend to be very kind & permissive of skirting the law to the rest of those who identify with their same political views, and it often goes the same for the Sheriff, and sometimes even further up the chain.
Simply put - I don’t know the entire context, but if one of the reasons they’re harassing this person has to do with the fact he’s of the “wrong” political views, the police aren’t going to do anything to those harassing him.
That is one of the reasons our gun laws are nice, but sometimes when the “wrong side” exercises their right to self defense, the sitting president publicly calls for their execution without trial. [1]
@anon_123g987 if it weren’t literally poison I would be more inclined to agree with you on not using excessive force. But somebody who dumps poison on your property probably doesn’t think very highly of your life, and may over time take more brash measures against you. Also, having somebody work security on your property definitely isn’t a trap, especially in rural areas.
Was only there for a few minutes, but we got in a short and pleasant conversation about housing scarcity and the future of AI. Really interesting character, clearly living his best life.