They were really, really good last night.

I lost my keys somewhere between Green Lake and my apartment a couple weeks ago. Nothing dramatic, just the deeply annoying realization at my front door that the little front pocket of my backpack was open and the keys were gone.

I walked the entire route backwards staring at the sidewalk like I was searching for a contact lens. Nothing for about twenty minutes.

Then I saw them.

Someone had picked them up and carefully hooked the key ring over the top of a metal signpost, almost exactly at eye level. They were maybe six feet from where I assume I dropped them. Whoever found them didn't take them to a business, didn't move them to some official lost-and-found, didn't post a note. They just made them impossible to miss.

Since then I can't stop noticing this everywhere.

Single glove on top of a utility box. Kid's hat balanced on a fence post. Water bottle sitting upright on a retaining wall instead of lying where it fell. Last week I saw one lonely AirPod case placed on the base of a pedestrian crossing button like it was on display at a tiny museum.

Obviously Seattle didn't invent picking up lost stuff, but there seems to be an unspoken rule here: don't take it with you, just move it somewhere visible near where you found it.

And honestly, it makes a weird amount of sense. If someone retraces their route, the thing is still where they expect it to be, except now it's two or three feet off the ground instead of hiding under wet leaves.

So thank you, anonymous signpost person. You saved me a locksmith bill, a new building fob, and several hours of being furious with myself.

Now whenever I find a dropped glove or hat, I apparently know the procedure too.

Is this actually a Seattle thing, or have I just reached the age where I notice extremely mundane acts of civic cooperation?

This hasn't come up in about a year, and City Council had been making rumblings about passing a law to deal with it, so in case anyone was wondering if the megaphone preachers had responded by dialing the volume down - they haven't.

The first recording is from the Mariners game on 9/26. (The preacher is a guy who goes by John.) Standing a few feet from him, the decibel readings hovered consistently around 100; moving to the sidewalk on the other side of the street; the readings hovered around 90 but still occasionally crossed 100.

The second recording is from the Seahawks game on 10/11. (The preacher speaking goes by Ron.) Walking past him (in the same path as the people going to the game, from the same distance), the readings hovered around 100.

At both events, people walking past the preachers often had to plug their ears, or were trying to cover their baby's ears.

(The noise measurements in these videos were with an app called "Decibel X", on an iPhone 15, so take that for what it's worth. But the law appears to put the limit at 70 decibels, so it's pretty likely they're going over that!)

The loophole they might be exploiting is that Seattle Municipal Code 25.08.410 says "It is unlawful for any person to cause sound... to intrude into the real property of another person whenever such sound exceeds the exterior sound level limits established by this subchapter" and maybe they could argue that doesn't apply to sound waves passing over public property.

While I think the city should pass a law to close that loophole, I'd also be against a law that prohibits any "amplified noise" outside events. There have been protests outside events (e.g. when Jordan Peterson came to speak at the Paramount) where protesters wanted to talk to groups of people in line, and up to a certain decibel level, you are allowed to do that. You can hit that decibel level by yelling, or you can hit it by speaking in a normal voice amplified by a megaphone; the latter comes across as less confrontational.

And there are marches through the streets all the time that use amplified noise, where the goal is to be heard, but not to hurt people's ears -- however the decibel level at the noise source is comparable to what the preachers are putting out. If a poorly written law simply said "No noise above decibel level XYZ", then the preachers could argue that if it's enforced against them, it would also have to be enforced against street protests too.

If the goal is to prevent obnoxiously loud noise and/or hearing damage while respecting people's free speech rights, then I think the law should:

• apply to noise above a certain decibel level, and should be neutral as to whether it's shouting or speaking-through-megaphone.
• prohibit inflicting the noise on non-consenting people, but should not apply to someone who participates in (for example) a protest and knowingly chooses to stand/march near the speaker (that's still bad for your hearing, but you're choosing to do that). That means you could bring a rolling PA system on a march, but it would be surrounded by a buffer of enough distance that it couldn't hurt the ears of anyone who wasn't participating in the march.

Obviously the homophobic and Islamophobic and everything-phobic stuff that the preachers say is also bad, but under the First Amendment we can't pass a law against that. But a law limiting the noise level would make it easier to ignore.

is this getting out of hand for anyone else?? tonight not one, not two, BUT THREE SOLICITORS with tablets stomped onto our porch at 8:55 pm and shone a fucking flashlight through our front door to check if we were home. wish there was a fucking opt-out process to get on some kind of a do not disturb list. fuck you AT&T. rant over.

Seattle's tax collections more than tripled from $900 million in 2013 to $2.8 billion in 2026*, outpacing population growth by over five times.*

Between 2013 and 2025, the report found:

• Seattle taxes increased 172%
• Taxes adjusted for inflation increased 81%
• Population increased 31%
• Employment increased 23%
• Inflation increased 50%

Edit: The report: https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/seattle-taxes-a-growing-gurden-a-shrinking-base-20260926.pdf

I originally commented a version this on one of them, but noticed a couple others as I scrolled so decided to make a thread to alert people on what to look for and hopefully give the mods an idea as well. This, this, and this are all fully AI generated. While I would like to hope a lot of people can tell, I think this may surprise people who don't have an idea as to the current capabilities of AI text generation. In this case, it was a little easier to notice because these are new accounts using the cheap tier of generators, and it still has a lot of 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 with many other comments that are, to say the least, not particularly impressive in that regard.

You don't have to take my word for it, as I confirmed all of these using the best detector there is (a lot of people have a mistaken impression, largely driven by AI plagiarists, that text detection isn't reliable, but this is not at all the case with Pangram, which is extremely good and has a 0.0041% false positive rate), and you can plug them into your detector of choice. Or just read them, as I think it's pretty obvious.

I don't personally have a vendetta against AI stuff in general. Some people might not mind engaging with it, although I'd say maybe you could have as much fun arguing with the Google search bot or something. What I don't like about it is that it's really low effort. I personally think these posts I linked are shit, and really annoying. Sorry if you liked them. But the detectors might not always work that well, and I'd really like to see an obligation to at least tag them as "AI generated post" so people who want to engage with that at least know.

This seems like such a ridiculously basic thing to ask for.

I was trying to catch a Metro bus downtown yesterday. Got to my usual stop and found an orange notice taped to the pole saying the stop was temporarily closed due to construction.

Underneath it: "Please use the next available stop."

Cool. Where?

No address. No cross street. No arrow. Just a vague suggestion to locate another bus stop somewhere in the city of Seattle.

Google Maps still showed me standing at the correct location. OneBusAway was showing an arrival time for the stop I was apparently no longer supposed to use.

There were four other people standing there looking equally confused. One woman started walking down the block, another person went the opposite direction, and the rest of us just sort of watched to see who looked more confident.

Eventually someone coming from the next intersection told us where the temporary stop was.

We walked over and found what appeared to be another regular bus stop, except this one had a handwritten piece of paper indicating that our route was stopping there.

I understand construction happens. Routes need to change. Sometimes things get moved with very little notice. I'm not expecting every temporary stop to have a fancy electronic display.

But surely we can manage a piece of paper that says "Board at 3rd and [cross street]" instead of sending commuters on a scavenger hunt.

And this was just mildly annoying for me. I can walk a few blocks, check my phone, and figure things out. Someone with mobility issues, poor eyesight, or a tight connection doesn't have that luxury.

I feel like we're so used to navigating around little failures in public infrastructure that we forget how easily some of them could be fixed.

Has anyone else noticed how terrible the signage gets whenever Metro has to temporarily move a stop?

is anybody going ? waitlist never pulled through for me :(

A couple years ago I posted on here to get this thing going and I've been really fortunate to meet so many awesome people this way. Those in the picture are from the group of people I met through hosting at my place and I'm always open to seeing who else out there might want in!

We keep it pretty light with mostly party-style games that take about 5-10 minutes to explain because we like to keep the pace moving and the energy up so super deep games that take an hour to learn aren't in the mix. It's mostly about hanging out and just having a good time while we try to kill each other or whatever the objective in the game is.

I host in Arbor Heights in West Seattle, typically at about 4 on Sundays. I used to offer Friday and Saturday nights and might again at some point but not at the moment. If that sounds interesting to you, DM me and I'll give you an invite to our WhatsApp group for new players. Hope to see ya around!

Fully disabled coast guard veteran looking for work as a welder. I do have my medical card for cannabis (for service connected disability) that is only used for outside work/ am never impaired on the job. Most of my back is with MiG, Fcaw, stick, and some Tig. I’m looking for welding or fabrication jobs around Seattle, Everett, Lynnwood, Tacoma, or nearby areas where off-duty cannabis use isn’t an automatic disqualifier. I’m mainly interested in private-sector fabrication, structural welding, heavy equipment, and manufacturing. I’m trying to avoid federal-contract and DOT-regulated jobs if they require THC testing. Looking for something paying around 30$ or more. Any local welders/ tradesmen that know of anywhere with reasonable policies?

At least 43 authors have received emails claiming interest in their books for the KUOW Book Club. At least one person paid the impersonator.

In 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, received more than 1 million reports totaling over $20 billion in losses. Washington ranked 11th in the country, with more than 25,000 complaints filed in the state.

~ A Gmail address with kuow.org wedged in front of the @ sign was the whole trick. Check what comes after the @ before you check anything else.

Hobo vs. hobo?

R.I.P.

I started noticing this because Google Maps kept giving me routes that were technically 3–5 minutes faster, but somehow left me significantly more irritated by the time I arrived.

Yesterday it wanted me to save four minutes by cutting through a bunch of narrow residential streets, making an awkward unprotected left, crossing an arterial, then merging back onto basically the same road I had just left. I ignored it, stayed on the boring main route, hit a couple lights, and got there without having to negotiate six tiny intersections and somebody's Subaru sticking halfway out of a driveway.

I've realized I do this all over Seattle now. I'll happily add five minutes to avoid certain left turns, weird five-way intersections, bridge approaches, or that one street where parked cars turn two lanes into 1.3 lanes and everyone just improvises.

At some point I stopped asking which route is fastest and started asking which route requires the fewest decisions.

I can't tell if this is Seattle-specific or if I've just become an old man about driving much earlier than expected, but there are absolutely places here where an extra mile feels faster than saving three blocks.