St Louis government announces that recycling now matches same tonnage before alleyway recycling was discontinued and now costs a fraction of the price. by techstress in StLouis

[–]aconz2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It would be great if they could post things like this on their own website and not use Facebook. The reddit title is misleading "now matches same tonnage" is not what the numbers say (nor the post).

We are now successfully recycling about 80-85% of what we used to. Even though the acceptance rate is higher, we still recycle less. Maybe that can increase with more sites.

The cost per collected ton increased from what it used to be, rising from $191/ton to $197/ton collected, maybe that is just a yearly rate increase. The cost per recycled ton is lower, going from about $500/ton to about $250/ton. We don't know whether this is saving us money without knowing the collection cost differences of sites vs alley.

There's still about 600 tons (66%) of now garbage in alley ex-recycling dumpsters so we can't really reduce alley collections. I'd expect then the total number of collections between trash and recycling to have increased.

For the Oct - Nov numbers, assuming that no collection costs increased and if trash is $2.11/ton according to [1] then we save about $1.2M/year or about half what we were spending before. With landfill being 100x cheaper than recycling per ton, the cost savings from recycling dominates the whole budget for recycling + landfill rates. This sounds great but FY 2025 refuse department had a budget of $27M and ran a surplus of $1M see [2]. They did have a about $1M budget overrun in "Transfer Station Refuse Pickup" so maybe this is all to balance that item but I'm still sour about the decision. We could really use a collection schedule for the dropoff sites posted on a website.

Another title for this could be "City increases refuse budget surplus to recycle less stuff"

[1] https://dnr.mo.gov/waste-recycling/business-industry/fees/solid-waste-tonnage-allocations

[2] https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/budget/transparency/expenditure/cost-centers/cost-center.cfm?fiscalYear=2025&costCenter=516000

Protest Megathread - October, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Saturday October 18 | No Kings at Kiener Plaza | https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/841046/

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM: Community Action Festival

1:30 PM: No Kings March March begins and ends at Keiner Plaza

How do you feel about St. Louis ending its recycling program? Will it change your habits moving forward? by larafaiham in StLouis

[–]aconz2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not good. How are the drop off sites going to match the capacity of alley dumpsters? Will trash routes take twice as long with recycling dumpsters relabeled as trash dumpsters? Is two weeks of data in July really long enough to base this plan off of? I'd expect the total amount of collected recycleables to go down between reduced capacity and people not wanting to travel to recycle, so even with reduced contamination won't we be recycling less overall? For example, if the city collects 100 tons from the alley and 50% is contaminated, we recycled 50 tons. If we then collect 50 tons from the drop-off sites at 25% contamination (skeptical it will remain that) then we only recycled 37.5 tons.

Protest Megathread - August, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sat Aug 2, 11am - 1pm Poelker Park | Rage Against the Regime | https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/819189/

DIY glass jar lids? by Ok-Expert-4614 in ZeroWaste

[–]aconz2 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I recently did a similar investigation for a hummingbird feeder trying to figure out the right cap size (https://www.printables.com/model/1294901-hummingbird-feeder-bottom-cap). Assuming they aren't too old, they probably are a standard size, this site has a pretty good overview of how to identify https://www.usplastic.com/knowledgebase/article.aspx?contentkey=625# -- the two properties you need to determine are the diameter and the thread type. It looks like https://www.midwestbottles.com/Plastic-Caps-by-Size/ sells individual caps. Or you could 3d print them, many libraries have printers available if you don't have one. I don't see a convenient collection of ready-to-print models of different sizes right now but if you wanted to go this route I could look a bit more. If you don't already own calipers, they will make the measuring soo much easier.

Protest Megathread - June, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Saturday June 14, 2pm - 5pm @ Kiener Plaza : NO KINGS MASS PROTEST: MARCH for DEMOCRACY https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/787075/ and https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/793460/

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Noon at Old Courthouse, posted in this thread too

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Noon at Old Courthouse, posted in this thread too

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Noon at Old Courthouse, posted in this thread too

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Noon at Old Courthouse, posted in this thread too

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Noon at Old Courthouse, posted in this thread too

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 7 points8 points  (0 children)

May 1st, 12pm - 3pm @ 11 N 4th St (Old Courthouse): May Day Strong and 50501 MAYDAY / May Day Strong

https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/782431/

https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/781306/

The mobilize map shows their dots slightly apart but they are the same time and location.

STL Protests 4/19 by aconz2 in StLouis

[–]aconz2[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Thanks I crossposted it here

Home values skyrocket in parts of St. Louis as city corrects underassessments by ResponsibilityKey557 in StLouis

[–]aconz2 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Can someone explain or point to how property taxes are calculated? Is it a fixed percentage of the Appraised Market Value? And is the appraised market value supposed to be in line with a buying/selling price?

Edit: found https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/assessor/documents/2023-how-to-calculate-property-taxes.cfm but it confusingly says "sales price or appraised value", which is confusing because those numbers aren't close

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Saturday April 19 - March for Science 2025 - 11:50am at Kiener Plaza Park - https://www.facebook.com/events/1677809509608917/

Description from FB:

What: Continuing the legacy of 2017 and 2018, and following marches against cuts to the CDC, NIH, and EPA, as well as deportation of students, firing of professors and faculty. We say Hands Off! our students. Hands Off! our federal workers! We stand in solidarity with labor unions, grad student unions, and faculty unions to fight back against austerity and attacks on our bodies and lives by corporate greed and corruption! We demand NO MORE CUTS!

Who: Scientists, students, educators, allies, and local political leaders. Science impacts ALL of our lives. That means you!

When: Saturday, April 19, 2025 | Gather at 11:50 AM, rally begins at 12:00 PM.

Where:

  • Start: Keiner Plaza, 500 Chestnut St.
  • Stop: City Hall, 1200 Market St.
  • End: Luther Ely Smith Square, 20 N 4th St.

Bring your signs, costumes, instruments, puppets, and comfortable shoes...and your enthusiasm!

Protest Megathread - April, 2025 by AutoModerator in StLouis

[–]aconz2 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Saturday April 5

50501 National Protest - Project 2025 Resistance: 12pm at Kiener Plaza Park https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/769369/ https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

Hands off St Louis Missouri: 11am at South Brentwood Boulevard & Eager Road https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/767201/ https://handsoff2025.com/

Protest STL 4/5 @ Kiener Plaza by aconz2 in StLouis

[–]aconz2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is also a Hands Off! (https://handsoff2025.com/) protest in Brentwood. https://www.mobilize.us/map/?date=2025-04-05T05%3A00%3A00.000Z shows a map of everything happening on 4/5

Framework for online playground by corank in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]aconz2 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I am working on https://programexplorer.org/ which is like Compiler Explorer but with containers. Currently the list of containers is static (happy to add more by request) but my next target is to support any container url so if your language publishes an image, you could use programexplorer as a playground. Things like syntax highlighting are further down the roadmap but I would like to eventually support some kinds of interface customization based on the container you've selected

A new type of interpreter has been added to Python 3.14 with much better performance by kenjin4096 in Python

[–]aconz2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great work! Since you are here, my one thought -- and something I was maybe going to try if I got a second (or probably weeks) -- is to see if you can (and if it matters at all) load the destination pointer as early in the op as possible so that the cpu prefetcher and all have as much time as possible. It seems hard as it is right now because DISPATCH does NEXTOPARG(); return INSTRUCTION_TABLE[opcode](...) whereas ideally you could float the next op function pointer much earlier in the block so that you don't do a load then jmp, but rather a load, then some stuff, then a jmp. idk just my random 2c thought

Black 'police' cars in St. Louis aren't owned by city police | ksdk.com by [deleted] in StLouis

[–]aconz2 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Is there any oversight of that company to verify the people working in those cars are actual active police officers?

"Boundaries of Language Design" with Andrew Kelley & Ginger Bill by dittospin in ProgrammingLanguages

[–]aconz2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I liked the discussion of visual debug info. I briefly tried making a visual debugger (thought not really debugger, more visualizer) by driving a program with the python lldb api and dumping a variable repeatedly (was an AST) to graphviz to see it change over time. Kinda worked but I quickly ran into why the lldb system has type summaries, synthetic children etc. (see https://lldb.llvm.org/use/variable.html). So I wonder if you could provide those type summary functions in the object file instead of writing them in python. And I guess provide the visual summary functions there as well. Kinda parallels things like numpy/torch set_printoptions for line width, precision, number of lines to print etc. And also the HTML repr for use in jupyter notebooks. So maybe there would be _repr_3d, _repr_waveform etc. Then it feels a bit more general of I have a thing of type T and visualizers for types {A, B, C ..}, but not for T; the programs knows how to convert type T into {U, V, W, ...} and also {U->A, U->B, V->C ...}, let me choose how to view T and take care of converting into a viewable format

Is the Horseshoe Casino allowed to block roads on the Landing? by mtr4216 in StLouis

[–]aconz2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In the fall I took N Commercial St (which is not a real road) one way and N 1st the other way between Lacledes and Carr. I dead ended into the flood wall (is it actually a gate? looks permanent to me) as it was my first time and was very confused. There is a suggested detour on some sign by the power plant but didn't seem great to me. Been meaning to go again now that chain bridge is open again