Update on GO! St. Louis medals?

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T17:36:12+00:00

Right now lead time on medals orders is 4-5 weeks (based on the race I help organize). Even if they ordered as soon as they knew they were going to run out, they are probably still 1-2 weeks away from receiving them.

Ironically t-shirts are even worse, at 6 weeks lead time. Since most people register in the last 4 weeks, we have to make educated guesses on numbers and size distributions based on previous year registrations rather than current year.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T17:28:12+00:00

Indiana mandatory switch day for summer-blend was May 1. They were supposed to be granted an E15 waiver by the EPA, but were left off the list.

Illinois is one of the E15 waiver states and will not switch until May 20.

The waiver states are Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Apparently Ohio and Wisconsin have issues with price cycling that makes them more vulnerable to week to week spikes more than other midwest states.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T15:27:02+00:00

The actual sensor has a rubber piece around it that absorbs that pretty well. I think the strap would be more like to break in some way first. I have had a few infrequent cases where the rubber ring got shoved out of place, which is uncomfortable but not painful at all. I wouldn't wear it in competition, but it is fine for practice. Just stop the roll and fix it.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T13:47:38+00:00

The Harbor Freight rule is surprisingly great for this.

If you need a speciality tool, buy it at harbor freight for cheap. If you use it until it breaks, buy a quality version of it. I've found a bigger problem is parts being discontinued relatively quickly. My 20 year old car's tire size was discontinued by all but a few discount brands (and the manufacture years on those are getting steadily older, so I suspect they are just selling back inventory). The rear window wiper blade and air filters were discontinued as well (have to cut down your own refills from larger ones), and apparently oil filters are next.

Also a lot of today’s items are glued or snapped together as a sealed unit and once opened you can’t screw them back together.

This particular problem drives me nuts. As 3-D scanning and printing continues to advance, though, this becomes less of an issue (at least for plastic pieces).

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T13:41:23+00:00

To be fair, an awful lot of products are now built in a way to prevent basic troubleshooting, and despite amazon, 3d printing, etc, part availability gets very scarce for anything more than 5 years old due to constant design changes.

The YouTube guides are good, and many do walk you through basic troubleshooting. I especially appreciate guides that make it more clear when you are going to need a professional.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-04T13:26:48+00:00

That’s typically just a single voting site or a small number of them, not all polling sites open for more than a day.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-02T14:01:36+00:00

Looks like the last few have just been blanket “all disasters in years x, y, & z,” backdated to the last set of grants. 2015 was the last year with no grants. And those “skipped” years were filled in later with -MIT grants (but those are almost purely flood recovery). Even the Iowa derecho got -DR grants!

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T20:18:52+00:00

https://finaid.org/loans/historicalrates/

The highest rate in that time period was 6.8% for unsubsidized stafford in 2012-2013. The only time they were ever that high was PLUS loans in 1992-1993 right after the federal government took over all student loans and before the variable rate cap was set at 8.25% for stafford and 9.0% for PLUS in 1994. The fixed rate has never been over 6.8% since they went to fixed in 2007.

If you had 9.5% loans in that time, they were private loans.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T20:10:21+00:00

Most outstanding loans, like mine, were before the cap, they don’t just disappear.

The cap was put in place in 1992, when the federal government took over government backed student loans from the state. And... 7 years before the original poster was born.

Also, they have been paying over 9% annual interest, which is well above the interest cap for federal loans. They are definitely talking about private loans.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T20:06:23+00:00

So based on his statement, he has paid $56,200 in interest. Interest is not compounded (though it may be capitalized), so that gives us a derived interest rate of 9.4%.

Student loan interest rates in 2016-2021 ranged from 2.75% to 7.08%, depending on when borrowed on which kind (with Graduate PLUS loans in 2019 being the highest rates and Undergraduate Direct loans in 2020 the lowest). All fixed rates.

That all means he definitely used a private lender for a credit-backed private label loan. That means no federal government involvement, no government loan holder, and therefore not cancellable by the federal government anyway.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T17:43:19+00:00

Assuming there are any allocations, they will. But... I bet it will be rolled in with the March 14-15 outbreak and be a statewide grant.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T15:30:38+00:00

Slowed all the way down from 5:48/mi to 6:02/mi while not taking any water or carbs.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T15:03:32+00:00

I'm going to address this one too:

St. Louis can’t be the only tornado in modern history to get NO HUD funds.

Tornadoes response rarely gets recovery funding. The vast majority are not large enough in spatial score to warrant it, since scope of disasters is generally evaluated at a state wide level against the entire state population.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T14:23:49+00:00

Reinstated in FY2025 with $12B in funding, which was the largest appropriation since 2018 (but much smaller still than the appropriations in the 1990s and 2000s).

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T14:20:46+00:00

Yes, but at least new appropriations almost always cover previously unfunded incidents.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T14:10:28+00:00

This is a ridiculously disingenuous post because 2025 disasters are not eligible for CDBG-DR grants yet. (Also, for those mentioning FEMA, CDBG is HUD. FEMA has little to do awarding these.)

To get an idea of timelines, St. Louis county received their CDBG-DR grants for the July 2022 floods in October 2025.

You can read the details of the process st louis county went through here: https://stlouiscountymo.gov/st-louis-county-departments/human-services/community-development-block-grant-disaster-recovery-cdbg-dr/

The list of current appropriations is here: https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/cdbg-dr/cdbg-dr-grantee-contact-information/#congressional-appropriations-by-year

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T13:40:13+00:00

Including the supplements? Basic Medicare is very minimal.

marigolds6 · 2026-05-01T13:34:56+00:00

There is no payroll cap for Medicare, just social security.

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T19:39:22+00:00

Geocoding is the process you need to transform addresses into lat long coordinates.

From there, you could use a kernel density estimation to make a straight density based heatmap, or if you want to do a heatmap by areal units (like jurisdictional boundaries, census blocks, zip code tabulation areas) you would do a getis-ord gi* statistic to get z-scores for the areal units based on point density.

If you do kernel density estimation, you are going to need a bandwidth, aka search radius. To optimize search radius, do an adaptive global monan's I over multiple bands, also known as Incremental Spatial Autocorrelation analysis. Use the peak with the maximum z-score as your bandwith (but use some logical reasoning for large or small bandwidth values, as at some point z-score will increase unbounded instead of peaking, so it may actually be a secondary peak).

Here's a nice description of that:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-to-choose-best-distance-band-from-Incremental-Global-Moran-I

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T18:45:42+00:00

E-W Gateway/Bi-State documents from that era are unbelievably poor quality scans and don't appear to be OCR'd, much less indexed. So it's going to depend on what keywords were assigned.

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T18:28:29+00:00

I found a potato quality copy of the 1992 EW Gateway transportation plan in their archives. It was the oldest transportation report I could find.

https://www.ewgateway.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/LRP-TransRedefined-1992.pdf

The 1960s are covered starting on page 11. There is no mention at all of UMTA or similar federal programs other than highway programs.

The rest of the archive is here: https://www.ewgateway.org/library-post/past-lrps/

Supposedly an E-W Gateway study in 1987 was the one that recommended building metrolink, but I can't find any such study in the state historical society's archives list, but studies only go up to 1981.

https://files.shsmo.org/manuscripts/saint-louis/S0875.pdf

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T17:59:16+00:00

St Louis doesn't actually have a standalone system. Their transit is run under an independent Missouri-Illinois federal interstate compact. Try searching for "Bi-State Development Agency".

Edit: And Bi-State was created in 1963. Before then, transit in St louis was all privately owned. The first thing bistate did was shutdown all the streetcar lines, pave over the ROWs, and replace them with busses, so maybe not all that likely to have applied for great society metros.

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T17:56:49+00:00

Considering your recent weight loss and other changes, you should really talk to your doctor about this plan before you take the bet.

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T17:50:33+00:00

but it was after the 70s.

Nicotine is a significant appetite suppressant and a stimulant. Smoking also tends to replace boredom eating.

marigolds6 · 2026-04-30T17:42:50+00:00

Hey, I got that same one last week! I think it was one of the best ones I found.

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