03 September 2010

thanklessness

[click image, audio, half hour]

.

A good listen.

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love, 99
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\\\\\ 9/03/2010 09:08:00 PM \\\\\ ,

10 comments:

  1. Bluebear29/4/10, 8:35 PM

    Here in Sacto we have these big blue bins for all of our recyclables. Cans, bottles, plastics and paper all go into the same 80 gallon can to be hauled off by a truck every week. Every pickup day folks with their shopping carts or bikes with trailers come through the neighborhood scavenging the bins for aluminum cans. I end up torn between leaving them have them and stopping them so the recycling program isn't losing out. In the end I let the scavengers have it, except for the few that dig stuff out of the can in their quest and then leave the stuff they don't want laying on the ground. Those folks I chase off.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bluebear29/4/10, 8:50 PM

    My favorite weekend hangout in high school was the local dump. We got to know the guys who operated it and they gave us free range. It wasn't one of those huge landfills with trucks dumping and bulldozers burying everywhere, rather a small operation, several acres at most, inside an old sand quarry. My friends and I would find all kinds of cool stuff there to take home and tinker with. Old radios and TVs - those were easy to fix back then. We could test the tubes at the local TV store and burned out resistors, capacitors and transformers were easy to find just by looking over the components. A soldering gun and $5-$10 in parts would get them working again. Once we found a welder which only needed a new cord and a large parabolic mirror from a professional TV projector. With those components and the carbon welding torch rods we found with the welder we manufactured a carbon arc spotlight which lit up the WTMJ radio towers 1.5 miles away as if it were daytime, and airplanes flying overhead like in the WWII movies.

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  3. wimpy9/4/10, 9:08 PM

    I guess it's yer karma then to have scavengers picking through your junk. I don't have a problem with it if I can't see it, but there's so many people using the names and personal specs they get off people's garbage for nefarious activities it makes me uncomfortable. Plus, it's ALWAYS made me uncomfortable because I've never thought we should have all that junk to pick through, or that anyone should be in circumstances where they HAD to pick through dumpsters to find FOOD.

    I think about ancient times and injun tribes, nomads, Thoreau. Those worlds did not have all this crap and corruption and pollution and plague. Something as prosaic as trash drives me crazy whenever I think about it too hard.

    And, yes, stealing the valuable recycling is very likely to shut down what resort to it we have. You can't blame them because they are hungry, but you can blame them because it's fucking it up for the rest of us and so the planet.

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  4. Bluebear29/4/10, 10:02 PM

    We don't put any personal info in the bin. We shred that stuff first. It takes us several weeks to fill the bin, yes it would be better not to make the waste in the first place, but at least it is getting recycled at the main processing plant rather than going into a landfill as it did twenty years ago!

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  5. wimpy9/4/10, 10:15 PM

    Well, right, and I have trash like everyone else. I resent having to shred stuff, to be constantly vigilant not to just shitcan crap that piles up to be waded through later instead. And EVEN having to put recycling stuff in a separate bin is a crock. They have machines now they can run it all out on conveyor belts for people to pick out the recycling and repurposing stuff. It is a GREAT way to keep the landfill thing to a minimum and maximize reusable material, but since it requires SALARIES, they don't do it... EVEN as, when done properly, they make a fortune off doing it that way. We should not have to pay them to pick up our junk. They should pay us... or at LEAST come get it free.

    The dump in Auburn is way hip. Or used to be. All the garbage is backed up to a huge sunken warehouse-like room and every dump load gets picked through and materials parsed out to scrap merchants and recyclers. Or that's what they were doing twenty-five years ago anyway.

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  6. Bluebear29/5/10, 10:07 AM

    Near here they have one of the several "Transfer Stations" where for $20 you can bring in a pickup load to dump. Wood goes on one pile, metal on another, old refrigerators and air conditioners in another pile, e-waste has special hours when it is free to drop off old electronics etc. The remainder is thrown into a shed where huge bulldozers push it into piles to later be picked up and hauled away to a landfill. You are not allowed to remove anything.
    The old landfill near Cal Expo was topped of years ago with a layer of dirt forming a huge mound on which they planted grass. Pipes are sunk into it every 150 feet or so and these are all connected with hoses collecting the methane and piping it to a co-generation plant where it is used to supply a portion of the the city's electric power. The wood scraps and tree limbs etc. from the transfer stations are ground up and also used at this plant.

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  7. Anonymous9/5/10, 11:20 PM

    BB2, I did some searching on the Solid Waste Enterprise website and found they had not posted some financial records.

    http://www.msa2.saccounty.net/wmr/Pages/AboutUsFinancialReports.aspx

    Well you might argue 2010 isn't done yet. Then explain why in 2009 I found missing reports from 2008.

    heh.

    http://www.msa2.saccounty.net/wmr/Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

    They seem to be behaving now. Although neither accountant nor journalist am I

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous9/5/10, 11:26 PM

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Andis. Chris (MSA)
    Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 10:20 AM
    To: Echols. Kristin (MSA); Beck. Gloriette (MSA); Parker. Annie (MSA)
    Cc: Philleo. Paul (MSA)
    Subject: FW: Recycling, WARNING: MISSING Financial Report for 2008!

    Good morning...
    See below a letter that came in this morning (at 2:44 am!) and my response.
    I need your help to answer some of the questions:

    WMR - the financial information on the annual reports
    MIS - the asp/script sentence and searchable pdf issue
    Annie - can you look for the missing pdf in the old WMR website and double check the links? Maybe one of the PDF's wasn't published.

    I think it might be easier (and provide us a concise record of correspondence) if we collected the info and sent it all back in one e-mail.

    Hello,
    I'm responding to your questions about recycling revenue. You are correct, recycling revenue received by the Solid Waste Enterprise goes directly towards operating expenses, thereby mitigating the
    need for rate increases to our customers to cover increasing costs of labor, fuel, and truck maintenance.

    Regarding the math, note that we serve only the population of the unincorporated area (about 600,000) which is 150,000 households. Divide the $1.7MM by 150,000 and you get about $11/year/household.
    Still doesn't knock your socks off. We wholeheartedly agree a household can make far more money if its inhabitants choose to separate and haul recyclables on their own; and we have no problem
    whatsoever if they do that - our primary concern is the stuff stays out of the landfill. Our recycling service is based on convenience: one can, curbside service, and the low return to each
    household reflects the cost of hauling and processing so the customer doesn't have to.

    Incidentally, when you do get access to the 2008 report, you will see that the 2007 recycling revenue was restated as $2,707,209 and the 2008 revenue was $3,491,624, or about $23/year/household.
    This is about 10% of the monthly rate ($21.55) for each customer.

    Thanks for the inquiry. Frankly, I appreciate your scrutiny. Feel free to get in touch if you have more questions.

    Paul Philleo
    Director
    Department of Waste Management and Recycling
    (916) 875-7011

    philleop@saccounty.net


    Good morning,
    Thank you for your letter; I enjoyed reading it.

    I'll answer what I can in this e-mail, and seek help from others for the questions that I cannot answer.

    My name is Chris Andis - Annie Parker and I work for the Communication and Media Office. We work on the websites for the Municipal Services Agency, which includes the Waste Management Department. We
    just completed moving this website over from Microsoft Front Page into SharePoint. SharePoint is new to us and there is still much we have to learn.

    If documents are missing- it is likely that, despite double checking by multiple parties, we missed moving them over from the old web site. We will search for the documents in the old files and post
    them, and if we can't locate the documents, we'll ask Waste Management for them and get them online.

    We use the cmomailbox address on all the websites so that as employees come and go we don't have to check hundreds of pages to change contact information. The central mailbox also allows multiple
    employees to check it so that if one of us sick or out of the office for a few days, questions can still be addressed quickly.

    I've included specific responses below in your e-mail with *** by each response. Give me a couple of days to find your answers and I'll get back to you.
    Chris Andis
    Andisc@saccounty.net
    875-4047




    My original complaints and crap are far too large to post on blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  9. wimpy9/5/10, 11:41 PM

    Phil, there's a spam filter on Blogger now and it hides posts it thinks are spam. I have to go fish them out of the spam filter whenever I get the email notification of the comment and know to look for it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Anonymous9/5/10, 11:50 PM

    There was much more dialog, blogspot doesn't like me trying to post it.

    You must shred everything with your name and codes on it these days.

    I used to drop off concrete to be smashed at the downtown dump. The dump basically runs right into the american river, I could have driven a truck into the river from there.

    I used to be one of the guy (and gals yes women strip electronics too!) looking in your garbage collecting your electronics, so I could get the semiconductors out of it with a propane torch and pliers. I was mostly interested in Audio Tubes, CB's, and Audio Amp Semiconductors, and large Caps. But I would happily strip everything at the end of the day... all the way down to the diodes and resistors.

    ReplyDelete

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