Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from Washpo:
In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases rose 32.3%
New daily reported deaths fell 10.6%
Covid-related hospitalizations rose 14.3% Read more
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 2.9%.
The number of tests reported fell 26.1%
An average of 167.0k adults received the first dose in the U.S. over the last week. Nationwide, the number of shots has dropped 47%/
From CDC:
There's no way to explain away daily jumping over the week from 4 figures to up to 31K, raising the weekly rolling average up by more than 50% to over 17K. At the same time vaccinations dropped by nearly half.
Things at work continue to normalize. The government facility I work at has reduced semiweekly COVID-related briefing emails to weekly. The inner English teacher in me was amused as the manager wrote "biweekly" vs. "semiweekly'. I would say now roughly a majority of people are working unmasked, almost all the contractors. (There's a reminder at the building entrance that unvaccinated people are expected to mask, and of course masking is optional for the fully vaccinated.)
Probably the biggest news over the week, Pfizer indicates next month it will file for a COVID-19 booster shot approval. (I'm not sure where the stats are maintained, but CNN indicates like me, more than half the fully vaccinated have taken the Pfizer version.) Pfizer argues protection against symptomatic infection declines after 6 months and the emergence of variants makes additional protection warranted. The government, as usual, is saying, "Show me the data..."
Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog continues to advocate for COVID-19 fractional dosing. It turns out this is not a new strategy but has been used to stretch scarce supplies to combat yellow fever in the southern hemisphere. I still feel during the early stages of vaccine rollout as the 3 vendors scrambled to ramp up production, the government erred by exclusively focusing on the elderly. Make no mistake--that definitely helped reduce the highest risks for mortality, but it wasn't the elderly spreading the disease in the general population. You had supplies in inventory unused or vials with doses spoiling unused under government-specified rules, with threats against distributors who violated them. The free market would have done this much better and faster; I would have been willing to pay the going rate to get mine earlier; it was annoying to find out my two younger brothers and even a nephew (a meteorologist) in his 20's, while I was in a health risk group, patiently waiting for the local county to work through a backlog of 75-and-older population (and other privileged "essential workers") A younger sister's whole family (including 3 adult nieces) got vaccinated before I did. Don't get me wrong--I was happy for my extended family being protected if anyone was getting protected before me and others. But I resented politicians deciding winners and losers, and I also resent the FDA, even under emergency approval rules, not adopting more of a right-to-try approach. I probably would have opted to test one of the mRNA vaccines. I do marvel at the fact we were able to develop and get approved vaccines within 9 months of a domestic outbreak but there were ways we could have moderated the casualties earlier.
I've seen some stories that state perks, like vaccine taker lotteries really haven't worked in comparing cross-state immunizations: surprise, surprise! I'm getting more and more irritated at right-winger like Greene and Boebert even using Nazi-era references in discussing vaccination public policy. In fact, I published a rant against a fellow libertarian Congressman Massie earlier this week over irresponsible tweets,
Life's Little Problems
Spam. I have a number of external email accounts (including multiple Gmail accounts and at least two other vendors) There are reasons for other accounts, in part for compartmentalization. I had legacy email addewaawa with hotmail and Yahoo, the latter of which was integrated with my personal calendar. Some I might use like a sandbox in the event I'm wary about a vendor's use of my registered email address. I generally stage my core emails into a version of the excellent Mailstore Home for a data warehouse of literally hundreds of thousands of old emails. Every once in a while I'll purge my warehouse of certain emails, like old weather reports, daily stock market recaps, and old sales promotion emails. Speaking of weather reports, Accuweather started announcing some time back it would discontinue daily weather reports/forecasts this past spring. I got one these morning, in fact, not complaining. But I've already got Amazon Alexa programmed to give me severe local weather alerts and various weather portal browser bookmarks. Is it worth my time and effort? Probably not. I think originally my plan was to go back and go through them when I had more time. Most of the time I'm just searching for things like old payments, a past employer's contact information or other things I need, say, for government paperwork.
The external email vendors generally do a good job of weeding out the obvious spam emails; I don't think I get more than a handful a month of getting through. There are reasons I go through periodic spam reviews. For example, in the past, professional recruiters will insist they had sent me a job listing (another reason for having an alternative email address). And some legitimate emails are filtered out (but maybe 5 out of 100).
But some are somewhat amusing but disturbing. It reminds me of a former supervisor or vendor accusing me of something that never happened. One example that comes to mind is Oracle Technical Support. I've had more than my fair share of issues with bad, inexperienced Oracle Support analysts over the past 20-odd years. (There have also been some good ones.) A lot of times you'll get someone doing little more than a superficial intranet search (95% of the results completely irrelevant), all requiring busywork, they want to go down the list in chronological order, and in the meanwhile, I've got a production problem caused by faulty Oracle software, and if I give any pushback, I've got this junior moron accusing me of having a bad attitude and threatening to close the problem ticket. And more than a few times, I've had to escalate the issue to a senior analyst. Keep in mind Oracle Support is not "free"; you're paying roughly 23% of your license costs a year for the privilege of getting access to Oracle code fixes and other material. I became a target for Support duty managers who disliked my escalating issues all too quickly in their view. What I know is when I got the right analyst, it was like 5 minutes, and we're done. I had some analysts think I was like the Amazing Kreskin; I remember predicting there was a patch to deal with a particular issue: "Just like you said; how did you know that?" Because the software had been released some time back, and it was a general issue that would come up in doing an uncomplicated install. Usually they do a thorough job testing code before they release it.
So I've been attacked politically multiple times by troublemaking Oracle duty managers, who never had the balls or integrity to come to me with libelous accusations. In one case, this idiot called my practice manager at Oracle Consulting (yes, the same employer!) and offered to recruit my replacement if he would just fire me. In another case, my boss was on a business trip, and the company switchboard forwarded the call to me. The dimwit started lying about me to my face, not realizing he wasn't talking to my boss. I remember in one case, a son of a bitch directly accused me of swearing and venting at one of his female analysts, leaving her so emotionally disturbed, he had to send her home for the day. "Dude, you're a fucking liar!" (Not in those words, obviously.) "I've got proof... Phone recordings." "Bullshit! You can't possibly have evidence of something that never happened." It's just not my style at all. I taught 8 years at the college level, 5 as a professor. (Not including my calculus TA experience at UT.) I've had more than my fair share of obnoxious students to deal with. I've had students repeat a question I just answered 5 minutes earlier. I even had one coed who literally had a full-fledged temper tantrum in one of my classes at UTEP--something I've never before seen in any class since kindergarten. (I had given a general warning about unnamed students who had cheated on an assignment.) She (correctly) inferred I was talking about her and RA and had a meltdown in class, threatening me. I pretty much was Joe Cool, never raising my voice, no matter what provocation. I NEVER cussed a student out or made a disparaging comment in front of his or her peers. The same goes in my personal interactions with others in general. Oh, I've sometimes deliberately used a vulgar word--intentionally, for dramatic effect--in a tweet or post. But no matter what the provocation, I don't cuss out people in person, over the phone/web, etc. If you go through thousands of my tweets (and I've received dozens of personal attack reply tweets) you won't find anything comparable like "You're just a retarded commie!" Usually I'll be making a salient comment about an issue in dispute. I remember once at UWM, I had to deal with an adversarial situation and had to give a response in front of several business school senior faculty. I'll never forget one of the people at the meeting congratulated me for maintaining my professionalism and making my case in an objective fashion. I didn't win the vote that followed, but I kept my dignity. I do keep a check on my temper. I just don't think making war with other people is a productive use of my time. So when I face a smear like that Oracle duty manager made, I'm going to push back. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity. But I know people make up shit all the time, and I refuse to let those troublemaking idiots put me on the defensive. I don't spend a lot of time worrying what other people think about me, something I have little control over. I do get pissed off when they resort to pure smears. Dude, I'm a libertarian-conservative; I get you may not agree with my politics. Keep your mind on the issues; don't make it personal.
So you're probably wondering, what the hell does this have to do with spam? I'm getting to it. Maybe this is a common scam, I don't know. But let me paraphrase for dramatic effect: "Dude! I know what you've done on the Internet since last summer. You like X-rated movies and porn sites, don't you?; don't lie to me, I know what you've been looking at--and I've made videos of you masturbating to all this. And I've got your personal email address book. So if you don't want your wifey, your boss, your mom, and your kiddos to find out what you've been up to, you better pay me a lot of Bitcoin to keep your reputation intact."
I don't know if this type of scam ever works, I'm not going to go into detail here, but most of this isn't even plausible. I don't respond to attempted extortion
Entertainment
There's been a lot of speculation over John Cena, whose acting career like the Rock and Batista's has been taking off, challenging Smackdown champ Roman Reigns for SummerSlam. As WWE resumes TV shows before live audiences next Friday, the hottest rumor is Cena making an in-person challenge to Reigns. What is uncertain is not whether Cena will job to Reigns (that's a lock), but whether Cena's movie he starts filming in late August has a contract clause forbidding the actor from engaging in potentially injury-prone activities like wrestling which would risk the production schedule.
Bayley suffered a major leg injury in training which has scrubbed her rematch to challenge Bianca for the Smackdown women's title at the Money in the Bank PPV next weekend. So there was speculation over who would replace Bayley. Of course, Sasha Banks never got her rematch after putting over Bianca at Wrestlemania and in fact hasn't been on TV since then. Of course, if she's gotten ring rust in the interim, it's almost impossible to ramp up in a week or so. I could think of others, like Asuka, on the RAW side of the house, or even RAW heel champ Ripley who could easily be scripted into credible challengers. But who does WWE script in? Former champ, the narcissistic Carmella, yes, the same Carmella who has lost twice to Liv Morgan in last month's programming. How does that merit Carmella a title shot?
There are some rumors of Rey Mysterio trying to resurrect the WCW concept of the Latino World Order. Of course, Zelina Vega has rejoined WWE, Humberto Carrillo, Angel Garza. NXT current women's champ is a Latina as is Bayley. Supposedly ex-champ Alberto Del Rio is interested in returning, but the last I heard, he had domestic violence charges pending, and WWE tends to avoid those types of engagements.
