Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
From CDC:
The daily case moving average has slightly dipped from the 120K's to th3 110K's, but that's well above the 70K's range around Thanksgiving.. Could this be an advance leg of the dreaded winter spike?
In the news, the Senate voted against Biden's OSHA vaccine mandate, but it was largely symbolic. It's unlikely to get s House vote, Biden has vowed to veto it if it gets to his desk, and there are more than enough Dems to sustain his veto in either chamber.: only 2 senators, from red states, voted to reverse the rule. Second, outgoing NYC Mayor DeBlasio announced his own private-sector vaccine mandate, among other measures. Finally, a federal judge has blocked Biden's mandate against federal contractors. (Note that I, in the past, have been a federal contractor.) Note that I have a nuanced position at mandates, despite being open about my own vaccination and pro-vaccine views and agreeing that contractors embedded into the federal workplace can pose a health risk. It's not clear that the disease is propagating via the workplace, and the mandate would cover workers whose job (e.g., remote work) does not involve close social contact. According to CDC stats above some 72% of adults are already vaccinated.. The remaining 28% includes adults not in the labor force. It is likely most workers are vaccinated already and have minimal risk to related severe health complications. Obviously employers have a vested interest in sick, contagious individuals staying home. But as an application of the principle of Subsidiarity, employers, not remote bureaucrats, are in a better position to judge workplace safety.
I'm getting increasingly annoyed at disingenuous anti-vaxxer rubbish. In last night's daily post, I went after Ron Paul co-host McAdams for some familiar talking points. I want to take up a different talking point here: I believe he referenced the VAERS database. The clipped article addresses the salient points, but let me rephrase for emphasis. Every research fellow has been taught the difference between correlation and causality, not to mention the limitations of self-reported data. Apparently FNC host Tucker Carlson (I'm not a viewer or fan) has cited it. But here's the key point: these aren't necessarily vetted data; the reporting of a COVID-19 vaccine shot is likely incidental to cause of death. Take into account the above statistic that 95% of senior citizens are at least partially vaccinated. The vast number of reported deaths in the database are of older people. The risk of mortality dramatically increases with age; A high percentage of deaths in the reference group likely is due to natural causes The number of vetted deaths involving vaccines is literally a near-zero percentage. The small number of the vaccinated who have died from COVID-19 are dominated by the elderly (not to mention the immuno-compromised). But one caution on anyone interpreting results from querying VAERS: in my MBA days, we had a popular construct: GIGO.
Other Notes
As someone who has 2 math degrees and has published research statistics, I'm somewhat obsessed with statistics from my social media feeds, including the blog. To give an example, I probably attracted over 100 pageviews a day over the first week of December, an above-average clip. But this pace has dropped off a cliff to the point over the past 16 hours, I've averaged less than a pageview an hour. Possibly Google is doing some maintenance; I've seen 2 6-hour periods with no page views. I'll publish, with or without pageviews. Ideally I, like any other writer, would prefer a wider audience, in the millions vs. dozens. I just find the fluctuations intriguing.
USPS continues to befuddle me. I recently moved locally; in my new complex I don't have a typical building apartment box panel, but a free-standing box not unlike what my Mom has for her Texas house. There is no link between a box number and address, except for USPS purposes. For example, suppose I was assigned 10. The 10 is not related to my street address or apartment number. It wasn't in the bank closest to me. I had to walk some distance down the street to find the stand with box 10. And the way it works is I had to put a $40 deposit for the box; apparently they have to schedule someone to change the locks which happens over a weekend. But, and I temporarily forgot about this, they give you the keys when you make the deposit. I was in the middle of the move and put the keys aside in a car compartment. I had to go back to the post office a week later to get the box number. (extremely inconvenient: I had to fit it in my work schedule: why they couldn't message my phone or my online USPS account, I don't know/ But I did remember to save my receipt. So when I got the number, I asked about the keys (I still don't see the logic of distributing the keys in advance), and the clerk said they left them with apartment management. I called the complex from my car in the parking lot and they quickly denied the point. I went back into building and this time another clerk told me they gave out keys at the time of deposit. I was drawing a blank on putting the keys aside, and she agreed to give me replacement keys, but told me I would have to put my mail on hold through the next 2 weekends because no lock replacement in the short run.
So then I went online and put a hold after following my change of address. What I didn't realize then is the USPS doesn't maintain a history log of transactions. Sometime later I was looking for sunglasses in my car and stumbled across the missing keys in my COVID facemask. I tried them at my new box and success! Prior residents to my address had mail stuffed into the box. Now I had a problem: stop the lock replacement and relax the hold on mail. So I returned to the post office and handed in the replacement pair.
Canceling the hold was niore difficult. The website required a hold mail confirmation which it says was emailed to me. WRONG! I eventually discovered they TEXTED the confirmation number to my phone. In the interim I'm calling the USPS 800 number, waiting in a queue and eventually get to talk to an agent. He can't find the hold, promises to follow up with the local post office. I get an email back ovrr the next few days, saying that my mail had been put on hold because too much mail had pilled up (probably what I turned in with the replacement keys). Where the agent failed to understand that I was the one who initiated a hold, I don't know. Is there any question why I repeatedly have called for privatization of USPS in the daily miscellany posts?
Sam's Club. One of my pet peeves are the plastic bag rolls. One of my purchase staples is the $5 rotisserie chickens, which I can stretch into 4 meals. I learned a long time ago I want to enclose the packaging into a plastic bag to prevent leakage of bird juices. I've found these bags are almost impossible to open. Typically I end up tearing into the top looking for a fringe I can peel apart.. So yesterday, a sweet old woman of color had noticed me selecting a bird and approached me with an opened bag and offered it to me as I inserted the package. I'm not sure why; I hadn't even peeled off my own bag yet. But bless her.
Speaking of Sam's Club, I finally tried Scan 'N Go. It's not that I had been channeling my inner Luddite, but I had had issues configuring it to work with my club/credit card through the app, and I didn't really see a good working example of how it worked. I had a few incentives to using it: one, some of the checkout lines can be ridiculous, like 20-30 minutes or longer. I last went there before my recent move on a Sunday, and it was ridiculously full and busy. I thought I was a line for the regular queue with multi-checkout lanes. Instead I was in a self-checkout lane queue. (I usually don't do that for a full cart.) It wasn't as bad as I thought once I got to the head of the line, but never again.
I had intended to try it earlier but I left my phone charging in the car. In any event I had gone onto my Sam's Club account at the portal and got confused by a number of things including a difference in membership ID's on my online account and my club card, my club card wasn't registered on my online account and I had expired credit cards in my account. So I wasn't sure what would happen if I tried to checkout with the app, and I really didn't see a relevant discussion on this. I really didn't want to go through the scan process just to run into a glitch at checkout..
So apparently the busy work I spent on the online portal profile worked, and checkout turned out to be easy. The app turned out fairly simple if you have any experience with cameras or barcode scanning with a phone. You click the scan icon to open the scan window, center the item barcode in the window, and assuming the barcode is legible (sometimes I had to smooth out the code for legibility), the scan will automatically shutter with an audible click and the item will appear in your checkout list.
The familiar reader knows one of my research interests is usability/human factors. There are just a couple of criticisms that come to mind. First, I found myself on 2-3 occasions flicking off items by accident while panning the list, meaning I had to rescan the items. I would make the deletion process harder to do, but I sometimes do a similar thing with Gmail. Second, I would provide some sort of simulation exercise.
Oh, there was another monetary incentive to try Scan 'N Go; in fact I could have sworn I saw a note of a credit during the scsn process, but it doesn't show on checkout. It may be a statement, not transaction credit and/or maybe I need a second checkout to qualify for the incentive. But it was by far the fastest and easiest checkout I've ever had, and I'll do it again.
