Pandemic Review
The latest stats from CDC:
The latest Worldometer daily US stats:
Most indicators (except deaths) are trending in the right direction--fewer emergency visits for COVID, declining test positivity ratios, and hospitalizations. We continue to see high profile infections, like WWE wrestler L.A. Knight, and the governors of Ohio and Washington (for the third time!).
Polls indicate that most adults expect to get the new monovalent COVID-19 shots although maybe their children. I tweeted over the week that my local Walmart pharmacy finally got its initial delivery but quickly exhausted its supply. I'll probably check next week.
Other Notes
It looks as though the month-long pageview hits from Singapore have finally ended with a more normal daily statistic today. Let's hope it's ended once and for all. The statistics were unusable. I still don't know what motivated it.
I'm not currently working for a federal contractor; it looks like Speaker McCarthy has worked a short-term no spending cuts short-term funding bill (but without additional Ukraine funding) that won bipartisan support and won passage in the Senate as well. But I can speak to various issues experienced by contractors. At some military locations, there is a practice of "59 minutes", typically allowing government workers to leave early on a holiday break. Contractors, however, can only bill for actual hours worked. Moreover, only government workers can open/close work facilities, which constrained the hours you could work on site. So, if the facility had a weather-related opening delay, chances are you couldn't book your normal 8 hours, and your pay assumed a full booking. You typically weren't allowed to make up hours. So, I and others would typically hoard PTO hours allowed on our positions to patch billing hour gaps, so our paychecks wouldn't get docked for hours unbilled. As far as I know, civilians (i.e., government workers) were excused for any related gaps. Obviously, interruptions like government shutdowns are treated similarly. Unlike many government workers, we didn't get backpay post-shutdown. And there were penalties in carrying over "excess" PTO hours: I lost several days of PTO over the past year. Shutdowns had other effects, e.g., my WV gig start was delayed by 2.5 months in 2013 over a backlog in getting an interim clearance.
I have a couple of siblings who have been career civilians. Now I've applied earlier in my work history for government positions, but I never got an offer or even contacted; over the last several years I've probably been over their age limits. The lure was probably job security; I've had more than my fair share of losing jobs over expiring federal contracts (e.g., in IL, SC, WV, and MD). I've experienced enough of government bureaucracy to realize working there would have driven me crazy. But apparently the picture is more nuanced than I expressed above. My sister, an RN, was required to work during the 2013 as an "essential" worker and insists that I am wrong over getting backpay.
