Analytics

Saturday, May 30, 2026

Post #7705 J

 Endemic Report

The latest CDC weekly stats:


The Sick Times: 


 The stats remain low, though we are seeing infections increase in Texas and Connecticut, possibly a sign of an expected new summer wave. On Capitol Hill. GOP vaccine-skeptics are continuing to focus on exaggerated vaccine injuries. On the vaccine front, we are seeing focus on the dominant COVID variant for this year's booster.

The latest COVID news items:
  • "An AI tool found that about 16% of nearly 460,000 patients with COVID-19 had developed long COVID, researchers reported May 27 in JAMA Network Open. Applied across the United States, those rates translate to more than 18 million Americans with long COVID, which is twice as high as current estimates, researchers said."
  • "FDA Advisors Favor Dominant US Strain, XFG, for Next COVID Vaccine"
  • "FDA report: No child deaths definitively linked to COVID-19 vaccine"
  • "ICE detainee died from COVID-19, autopsy shows"
  • "Healthy hearts prior to pandemic reduced severe COVID-19 risk"
  • "1 in 6 COVID-19 patients develop long-term symptoms after initial infection, study finds"
  • "COVID-19 can cause an ear infection"
  • "PECOS Study Details Long-Term Symptom Burden in Pediatric COVID-19 Patients"
  • "Hantavirus Outbreak Revives COVID-Era False Health Claims"
  • "DR Congo’s neighbors impose Covid-style measures in push to limit Ebola’s spread"
  • "Seasonal COVID-19 vaccine in 2025/26 cut illness risk by half in Canadian study"
  • "Mount Sinai Scientists Validate a Link Between Autoimmunity in a Subset of People With Long COVID"
  • "Wichita boutique closing after nearly 20 years, citing long-term COVID impacts"
  • COVID relief fraud or other crimes:

Other Notes

The blog is still attracting well above-average pageviews, though down somewhat from earlier weeks. This is an unusual month with 5 weekends and 31 days, so we've already reached 40 posts on a regular post schedule, without one-offs/essays. We've also reached the 200-post mark for the year, easily surpassing last year's schedule, when I went over a month without Internet access due to a health incident. I did publish my Trump-Massie essay, which so far has over 20 pageviews (but I think deserves more; it's an interesting discussion of the Old Right, which I regard as a more authentic conservatism, and also references the evolution of meat inspections, which aren't typical discussions of Massie. My latest X teaser stat shows about 1.3 K weekly impressions over the past week, with just over 210 followers.

Dealing with a tough job market, at least for me, I was reminded of my negative experience with East Indian recruiters. Part of it is the difficulties in the English style. It's difficult to discuss succinctly, but, for example, over the past week, this one recruiter discussed a gig in Alexandria and my willingness to commute. I start asking about proximity to the Metro (I've done gigs, e.g., to USPTO). She has no clue what I'm talking about and, at some point, starts talking about Falls Church, which is about 13 miles away on the other side of the Beltway. (I think that's probably the location of the contractor.)  Then there's the busy work and being swamped with far too many calls and emails; they'll frequently call you back if say, you don't email back in 10 minutes (never mind you didn't even get it yet: no respect for your time). It got to the point yesterday that I put my phone in airplane mode. I get asked questions that are explicitly addressed in the resume. Or some preferred qualification takes on exaggerated importance, and they become hostile, claiming I've misled them. I cannot tell you how many times I've fixed problems clients didn't know they had. Just one example off the top of my head: I went to an SF TV station and almost immediately observed a data storage allocation problem, which I easily resolved. Managerial users almost immediately noticed some things were suddenly working again. They had hired some consultants from Redwood City (Oracle's then corporate base) who couldn't figure it out. In another example, I discovered NASA contractors had improperly implemented Oracle Data Guard, meaning if the primary database failed, its standby clone wouldn't fail over. Not only that, but the failover server was in the same location as the primary.. Let's suppose the location lost power, got flooded, or whatever. This means your standby won't be available, which defeats the purpose of having one. Even if you had a backup at Iron Mountain, you would probably lose at least a few days of transactions. I found it impossible to find a NASA manager to point out that the emperor was wearing no clothes.  The contractor simply delivered a DG solution because they filled what was specified, even though it didn't make sense.

And sometimes government workers are as dumb as rocks. I once had to do a gig at a Navy base in southern Maryland (around 2004-2005). I may have mentioned this in a past post. I had been hired by a consulting company in the Baltimore suburbs; they had misrepresented the position to recruit me as an Oracle practice manager. In reality, the government had contracted with them a certain number of hours of DBA/other technical support on a NAVAIR contract for which the prime contractor had staffed operational DBA and developer roles. It turns out I was initially sent on a weird gig where the contractors' own personnel had "failed" to upgrade a 9iAS server to 10GAS. (The application server basically provided a reporting interface to the database.) I think the migration was motivated by a version 9iAS desupport and/or security issue. I say "failed" because they tried to argue I had failed my install, even though it turned out they hadn't upgraded their reports to 10AS server compatibility. Just to explain: Oracle provided a script/tool to check reports for compatibility, and I later discovered the tool and verified the failures. The important fact is that the defense contractor told the dumbass Navy NCO project manager woman that their reports were compatible with the 10AS Server. I ended up having to put signposts in the report code to find out where the report was failing, and it involved calls to a custom printer driver for MS Word document setups. (Keep this in mind because it became an absurdly political point with the dumbass PM.)  I then had to research the error and discovered 10AG supported and expected certain defined output filetypes like RTF and PDF. Via Google AI:





I was given one junior application developer resource to work with; I had not been tasked with development, and as I recall, he got reassigned in the process. But basically, I proved that if you submitted, say, a PDF-compatible file, the application would work. It was the prime contractor's responsibility to modify the reports.

The problem I had was political. The PM had a strong relationship with the defense contractor, and my new employer was willing to throw me under the bus to maintain their own relationship. I think she had been on leave during part of this. And she saw any deviation from her prime directive of no changes from the status quo: if a secretary had to set margins for printing, say, a relevant MS Word report, and the new report doesn't require changing margins, that's a failure of her prime directive. I point out that's not my issue. I'm paraphrasing, but the following is close: "This is not my responsibility." "I decide what your responsibility is." "This is Oracle's product design. I can't change it." "We're the f*cking Navy. Oracle will do what we tell them to do." (Um, no.)

I got thrown under the boss. I didn't really mind, although I had to find a new job. They lied in recruiting me. The commute was 3 hours each day

Posted by at