Since my website has a lot of information about Microsoft Teams, I can see when a lot of new Teams users came online during the lockdown. Now that people are returning to offices (and, I expect, are more familiar with the platform), I’m starting to see fewer search engine referrals. But I’m still 3-4x the numbers I’d seen pre-lockdown.
I needed to collapse multiple rows into a single row — the circuits within a diversity set are stored within the ds_dvrsty_set_circuit table as individual rows & the ds_dvrsty_set_id links the multiple rows. What I wanted was a set ID, set name, and the list of circuits within the set.
To accomplish this, I found LISTAGG which is a little bit like STUFF in MSSQL. This query produces a single row for each diversity set that contains the set ID, the set name, and a comma delimited list of set members.
SELECT
ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id,
(select ds_dvrsty_set.ds_dvrsty_set_nm from ds_dvrsty_set where ds_dvrsty_set_id = ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id) as set_name,
LISTAGG(ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.circuit_design_id, ',') WITHIN GROUP(ORDER BY ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id) AS member_circuits
FROM
ds_dvrsty_set_circuit
left outer join ds_dvrsty_set on ds_dvrsty_set.ds_dvrsty_set_id = ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.DS_DVRSTY_SET_ID
WHERE
ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id in (select distinct ds_dvrsty_set_id from ds_dvrsty_set_circuit where circuit_design_id in (14445678, 5078901) )
AND
ds_dvrsty_set.ds_dvrsty_set_nm like '43%'
GROUP BY
ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id
ORDER BY
ds_dvrsty_set_circuit.ds_dvrsty_set_id;
Voila — exactly what I needed. If the searched circuit design IDs appear in more than one set, there is a new row for each set ID.
the letter sent to homeowners to advise them of public hearings contradicts what the BZA says at the start of the meeting. I know it’s a form letter (and it’s used in many townships) and the spiel at the start of the meeting is some fixed text … but seems like the instructions int he letter can deprive homeowners of their right to testify before the Board. In the form letter, you are advised that you can attend the public hearing at such-and-such a date or submit a letter to the Board.
Sounds great. Except the beginning spiel that’s read at every public hearing says that Board members are not to consider as testimony any written correspondence that is not under oath. Oh, you had to write special letter in order for it to be given any consideration.
The spiel goes on to say that, while properly constructed letters can be considered testimony they should be given lower weight because the submitter is not available for cross-examination. That part didn’t make it to any minutes I’ve seen, but I’ve heard the chairperson say it. She, in fact, got rather curt with me for conveying exactly what she said at the beginning of the meeting to an employee of the Metro Parks when they submitted an e-mail with their opinion on a variance request. I don’t know which is true — maybe they’re giving equal weight to a written correspondence as they are to in-person testimony [this is the claim the chairperson made to me, how dare I tell the Board what they did and did not consider!] in which case the spiel at the start of the meeting should be reworded. Maybe they’re only giving consideration to sworn letters — in which case the public notice should tell you to send a sworn (or whatever) letter. Maybe a letter is basically ignored, in which case it should not be offered as an equally valid path for presenting your beliefs to the BZA.
A friend mentioned that Madonna has jumped on the demon-sperm-doctor’s ‘a cure exists’ train. To which someone replied “who cares?” … which is a reasonable gut reaction. Some celebrity, or has-been celebrity, wants to walk around telling everyone they need to get Airpods? I don’t care.
I don’t care that one individual believes, well, any crackpot idea or conspiracy theory either. There was a guy in downtown Philly who walked around with a sign declaring that the alien invasion was nigh and we should save ourselves by … I don’t even remember what he thought would appease our future alien overlords. People generally ignored him or felt sorry for him. Sometimes gave him a hairy eyeball. And we all carried on.
When the crazy idea is picked up by more individuals? Nonsense is less objectionable when a lot of people believe it (i.e. there are people who read this doctor’s statements from the fifth source & think maybe it’s true).
When those who hold sway over a lot of other people start promoting disinformation? Some percentage of Trump’s 84.3 million followers, and some percentage of Madonna’s 2.6 million followers, take this seriously. They use the ‘information’ to justify mask refusal, heading out to parties, etc. Unless you’re completely off the grid, you’ll be sharing space with them at some point. That’s why I care.
Tonight, I saw a post about the percent of rental households facing eviction — a staggering statistic on its own, but percentages can hide large or small numbers. 22% or 55% of households facing eviction sounds awful, but how awful depends on how many households rent or own in the state. The government, however, publishes a lot of data about US households. Data profiles for 2018 are available, so I’m using the number of renters by state in 2018 to translate percentages into households.
This chart represents 18 million households facing eviction — this is housing units, not number of people. One household may be one person or it may be ten people.
Beyond the immediately obvious question of “where are all of these people going once they are evicted?, there is peripheral impact — a lot of rental units are financed. How are property owners paying when a quarter of their rental units vacant? Are their kids still going to school? The government insisted on rescuing “too big to fail” banks. Ten or twenty million homeless people across the country seems more dire. Yet our government cannot pass an unemployment extension in a timely fashion.
There’s a historical hypothesis that the relative stability of the past couple hundred years was achieved by maintaining a large middle class. People constantly plagued by poverty and starvation are open to suggested alternatives — what do you have to lose? But give 60% a little something — a decent place to live, enough food, transportation, a little extra money for “fun stuff” and you’ve got a populace invested in maintaining the status quo (however inequitable that may be). Mass unemployment and homelessness is the stuff of mass protest and revolution.
Texas is going to start sending the least likely to survive home to free up healthcare resources. A few months back, Italy had been floating some metrics for determining who got sent home and who rcv’d treatment. Had a few friends freaked out over the inhumanity of it, but … there’s a limited resource exceeded by need (and a metric may make it easier for healthcare workers charged with delivering awful news to families). To act like the choice is between this awful scenario and something awesome — like we could have this most-apt-to-survive-gets-treatment rule or everyone would immediately be treated (successfully, of course) for whatever ailment — is living in a fantasy world.
Those aren’t the choices available. What we’ve got without “least likely to survive get no treatment” seems to be either first-come-first-serve or highest-bidder. Neither of those are great algorithms for determining who is saved. A “death panel” sounds inhumane (and it’s obviously branding from an opposition group), but some outcome prediction to determine who gets treated … well, I guess it sucks for those with unlimited cash to ensure they’re always going to be the high bidder because they’ve now in the same boat as everyone else. But it’s about as close to an equitable solution as you can get in an awful situation.
One of my biggest problems with politics is the short-attention-span theatrics of it all. Both death panels and now — yeah, someone can come up with a terrifying phrase to make a solution sound unthinkable. But talk about the options and the rational for the approach for an hour and it’s a different picture.
I wish progressives would get better at branding and marketing — yeah, we’ve got death panels. But you’ve got the medical treatment auctioneer. This vial of insulin goes to the highest bidder — and Anne Rice wins this round. Sorry, all you penniless rubes. If you’re not in a coma in two hours, we’ll have another auction.
Hopefully people will be a little more understanding of treatment allocation based on predicted outcomes next time we talk about universal healthcare.
Scott hypothesized that 2020 should have a fairly low rate of illness apart from SARS-CoV-2. The preventative measures taken to limit the spread of this virus should also have reduced the number of people with colds, flu, etc. There’s no way to tell for mild illnesses, but I knew the CDC tracked flu and pneumonia cases … you can link the CDC’s CSV data sources into Excel, create a Pivot table to get rows of week numbers or months & columns of year-by-year case counts, then create a chart that compares case counts year-to-year. Unfortunately, they have a new file name each week. You’ve got to find the latest URL from https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
I was surprised to see 2020 significantly higher than the previous two years through the end of April and bumping back up again between weeks 26 and 27 (late June / early July)
Broken out by state and filtered to a few states to make the chart readable, I see the same trend. 2020 is generally higher than 2019 or 2018.
The significant increase in pneumonia deaths this year? That’s probably not people who actually had pneumonia completely unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. The influenza/pneumonia data set includes an “All Deaths” column — which depicts the excess deaths for 2020 (I assume the past month or so of data is not yet finalized, as thee numbers fall off sharply in the final weeks of the data set).
People who have been dealing with police brutality for decades need to be remembered as protests against police violence continue. I could get brutalized for showing up at a protest, but someone with different DNA could get brutalized for walking downtown. But the evolution of BLM protests into protests against police brutality used against protesters and protests against federal policing of American cities are perfectly valid movements too. I see people who had no personal experience with police brutality who joined a protest based on their reaction to the Floyd video got to experience profiling (you’re here with a sign, so must be a violent anarchist out to smash glass), police brutality, and violent over-reactions. Brings to mind the hypothesis that military action in Iraq was a huge recruitment driver for radical groups — people who disliked abstract America policy in a non-violent way experienced that policy as friends and family became collateral damage. And wanted to “do something” to push back.
Although, that may be the point of the BLACK Lives Matter movement — that given two equally valid movements, the one impacting white people hold the nation’s attention while the equally valid concerns from a minority group fall by the wayside.