No UI choice I have ever seen is as user-hostile as this interaction.
1) Why would you even ask me that if you are capable of calculating it, like freaking any computer is. Just derive it from the birthday if you can.
2) If you calculate it, by all that is holy, you had better actually get your math right.
I hate you so much right now, web application.
I realize this is petty Twitter sniping but we’re stochastically killing people this year through bad web UXes because decreasing marginal propensity for people to vaccinate through unnecessary errors causes them to forsake lifesaving medical treatment.
And nobody seems to want to confront the obvious implications of that. The contractor will say, accurately, it was to spec. The government will say, to protect patient privacy, that they collected no conversion data (and, privately, that that *was not a success metric*).
And then the usual suspects will, within a few months, go back to talking about “It’s a shame engineers don’t get ethics training* and instead choose to e.g. build social networks”, when this single form more important than every eng ethics thinkpiece published.
*citation needed
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After hearing some of Dad’s war stories (commercial real estate) over the weekend for the millionth time I think I should probably have a podcast with him sometime.
They’re entertaining and would be useful for software people.
Dad and a younger colleague are trying to put together an assemblage, which will require convincing an irascible old man to sell a house that has been in his family for several decades:
Colleague: these meetings are a waste of time. He’ll never sell. He ends every meeting w/ it.
Dad: “When a man tells you he will never sell at his first meeting with you, it can mean many things, but when he tells it to you at his fifth, it means ‘You just haven’t said right words yet.’ He *keeps taking the meetings.*”
I get asked reasonably frequently about international comparisons in the vaccination rollout.
With proviso that I'm much more informed about US and Japan than any other healthcare system and my only expertise is from working on this during the pandemic:
People know that the U.S. "does healthcare a bit differently" but almost everyone underestimates the degree to which this is true. In particular it leads to *massive* structural differences with regards to the distribution and physical location of where and when care provided.
The choice in the U.S. to allocate a very large percentage of all doses to the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program is a choice that I would predict less than 20% of nations will make. This is, again, heavily coupled with the structural setup of how healthcare is accessed in the U.S.
Seriously though from a marketing perspective I sort of like it.
Registered agents are a commodity; the service is (literally, in the literal sense of literally) being alive in a consistent location daily to perform a largely outmoded function the government mandates.
You'd expect there to be as much marketing differentiation for registered agents as you'd expect for soap, because the job to be done for soap has been a solved problem for hundreds of years, high margins, and a stupidly high LTV.
A useful rule of thumb for the vaccine is 10,000 dose-days : 1 life saved.
So if you hypothetically had a million doses of a vaccine sitting in the freezer, and you decided to keep them there for a week rather than injecting them, that's something like 700 lives.
This is sensitive to, among other things, the progress of the vaccination campaign (dose-days save exponentially more lives early when they're being administered to seniors than when they're being administered to the general population), presumed infection rates, etc.
But some calculation like this is very useful to remind us that there is a cost to waiting, and the cost for waiting on this particular topic, at this particular moment, is so wildly disproportionate to the costs to waiting we typically endure as to stagger our imagination.
It is Day 100 of VaccinateCA, and now Day 1 of the Vaccinate The States. We’re a non-profit collecting and publishing the best public data set of coronavirus vaccine availability across the U.S.
We work with the federal government, some state and local governments, and partners in the community to collect, verify, and distribute information about where to get the covid-19 vaccine. We back official efforts & some of the largest publishers in the world, e.g. Google Maps.
We will increasingly act as a data broker between other community efforts, the government and provider vaccine data systems, and publishers. We are uniquely resourced and experienced in the ecosystem to verify ground truth.
Day 98 at VaccinateCA. By what I swear is coincidence, I think we'll have something fun to show off on Day 100.
And since I don't want to be a total tease, we took the embeddable map now backing e.g. Alameda County's health department and localized it into all eight languages we support.
We welcome government health officials, politicians, community organizations, and other to use it to help accelerate the vaccination campaign in your community.