As the vernacular goes, I've got a bit of personal news: early this June I'm stepping back from my day-to-day role with VaccinateTheStates.com .
The team will continue on the project until the end of the critical period for the pandemic; we're shooting for late summer.
It's been the experience of a lifetime to work with smart, passionate people running into a gap in core infrastructure. I think it was the most important thing I've done in my career to date.
After a few weeks with my family (I haven't seen them since January), back to Stripe.
Lots more to say on this topic eventually, but for the moment relaxing and waiting out my last few days of quarantine, while getting a few things tied up for the team.
You'll still have to put up with me tweeting about the progress of the vaccination campaign occasionally, as it is not yet over either in the U.S., Japan, or elsewhere. It remains probably the most important social issue immediately facing humanity.
And to that end, we'll have a bit of news Really Soon Now on what might be the highest leverage thing we've done to date.
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Speaking of which: it is Day 136 for VaccinateTheStates.com and I have the update baton.
Today, as always, the most important thing we did was collect information on where to get the covid-19 vaccines and fan it out to places where vaccine seekers will think to look.
We're increasingly relying on the "web bank" versus "phone bank" for our marginal data ingestion. The supply situation is uneven across the U.S. but the spottiness has largely worked its way out of the system; we more rarely see things change when calling a location repeatedly.
The data which continues to be very volatile is local government and community-run pop-up or mobile vaccination clinics. They often exist only for a few hours after being announced a day or handful in advance.
We mostly find out about these via tool-assisted people keying in.
I wonder whether one post-pandemic change in how things work is going to be continuing the new (lower) level of call center staffing for e.g. banks and air carriers.
It's been about 15 months of "We're experiencing elevated hold times" being constantly plastered across digital channels and rather aggressively trying to move routine inquiries to apps.
And while there was certainly an actual operational necessity to limit the number of reps per floor, the vaccination progress through the U.S. should have at least U.S.-based call centers OK to operate at normal capacities by this point.
The "knowledge management" problem is one of the hardest ones at companies. A great, great many tools purport to solve bits of it.
Most of the work is actually done by people more than it is by processes or technology, though those exist.
The instant case is sort of the easiest possible one, in that there is a known timeframe, a known bit of data, and a relatively known impact to that data being stale, and a known scope of work in updating it.
There are other, more interesting variants of this.
Many of the last 25k locations we've ingested have been in underserved neighborhoods. A huge amount of these are downstream of community contributions of scrapers.
If you've got some cycles free (takes a few minutes to an hour for most of them), we've got a pipeline up and running and Github issues tracking exactly what code at which points would unblock more of these locations getting published.
Most people who learn about vaccination sites through this work will not see it on our website, but will see it through a publishing partner. We work with the largest publishers in the world and federal, state, and local government entities throughout the country.
Does anyone think that Tether, or their alter ego at Noble Bank, has recently hired a small army of treasury professionals, sales reps, ops people, and backoffice required to make this happen?
An interesting thing about money movement is that it isn't purely scale-invariant: a billion here, a billion there, eventually you start to run into things which aren't just "Write a bigger number into the same box you used last time."
More contras. More paperwork. More regs.
There's someone feverishly preparing at this moment to roll *checks notes* something like a billion dollars of paper on Monday, right? And then on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc etc?
Who is that person? Who employs them? Who manages them? Where is the infra required to do this?
An interesting thing about watching video game streaming where streamers verbalize their logic as to strategy is that you realize that the population-wide distribution of analytical ability is wider than you remember it being.
Streamer: *articulates reason why Path A has 10X expected value of Path B*
Me: Got it.
Streamer: “Went down A last time so let’s see what is down B.”
Me: Wait no there is no hidden information here; you did the math right.
Streamer: Oh I died.
Me: Of course you died.
“I wonder how this mechanic works.”
“This core game mechanic which has been the same for the last 90 minutes? And was explained in tutorial?”
“I think *hypothesis*.”
“You could confirm that in approximately 5 seconds if the last 5 minutes hadn’t refuted it at least 12 times.”