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Monday, July 13, 2020

COVID-19 at NNSA

There were 23 new active cases of COVID-19 this week at National Nuclear Security Administration sites, marking a second consecutive week of double-digit increases across the civilian nuclear security enterprise.
https://www.exchangemonitor.com/twenty-three-new-covid-19-cases-reported-nnsa/?printmode=1

26 comments:

Anonymous said...


Could just be a matter of time before it just gets around and most people get it one way or the other. The other question is how many of the cases where severe.

Anonymous said...

Thus far, in Los Alamos at least, the “Covid cases” have been mostly false positives. No surprise.

Anonymous said...

Thus far, in Los Alamos at least, the “Covid cases” have been mostly false positives. No surprise.

7/14/2020 10:33 PM

I find this very surprising knowing the cowboy culture of the place, I would assume that they wold be totally reckless. Maybe the cowboy culture thing is a bit overblown, still I don't know why they would say such a thing if it where not true?

Anonymous said...

Maybe you know nothing about Los Alamos or LANL?

Anonymous said...

The article gives the statistics for Alameda County where Livermore Lab is located, but it doesn't give the stats for San Joaquin County. The lab's population was at or above 50% being located in San Joaquin county seeing as they couldn't afford Alameda. So does one encounter the virus more at work or from your friends and family in your off hours where you live? Food for thought.

Anonymous said...

There are 13 confirmed cases in Los Alamos. What are you talking about 10:33.

Anonymous said...


Covid-19 is going wipe out LANL. Cases are increasing 25 in 1 day!!!!, Cowboys. Also the town is going nuts, I mean really nuts, you better wear a mask 20 miles on a trial or else. There are attacks at the pond over masks, middle fingers, and people being defriended calling for executions and people not wearing masks are domestic terrorsts. There is no way the town can get through this, you have the crazy Trump supporters, the hippies, and the cowboys. It is going to hell fast real fast. Schools are closed the people fighting.

Anonymous said...

Here is an odd one from Forbes saying the protests did not increase Covid.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/01/research-determines-protests-did-not-cause-spike-in-coronavirus-cases/#7de5e907dac7

I only bring this up because some people at LANL keep putting this link up as argument.

First simply putting a link and saying "so there" is not an argument. You have to actually read the article and say something about other then "some body did a study".

Second although the title says "Research determines protests did not cause spike in coronavirus". Research does not "determine" anything it simply gives evidence for something, so the title makes no sense. The evidence may be strong or weak but research cannot determine something to be 100% true.

3rd, the study has not been peer reviewed yet, so it may not mean anything yet. Under peer review all sorts of issues with the results could be found, especially in social science work where the data could be iffy, a serious of uncontrolled assumptions could have been made, problems with methods and so on.

4th, I actually read the work, The results are based off of AVERAGE social distancing from phone records and found that in places with riots the AVERAGE distance went up. Sure the makes since 75% of the people say look there is riot outside, I am locking down and not going anywhere, so there distance increases but the problem is 25% come much much closer. Sure the average went down but the tail 25% is where all the action is and where all the infections wold come into play. They do not show the distributions they only show the averages. I will not mention that numerous other methodological errors in this work especially in the way they choose 340 cities. Again you need to take into account the scale and duration of the riots which they did a very bad job on.

One of the issues with social science work is the lack of understating of probability theory and distributions. They simply do not get this, even most economists do not understand this. There are whole books written on this like the "Black swan". Look I get that social science people don't understand math, what I do not get is that people at LANL with a Phd in a STEM field also appear not to understand math, and could not see right away that the AVERAGE number is not the relevant variable. Whatever.

5th another argument they use is that in many cases the spikes did not start at the places where the riots happened. This is actually very simple to explain, if you watched the riots on TV you would see that places like Santa Monica had a large riot however simply looking at the demographics it was clear that 85% of the participants where not from Santa Monica. The same could be said for many of the other places. What they should have done is look if there was a spike in poor neighborhoods in counties or neighbor counties where there where riots since this is where the people from the riots mostly came from. If you looks at Southern California the spikes that started first in June where in Los Angles and San Bernadio counties, both places with large riots while Orange county, and San Diego county the spike came latter and is less where there where only smaller protests.

Another argument is the protestors where wearing masks. I am not sure which riots they where watching but the ones I saw maybe 1/3 or less where wearing riots. The idea that people in very close proximity, running around for 8-12 hours for a week straight will not increase the risk is bit crazy to me. They than argue Trump rallies had people without masks. Trump rallies had 6k people the riots/protests could have had millions.

Anonymous said...



Another little tidbit, the timing of the overall Covid increase seems to match well with 1.5 to 2 weeks after the riots and protests. It could be the protests had a direct effect but also the sense many people had was "hell we just a a big old riot I guess the pandemic is over" and they become more risky and either effect implies the protests played a role. Another irony is that Trump was considering in the insurrection act which would have put troops in the street which could stoped the protests and hence the spike. There seems to be a lot of contradictions in the nation right now. Trump is a tyrant if we tries to stop riots but Trump is also to be blame for not completely locking down China stye. You are a idiot nut case if you don't wear a mask to protect everyone and schools need to be shut but mass protests and riots are perfectly ok. One thing for sure that this whole thing is highly politicized.

I am not sure what any of this fragmenting of the US means for the labs. I have a good idea what Trumps plan for the NNSA is but I have no idea what Bidens are. I think Warren who could be his running mate said something against nuclear weapons but I have no idea. For all I know Biden and crew will just stay hidden until Nov so we have no idea what his stance is on anything. If anybody knows what Biden thinks of the NNSA let us know. I guess I could go with a similar stance as Obama but who knows. Maybe the plan will be to ditch the labs for the Green New Deal. I could picture the speeches now " If can cut our police forces in half we can also cut our nuclear weapons capabilities in half!"

One thing I am sure of is that even if Trump is gone in Nov we are still going to have racial issues, still have problems like pandemics and wars, and still have to deal with the stockpile.

Anonymous said...


Los Alamos continues to go off the loony bin. There are now huge fights on facebook with people calling each other crazy, going of the rails, insults. I have not seen anything like this in town. There as a supposed attack about a people not weaning masks by the pond. Now the number of people going near the pond has dropped drastically. There are also verbal fights on hiking and running trails. I heard one on Friday with just F-bombs and people yelling listen to the scientists, I don;t want to die, I am not even 20 feet near you and so on. I have plenty of family all over the nation and even in big cities it is not this crazy. I get the feeling a lot of people in Los Alamos hate each other, usually it is not a problem but with Covid it getting out. Your have a bunch of different churches, and right wing and left wing people all in much closer proximity than you have in a town this size under normal conditions. I expect that a major incidence of violence will be happen before long.


Anonymous said...

In spite of the number of PhDs in Los Alamos, the county health administrators continue to subscribe to the DJT School of Medicine approach to pandemic control, which is "don't test, and you won't have any cases." Pure logic.

Anonymous said...

In spite of the number of PhDs in Los Alamos, the county health administrators continue to subscribe to the DJT School of Medicine approach to pandemic control, which is "don't test, and you won't have any cases." Pure logic.

7/18/2020 5:26 PM

Like dude, I am all with you like the orange man be bad and all that stuff, cool. But like I just can't catch with your waves on this. Cuz like you can easily get a test if you want at this thing called like a hospital and like you know they are doing this random tests and stuff at the lab. You must be too deep for me to flow with due to your super brainiac powers. Sweet bro, sweet. The only thing be clear is you be thinking the the Orange bro is like totally bad. Mind blown dude....Woha!!!!


Ok to be serious, what on earth is your point? I simply don't get it. Anyone can get a test in Los Almaos, and the lab is doing random and voluntary testing. Is there something else they can do? I get you don't have PhD, but those of who do seem to get that Los Alamos may be doing more testing than than the average town of the same size due to the lab. If anyone is sick in town they can get test to see if they are positive. The town or anybody with a PhD in the town cannot stop people from getting a test, so what is your point?


Anonymous said...

10:42 Exactly. The lack of knowledge of even basic statistics in our society is shocking.

Anonymous said...

10:42 Exactly. The lack of knowledge of even basic statistics in our society is shocking.

7/19/2020 9:59 AM

I keep seeing weirder and weirder news. I was just looking at the Huff post that had article saying how the recent uptick in violent crime has nothing to do with the protests against the police. Of course some of my friends link to this article. If I look into it it says similar upticks happened in after riots in Ferguson and Baltimore proving that the increase in crime afterword had nothing to do with the riots. How on earth does that make any sense as this statement seems to be saying the opposite? The argument a professor from U of Missouri St Luis said it is because these communities no longer trust the police and take action into their own hands, this is absolute madness. It is time for people to start reading these dam articles rather than than linking to them. One should stand by the maxim if you make an extraordinary claim than you need extraordinary evidence to back it up. If you claim the protests did not have any connection to the increase in Covid you need to provide some evidence for this because that is extraordinary claim. If you claim that riots are not the reason for increased crime you need evidence for this. Simply giving me a link to a "study" is not evidence unless you actually understand the study. Most of these studies are pretty easy to understand and see why they are not valid, make no sense, or just out and out wrong. Profs are paid to write papers and do studies so there are lots of studies out there. A place like Huff post just picks the ones that fit what they want to say and ignore the rest, this happens time and time again. Any one study is simply not that valuable in science, you need many studies, reproducibility and proper statistics. Right now there is something called the reproducibility crisis in the social sciences as it is being realized that a huge number of these studies cannot be reproduce when the next group tries it. Keep that in mind the next time you send your crazy uncle a link on how "scientists" prove that increasing murder rates is a sign of a thriving community or that having laws means more crime. Of course the best thing to do is simply read these things and trust me your eyes will be opened.


We are living in the 1984 world, soon you will see a study showing that "contradictions show something is correct" Some will post that ignorance is strength and than a link to this study.

Anonymous said...

"Anyone can get a test in Los Almaos,

7/18/2020 11:24 PM"

We like facts, "dude," facts. What is the per-capita testing rate in Los Alamos county compared to surrounding counties? Compared to the rest of US?

Anonymous said...

"The evidence may be strong or weak but research cannot determine something to be 100% true."
7/17/2020 10:42 AM emphatically declared.

Well, my independent research has determined that when I let go of an object, like a slice of buttered bread, it does not ever go to the ceiling, but rather falls to the floor 100% of the time (so far). My conclusion is that the attraction of masses due to gravity is indeed "true." The jury is still out on whether it lands butter-side down more than 50% of the time, as some great thinkers have proposed.

Anonymous said...

7/18/2020 11:24 PM

No amount of parody or even serious discussion will ever bring round the bitter anti-LANL guy who hitched his wagon to Bechtel and lost the race. He is still bitter about "LANL cowboys" as if Nanos were still around or even remotely still believable. So sad for him.

Anonymous said...

7/19/2020 9:59 AM

It is not "shocking." When and where did you expect the average American to learn anything about statistics? Where did you learn it? What is shocking is that none of 7/17/2020 10:42 AM's claims or fevered delusions stem from "statistics" at all, just numbers cherry-picked from news reports. He did zero statistical analysis. Citing some scientific process in your non-scientific rant doesn't make it science.

Anonymous said...

Stop pretending that Facebook posts are relevant. Problem solved.

Anonymous said...

Stop pretending that Facebook posts are relevant. Problem solved.

7/19/2020 10:14 PM

Good, point but they are a window into how people think. The question is how representative are they, in other words if I look at the percentage of facebook posts that are (1) virtue signaling, (2) insults, (3) repeated phases but wrong phrases "Trump said good people on both sides", "You did not build that" "LANL cowboys"..ect. (4) profoundly poor understating of math and the world. (Police kill 10 times more blacks than whites, everyone knows this, covid will kill 10% of the populations. (5) crackpot ideas, like Bill Gates created Covid to force everyone to use a vaccine, this is all a distraction to steal children . (6) religious nutcases, Obama is the red moon from the book of revelations. (7) talking points from Huff post or Breitbart. (8) links to articles that the poster never read or understands.

This is close to 50% of the posts on a typical community blog, does this mean 50% of the population is basically clueless, nuts, or a blind follower? Another odd thing is I noticed the rabid SJW types are essentially the same as the rapid religious types. Maybe it just means Facebook is attractor for this and most people are normal.

Anonymous said...

Stop pretending that Facebook posts are relevant. Problem solved.

7/19/2020 10:14 PM

Can anyone please explain why anyone would waste their time with Facebook?

Anonymous said...


Can anyone please explain why anyone would waste their time with Facebook?

7/20/2020 4:48 PM

Well there is the obvious reasons like useful information such as do you know a person who can fix this or that, I want to buy a certain kind cheese do you know where, what is the best beer in Colorado, that kind of stuff.

In principle it could be good for discussion and debate but rarely have I seen that. Just insults, crazy statements, broad generalizations and so on. Or pictures of a minion dropping a mic, a cat on a piano or someone laughing as a reply to someone. I remember being in Vienna talking over coffee for three hours on how capitalism and human could or could not be mapped to resistor, capacitor, inductor circuits. No one yelled, insulted or dropped a mic, just discourse. Now we have facebook and twitter.

On positive note this blog and blogs in general are higher quality.

Anonymous said...

People like a one-stop shop, even if everything in the store is garbage.

Anonymous said...

Right. FB has irrelevant posts for local residents but this blog brings out the most refined intellectuals. Posts eventually devolve into Trump rants, anti-LANL rants, or rants by the grammar police.

Anonymous said...

Every single anonymous blog on the web does the same thing. Who is surprised? Want to make it intellectually honest and respectable? Make it real-name sign-up and make it real-time moderated.

Anonymous said...

Facebook need not be a waste if you have a reasonable circle of family, friends and old classmates. Yes there are tons of crap on FB, but if the folks in one’s “bubble” don’t drag it inside, everything is OK.

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