SMS is great. Please convince my $MegaCorp to use this instead of the god-awful 90s attempt at flights.google.com they're using right now... god speed!
> It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.
Yes, but the Appalacian contingent is not a majority in any of those states. They just are historically less anti-union than other rural areas (while still socially conservative) so they can swing a bit. Overall the big cities and suburbs are usually the deciding factor there.
If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
>If anything, Appalachian are uniquely under-represented nationally. While the region as a whole contains nearly 25 million people, WV is the only state to have two Appalacian senators. I think TN has one as well, but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention.
Technically that is 50% more senators than California with twice the population.
Senators were just to make a comparison point against other rural areas (considering that the Senate is the place most rural places are over-represented). The same division though also ensures that, unlike Californians, Appalachians have relatively little voice in the electoral vote or for governor-level positions as well because WV is their only majority state.
A senator does you no good if your primary governmental irritant is the state government which for most rural areas is the case. The federal government generally doesn't do anything to egregious to rural areas (maybe because most federal policy mostly doesn't affect people's day to day lives or maybe because of those senators doing their jobs?) but the state governments generally have a problem with major cities enacting state level policy that should really be done on a county level.
Federally-funded farm subsidies are a huge deal to rural people in Midwest. Those are largely possible because mostly rural states like Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas have senators who strongly advocate for those deals.
Appalachians don't have the type of land that benefits from those subsidies, and they don't have enough clout to get an equivalent type of economic benefit package. The TVA was the last major economic project the feds funded, and it was hugely popular because it did actually improve the lives of people there. Better federal representation at the Senate level wouldn't solve every problem, but it could definitely alleviate some of the pain.
>but, overall the political power of Appalachia does not at all seem sufficient to warrant extra attention
They also serve (willingly or not) as exemplars held up by Republicans, particularly in the populist ideology of Trump supporters, of those "real Americans" who have been betrayed by globalism and progressivism, and to further the narrative of an intractable cultural and political divide having formed between the rural right and urban left (and to contrast the cultural and ethnic purity of the former against the corrupting influence of multiculturalism and secularism among the latter.)
I am hopeful. We're in for a rough ride, but we will survive.
1. Rate of progress and market adoption of key technologies (ICE alternatives and renewables) is much higher than I would have anticipated even 10 years ago, let alone 15 years. I am hopeful that, even with only market forces, by the end of my lifetime developed economies will have more-or-less righted the ship on GHG production with a corresponding blueprint for the rest of the world.
2. I think we still have a long time before some of the worst-case feedback loops are triggered.
3. The realities of climate change are becoming difficult to ignore. This is, paradoxically, good news because it makes denial a less tenable barrier to action in the mid-term future.
All that said, I'm hedging my bets with real estate investments in regions that are most likely to benefit from mid-term impacts of warming.
The Fly America Act is pork for the Airline industry; they aren't intended to save the taxpayer money. Exactly the opposite.
I've even seen identical itineraries -- one under a US flag carrier and the other under a foreign flag -- with a mid-3-figure price difference. The airlines know what they are doing.
This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."
You probably need to explicitly ban publishing in publications with publishing fees, otherwise money from other sources will be used to pad out the difference.
No, that's letting the perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Outright bans make open access harder; editing+publishing with reasonable quality and archival levels of access guarantees can be cheap but it's never free.
Just limit it to a very reasonable $/page. Even upper bounding it at some obscene amount like $10/page would be a vast improvement and a completely trivial expense (you don't want to know what plane tickets to IJCAI cost this year...)
To clarify, I'm saying any research funded by the NSF should have this requirement imposed on all publications regardless of funding source. I.e., DON'T say "NSF $ can't be used for more than $X in publication fees", say "NSF $ can't be used AT ALL if you ever pay more than $X in publication fees".
> I am not certain how it'd be best to define a rule that predicates on an absence of a token but that syntax is terrible.
That would be pretty confusing. Instead, transitions can always be allowed to happen if the left hand side is satisfied and then the "don't transition if there's an Eve" semantics -- when necessary/desired -- can be made explicit by adding assertions to each nondeterministic transition.
For example, if you want 1 Adam and 1 Bob to transition to 1 AliceBob regardless of Eves then you write:
Alice + Bob -> AliceBob
but if you want to insist there are no Eves for this rule to hold, then you write:
assert(0Eve);
Alice + Bob -> AliceBob
in which case there must be 0 Evens in order for the Alicebob transition to happen.
These sorts of nondeterministic transitions with optional guards are expressible in dynamic logic; see see A3 + A8 in [0].
Eve + AliceBob → Alice + Bob + Eve
Alice + Bob → AliceBob
I understand with non-deterministic behaviour and 10 Alices, 10 Bobs and 10 Eves I can get in a certain state (Alice, Bob, Eve, AliceBobs) = (1, 1, 10, 9), but if we stick to the evaluation order defined by the language, then the two rules above satisfy the condition.
> but if we stick to the evaluation order defined by the language
Is this true? According to the linked page:
"The program will continually pick rules at random from the set of applicable rules, until there are no such rules."
In your encoding, we could end up transition from state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} to state {3Eve, 1AliceBob}. I agree that, in the next time step, we might transition back to {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob}. But there are two problems with this formulation:
1. We often (in many domains always) really care about the intermediate behaviors of the model, not just the final state. Which means that an observation of the trace:
is often not necessarily equivalent to simply staying in state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob}. This is especially true in physical systems (including chemical reactions).
2. We might end up back in the "right" state, but only for those two rules! In particular, we might not actually end up back in state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} after all if there are other transition rules. For example:
Eve + AliceBob → Alice + Bob + Eve
Alice + Bob → AliceBob
AliceBob + Eve → WEIRDNESS
With some probability (which the docs don't specify) we might now observe the following transition:
with no way to get back to {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} :-(
One additional problem: this encoding is not equivalent to the guarded version if transitions can have side-effects (e.g., if transitions consume a global implicit "fuel" or some other abstract representation of cost).
