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Comment Not that easy to put things in 3d prints (Score 1) 19

The batteries would have to be specially designed to fit in the 3d print. 3d printing by itself is both slower and more expensive than injection molding (unless it is a small run). Throw in custom batteries are you are probably making the items 10x more expensive for a moderate sized job. Economies of scale might work for something we are making in the tens of thousands.

Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)

SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.

Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.

The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.

Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.

Comment Need to legislate language (Score 1) 116

Make "Buy", "Own", and "Sell" reserved for actually owning something rather than licensing.

Require the use of words like "Rent", "License", and "Borrow" when we are talking about licensing things.

After all when you pay a landlord a monthly fee for the use of an apartment nobody says you bought it, own it, or it was sold.

Similarly, we need to require IP businesses to follow the same conventions.

Comment Re:On AI design and also irony (Score 1) 51

It has seemed to me, for a very long time, that modern AI systems would need to be integrated with standard RDBMS systems for reliable persistant storage of raw information, some sort of no-sql database (memcache or some variant) for persistant storage of associations, some sort of document database for blocks of textual information, a SPARQL system for searching semantically-marked information within the document database, and a more old-fashioned back-propogation NN to provide a store of understanding that the user can directly manipulate.

Probabalistic classifiers are all fine and good, but only for a subset of the tasks needed. The above structure is a very loose, wildly-speculative initial framework. It's almost certain that if you actually tried building an integrated multi-model system, that you'd end up making a lot of changes to this basic idea, but that you'd end up having to implement the same core concepts that are identified in it.

Comment Re:"Alan Turing, one of the more famous people" (Score 1) 22

From their careful selection of text, they WANTED it to mean something else so badly that they couldn't handle putting in the full text. It's a common blight on today's Internet, where people want other people's writings to mean something other than what was meant by the writer, so carefully select the words they read.

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 56

That's the entire point. Trying to solve other people's problems NEVER WORKS. You CANNOT control others into responsible behaviour, but you CAN place them in a position where they will choose to be responsible of their own accord. It is the ONLY way that works. It is the only way that has ever worked. If you look at computer programming, you will see this repeated over and over - well-meaning "hard rules" are ignored, STANDARDS are kept.

You must give them parameters and force them to find their own solution within those.

Comment Re:Good idea... but (Score 2) 79

You are either an AI bot, a paid propagandists, or an uneducated fool. Not paying for something is not the same as denying you the right to do it. The pay wall is not insurmountable. There are lots of cheap colleges that cost less than $5,000 a year.

Federal scholarships are not the only source of scholarships. States routinely offer them (and there are states that hate the liberals and states that hate the conservatives). In addition there are LOTS of private charities that already offer scholarships.

Also, the schools already deny the people the right to an education. You try getting into college if they deem you below their standards.

Finally, you are a damn fool for thinking we should give them to everyone. Why this would be a bad idea:

1)Such an attempt would not only be doomed to failure by the Republicans, it is the kind of dumb ass thing they use as propaganda making all liberals look foolish.
2) It would be too expensive. There is only so much money to go around.
3) Some people fail out of college already, if all went then it would be a massive waste of money.
4) College is not only used to educate the population, but also to grade them. We need ways to tell between those that are good people but not highly qualified and those that are highly qualified. While we could use their GPA, it is much easier to just ask "is she a college graduate?"

I believe education is a right for all, but we also have the right to choose who we help with our limited assets. If you can't convince another to charitably pay for it, you should have to earn the $5000 per year to do it yourself.

But this only works if it is relatively easy for both the 10% smartest and the 10% who came from literally nothing but still did well in high school can get educated without crippling themselves financially.

Comment Good idea... but (Score 2, Informative) 79

We really should abandon the Student Loan idea.
1) It is not reasonable to expect people that by definition have NOT had a college education to make good decisions about student loans. Some of their parents may have collage degrees, but not all.

2) They are long term loans that cannot be refinanced. If interest rates rise, the borrowers make out like a bandit. But if they fall, they get screwed.

3) Scholarships are better ideas.

Why scholarships are better:

You can quite easily pick the person who really needs it and/OR the person that most benefits from it.

You can get much stricter on which education institutions qualify for them. This will end a bunch of scams, such as the schools that if graduate from get a $60,000 per year job but cost $900,000 to go to.

You can put in grade requirements for continuing them for next year.

Scholarships fight educational inflation, while loans encourage it. If schools know the main government scholarships only pay Y on average, they will have immense pressure to keep their costs below Y. The government can easily set the values of the scholarships to discourage inflation because they do not want to pay more.

But banks will always be willing to increase the amount they loan to the students. To them, the cost of education is a GOOD thing because larger loans means larger profits.

Comment Re:Listen we are a nation of 12-year-old so it's (Score 1) 56

I don't care how much of an idiot you are, you're simply too stupid to respond to further. I don't want things to be as they were in my childhood. Back then, things were a mess. BECAUSE government tried either to micromanage everything or manage nothing at all. The idea of a third way, where governing is about just that, placing control mechanisms in place but not do the management, is obviously far beyond your pea-brain.

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 56

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

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