My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician
At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.
When I was in college I wrote a computer program (yes, involving yellow text) that couldn't be photocopied because I put the "o"s in the right place to trigger the eurion-finding algorithm. People thought it was neat.
That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.
That strikes me as extremely counterproductive given the actually sensitive part of a BP is an (outside of the US) unsigned, semi-publicly-documented barcode.
Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government.
Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis.
This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.
The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.
Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.
On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.
Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.
So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.
It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.
Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
The 2A crowd has been really quiet this past year. Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public. I guess no one cares about government tyranny unless they're asked to respect someone's pronouns.
1) That's a mischaracterization of the FFL purchase process if I've ever heard one.
2) The weapons culture of the US is so obsolete that there are government officials parroting lines about it not being legal to carry a concealed weapon during a protest in Minnesota when it is, actually, very much legal. That is to say, it's not obsolete at all. Given the prior public stances of the Trump administration on firearms, this is incredibly telling, and all the more reason why you can't trust people like them.
Tried the same, doesn't do anything on my scanner. Interestingly, there are regions of banknotes my scanner refuses to scan. But had no time to investigate further.
Yes, absolutely. It's a pattern of five rings, well-documented although Omron appears to keep the exact details pretty tightly held.
They don't have to be exact circles, they just have to be some dots in about the right place. In the UK, the Bank of England issued notes with Elgar on them and the EURion constellation picked out in musical notes ;-)
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
You need both, because there really is no such thing as kill it in it's crib. The people that want this will continue to want it forever, and will continue to propose it forever. And eventually it works.
Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.
I seriously doubt it's the undercutting that's the problem here. When they release a new model they can't keep up with demand anyway, they max out production capacity on legitimate orders.
I think, if anything, the problem is when people buy a cheap clone and blame Prusa when it fails.
We still have open source hardware in Voron. High performance and almost infinitely moddable. Pair it with the open source Klipper firmware and open source slicer OrcaSlicer and you're there.
I had the Kobra S1 with the ACE Pro and I couldn't get rid of the thing fast enough, probably the worst electronic device I have ever owned in my entire life. In 8 months with it I completed one multi-colour print, and that was only with ~30 filament changes - to be fair to Anycubic, their support has been excellent and they kept shipping me more and more parts to replace, none of which would solve the fundamental issue of the ACE being generally unfit for the job. In the end if was just a fancy £300 filament dryer, and I decided that you know what, even my Ender 5 was giving me fewer issues than this whole thing. I got an H2D with 2 AMSes and yes, they cost a fortune but they just work. I finished a 9 colour print with 800 filament changes the other day and it just worked fine, not a single problem.
I will always admit that maybe I was just unlucky with my S1 but both the printer and the ACE was horrendous experiences and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone based on my problems with them.
None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.
Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).
Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.
But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.
Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)
If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers.
Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.
Last time I looked, the MK3->MK4 upgrade kit is basically the same price as a complete MK4 kit (very little can be reused. New electronics, motors, extruder)
The upgrade kits are definitely a good thing, going from MK3 to MK3S to MK3.5S was a worthwhile upgrade path and has prolonged the useful life of the printer. But they have their limits.
(And with 3D printing going more mainstream, there's a large segment of the market that has no interest in building printers from kits or stripping down printer to install upgrades - even though some of us find that quite enjoyable)
Not criticizing your decision, but I went the opposite way, deciding that I was ok spending a certain extra amount initially in order to encourage a non-Chinese manufacturer. But I understand not everyone has this luxury.
I bought the Core One kit to understand better how the machine works, which reduced the price delta somewhat.
It remains to be seen over the long term which way is actually better financially, as Prusas have historically had long lives, while there is only limited data on the Bambu Lab side yet.
So far, I am quite happy with my decision. But competition is on. I am excited about the upcoming INDX system for the Core One: if it delivers on its promise, it will be fantastic!
Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.
Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.
I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.
To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.
I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.
But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.
Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.
I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.
You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.
In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.
That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.
With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.
They must be able to control their printers from their phone.
The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.
"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "
Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".
> The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.
I have a 10 year old kit-built prusa I3 sitting next to me. Its brother is in the basement next to a kossel. It's been years since they have seen action, there is a litany of small bits of work they need.
I unboxed an A1 Mini and it's been like an epiphany. I've been printing almost nonstop. It's so much FUN. I just send from my phone and it just works. Everything has been nearly flawless until last night where half a batch of mini utility knife frames started to spaghetti, probably my fault for not fully cleaning the build plate in a bit.
Beats the hell out of glue stick or blue tape, fussing with slicer params, babysitting the first layers, etc etc. Fuck that, gimme the cheat.
There are plenty of us “old” type of users who made and designed our own printers and parts and spent hours on calibration, who no longer want to unnecessarily waste time doing so.
I might be a software engineering but I’m not going to waste time writing a bootloader for my next PC when it is a solved problem.
Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.
But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.
Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.
I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.
But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.
>>You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.
Why can't you be both. I loved my time with my Ender 5 Pro, I had it for 3 years and I will always freely admit that 90% of the fun was with the tinkering to make the machine work correctly. But you know, you get bored of it. I got an H2D just before christmas and it's incredible to have a machine that "just works". I can print things for myself and others and not worry whether it's going to work or not - it just will.
Same as I used to tinker with my cars when I was younger, now I want an appliance car - I want to get in, press start and drive across europe not worrying whether I'll have to fix it on the roadside or not. I would say it's just getting older, but I Don't think it is - I think everyone goes through stages of developing things they enjoy about their hobbies.
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...
Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...
The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
Recently they banned all new DJI drones and as far as I know they were basically the only option in the consumer space? And there's nothing domestically of course :/
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.
I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?
That could be used to justify banning drones in general, or banning all drones which aren't radio controlled (not that those are being used domestically). And "it can be used for war" is a bit silly in a country where you can buy guns at the grocery store. Not to mention that cars can be very effective weapons as well, and those haven't been banned yet.
The far more likely explanation is that they just don't want people filming them. They can't legally stop someone with a cellphone from filming them, but that hasn't stopped them from using up-to-lethal force against observers. On the other hand, you can't exactly beat a flying drone into submission, so the obvious move is to observe using drones instead.
Luckily for ICE the FAA already has the mechanics in place to criminalize flying drones in certain places, so with their magic "no drones anywhere we operate" NOTAM they can now punish observers with a year of jail time.
I agree with your point but they definitely want to kill you for being in a car and driving near them if they get scared so IDK if we can use cars as an example of something they don't mind
they also don't publish the NOTAMs ahead of time. So, they're effectively allowing ICE to retroactively make flying a drone illegal if an agent takes issue with the color of your cheesburger bun.
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.
EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.
My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.
All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.
The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.
They forgot.
They dont care.
They missed the registration deadline.
They're homeless, and no address.
They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.
They're in prison/jail.
The candidates suck, so you dont vote.
Can't afford to take time off work.
They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.
To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.
It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.
Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people.
Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes.
On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes.
Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?
> Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful?
The US tried to do this kind of "literacy test" before, remember? It's where the expression "grandfathered in" comes from: you had to do an impossible-to-pass test to gain the right to vote - except if your grandfather had the right to vote.
This was of course used to ban black people from voting without explicitly banning them for being black.
> Prisoners voting is madness
If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?
> People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes
This should obviously includes everyone working for government contractors. Which is obviously going to include everyone working for any kind of tech company with any government contract. Which, considering HN demographics, means you likely shouldn't e allowed to vote.
Heck, why not extend this even further? Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting. Everyone driving their car on government-maintained roads should be banned from voting!
Where did I mention a "literacy test"? I'm against such tests for exactly the same reasons I'm against prisoner voting.
> If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?
Prisons, by definition, are built on the principle that prisoners are under the full control of prison administrations. If everyone who will vote against could be imprisoned, there would be no problem allowing prisoners to vote: prisoners would still vote in the manner desired by the prison administration. That's how prisons work. And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.
> any kind of tech company with any government contract.
Obviously, this shouldn't apply to "any" government contracts. But if the majority of a contractor's income comes from government contracts, then yes, employees shouldn't vote.
> Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting.
I don't understand why you're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity. The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship through its ability to control taxes. And yet you're proposing measures that would proclaim such a dictatorship.
> And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.
Because what happens in the ballot box is private, it should be possible to let prisoners vote without interference as long as poll workers are allowed inside to do their job, but it's not just people currently in prison you have to worry about. There are places where convicted felons can lose their right to vote even after they've served their time and laws like that have already been used to suppress votes.
> The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship
Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with. By strictly limiting who is allowed to vote and taking that right away from millions of Americans you'd be destroying the country, not saving it.
> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.
Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.
An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.
The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).
Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.
The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.
If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
In recent years, people can vote early, vote by mail, or vote on election day. Hard to see how a "holiday" for voting makes anything easier for anyone, though I could maybe support it if you eliminated all the other options.
Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state.
I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
The President is the representative of the constituent State governments of America, not the people. That is why it is the States that vote. The only part of the Federal government that is intended to proportionally represent the people, and is in practice, is the House of Representatives in Congress.
This is a good and appropriate thing. States are approximately countries. Most laws only exist at the State level e.g. most common crimes don't exist in Federal law. The overreach of the Federal government claiming broad authority over people is an unfortunate but relatively recent (20th century) phenomenon. The US does seem to be returning to States having more autonomy, which I'd say is a good thing.
Another foundational element of our constitution was denying women the right to contribute to society, and not establishing any form of succession and other blatant and stupid failures.
Maybe the framers can go fuck themselves.
Yet the framers quite literally told you to change what they made, so they agree.
> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.
> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.
> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.
> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
I wouldn’t call the US system ‘effective’.
The US system is spiralling and it’s getting dystopian.
The hunger games analogy is fitting, with The Patriot Games coming right up.
>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.
>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.
Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)
>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
> Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting?
About half of all folks in US prisons are there for non-violent crimes, and we're talking about a relatively small percentage of voters anyway. Maybe ~3 million added to the ~244 million eligible voters
For a consequence to be effective, you have to lose something. If you go to prison, the big thing you lose is freedom of movement. But other things, such as who you live with, what you eat, and the ability to vote are other things.
> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.
> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.
> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).
So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).
So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.
>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.
>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.
More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).
A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?
Voting is always a compromise. No candidate ever perfectly represents one's own views on every issue. So IMO reasons for voting "for" a candidate or "against" another don't really matter.
Which is why it isn't really fair to say "this is what people voted for." Just because people voted for a candidate doesn't mean they agree with everything that candidate does.
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people
Define "property owning", presumably you mean land or a home (would an apartment be enough without any real rights to the land it sits on?). This definition would end up disenfranchising most young adults and probably a majority of the members of the military (the military is relatively young, and young enlisted folks are housed in dorms, and if they move frequently often don't bother buying homes because it just doesn't make financial sense).
>Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote
I don't follow. Please explain.
>Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Yeah, just like the good old days when we had literacy tests in this country to vote down south.
You're literally calling for a return of Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was bad because it targeted people in the basis of a characteristic that didn’t matter: skin color. That doesn’t mean that all restrictions on voting are bad. If the restriction is based on a characteristic that does matter, like intelligence, that’s completely different.
I am certain, because you use IQ as a metric for who you think should vote, that you are smart enough to puzzle out a steelman argument for my position.
Use that big brain of yours and try it, you might learn something about humanity (and humility)!
> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.
Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?
It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.
As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.
> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.
So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.
It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Holy crap, the dog whistles.
Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"
Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.
And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?
You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.
That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.
Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.
Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.
The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.
If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random.
If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.
The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.
The average person who doesn’t vote is a low-trust individual who is skeptical about government and institutions. Those people are Trumpier than average.
I thought I had a decent understanding of the 2024 election; people were unhappy with the status quo, therefore mistrusting the people and institutions they believed responsible for it. Then I saw this and its supporting data in your first link:
> Voters saw Harris as more ideologically extreme than Trump
According to Gallup, the record high support for increasing immigration was about 36%. Harris presided over an administration that saw a large increase in immigration. So believe didn’t find it credible when she said she wanted to control the border. And the position of wanting to increase immigration is more ideologically extreme than Trump’s position of wanting to shut down the border to illegal immigration just as a factual matter.
The latest Harvard-Harris poll, which isn’t good for Trump, still shows people want to deport all immigrants here illegally by a 52-48 margin: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/HHP... (page 24). I don’t think even Trump intends to actually do that. He would have to dramatically escalate what he’s doing now in order to achieve that outcome.
"you" lost? Did this guy you're replying to run for office? This whole my team vs your team bullshit is really one of the big problems in our country. No independent thought. Just stick with what news says. Always vote my team. Dumb. Here's a news bulletin for you, everybody lost.
I think people not being able to vote because their right to vote has been taken from them, or their vote was made pointless through gerrymandering, or because of other acts of voter suppression does change elections. The ability for it to change the outcome of a race is why voter suppression happens.
People who don't bother to vote for any reason changes elections. It also makes it very hard to make claims about what the majority of Americans want, since so many didn't make their opinions known
In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.
I do not think the current government in the US is fascist, but electing fascists would indeed be an exercise in democracy. The entire point of democracy is that it's the will of the people, whether right or wrong.
This is precisely why democracy was never seen as a tenable system for millennia. Thinkers of the past always assumed that the people would be incapable of picking the most skilled leaders, and would instead end up picking the most charismatic leaders. This is precisely what Plato's endlessly cited allegory of the Ship of State [1] is about.
Democracy is not "Whoever gets half + 1 vote is king"
Winning representatives are still supposed to represent the people who didn't vote for them in fact.
Democracy isn't about picking the "best" leader because that's not necessary. "The best" is almost never necessary, and you are much better off building a system that handles regularly not getting the best, because no system reliably picks the best, especially since "The best" is a criteria that cannot be rigorously defined.
To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.
> And when you're done that, can you build another one and sell it to me?
Yep, that's exactly what the fed undercover will say.
And sure, they can't catch everyone, but they don't have to. They just need to catch and visibly prosecute enough people to create a chilling effect. It's about making it harder, not making it impossible.
Whether the cost/benefit here justifies those gains is a different question.
Are you sure about that? All the normies use streaming services for music and movies. Techies around here tend to too. The normies don't know about and can't work torrents. They can't even work their own file system. The techies decry it as "inconvenient".
THis is a case of me not knowing and assuming, ha. I remember the peak days of the RepRap scene so I just assumed as that slowed down, the entire thing was dead
DIY used to just be “the way”. Today “the way” is Bambu. But the scene has also grown a lot, so I could see the market size of DIY staying the same or growing, even if its lost a lot of market share.
The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender, religion, activist content you consume, etc.
PoiZoN BBS Sysop chiming in. I ran the BBS on a free phone line I found in my childhood bedroom. I alerted the phone company and a tech spent a day trying to untangle it, but gave up at the end of his shift. He even stopped by to tell me it wouldn’t be fixed.
I didn’t know the phone number, so I bought a Caller ID box, hooked it to my home line, and phoned home. It wasn’t long before every BBS in town had a listing for it.
I had to wait til I was old enough to get a phone line in my own name before running a BBS. And also til I had a modem that would auto-answer, which was not a given back then!
But I confess my first question for a working but unassigned phone line would be: who gets the bill for long distance calls?
I had access to no-cost long distance calling through other administrative oversights, but they were a bit more effort to maintain! :)
Mine will turn my LG on, control the volume, do all of that, it just won't ever turn it off. The AppleTV will turn itself off, but the TV itself will revert back to its screen saver display complaining about No Input.
I've got a Apple TV -> Denon -> LG C3. CEC on the appleTV remote will turn all 3 on, and long pressing (power button on appletv remote) will turn all 3 off, not just screen saver with input.
My Samsung frame does that too, some TVs ignore the off CEC command. It might be a setting you can control on the tv. Last time I checked the frame did not have that option.
Yes, this is so scary! I know I'm just hopping in here with anecdotes but this happened to my friend's mother as well. She was seemingly getting dementia, her health got really bad, she was tired all the time, couldn't figure out what it was for a while. Eventually they figured out UTI, treated it, and all the mental stuff went away as well.
UTI almost always causes delirium in the elderly. Those with dementia go completely off the rails. When my grandma had UTI she was basically in a parallel dimension talking to her deceased parents and that kind of thing.
You shouldn't just automatically trust it, but it allows you to examine what its doing and make your own informed decision about whether or not you can trust it. If you discover your data is being collected in an open source project you can, at the least, make an informed decision and give consent to it.
And while everyone won't be able to understand what they're looking at, the community as a whole would benefit from people looking at it an announcing/discussing problematic things they see in the code base.
If an open source project is syphoning data, someone's going to see it and talk about it.
If a closed project is doing it, it's harder / more complicated for that act to be discovered.
But how can I trust “the community”? I don’t know them. I don’t know their capabilities, nor do I have any say in what they check: whether it’s complete, or accurate; whether the software has been compromised since the last time the community checked; or whether they did the checking they said at all.
and on Github too, or some other public build mechanism. The thing of it is, is that if it's open source, but the binaries are built privately, there's no guarantee that the binary actually came from the source that's been presented.
The same thing happened to me recently! I had the walk indicator lit, crossing in a cross walk, someone comes speeding up to me and stopped and yelled at me to "get my ass out of the road." Someone else drove up on the sidewalk and almost hit me -- they were on their phone when it happened. People are nuts.
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