I've often thought that municipal or even state governments should make available an interactive budget tool for constituents using this kind of visualization.
The purpose would be to show that everything the gov't does is connected through incoming taxes and outgoing expenditures - and there are very tough choices when it comes to the direction of taxes.
Not my area but complications in visualizing flows dramatically increase when the flows criss cross. Even small budgets start looking like chaotic weaving.
Which I think is why we still have buildings full of accountants and analysts to make sense of what is going on even though lots of people have access to the data.
I think it should be a mandatory exercise for any politician - and voter.
memexy 1381 days ago [-]
This is a good idea. Why do you suppose they don't do it?
LyndsySimon 1381 days ago [-]
Based on my own experience at local government meetings, I don’t think the knowledge is all in one place.
The meeting I’m thinking of was the city council advocating extending a tax that was due to expire. They had a presentation deck full of the things they planned to use the money for. That’s all well and good, but when I raised my hand and asked what proportion of incoming revenue for the public works department and the overall city budget the tax currently made up... crickets.
No one there knew exactly how much public works was allocated, because the director of public works. They had the overall city budget numbers handy, but no one there had a breakdown by source, and no one knew where to find that information.
memexy 1381 days ago [-]
I see. So they didn't even have the tools to gather the data in the first place it sounds like, let alone figure out how to put together a simulation for it.
rapsey 1381 days ago [-]
It's not so simple. Governments run huge deficits and debt is the primary means of funding. Taxes are more of an inflation guard.
Sambdala 1380 days ago [-]
They specified Municipal and/or State governments which cannot monetize a deficit.
aaanotherhnfolk 1380 days ago [-]
There's a much much more advanced version of this tool used for systems design in game design called Machinations. You can model really complex economies with it.
Now that I've left the games industry I still think about this tool often and how it might be useful for modeling load on a backend. Kind of waiting for an opportunity to try it out.
I see the value for game design, but also for lots of other system simulation (modelling load, as you said, among other things). I only tinker with game dev, but I can see myself using this tool on other projects too.
Thanks for sharing.
malnourish 1380 days ago [-]
It says it's in open beta. Checking the FAQ indicates that a desktop version used to exist. Which version did you use?
This is indeed an interesting tool, thanks for sharing.
aaanotherhnfolk 1380 days ago [-]
I had used it back when it was an Adobe Air program. Maybe the death of Flash contributed to the decision to build a web version instead; but I also think the Google Docs metaphor is a much better fit for the tool commercially. I hope they do well.
groby_b 1381 days ago [-]
It's a nice idea, but it's too simple for most systems simulations. It is, however, a splendid interface for building simulations. I'd hope the author hooks it up to a simulation framework at some point, exposing a much wider range of tools.
(Or builds their own framework, IDK. I just want to build more complex systems by drawing on a canvas :)
yanovskishai 1381 days ago [-]
Anyone got a chance to try the recently launched Hash.ai?
From their announcements it seemed like a tool aiming to more complex scenarios.
playeren 1381 days ago [-]
I've messed around with it a bit, and it's actually pretty great for agent based modelling & Monte Carlo simulations. It does have nice visualizations, but not so much geared toward representing complex relationships, but rather showing realtime/step-by-step representations of simple relationships. But, I have only played around with it for a bit - I may very well be grossly underselling it.
rotbart 1381 days ago [-]
It's a very simplistic tool, but it is great to help visualise and illustrate some systems. It helped me demonstrate the dynamic between technical complexity, delivery pressure and velocity (then add refactoring) https://medium.com/pageup-tech/the-system-of-technical-compl...
vfinn 1381 days ago [-]
I've been also thinking about systems like this, but wouldn't you need constraints and counting?
I mean let's say you modeled human behavior based on basic economic principles, then you'd have constrains/rules like:
if money < x, stay home (and you wouldn't meet new people and have an impact)
if money < y, walk instead of taking a bus (and you would get only so far, your reach is small)
if money < z, have no energy to do new things (your behavior would stay the same)
I love loopy for the crazy simplicity, it's good just to illustrate the moving pieces. But when you want to model something, the next tool I'd turn to is Insight Maker
So you can do a lot with it. You can even do sensitivity analysis with it! The devs are super responsive, I made a feature request and they implemented it in a day.
yoloswagins 1381 days ago [-]
Loopy is pretty neat. I played around with modeling glucose, but I couldn't get the arrows to model glucose uptake quite the way I wanted. https://bit.ly/2CjjaO0
foobar_ 1381 days ago [-]
Not sure how we can debug it. It seems the simulation is sensitive to
1. When you start each circle
2. Length of the wires
It would be neat if actual numbers were shown and rates could be adjusted via a hard reset.
I was messing with a procrastination model in
https://bit.ly/2ZPNXdo .. it seems if you are not feeling good and you procrastinate less, things improve over time. To test this, decrease the feel good and then decrease procrastination.
Never give up vs give up is such a classic dilemma. I do think the positive aspect of procrastination is exploration, satisfying curiosity but on the flip side exploration can also increase anxiety. If we did not explore then we would be using the same fishing net to catch the same fish. All progress depends on procrastination.
hosh 1381 days ago [-]
I was playing with it to try to model a simple regenerative system from permaculture design -- the "Three Sisters" plant guild: https://preview.tinyurl.com/ydxqmmwd
The model is really off since I can't specify units or connection weights. I was hoping the tool would be adequate enough to use as a kind of visualization or a kind of sandbox/lab to illustrate different regenerative processes. Might still work.
KingOfCoders 1381 days ago [-]
Love it, always liked iThink to model systems but the price is going through the ceiling in the last decade.
Rendered at 22:02:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The purpose would be to show that everything the gov't does is connected through incoming taxes and outgoing expenditures - and there are very tough choices when it comes to the direction of taxes.
Not my area but complications in visualizing flows dramatically increase when the flows criss cross. Even small budgets start looking like chaotic weaving.
Which I think is why we still have buildings full of accountants and analysts to make sense of what is going on even though lots of people have access to the data.
I think it should be a mandatory exercise for any politician - and voter.
The meeting I’m thinking of was the city council advocating extending a tax that was due to expire. They had a presentation deck full of the things they planned to use the money for. That’s all well and good, but when I raised my hand and asked what proportion of incoming revenue for the public works department and the overall city budget the tax currently made up... crickets.
No one there knew exactly how much public works was allocated, because the director of public works. They had the overall city budget numbers handy, but no one there had a breakdown by source, and no one knew where to find that information.
Now that I've left the games industry I still think about this tool often and how it might be useful for modeling load on a backend. Kind of waiting for an opportunity to try it out.
https://machinations.io/
I see the value for game design, but also for lots of other system simulation (modelling load, as you said, among other things). I only tinker with game dev, but I can see myself using this tool on other projects too.
Thanks for sharing.
This is indeed an interesting tool, thanks for sharing.
(Or builds their own framework, IDK. I just want to build more complex systems by drawing on a canvas :)
if money < x, stay home (and you wouldn't meet new people and have an impact)
if money < y, walk instead of taking a bus (and you would get only so far, your reach is small)
if money < z, have no energy to do new things (your behavior would stay the same)
if energy < c, die
edit: adjustments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498073
https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/
Someone ported https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3 to it: https://insightmaker.com/insight/2531/My-World3
So you can do a lot with it. You can even do sensitivity analysis with it! The devs are super responsive, I made a feature request and they implemented it in a day.
1. When you start each circle
2. Length of the wires
It would be neat if actual numbers were shown and rates could be adjusted via a hard reset.
I was messing with a procrastination model in https://bit.ly/2ZPNXdo .. it seems if you are not feeling good and you procrastinate less, things improve over time. To test this, decrease the feel good and then decrease procrastination.
The model is really off since I can't specify units or connection weights. I was hoping the tool would be adequate enough to use as a kind of visualization or a kind of sandbox/lab to illustrate different regenerative processes. Might still work.