I think this is the main content of the law. (Everything below is quoted.)
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Section 3. Right to compute
Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
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Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by artificial intelligence system -- shutdown.
(1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall ensure the capability to disable the artificial intelligence system's control over the infrastructure and revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.
(2) When enacting a full shutdown, the deployer shall consider, as appropriate, disruptions to critical infrastructure that may result from a shutdown.
(3) Deployers shall implement, annually review, and test a risk management policy that includes a fallback mechanism and a redundancy and mitigation plan to ensure the deployer can continue operations and maintain control of the critical infrastructure facility without the use of the artificial intelligence system.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately...
This seems weirdly backwards. The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own. The bill does nothing to address the actual rights of citizens, it just limits some ways government can't further restrict the citizens' right. The government should be protecting the citizens' digital rights from anyone trying to clamp them down.
Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.
Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.
It’s kinda good the planet gets to run both experiments, and more.
The EU approach seems to want to insert government in to contracts between private individual and those they do business with, and the US approach seems to want to maybe allow too much power to accumulate in those who wield the mercantile powers.
The optimal approach probably lies in the tension between multiple loci.
It's one experiment because both systems are competing at the same time for global resources both in cooperation and competition with each other and other actors. Additional both systems exist in such widely different contexts that any comparison would be inaccurate because other factors such as geographic and historical have a large impact on any measured results.
The US approach is more than that, for instance if every employee in a business pushes for a contract that says workers will negotiate as a block and pay new union dues, and the contract says new hires will be bound by that too, that's illegal in many states. Not just the normal "right-to-work" restrictions, the contract isn't valid even if unanimously agreed on by every current employee (union security agreements). But for shareholders they all set it up like that, with votes weighted by dollars. A new shareholder can't buy someone's shares and government says it's illegal for him to be bound by the voting structure.
And secondary strikes are also illegal in the US under Taft-Hartley.
The optimal approach appears domain specific and granular, too.
As for domain specificity:
I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
I don't know any European technology companies that hold a candle to the sheer breadth and depth of capabilities brought into the world by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Yes, Mistral, Nokia, OVH, and SAP exist, but compared to the alternarives, they exist in the way the American healthcare system exists compared to its alternatives.
As for granularity:
Perhaps we want American style governance for building the tech, but then European style governance for running it?
The American model of governance was created for a world with very distant nation-state threats but a large number of colonial threats, which is why it's centered around "every man for themselves" (in spite of FDR's best efforts). On the contrary, European governance was basically developed during the Revolutionary Wave, which was sweeping all across Europe, that monarchies found that the only way to appease the people was to give into their reforms - and often rapidly because of the domino effects of revolutions. In other words, American governance was built from the ground up, while European governance had to be adjusted within the existing environment and monarchical government frameworks.
In fact, European governments weren't even well-defined in their current state up until the end of WW2, in spite of how much Europeans like to take potshots against USA for being a "young" nation.
This does make the American form great for working with uncharted territory (how to handle new tech, how to exploit the earth in new ways, etc.) while the European form is more reactionary (how do we keep the people appeased, how do we provide a better standard of living, how do we alleviate hardship).
Perhaps the ideal mix of the two, between the frontier-style governance and European-style reactionism, like the Swiss model.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Selfishly I think my American healthcare is better than anything I ever had in the UK. I can see a doctor within 2 weeks even a specialist, I can actually get a sleep study, my doctor will actually listen to me rather than tell me I'm just getting old, go home and take an ibuprofen.
In terms of health outcomes, the UK generally has higher life expectancy and lower maternal mortality rates than the US - but that said, even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts.
The real focus and point of contention should be that the US healthcare system is exponentially more expensive per capita than any European model, but is worse for almost all health outcomes including the major litmus tests of life expectancy and infant mortality. In some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Americans average spend on inpatient and outpatient care was $8,353 per person vs $3,636 in peer countries - but this higher spending on providers is driven by higher prices rather than higher utilization of care. Pretty much all other insights in comparing the two systems can be extrapolated from that fact alone imo.
This is probably incredibly naive so apologies if so - are things like differing obesity or other health problem causing conditions accounted for when looking at overall outcomes of the system?
The higher cost makes perfect sense to me but calculating an apples
to apples comparison of health outcomes between potentially very different populations seems potentially very difficult? Again sorry it's probably a solved problem but figured I'd ask :)
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.
There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
That's because mortality rates are only weakly correlated with healthcare quality. The US has much higher death rates in some young demographics, which skews the average, but those people didn't die due to lack of medical care.
You can have exceptional healthcare quality and relatively low life expectancy in the same population.
The Brown study I cited above concludes differently, and is strictly a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age.
Within that 50-85 cohort, among 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.
This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).
A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:
1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.
2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.
3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.
At least from what I can see, COVID and the changes in attitudes towards medical professionals are driving a lot of burnout and leaving the profession; and since then economic pressures are squeezing private practices out of existence and a lot of specialists end up working for private equity now.
I think you should also balance your take by asking people who recently lost their job what they think about their healthcare. I’m sure you’re aware of that, and my point is rhetorical, but that’s the trade off here, it isn’t only about what it looks like when things go right, you should also consider what happens when things go wrong. It’s also enlightening to see what happens many times when people “did everything right” and still got shafted by the US system. See: Sicko for instance https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEQ7acb0IE
I suspect the time it takes to see a specialist in the UK depends on how urgently the issue needs to be addressed. The real advantage you have is that you can be seen by a specialist within two weeks even for non-urgent stuff. That’s not to dismiss your need though. The definition of medical urgency and comfort don’t align well.
That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)
If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it out' these days.
That's largely due to austerity effects and not the inherent model of UK healthcare. That's what happens when political appointees and ministers bully civil servants and doctors that the best minds all leave, while the government significantly cuts funding to the NHS while forcing it to move to AWS.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Probably depends a lot on where you are in Europe. Some countries have long waiting lists for surgeries (life saving ones) and access to doctors is very limited (too few, months to get an appointment) so it sucks as well if you are in such a situation
Ok, so about 0.0134%, Parent comment’s point is that -the average European- absolutely does not want the US healthcare system in Europe. Simply due to our shared believe healthcare is a basic right and should be universally available to everyone.
Those who have the financial means to travel to the USA for medical treatment do so largely due to running out of conventional options at home, experimental treatments or specific doctors who are regarded as the best in their particular field.
Most of the US outbound medical travel is due to treatment at home being too expensive and risking pushing entire families to bankruptcy.
The fact that 100k europeans fly to the US for medical treatment is factual, but does not equal them wanting the US healthcare system in Europe.
Idk .. I injured my knee playing soccer (tore a bunch of ligaments) a few months ago. Wasn't life threatening. Still, got care after waiting for about an hour, xray and all. On a Saturday. In Sweden, single payer insurance. I paid only about $20 out of pocket.
This is mostly to obtain cheaper care. In general America does seem to have some of the best care in terms of quality. It’s just also some of the least affordable.
US is not the only destination for Europeans, they also go to Thailand and wherever. Few Americans go to Europe. It's not affordable, but when money is not the issue you go to the US.
i'm one of the Americans. went to South america for a dental procedure that was 12k in the US, 2.5k there. very modern facilities, they had some better tech than my american dentist. if you can speak a bit of spanish, i highly recommend looking into it for expensive dental stuff.
Most people prefer healthcare they afford over healthcare they can’t. (Most, not all. There are a surprisingly large chunk of Americans who seem to vote
Against their best interests in a lot of areas.)
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you would be more fair by replacing these companies with VCs, because they’re the ones lifting real weight here.
That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people. At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org. A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Of course this comes with a social cost, offset as this allows people who are discontent with their arrangements to forge a new path
States like California have high job lock, so most innovation comes from side-projects as people checkout from work.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
How are credit ratings maintained again?
> At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org.
I have to what!? News to me.
> A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Maybe, but the EU is more militant in enforcing that right. Some US states are working on "right to be forgotten" laws, but they've got a lot of catching up to do, and I don't think there's a federal law in the works yet.
I don't agree with that at all. If anyone else tries to infringe your rights it's either voluntary i.e. you've consented to this, or it's involuntary in which case you can sue them or the state will prosecute them on your behalf.
What you’re missing is that the set of rights European countries recognize and the set of rights that the American government recognizes are not the same set.
In Europe they recognize a right to be forgotten that simply does not exist in the US. Europe recognizes personal data rights that the US does not. These data rights impose requirements on the way companies manage your data and specifically do not allow, e.g., Facebook to get you to consent that your rights do not apply. The European government protects imposes citizens’ rights on businesses in several ways that the US government does not.
On the other hand, US free speech rights are generally stronger. And of course no one else except US citizens have an inalienable right to sleep on a bed made of loaded handguns.
Obviously the rights that the state grants are different in the US than Europe, but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries. To the extent you can have famous cases where people sue large coffee franchises for selling coffee that's too hot.
So the statement that "the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals" is far from reality, and I felt it necessary to ground this conversation back in reality.
> but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries
Kind of. In the US there is no protection of free speech when posting in Twitter or Facebook, for example. There isn’t even a consent issue here. There’s no need for you to consent that Facebook can sensor your speech because you have no right to free speech in that context at all.
This is exactly what the poster was presumably referring to. Many rights in the us are in fact only protected from infringement by the government.
What I said is a very general statement that broadly applies to all civilised countries, reiterated because the parent comment was very incorrect suggesting that rights are mainly protecting citizens from their state in the US. It's simply not true.
It is oddly funny that people in my town are ferociously protesting the police force's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras when everyone already carries total surveillance devices (smartphones) on their person at all times.
You can (generally) tell when a person around you is filming, and you generally don’t have to worry about tons of random individuals bringing together footage of you for tracking and surveillance.
Most of the cameras are attached to either Apple or Android devices. The companies that control these ecosystems could use them for mass surveillance. The government could 'politely' ask these companies to do that for them. Or they could just directly order the phones.
Sort of except for the fatal flaw that you are talking about battery powered devices that mostly live in peoples' pockets. The reason Flock cameras and Ring doorbells both serve well for mass video surveillance is consistent predictable location and power.
Maybe, yes. On the other hand, there's lots and lots of people running around with these things, so you get pretty good statistical coverage, especially in cities.
Unless we are trying to do the "conspiracy theory" route: there is not "thinking" here. You can at least sniff traffic or whatever and tell if your phone is ringing back to google even when you tell it not to.
And the discussion above is about a different kind of surveillance. Notifying Google (or state) that I'm sitting in front of my PC is one thing. Sending photos of videos of me jerking off is different.
In Germany it's (very roughly speaking) illegal to film people in public. (Importantly, not the same as filming a thing or event and having people incidentally in the frame)
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.
That's the notion of "rights" we have in the US though. It's the same with the Bill of Rights. It's true some states do go further and bestow more affirmative rights. But it's deeply ingrained in US political thought that "right to do X" means "government won't stop you from doing X", not "government will stop anyone who tries to stop you from doing X".
> The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own.
But those come from laws, like DMCA 1201, that prohibit people from bypassing those restrictions. The problem being that the DMCA is a federal law and Montana can't fix that one, but at least they couldn't do state one?
Although this language seems particularly inelegant:
> computational resources for lawful purposes
So they can't make a law against it unless they make a law against it?
The proprietary restrictions are an extension of government, because the government grants private actors protection of their IP and enforces that IP. The only issue is that because we take IP protections for granted, we see it as an issue of the private actor rather than the state which has increasingly legislated against people's ability to execute code on computers they themselves own. But it should be simple. The government grants a monopoly in the form of IP to certain private actors - when that monopoly proves to be against the interests of the citizens, and I believe it is, then the government should no londer enforce that monopoly.
This seems to have the positive effect that patching applications on your own device (a la Revanced patching Spotify) appears blessed, since government prosecution would need to demonstrate a public interest case, if I'm reading this correctly.
No, the problem is the extent to which private parties can use the power of law to legally restrict your usage of property you own. And that's the reason it's a right.
If you don't like the restrictions a product has you can simply not purchase the product, no "right" has been infringed.
The issue is societal lockin - aka network effects. People can't afford to "not buy one" because then they are "the one without".
Banking apps, delivery apps, public transport apps, utilities apps, insurance - so many services have been captured by the big two phone oligopoly that modern life revolves around your phone. The assumption is that you will have one.
Sure, you could decide not to, but you are instantly a societal pariah as every business finds it s so much harder to deal with you - and you don't have enough time in the day to deal with the secondary processes these businesses employ, for every aspect of your life.
Maybe it's country specific - here in Canada I don't feel like I need a smart phone for anything crucial. There is a trend where people including zoomers such as myself switch to dumb phones for a "digital detox". So it seems perfectly feasible to do so.
I was called a luddite for not wanting to follow the "official" schoool Whatsapp group. Online banking is practicably unusable without the bank's own 2FA app.
Many things can still be done in a web browser, but the rest of society is going the smartphone route and it's increasingly difficult to avoid it.
Any non-digital options are aimed at elderly and handicapped individuals; not people who don't want smartphones.
Some people can do it. I'd also ditch my smartphone if I was living in the woods, or had a personal assistant handling my daily needs, or lived in an Amish community etc.
But I don't see the vast majority of people to be able to ditch their smartphone, that's just not a reasonable proposition.
A few people can live with just phone calls, but a sizeable majority use some additional apps for texting. Dumb phones won't work here.
1. Many people use a virtual text number, like google voice
2. Maybe even more folks use one or more app based texting services. I bet many users here have several on their phone:
Signal
What's app
telegram
There are probably 50 texting type apps in this category
These are dangerous attack vectors for people trying to remotely control your phone, but also important to talk to your friends.
I think we need a solution for these types of apps for a popular usable solution. I don't know how to solve the safety issue when running these apps, and I can't just "forward" text messages to my dumb phone.
But 30 years ago there were also no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
Nothing has changed, there are no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
There are many that do require SMS or a phone number of some sort at this point.
We are mostly saved by the part of the 70+ crowd who is completely computer illiterate and own significant investment resources. But that will only last 10-20 more years.
How does (great) past suffering justify (mild) modern suffering?
And my forefathers probably fought in wars against your forefathers. The world would have probably been better off, if they all had just stayed home. Nothing glorious about that.
Citizens don't need to be aligned with eachother, but they should ensure that the government is aligned with the citizenry as a whole. Everyone should have the freedom to polarize in different directions and hold different opinions as each individual sees fit. The government is only supposed to implement the laws that most people want in common, not enforce alignment of opinion in the populace (that's an authoritarian regime). If people are allowed to freely misalign, then they'll be misaligned in different directions, and their conflicting wishes will cancel eachother out like random noise when they vote, leaving only what most people want in common to be written into law.
As a simple example, Finland's national government just passed a smartphone ban in schools. That's fine by the criteria you brought up, but I think it's utterly moronic.
Not because I disagree with the Finnish people, or their elected representatives on the issue itself: that's for them to decide. I disagree that this should be handled at the national level at all!
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).
In this case, I lack the imagination to see the reason why this issue couldn't have been handled at eg the city level, so that the good people of Oulo get the policy they want, and the good people of Helsinki get the policy they want.
Or even lower: there's no reason to even go as high as the city level, each school individually can decide what they want.
But just to give you the limits of subsidiarity here: I can see why you'd want to have a unified policy per school instead of per teacher or per class: the logistics are easier, and the individual teacher doesn't have to use their own judgement and authority on this. (Of course, individual schools should be free to let the teachers decide, if that's the policy they want.)
You can surely create your own example that cover more familiar territory, eg legal drinking ages in the US (which are ostensibly a matter for the states, but have been hijacked by the central government.)
I'm not sure if national legislation is the correct place for the ban either, but consistency is sometimes better than flexibility. The Finnish school system has always (well, since the 70s when the current system was designed) been big on equity and everybody following the same basic rules (though at the same time giving individual teachers quite a lot of freedom to organize their teaching – there are almost no standardized tests, for example).
Students would understandably think it's unjust if their school had a stricter phone policy than their friends in the next school over. On the other hand, the new legislation only forbits phone use during classes, and gives individual schools the authority to decide if they want to restrict it during recesses too, so there will in any case be policy differences between schools. shrug
Well, that just goes to show that national level for bigger countries is even more overblown than for Finland.
You can generate your own examples, if that convinces you more. Eg there's no reason to forcible coordinate national minimum wages in the US, when that can be handled at city level. (Or at most at state level.)
It could be because the general population is genuinely moronic in this matter, and actually do want to implement smartphone bans for kids at the national level, or it could be because their government is not a perfect democratic system so the bill has motives unrelated to its stated purpose that are designed to be convenient for the government at the people's expense.
Even if we assume all democracies operate the way they're supposed to all of the time, some moronic policies will still be favored over wiser alternatives when most of the population hold the same moronic opinions. That is just democracy working as intended.
One important difference between an authoritarian society and a democratic one is that the democratic one makes everyone feel like they're making very important decisions for themselves at the societal level. People with new ideas convince everyone else to voluntarily implement their ideas, rather than force everyone else to implement their ideas. Societal change in a democracy does not happen until the majority has internalized the ideas associated with those changes and want them to happen. And I think this is really nice because life is miserable if all you do is go through the motions. Being able to control your own destiny is a good feeling and source of motivation.
There are many pillars of democracy that must be supported by the majority of the population at all times, otherwise the democratic system will degrade or even collapse. But this is simply the people getting the government they deserve. The democratic system does not deny the populace the choice of replacing it with an authoritarian regime by voting that way. If the people regret it later, they will have to relearn what they forgot and rebuild what was lost through hardship.
Circling back to private ownership of computational resources: this is one of the many necessary conditions for online freedom of speech, which recently became a necessary condition for democracy to continue to exist. The recent surge of authoritarianism around the world is largely due to the centralized moderation and ranking mechanisms used on social media platforms, which encourage the formation of large echo chambers. If we want to reverse this surge, we must move filtering and ranking mechanisms to the client-side (so that each user can decide what they want to see without affecting what others can see), and then popularize decentralized protocols for social media. And that, coincidentally, would also address the root cause behind the smartphone ban you mentioned. These things are impossible to do if individuals can't own compute. Writing the right to own compute into law slightly decreases the likelihood of a dystopian future where every consumer device is a SaaS terminal that can't run anything on its own. And in that future, all democracies around the world would collapse or be severely degraded.
Well if you want to really get pedantic about it, it comes from the government enforcing those restrictions, like the DMCA, patent, or copyright, otherwise people would just do it willy-nilly for the most part.
"lawful" seems like an enormous loophole that makes this seem vacuous. If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted. How would the government restrict you from doing something lawful in the first place? A bill of attainder? That's already illegal.
It gives a legal foothold to those who would challenge later laws, akin to the bill of rights. Believe it or not, courts will honor that kind of thing, and many legislators act in good faith (at least at the state level).
The difference is that while they can restrict the what, they can't restrict the how. Yeah they could make training LLMs illegal, but they can't for example put a quota on how much training you can do. Passing a law to ban something completely is a lot harder than passing a law that puts a "minor restriction" in place.
Ultimately any law can be repealed, so the loophole of changing the law in the future always exists. The point is that any future change to the law will take time and effort, so people can be confident in the near term that they won't be subject to the whims of a regulator or judge making decisions in a legal grayzone which may come down to which side of the bed they woke up on.
Yes, rights are real in the way ideas are real, for what that’s worth. They’re not guarantees, as many tend to view them.
They only become tangibly real when those in power allow it. More of a temporary gift, quickly taken away when those in power are supplanted by a tyrant.
The interesting angle to me is that the same ideas seem to be sort of “inevitably re-emergent”. They return, even after generations of tyranny, where no one alive in society has been handed these ideas we call rights.
So it’s more of a temporary gift that we should appreciate while we have it, which is forever at risk of being taken away, but which will always re-emerge as long as there are conscious beings capable of suffering.
That's as strong a rule as you can put in a normal law. If you want it to restrict what laws the government can pass, you need to put it in the constitution.
I feel like this was a mistake: “must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety”
So, public health or safety, in the hands of a tyrant how broad can that get? I imagine that by enshrining this in law, Montana has accidentally given a future leader the ability to confiscate all computing technology.
In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
Almost every part of government is in isolation a single point of failure to someone with a tyrannical streak, it's why most democracies end up with multiple houses/bodies and courts - supposed to act as checks and balances.
So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
> In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
But that is not how tyrants actually operate, at least most of the time.
The most tyrannical country possible would be a "free democratic union of independent people's republics". Democracy has been so successful that most tyrannies operate under its veneer. This is in stark contrast to how monarchies have operated historically.
The trick isn't to ignore laws, but to make them so broad, meaningless and impossible to follow that you have to commit crimes to survive. You can then be selective in which of these crimes you choose to prosecute.
You don't charge the human rights activist for the human rights activism. You charge them with engaging in illegal speculation for the food they bought on the black market, even though that was the only way to avoid starvation, and everybody else did it too. In the worst case scenario, you charge them with "endangering national peace", "spreading misinformation" or "delivering correspondence without possessing a government license to do so" (for giving out pamflets).
"must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest" is exactly the shenanigans tyrants love. You can get away with absolutely anything with a law like that.
How has that been working in the US where both the legislation branch and judicial branch have willingly given their authority to the executive branch?
> So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
If an unchecked tyrant exists, do they really need the paper-thin facade provided by manhandling the English language to pretend that some law supports their actions?
This is just making a slippery slope fallacy by circuitous means.
The point of all laws and thus the courts is that each new action provides an opportunity to debate and decide on whether an action is lawful, and thus determine whether it should proceed.
You are arguing that all such decisions would always be decided in favor of the tyrant because they're a tyrant ala a slippery slope: the law exists, all things will be declared lawful, ergo all things are allowed with no further challenge.
This can certainly be true, but it doesn't naturally follow.
Show me a tyrant that doesn’t have rules and laws. Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, Sadam Hussein’s Iraq, and Russia still have law creating and law enforcing bodies. A good chunk of those countries even hold elections.
Hell, even in medieval England the king didn’t have absolute authority and had to worry about political alliances abcs political support of the other nobles.
You should go read the dictator’s handbook. Think about it from the perspective is the tyrant - there’s one of you. How do you establish control over groups of other people? Just ordering people around doesn’t work. You need to create a power base. You can go broad and give riches back to the people or narrow and give riches to people who have power and influence already. Dictator’s generally go the latter route because you’re not at the whim of changes in political mood and individual problems can be managed easily. But you still need to tap into symbolism and other institutions to lend yourself legitimacy to avoid uprisings.
in that case they can just vote in whatever law they want or they can hold starving kids hostage and forbid anybody from helping - I don't think this law in particular will make any of it worse.
Yea a Supreme Court ruling 110 years after a law passed only for them to reverse course 2 years later. Surely that’s based on the constitution and nothing else.
It seems strange (or maybe you are just young) that you think this. But both Democratic and Republican controlled Congresses have fought against excesses of their own President. The same is true for the Supreme Court in the past ruling against an administration of its own party.
There was an entire coalition of “Blue Dog Democrats” that came from red states as recently as 30 years ago.
Or did you really forget that even in Trumps first term that Republicans like McCain voted against Trump snd 10 voted to impeach him?
The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship. The behavior of republicans decades ago is irrelevant, and it's obvious that MAGA has learned lessons from Tumps first term.
Perhaps it's you who haven't been paying attention? I find older people have a lot of unfounded faith in these failing institutions, but if you try to keep up you'll see this isn't the same America you grew up in.
And 2021 was when the republicans decided to protect Trump after his half-assed failed coup attempt. He should have been locked up but the republicans decided to protect him.
How many Republicans were purged from party leadership after they didn’t vote to shelter Trump from the consequences of attempted election theft? His first term you had Romney, McCain, Cheney, etc. in Congress and a lot of people in his administration like John Kelly who had various lines they wouldn’t cross.
Those people have all been purged. Any instinct you have for what Republicans will do which is older than 2021 is now actively misleading your judgement.
I get (and partly agree with) the point you’re trying to make, but do consider that the fact that Trump was ever elected at all, let alone twice, is really not helping your argument.
> The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship.
remember the "sanctuary city" thing? That kind of blind obeisance to the tribe and defiance to the federal government smells awfully like what MAGA does today.But let me guess: it's okay when your tribe does it?
So this is a fascinating example of left vs right thinking.
To those on the left, why you do things matter. Breaking a law that is widely regarded as unjust is considered to be a moral action as long as it helps people.
The difference is being able to understand that "defying the federal government" is neither an absolute moral good nor is it an evil. Why you're doing it is the more important reason.
> Breaking a law that is widely regarded as unjust
That's not the "why" for so-called "sanctuary city" practices. The answer is more pragmatic: local law enforcement needs all local residents to cooperate with them to be able to do their jobs.
If undocumented people are afraid to report crimes or be a witness, that hinders investigations and prosecutions of more serious crimes.
That is not left or right issue. Why you do things matters to everyone.
What you're talking about, which the left can certainly be said to have been guilty of, is selective enforcement, where people who purport the right motivations (read: politics) are fine to do things that others are not.
Well, no. It's the right, for example, that constantly saw the "spectre of pedophiles" everywhere, including a random pizzerias basement, but when it comes to Epstein Files and his friends, many of who are in office, they suddenly don't care. Leftists, are, at least as far as i can tell, very consistent in not liking child molesters.
There's a huge amount of rightists against ALL abortion, until they suddenly need one. I don't know of any leftists that are ever like "I think abortions should be legal except for that one person who I don't like".
To follow your format, apparently the entire left is okay with releasing convicted sexual predators back into society, when legally they should have been deported.
Now, I don't think the left is actually in favor of that, but their policies cause this to happen.
There's plenty of folks on the right who want to see the "Epstein Files" released. There's also plenty of folks on the right who are against abortions and still end up having the kid even though it will cause difficulties for them. If you're unaware of this, you may want to broaden how you're exposed to opposing views a little more.
And there are plenty on the right who call themselves “evangelical Christians” but constantly defend a theee time married adulterer who pays off prostitutes and brags about grabbing women against their wills…
The President of the uS literally admitted to being a sexual predator on tape.
> but when it comes to Epstein Files and his friends, many of who are in office, they suddenly don't care. Leftists, are, at least as far as i can tell, very consistent in not liking child molesters.
This is totally ahistorical. This was not too long ago a "far right conspiracy" as the right was genuinely concerned about it, and it's only that Trump is in the firing line for Epstein that the left has jumped on it as a cause. Which is the opposite of a principled stance.
No city is “defying federal laws” by not cooperating with federal law enforcement to enforce federal laws. In fact, the Supremr Court has specifically said that enforcing immigration is the responsibility of the federal government.
This doesn't fully capture it, because the right is clearly fine with lawlessness.
The distinction is the left cares about why, as you said, while the right cares about who. If the Right People are breaking the law (Trump, ICE, the youth pastor), it's okay.
If every accusation is an admission, GP admits it plainly: "it's okay when your tribe does it?"
I think another way to say this is that some people see laws as one layer in a stack of principles of varying degrees of generality, and believe that it makes sense to oppose a policy at more specific layer if it conflicts with a more basic principle at a deeper layer. Others see laws as just arbitrary dictates: you follow the law or you don't, and that's it, the law doesn't represent or instantiate any principles or ideals, it just is what it is.
I'm not sure the distinction here maps cleanly onto a left/right political axis though. People on the right also think that stuff like refusing to serve gay people or (at least in the past) standing in a schoolhouse door to block racial integration constitutes a form of legitimate resistance or protest against unjust laws. And there are certainly those on the right who believe that certain acts are okay (or more okay) when done by certain people (e.g., the homeless, oppressed racial/ethnic groups).
It does seem to just come down to different views of what principles are in that stack and what the priority ranking is. An obvious case is that many on the right would give certain tenets a central, foundational status on religious grounds, whereas it's increasingly the case on the left that religion isn't considered a legitimate basis for public policy. And in fact, the divide is even deeper, since many on the left consider that secular perspective itself central and foundational --- one side thinks certain things should be illegal because religion says so, while the other side considers it wrong for the law to even take account of what religion says.
In light of this what I find frustrating is that so many of those on the left (especially those holding political office) are unwilling to turn against those institutions themselves on the same grounds, namely that the institutions are subverting and impeding more basic ideals of freedom and justice. Democratic politicians shouldn't be arguing about this or that Supreme Court decision or what this or that Senator did or didn't do; they should be arguing that the Supreme Court and the US Senate are undemocratic institutions and should be swept away entirely, along with a good bit of other governmental cruft, in the furtherance of the root goals of democracy and equality.
The government partnering with businesses to restrict speech is actually a really bad thing. Thankfully we've pulled back from that now. Trump being corrupt and a garbage human doesn't negate that fact.
I think it would be interesting to hear your take on this hypothetical situation: I have been cursed by the Devil himself, so that whenever I say "xyzzy" and then the name of a person and then "plugh", that person drops dead.
The law does speak on this though, already. If you run a gang, and you say out loud "Charlie is such a pain" and every time you say that phrase, the person you named is killed, you are also held liable for those killings.
Yep, lots of ways that we restrict speech. Criminal speech is not protected. Business speech is also not protected. Telling Eastasia about our new spy plane is also not protected.
Saying stupid, abhorrent, wrong, etc things online is, thankfully, protected. If you don't think that it should be, just imagine the person you dislike politically the most being the one who decides what should be allowed and what shouldn't.
Earlier you stated - and I quote - "the government partnering with businesses to restrict speech is actually a really bad thing" but now you state it's okay to restrict certain classes of speech. Is it bad or isn't it? Suppose every time I tweet "xyzzy", someone's name, then "plugh", they die. Would the government be justified ordering Twitter to ban me?
I don't actually need to use magical examples any more since you provided three of your own:
> Criminal speech is not protected.
So if I keep tweeting "kill this guy" and people are killing all the guys I name, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
> Business speech is also not protected.
So if I tweet "I'm buying Twitter for $420 per share" and then don't do it, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
> Telling Eastasia about our new spy plane is also not protected.
So if I tweet to Eastasia about our new spy plane, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
This actually happened, on Discord. Was it really bad when the government partnered with Discord to restrict the speech of that War Thunder player?
So you're murdering people and asking whether the government should stop you? Obviously? Not just by restricting your speech but by using lethal force if necessary.
It's not speech. You have a gun that fires when you say a word. You having a setup that fires the gun when you say a word instead of pulling a trigger doesn't mean you are utilizing "speech" in any meaningful sense of the word, other than that the gun responds to a sound.
Again, we don't live in a fairyland, we live in reality. A gun is real, your magic is not. If you had a gun that fired based on a sound, the fact that a sound is used does not matter. It is not "speech". Noise is not protected speech.
Likewise, if you had the magical ability to kill a random person with your magical sounds, you are not practicing "speech", you are using a magical technique in your make believe land to kill random people.
Yes, for some definition of "speech which causes deaths". This definition should include calls to violence but exclude, for example, vaccine skepticism.
We have pulled back from that with Trump suing companies who have said things against him and then paying him off - see Paramount, Disney, Facebook, X, and Google.
Not to mention the new press corp policy that everything that press says about the Pentagon has to be approved by the government. It was a policy so abhorrent that Fox News even refused to sign.
He even threatened to take away ABCs broadcast license because someone criticized a dead racist podcaster.
Conservatives all over the US - especially in “the free state of Florida” - are firing public officials who criticize him.
(and every time I dare say that Kirk was a racist who said a good “patriot” should bail out the person who best Pelosi’s husband almost to death, I get flagged)
I like how the first quote on that link was taken out of context. It let's me know that the rest of those likely are as well.
The statement he was making was that programs like Affirmative Action and DEI can lead a person to think those things, and he doesn't want to think those things.
Not a fan of his, but if he's such an evil person, one wouldn't have to resort to twisting his words.
So what “context” makes this okay “ If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”?
What “context” makes it okay to call someone a “patriot” if they would be willing to pay to bond out the guy who beat Pelosi’s husband almost to death?
Did he also speak out against the unqualified people in the Trump administration like RFK Jr., and the entire DOGE effort? Where is the outrage about Trump appointing his own lawyer to be a DA who has never prosecuted a case because all of the qualified ones wouldn’t go after his enemies? Is it only “unfair” if a non White person (supposedly) gets a job they aren’t qualified for?
So he was “just saying what other people think”. He was actually a good caring Christian man that wouldn’t say a bad word about anyone…
Most of the time when “great men” die, their true believers quote what they said during their life. Not one of his supporters will quote his most famous speeches.
The “sanctuary city” label was applied to local governments doing what local governments are supposed to do. There’s nothing in the US Constitution which forces cities, counties, and states to enforce Federal laws. That’s why there are Federal law enforcement agencies, and more of them than most people know.
The FBI, CBP, ICE, US Postal Service, USDA, the Park Service, the Secret Service, the US Marshalls, the Marine Fisheries Service, USACID, US Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Office of Odometer Fraud Investigation, Administrative Office of the United States Courts Office of Probation and Pretrial Services, Tennessee Valley Authority Police and Emergency Management, DEA, ATF, all the departmental offices of Inspectors General, and a whole bunch more account for over 130,000 officers with powers of arrest (and usually armed, or will otherwise partner with armed agents from somewhere else).
Cities and counties should be enforcing city, county, and state laws. They are not political subdivisions directly of the federal government, and their taxes and resources should be spent on their own jurisdictions.
From what I can tell, all Sanctuary City means is that locals will not cooperate with federal law enforcement unless it is legally required. Which seems right to me? States are independent entities with their own laws.
Exactly, sanctuary city/state laws are an application of 10th Amendment reserved powers of the states, and particularly the principle known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine”, hinted at in in dicta concerning hypotheticals regarding the Fugitive Slave Laws in cases shortly before the Civil War and first applied as a basis for judgement by the Supreme Court in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).
Even where the Constitution grants the federal government authority to make laws and to provide for their enforcement, it generally does not have the power to direct states to use their resources to enforce those laws. Sanctuary laws simply restrict the conditions in which state or local resources will be used to enforce certain federal laws.
They just said they won’t be deputized to do something that’s the federal government’s responsibility any more than a city government is responsible for going after federal tax evaders.
Municipal government does not have any power, obligation nor responsibility to enforce federal law.
Lowering themselves to be federal snitches, they reduce compliance with state and local laws which actually impact the public, and create a variety of other problems that hurt the community. Where does it end? Should states investigate purchases that may enable the violation of federal law? You realize that there’s almost no limit to what can be technically constructed to be a federal felony. Why is immigration so special?
To conservative thinkers, sitting behind their keyboards in the cushy suburbs, the concept of states’ rights ends with the oppression of minority voting and pillaging of the environment. Anyone, regardless of politics, who is comparing that legal concept to support of the lawlessness the regime is carrying out should really look within.
sanctuary cities are there partly due to government trying to be (just a little bit :) ) lawless… if ruling party was obeying the laws there wouldn’t be any need for “sanctuary cities” so pick another example
your “tribe” in particular is *all about State rights” unless of course States do what the Tzar doesn’t like, right?!
Sanctuary city laws were largely driven by local law enforcement and community services agencies and the way fear of being targeted (personally, or family, or community members) by immigration authorities in the event of law enforcement or other government contact complicated enforcement of local enforcement of non-immigration laws and delivery of local services in communities with significant immigrant populations; mitigating that fear related to contact with local government and leaving enforcement of federal law to federal authorities improved the ability of local governments to serve their own priorities.
In my city, the origin of those laws was partially trying to push the national discourse for immigration reform but mostly due to wanting law enforcement, public health, and education to work better. Without legal paths, you inevitably get people who are joining relatives who are here legally, trying to appeal refugee decisions, etc. where those people are not causing problems but could be victims of crimes everyone wants to be reported and you don’t want perverse incentives like a minor who is a citizen being deprived of education or other support because they have a caretaker who is not a legal resident and doesn’t want to listen to themselves on official forms.
Sanctuary cities are there to shelter people who enter the country illegally. That's not the government being lawless.
They were not a reaction to recent ICE moves; you've no history, and have reversed cause and effect.
In the 1980s they were a great moral move originally by the southwestern churches, they've just expanded into electorate jerrymandering and virtue signalling.
So-called "sanctuary cities" have made the judgement that their law enforcement apparatus will be more effective if people who fear immigration authorities are willing to interface with it. They can't and don't stop enforcement actions by federal authorities (see Chicago, right now) - but they view active cooperation with those efforts as detrimental to other law enforcement activities. You might disagree with that assessment, but it is a straightforward exercise of the municipal power to allocate its own resources.
Claiming that they are "there to shelter people who enter the country illegally" is disingenuous at best. In reality, that is neither the goal nor the effect.
This is a boogeyman that needs to die. Conservative groups have been trying to find evidence of substantial illegal votes for decades and the only illegal votes are the false electors that Trump’s cronies used to try to steal an election in 2020.
This is essentially the "strict scrutiny" standard, which governments have to achieve in order to violate your strongest constitutional rights (e.g. 1A). If you don't spell it out, then it might be delegated to a lower standard like "rational basis".
Seems like a lazy way to write a law. Basically just gives any governor whose party controls the supreme court a blank check. The law should qualify what public safety means
You want discretion for judges so that they can respond to the problems of their era wisely rather than rigidly applying the ideas of another time without nuance
Unless those judges themselves have a fondness for an imaginary "great" time, and will apply their reasoning in a way that just happens to fit their ideology.
Law is either rigorous or it's not. When I'm told that the law is against me but gosh darn it the law is the law, I grow resentful of the "discretion" reserved for some but not others.
What drives me nuts is the way lawyers (of all stripes) keep praising "legal reasoning". None of it strikes me as even vaguely rigorous.
I'm not a lawyer so I could well be completely off base here. But if my perception is correct, I would much rather they admit that it's fundamentally up to someone's gut feeling. That's more honest than telling me that a bit of reasoning is airtight when it's not.
The true honesty is that judges may rule however they please, regardless of the reasoning. In many cases they require their intuition to guide them. In that sense, it is already up to their gut feeling.
At some point someone needs to weigh the facts, and they are given great discretion to do so. It is generally a good thing, because we have multiple layers of appeal to prevent obviously horrible outcomes.
So this legislation, like all legislation, provides guidance for the good faith judge to help weigh the facts. There is no guidance that will prevent a bad faith judge from ruling badly: You do not need a clause about public safety to get the ruling you want, but there is an argument that your ruling may perhaps be less scrutinized.
There’s a reason an attorney’s answer is always “it depends” :) No legislation is truly airtight from abuse.
A judge can rule however they please, but if it goes against legislated law or precedent, it can (and should) be appealed. Sure, if the highest appellate determines the law says something different than it really does, that’s that, but it’s not like most judges have carte blanche to determine the outcome of any legal entanglement on a whole.
It appears to be a law that is simply adding restrictions to what the state can do (like the first amendment, the best sorts of laws IMO). It’s not granting people limited rights. Any existing rights people had under the fourth or first example, for example, are still in place, this just sounds like further restrictions on the state.
Yeah, so much that my feel is this law basically gives the state of Montana the right to confiscate computing equipment rather than the right to of the owner to have and use it. I understand that the intent of those involved in passing this was to protect civilians from the state, but such a broad and unspecific carve out just makes me think that a radical from either side could paint with quite a broad brush. “Who’s the terrorist today?” Kind of thing.
I know what you mean, but this is actually as strong as a protection in Montana (and probably elsewhere) gets. The burden is high. Montana's RTC bill had strong and competent libertarian input.
So this is probably just to attract datacenters with the promise there will be no recourse for the local environmental consequences and the horrible noise for neighbors.
Exactly. All of the people in comments here thinking this has any impact on right to repair or open source are thoroughly kidding themselves. Lawmakers don't get out of bed in the morning to fight for nerds or the working class.
* Reaffirms (state) government power to restrict individuals in computing
* Suggests that when a restriction infringes on your rights, but not on some specific fundamental rights, then then governmenty actions need not be limited.
* Legitimizes the control of infrastructure by artificial intelligence systems.
* Mostly doesn't distinguish between people and commercial/coroprate entities: The rights you claim to have, they will claim to also have.
That's .. unexpectedly broad? A strict interpretation of that would mean no gaming consoles and certainly no iPhones.
Their fundamental promise is a gatekeeper that restricts a lot of things that are not only legal but many customers want to do, including trivial things like writing their own software.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources
If the government tried to block you from installing certain apps on your phone, that would fall under this law. Apple as a private company can still block whatever they want.
It does get a little interesting to imagine the interface here though: if I circumvent those restrictions, a strict reading would be that I'm allowed to because the mechanism by which Apple would stop me would be through the State.
Which in turn would put it in conflict with the DMCA.
That seems like a correct interpretation and I don't like seeing it spelled out like this in a law. It seems more like a CAN-SPAM act than a step in the right direction.
So it's just a lot of hot air, simply because it is not the government that is restricting our right to compute. But the device makers, and software developers.
Google deciding to monopolize app installations is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
Device makers locking bootloaders is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
Bank applications refusing to run unless running on a blessed-by-google firmware on a device with a locked bootloader is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
> So it's just a lot of hot air, simply because it is not the government that is restricting our right to compute. But the device makers, and software developers.
No, it is only the government which can restrict these rights through violence and the threat of violence. Sony cannot restrict you from buying an Xbox or Nintendo.
But sony, microsoft and nintendo all heavily restrict what you can use their computer for, and what software you can run on it.
This is not a free-market issue. Yes, I am still free to buy another device. But if all device makers heavily restrict access, then this is a bunch of feel-good nonsense.
It is a free market issue, because when an oligopsony controls what can be bought and sold you don’t have a free market. These hardware vendors are controlling the market for software for their devices, and buyers are not free to make their own decisions about hardware they purportedly own.
Good job, Montana. There was a trend in proposed and passed policies that were eating at rights to own machines. Examples: DMCA anti-circumvention (right to repair and jailbreak), export controls for high-end chips and cybersecurity tools, proposals to weaken/negate e2e encryption or delay security updates, AI rules that you can't train past X amount (shortsighted for future of personal compute capacity), restricting individuals from crypto mining, etc. So basically a trend of restricting software use or modification on general-purpose hardware. Once the tiniest relevant policy lands, it tends to expand from there. Hence what Montana did.
I think this is just to make it so that data centers and crypto mining facilities can be built and operated where owners want. Makes it so zoning and environmental regulations can’t stop you as easily.
People need to be more skeptical. This is not going to be used to uphold individual rights, and that's not the intention. This will be used not only to fast track data centers, but to support companies like Flock and push back against any attempts to regulate widespread surveillance.
Not sure, but to me the beauty of individual States who agree to Unite, is they get to keep all powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government, which creates 51 different A/B tests, to see which ones others would want to adopt or champion.
^^^ Ok, I just learned that concept from a recent tweet from Linus Torvalds.
Ug, this bill is all about preventing regulation of multinational corporations, it has nothing to do with the right for individuals to compute anything.
Yep, I'd like to think this was a bill to protect my right to run any software I want to on hardware that I own, but it's actually a bill to keep Montana localities (cities, counties) from regulating or restricting data centers (noise, power, etc) in the interests of their residents. It's a state preemption bill restricting local democracy for the benefit of big business and polluters.
"Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety."
They can absolutely be regulated, but you must prove actual harm instead of "I don't want any data centers near me because of (conspiracy theory I read on Facebook)."
Question nobody wants to talk about: will this prevent courts from issuing "no computer" restrictions on persons convicted or being investigated for crimes involving computers?
I have seen clients go for many years without cellphones because a judge cassually attached a "no computer" protective order. It is hard enough finding work as a convict or person under investigation, but 10x harder for those without cellphones and email.
It does look to be a nudge in that direction, but it's not a slam-dunk. From my non-lawyer reading of the text, it seems like it would depend on how well you can argue that a total ban is not "narrowly tailored."
These restrictions must be scrapped completely. Along with this barbaric "criminal record" they delegate big chunk of the population to an underclass, well, unless they are rich.
I disagree for most crimes at least. Most crimes are either going to be some form of illegal dishonesty (theft, fraud, etc.) or violence. I would hope the company I work for is able to screen individuals for such behaviors before hiring them. “Willing to lie/cheat/steal for gain” in particular is such a huge red flag that any company who hired someone and ignored such red flags could reasonably be sued for negligence whenever that employee inevitably commits another similar crime. There are examples of this in the news literally today.
"Most" crimes are posession and/or status crimes. Either you are caught with something illegal (drugs, guns etc) or you violate some sort of protective restriction (parole violations for guns/drugs/alcohol). That, and just generally being drunk or high, represent the bulk of crimes that land people in jail. No dishonoesty or violence is required.
And who says violence should haunt the person for the rest of their lives? It could be a single act in unfortunate circumstances. Person pays for it once and should be free to live the rest of their lives as normal unless they reoffend. Except some special circumstances companies should have no fucking business about private lives of their employees.
You say that now, but if your family member were hit by a drunk driver who was only in your city for work, and the employer knew the employee had a couple of DUIs but had them rent a car for travel anyway, you'd probably want them to be held somewhat responsible. We can't have it both ways.
SB212 is an AI bill. It also includes some guidelines around AI-controlled infrastructure. But, as the source explicitly discusses, the focus clearly seems to be around preventing AI regulation of private individuals (individuals also means corporations in the US).
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
> The MRTCA stands in stark contrast to recent regulatory efforts in other states, such as California, Virginia, and New York, where proposals to rein in AI technologies have either failed or been heavily revised. Montana’s approach leans toward empowering individual users rather than restricting access.
Sure, I completely believe this model legislation drafted by ALEC is being pushed by a "grassroots group" and not an industry lobbying organization. I wish reporters would be more careful with their language.
Maybe someone could have just came up with in a vacuum, but it looks like a response to other attempts to restrict AI by saying that models trained with more than X amount of compute resources have to follow tons of extra rules.
And, per the article, the group pushing this is AI and blockchain companies.
I guess this is like the second amendment, except for computers and GPUs? I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Maybe I'm naive, and I am definitely uncertain about how all this AI craziness is going to break -- whether empowering everyone or advancing ultra corporate dystopia. But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
The federalist wing of the drafters of the US Constitution didn't think a Bill of Rights was necessary because they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
So they didn't even think things like the First and Second Amendment were even necessary.
Fastfoward 250 years and now maybe the idea of a "right of the people to own and self host their own software, shall not be infringed" doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
"The law is antiquated and should be repealed. The framers could never have envisioned Our Supreme Lord AI and how irrelevant individual compute is today when writing that law."
There's an oft-repeated factoid that recognizable organized civilizations last about 10 generations or 250 years on average. And then there's Strauss–Howe generational theory. There's no magic formula or universal fate except it's risky to have lots of corrupt, stupid leaders, injustice, inequality, and/or bad circumstances that do everything to avoid rare, effective leadership with integrity and labor wealth growing faster than capital wealth. Late stage capitalism is omnicidal and suicidal because the greedy fools involved tend not to care about or plan for the future, including a cognitive dissonance to deny anticipation of domination by externalities like changes in youth public sentiment, demographic shifts, geopolitical balances, and climate change. The current richest people in the world are drug addicts, warlords, pedophiles, and those who erroneously believe public beaches belong to them personally.
> they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
That's a perspective, but it seems to me that the Federalists didn't believe that government should be limited at all. The Constitution is a genie granting three wishes, and explaining beforehand that one of your wishes can be to wish for three more wishes.
Personally, it's always seemed obvious that the Federalists and their children have been the worst intellectual current in US government. They never had popular support at any time, and relied on the manipulation of power and position to accomplish personal goals (which is really their only ideology.) It began with a betrayal of the French Revolution, setting the US on a dirty path (and leaving the Revolution to be taken over by the insane.) The Bill of Rights is the only worthwhile part of the US Constitution; the rest of it is a bunch of slop meant to placate and protect local warlords and slaveholders. The Bill of Rights is the only part that acknowledges that individual people exist other than the preamble.
The Anti-Federalists were always right.
I agree with you that what we should be working on is specifying, codifying and expanding the Bill of Rights, rather than the courts continually trying to come up with new ways to subvert it. New ways that are never codified firmly, that always exist as vibes and penumbras. Rights shouldn't have anything to do with what a judge knows when he sees. If we want to abridge or expand the Bill of Rights, a new amendment should be written and passed; the Supreme Court is overloaded because 1) Congress has ceased to function and 2) the Senate is still an assembly of local warlords.
Ha. You reach for the 2nd but fail to realize that of all the Amendments, there is more legal precedent torture to sidestep that prohibition than any other amendment save maybe the 4th, 5th, and 10th.
There is a big push to limit what kind of models can be OSS'd, which in turn means yes, a limit to what AI you are allowed to run.
The California laws the article references make OSS AI model makers liable for whatever developers & users do. That chills the enthusiasm for someone like Facebook or a university to release a better llama. So I'm curious if this law removes that liability..
It's not about private citizens, for all they go on about “protecting rights”; this is transparently about preventing corporations from having their datacenters regulated.
US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
> But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
This law is not about them coming for your laptop. It's about some massive corporation is not allowed to cover all the land in data centers. Which one of you has more legal lobby power?
The gov doesn't need to come for your laptop if you are out of the job and can't even afford that laptop because everybody pays an LLM company instead
Think about this like you're openai not an average Joe:
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes
> I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Yes, the threat of mandated computational devices performing mandated computations to do things in regular life. Currently, these come almost exclusively from private companies (at least in the free world), but I think it's a good precedent for a government to recognize the dangers here. To be really helpful, it needs to ban those private companies from doing what they're doing. But this is a good start.
You're thinking about your own situation - that's normal, but not enough: there are still loads of folks who don't have a computer but are expected to interface with their governments (municipal, county, state) using a computer, and have had to pay disproportionately more being in the least affluent and/or most vulnerable demographic.
It's not about losing access to laptops, it's about guaranteeing the right to even have access to the same tools that folks like us think everyone already has access to.
That seems like something different though. My understanding is that this is not about the government handing out free laptops, the same way the second amendment is not about the government handing out free guns. Rather, this is saying people have the right to own general purpose computers.
As far as government expecting you to interface with them using a computer, I loathe this trend. And of course it's infinitely worse if they require a specific proprietary platform like iOS or Android. But I don't think this is about that.
I'm totally with you as far as requiring a proprietary platform, but at some point we do just have to cut off obsolete methods of communication. We can't just keep supporting them forever.
Methods of communication like "face to face" or "mail" are not obsolete. Yes you can support them forever if that's literally your job as the government. And it should be.
Mail is completely obsolete and we shouldn't spend money to support it. I can't think of anything stupider than writing a message down on paper and physically transporting it to its destination. Not one cent of my taxes should be spent on maintaining it as a standard means of communication.
Mail is the opposite of obsolete. Ever bought anything and had it shipped to you? You probably used mail. A paper letter is just a special case of mail.
My taxes shouldn't be spent on putting up walls around the government and juicy contracts with technocrats excluding people from being able to sort things out with government. If I must first pay some technocrat to buy their computing terminal to contact government then government failed me.
Yes, and it happens to be the special case we are talking about here since the entire thing is about communication with the government. If you refuse to use email you choose to segregate yourself and it should be your own problem to deal with that, not anyone else's.
if you are so crazy about not paying more tax than needed think that having to buy a device is also a tax.
also next you will say there's too much email spam so we can't waste taxpayer money making them go through it, so we can only contact them using the approved app on approved hardware with remote atteststion to ensure you didn't root it. if you refuse, it's your problem segregating yourself.
of course later that app will require you to first talk to an LLM. only if LLM decides your problem is important enough you can really contact the government. why waste taxpayer money on supporting various legacy means of talking to taxpayers if it can be spent on billion dollar contracts with tech companies instead
Well you are the one who insists the government should support any means of communication anyone wants to use. So really you are the one advocating for LLMs and stupid device attestation crap. I just don't have patience for people who can't use email.
Not support any means, but means most open to people. People are not born with a computer and a phone, they are born with two legs, two hands and a mouth. So if they want to walk to the office or send a letter by post they should be able to.
a government that says contact us only using whatever current tech we think is fashionable today... I don't care, fax, email, tiktok, chatgpt, neuralink... for me is a government that is trying to avoid talking to its people (and to enrich tech lobbiers)
The name and rhetoric of the bill sound great, but the actual point of the bill is to make it impossible to stop AI companies and cryptominers from building data centers in your residential neighborhood.
You're not alone wondering about that. I would much rather have seen something along the lines of:
- right to internet connectivity (along with restrictions against some particularly offensive practices impinging access, including ads and popups when they are intrusive enough to substantially interfere*)
- right to utilize methods that protect personal privacy, like off-cloud computing (which I guess is partly covered here) and encrypted communications
- limit the extent to which online Terms of Service can bind you (i.e. deem unenforceable some of the worst clauses making their way around Silicon Valley, e.g. vague catchall indemnities that don't arise directly out of a user's breach of contract or illegal activity, incorporating third party terms of service by reference without explicitly stating what those terms are)
- identify activities that must be explicitly opt-in instead of opt-out (e.g. newly-introduced settings or features when they reduce a user's privacy, consents to sell user information / behavioral advertising / advertising remarketing / etc.)
---
* Think about it like driving down a road. Imagine if you couldn't even get get down the street or across an intersection without bumper-car-ing into some giant "acknowledge", "agree", "go away" buttons, and having to swerve around billboards that randomly jump into your lane.
Montana likely passed such a law because they have a governor and a senator who both came from the tech sector in big ways (sold the same company to oracle).
That said, there are a lot of other legal hurdles that would prevent Montana from ever being significant to the tech sector, despite the fact that I'm certain many skilled people would love to live there. From being the only state to not have at will employment to having a completely out of wack tax system (ratio between income and sales tax for a state entirely dependent on tourism), to countless restrictions (and often necessary because of water restrictions) on building large amounts of new housing, it just sin't happening.
I feel super happy for the 5 people and 20 cows who will benefit. (This is intended less a jab at Montana specifically and more at state and national politicians who only seem to have political gumption when it concerns the needs of less-populated states with particular demographics.)
Really? - I took away that this does give people the right to use computers and AI technologies. I.e. the government can't ban or encumber those things. But I didn't see the full text in TFA. Can you elaborate a bit on how this does not meaningfully create any rights?
Montana, which has the 4th largest population of millionaires despite being the 7th lowest populated US state, passes a law to prevent AI regulation. I don't think that it's a coincidence that many of the wealthy individuals that have flocked to Montana made their wealth in the tech industry
I used to do presentations at educational technology conferences and many (30+)years ago I speculated that "in the future" computers that could create would be licensed. This was based on the observation that every significant past technology under user control was eventually licensed for permission to operate - radio, television, cars, the list is long.
radio/tv share the bands which are very narrow resource so licensing pretty much have to exist else there would be interference abound (imagine competing TV station just driving around with a jammer on competition
cars have that + the fact infrastructure is built by public money. Allowing anyone on anything with no training there literally costs lives
Or, copyright wise, to earn money in before digital world you kinda had to not have too much of copyright infringement - while artist today might get popular enough to subside on patreon/other form of digital tips, before it wouldn't be possible
This doesn't really disagree with the parent's thesis. You're just giving the long explanation for each event.
Any significant technological advancement necessarily uses some shared public resource which will drive people to regulate it. For AI folks are trying to get a lot of random things to stick: the power grid, water usage, public safety, disinformation.
>Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
Exactly. I was hoping that this law would be the pushback to the overzealous prosecution of DeCSS, people who defeat DRM locks in order to lawfully back up the multimedia data that they already paid for, etc.
I also wonder what the impact of the law is on TPM chips on computers (restricting your ability to boot whatever OS you want), the locked-down iOS mobile app store, etc.
I admit I'm not knowledgeable about this law but as it's written it seems fairly meaningless to me, as it could be interpreted in many different ways, and the exclusion is a hole you could drive a metaphorical truck through.
Yep. Use a modern corporate browser and you'll have no problems personally (or so I assume from everyone saying so, I don't use chrome). Use anything else (ie, not-modern corp browser like FF pre-XUL death or some modern non-corporate browser) and you'll get blocked. I'm still getting blocked, btw. And it is cloudflare's block page. And it happens from my residential (comcast) IPv4 and multiple test IPv4 from other netblocks.
It is real. People are being blocked. Even if you aren't.
As long as laws are restricted to business services it shouldn't conflict. This is the right for citizens to use computation, business regulation is always a layer on top of that.
Um. Montana resident here. The state also had quite strong anti-corruption (aka campaign finance) laws, since the copper baron days. But the US Supreme Court ruled that doesn't matter (because their corruption trumps any state anti-corruption law presumably). So don't expect this to amount to anything.
I’m all for this movement provided it’s actually focusing on the rights of individuals rather than empowering corporations to own and operate massive amounts of computing power unchecked. When I first read the article, I frankly assumed this was meant to limit regulation on AI. From what I’ve read in the law that doesn’t seem to explicitly be the case, but given the organizations involved, I fully expect to see more in that vein.
Interesting, has the EFF done a writeup/opinion on this legislation yet? I tend to trust them on breaking things down from the legalese and implications.
Yes. In written laws "citizen" generally means any person and/or organization subject to the laws of the state. It doesnt mean just living people who can vote.
Many a young law student has pontificated that as non-citizens, visiting tourists have no rights. There is no more loaded a word in US politics, and none more malleable under the law, as "citizen". It means something different in every context.
I mean, without this law, are the people not allowed to use computing? What exactly is the difference it brings? Does it force government to provide computing to all citizens?
I think this is the main content of the law. (Everything below is quoted.)
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Section 3. Right to compute
Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
---
Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by artificial intelligence system -- shutdown.
(1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall ensure the capability to disable the artificial intelligence system's control over the infrastructure and revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.
(2) When enacting a full shutdown, the deployer shall consider, as appropriate, disruptions to critical infrastructure that may result from a shutdown.
(3) Deployers shall implement, annually review, and test a risk management policy that includes a fallback mechanism and a redundancy and mitigation plan to ensure the deployer can continue operations and maintain control of the critical infrastructure facility without the use of the artificial intelligence system.
If that's the gist of it, then:
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately...
This seems weirdly backwards. The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own. The bill does nothing to address the actual rights of citizens, it just limits some ways government can't further restrict the citizens' right. The government should be protecting the citizens' digital rights from anyone trying to clamp them down.
Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.
Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.
It’s kinda good the planet gets to run both experiments, and more.
The EU approach seems to want to insert government in to contracts between private individual and those they do business with, and the US approach seems to want to maybe allow too much power to accumulate in those who wield the mercantile powers.
The optimal approach probably lies in the tension between multiple loci.
It's one experiment because both systems are competing at the same time for global resources both in cooperation and competition with each other and other actors. Additional both systems exist in such widely different contexts that any comparison would be inaccurate because other factors such as geographic and historical have a large impact on any measured results.
The US approach is more than that, for instance if every employee in a business pushes for a contract that says workers will negotiate as a block and pay new union dues, and the contract says new hires will be bound by that too, that's illegal in many states. Not just the normal "right-to-work" restrictions, the contract isn't valid even if unanimously agreed on by every current employee (union security agreements). But for shareholders they all set it up like that, with votes weighted by dollars. A new shareholder can't buy someone's shares and government says it's illegal for him to be bound by the voting structure.
And secondary strikes are also illegal in the US under Taft-Hartley.
The optimal approach appears domain specific and granular, too.
As for domain specificity:
I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
I don't know any European technology companies that hold a candle to the sheer breadth and depth of capabilities brought into the world by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Yes, Mistral, Nokia, OVH, and SAP exist, but compared to the alternarives, they exist in the way the American healthcare system exists compared to its alternatives.
As for granularity:
Perhaps we want American style governance for building the tech, but then European style governance for running it?
The American model of governance was created for a world with very distant nation-state threats but a large number of colonial threats, which is why it's centered around "every man for themselves" (in spite of FDR's best efforts). On the contrary, European governance was basically developed during the Revolutionary Wave, which was sweeping all across Europe, that monarchies found that the only way to appease the people was to give into their reforms - and often rapidly because of the domino effects of revolutions. In other words, American governance was built from the ground up, while European governance had to be adjusted within the existing environment and monarchical government frameworks.
In fact, European governments weren't even well-defined in their current state up until the end of WW2, in spite of how much Europeans like to take potshots against USA for being a "young" nation.
This does make the American form great for working with uncharted territory (how to handle new tech, how to exploit the earth in new ways, etc.) while the European form is more reactionary (how do we keep the people appeased, how do we provide a better standard of living, how do we alleviate hardship).
Perhaps the ideal mix of the two, between the frontier-style governance and European-style reactionism, like the Swiss model.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Selfishly I think my American healthcare is better than anything I ever had in the UK. I can see a doctor within 2 weeks even a specialist, I can actually get a sleep study, my doctor will actually listen to me rather than tell me I'm just getting old, go home and take an ibuprofen.
In terms of health outcomes, the UK generally has higher life expectancy and lower maternal mortality rates than the US - but that said, even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts.
The real focus and point of contention should be that the US healthcare system is exponentially more expensive per capita than any European model, but is worse for almost all health outcomes including the major litmus tests of life expectancy and infant mortality. In some cases, the wealthiest Americans have survival rates on par with the poorest Europeans in western parts of Europe such as Germany, France and the Netherlands.
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-04-02/wealth-mortality-gap
Americans average spend on inpatient and outpatient care was $8,353 per person vs $3,636 in peer countries - but this higher spending on providers is driven by higher prices rather than higher utilization of care. Pretty much all other insights in comparing the two systems can be extrapolated from that fact alone imo.
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/health-policy-101-i...
This is probably incredibly naive so apologies if so - are things like differing obesity or other health problem causing conditions accounted for when looking at overall outcomes of the system?
The higher cost makes perfect sense to me but calculating an apples to apples comparison of health outcomes between potentially very different populations seems potentially very difficult? Again sorry it's probably a solved problem but figured I'd ask :)
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.
There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
That's because mortality rates are only weakly correlated with healthcare quality. The US has much higher death rates in some young demographics, which skews the average, but those people didn't die due to lack of medical care.
You can have exceptional healthcare quality and relatively low life expectancy in the same population.
The Brown study I cited above concludes differently, and is strictly a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
Within that 50-85 cohort, among 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.
specialists in two weeks is definitely not the norm everywhere in the US. it's certainly not in Seattle.
This is likely very regional. As a single data point, raising the family in the Boston area for the last 25 years I do not recall not being able to see a doctor the same day for the regular scares, from ear pains and high fever to falling and later vomiting (is this a concussion?).
A few times when we needed to see specialists, we often saw them within 24 hours; occasionally longer but I would say with a median of 48-72 hours. Even things that are clearly not urgent (for dermatologist "hey, I have forgotten about skin checks for the last 2 years, can we do the next one now", for ENT "hey, my son is getting nosebleeds during high intensity sports; can you check if there is a specific blood vessel that is causing problems"?) always happened well within two weeks. Three caveats to this happy story:
1. This is Boston area with likely the highest concentration of medical practitioners of all kinds in the US. I had good insurance with a large network, decent out-of-network coverage and for most cases not needed a pre-approval to see a specialist.
2. Everyone is generally healthy and our "specialist needs" were likely well trodden paths with many available specialists.
3. Our usage of the doctors, as the kids became generally healthy teenagers and adults, dropped significantly in the last 5-7 years. I hear post-covid the situation is changing and I may be heavily skewing to the earlier period.
At least from what I can see, COVID and the changes in attitudes towards medical professionals are driving a lot of burnout and leaving the profession; and since then economic pressures are squeezing private practices out of existence and a lot of specialists end up working for private equity now.
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I think you should also balance your take by asking people who recently lost their job what they think about their healthcare. I’m sure you’re aware of that, and my point is rhetorical, but that’s the trade off here, it isn’t only about what it looks like when things go right, you should also consider what happens when things go wrong. It’s also enlightening to see what happens many times when people “did everything right” and still got shafted by the US system. See: Sicko for instance https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEQ7acb0IE
I suspect the time it takes to see a specialist in the UK depends on how urgently the issue needs to be addressed. The real advantage you have is that you can be seen by a specialist within two weeks even for non-urgent stuff. That’s not to dismiss your need though. The definition of medical urgency and comfort don’t align well.
The US has world-class healthcare, if you can pay for it. If you can't, then you're getting the healthcare equivalent to a third-world country.
That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)
You can and get that in the UK, surely?
If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it out' these days.
Most UK healthcare these days is someone tells you to take a paracetamol over the phone. Even dentists...
That's largely due to austerity effects and not the inherent model of UK healthcare. That's what happens when political appointees and ministers bully civil servants and doctors that the best minds all leave, while the government significantly cuts funding to the NHS while forcing it to move to AWS.
> I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Probably depends a lot on where you are in Europe. Some countries have long waiting lists for surgeries (life saving ones) and access to doctors is very limited (too few, months to get an appointment) so it sucks as well if you are in such a situation
Here in America we have to wait months for the privilege of paying out the nose.
>I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
Some 50-100k Europeans fly to the US to get American healthcare every year.
Ok, so about 0.0134%, Parent comment’s point is that -the average European- absolutely does not want the US healthcare system in Europe. Simply due to our shared believe healthcare is a basic right and should be universally available to everyone.
Those who have the financial means to travel to the USA for medical treatment do so largely due to running out of conventional options at home, experimental treatments or specific doctors who are regarded as the best in their particular field.
Most of the US outbound medical travel is due to treatment at home being too expensive and risking pushing entire families to bankruptcy.
The fact that 100k europeans fly to the US for medical treatment is factual, but does not equal them wanting the US healthcare system in Europe.
That's about how many need it, can afford it, and can't wait for an appointment in half a year.
Idk .. I injured my knee playing soccer (tore a bunch of ligaments) a few months ago. Wasn't life threatening. Still, got care after waiting for about an hour, xray and all. On a Saturday. In Sweden, single payer insurance. I paid only about $20 out of pocket.
Just as a contrasting data point, some estimates are that well over a million Americans travel overseas for medical care every year.
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343%2818%2930620-X/ful...
This is mostly to obtain cheaper care. In general America does seem to have some of the best care in terms of quality. It’s just also some of the least affordable.
US is not the only destination for Europeans, they also go to Thailand and wherever. Few Americans go to Europe. It's not affordable, but when money is not the issue you go to the US.
i'm one of the Americans. went to South america for a dental procedure that was 12k in the US, 2.5k there. very modern facilities, they had some better tech than my american dentist. if you can speak a bit of spanish, i highly recommend looking into it for expensive dental stuff.
So the other 99.987% of Europeans agree with the parent comment?
No, they just can’t afford it or don’t need it.
Most people prefer healthcare they afford over healthcare they can’t. (Most, not all. There are a surprisingly large chunk of Americans who seem to vote Against their best interests in a lot of areas.)
I would argue that "don't need it" could just as easily be because they have better healthcare closer to home.
I couldn't find a source for this with a quick couple of searches, could you provide one?
I'm not GP, but https://www.trade.gov/survey-international-air-travelers-sia... suggests that in 2024 about 0.4% of European travellers to the US told the government they were coming to receive medical treatment, and https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/december-and-annual-20... says about 13 million people from Western Europe visited the US in 2024, and if you multiply those numbers you get 50k.
That isn’t the flex you think it is lol
I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you would be more fair by replacing these companies with VCs, because they’re the ones lifting real weight here.
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That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people. At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org. A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Of course this comes with a social cost, offset as this allows people who are discontent with their arrangements to forge a new path States like California have high job lock, so most innovation comes from side-projects as people checkout from work.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
How are credit ratings maintained again?
> At least not in the European way where you have to give your life to an org.
I have to what!? News to me.
> A US citizen has the freedom to disassociate with any organization at any time for any reason.
Maybe, but the EU is more militant in enforcing that right. Some US states are working on "right to be forgotten" laws, but they've got a lot of catching up to do, and I don't think there's a federal law in the works yet.
> That's because in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people
Have you been following the news for the last few years?
>in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.
False.
What are you on about?
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What restrictions do European governments impose on the state?
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I don't agree with that at all. If anyone else tries to infringe your rights it's either voluntary i.e. you've consented to this, or it's involuntary in which case you can sue them or the state will prosecute them on your behalf.
What you’re missing is that the set of rights European countries recognize and the set of rights that the American government recognizes are not the same set.
In Europe they recognize a right to be forgotten that simply does not exist in the US. Europe recognizes personal data rights that the US does not. These data rights impose requirements on the way companies manage your data and specifically do not allow, e.g., Facebook to get you to consent that your rights do not apply. The European government protects imposes citizens’ rights on businesses in several ways that the US government does not.
On the other hand, US free speech rights are generally stronger. And of course no one else except US citizens have an inalienable right to sleep on a bed made of loaded handguns.
Obviously the rights that the state grants are different in the US than Europe, but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries. To the extent you can have famous cases where people sue large coffee franchises for selling coffee that's too hot.
So the statement that "the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals" is far from reality, and I felt it necessary to ground this conversation back in reality.
> but the rights of individuals are protected versus other individuals, corporations, and general organisations; just as they are in all civilised countries
Kind of. In the US there is no protection of free speech when posting in Twitter or Facebook, for example. There isn’t even a consent issue here. There’s no need for you to consent that Facebook can sensor your speech because you have no right to free speech in that context at all.
This is exactly what the poster was presumably referring to. Many rights in the us are in fact only protected from infringement by the government.
Unfortunately, the world contains nuance that your statement does not.
What I said is a very general statement that broadly applies to all civilised countries, reiterated because the parent comment was very incorrect suggesting that rights are mainly protecting citizens from their state in the US. It's simply not true.
It is oddly funny that people in my town are ferociously protesting the police force's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras when everyone already carries total surveillance devices (smartphones) on their person at all times.
You can (generally) tell when a person around you is filming, and you generally don’t have to worry about tons of random individuals bringing together footage of you for tracking and surveillance.
Private individuals generally aren't systematically using their cameras for mass surveillance of you. The government is.
> The government is.
Companies too.
Companies can't use violence against individuals who do things they don't like.
Most of the cameras are attached to either Apple or Android devices. The companies that control these ecosystems could use them for mass surveillance. The government could 'politely' ask these companies to do that for them. Or they could just directly order the phones.
Sort of except for the fatal flaw that you are talking about battery powered devices that mostly live in peoples' pockets. The reason Flock cameras and Ring doorbells both serve well for mass video surveillance is consistent predictable location and power.
Maybe, yes. On the other hand, there's lots and lots of people running around with these things, so you get pretty good statistical coverage, especially in cities.
Could, but don't.
You really think Google and Apple aren’t tracking users?
No, I really don't think Google and Apple are using Android/iPhone cameras or microphones for mass surveillance.
Unless we are trying to do the "conspiracy theory" route: there is not "thinking" here. You can at least sniff traffic or whatever and tell if your phone is ringing back to google even when you tell it not to.
And the discussion above is about a different kind of surveillance. Notifying Google (or state) that I'm sitting in front of my PC is one thing. Sending photos of videos of me jerking off is different.
In Germany it's (very roughly speaking) illegal to film people in public. (Importantly, not the same as filming a thing or event and having people incidentally in the frame)
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I can leave my phone at home. I cannot leave flock at home. It’s about consent.
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.
That's the notion of "rights" we have in the US though. It's the same with the Bill of Rights. It's true some states do go further and bestow more affirmative rights. But it's deeply ingrained in US political thought that "right to do X" means "government won't stop you from doing X", not "government will stop anyone who tries to stop you from doing X".
> The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own.
But those come from laws, like DMCA 1201, that prohibit people from bypassing those restrictions. The problem being that the DMCA is a federal law and Montana can't fix that one, but at least they couldn't do state one?
Although this language seems particularly inelegant:
> computational resources for lawful purposes
So they can't make a law against it unless they make a law against it?
The proprietary restrictions are an extension of government, because the government grants private actors protection of their IP and enforces that IP. The only issue is that because we take IP protections for granted, we see it as an issue of the private actor rather than the state which has increasingly legislated against people's ability to execute code on computers they themselves own. But it should be simple. The government grants a monopoly in the form of IP to certain private actors - when that monopoly proves to be against the interests of the citizens, and I believe it is, then the government should no londer enforce that monopoly.
This seems to have the positive effect that patching applications on your own device (a la Revanced patching Spotify) appears blessed, since government prosecution would need to demonstrate a public interest case, if I'm reading this correctly.
No, the problem is the extent to which private parties can use the power of law to legally restrict your usage of property you own. And that's the reason it's a right.
If you don't like the restrictions a product has you can simply not purchase the product, no "right" has been infringed.
> you can simply not purchase the product
You should explain how you'd see the majority of the population not buying a smartphone from a major brand.
...by not purchasing one?
The issue is societal lockin - aka network effects. People can't afford to "not buy one" because then they are "the one without".
Banking apps, delivery apps, public transport apps, utilities apps, insurance - so many services have been captured by the big two phone oligopoly that modern life revolves around your phone. The assumption is that you will have one.
Sure, you could decide not to, but you are instantly a societal pariah as every business finds it s so much harder to deal with you - and you don't have enough time in the day to deal with the secondary processes these businesses employ, for every aspect of your life.
Maybe it's country specific - here in Canada I don't feel like I need a smart phone for anything crucial. There is a trend where people including zoomers such as myself switch to dumb phones for a "digital detox". So it seems perfectly feasible to do so.
I'm not sure how I'd manage tbh (in Finland).
I was called a luddite for not wanting to follow the "official" schoool Whatsapp group. Online banking is practicably unusable without the bank's own 2FA app.
Many things can still be done in a web browser, but the rest of society is going the smartphone route and it's increasingly difficult to avoid it.
Any non-digital options are aimed at elderly and handicapped individuals; not people who don't want smartphones.
Some people can do it. I'd also ditch my smartphone if I was living in the woods, or had a personal assistant handling my daily needs, or lived in an Amish community etc.
But I don't see the vast majority of people to be able to ditch their smartphone, that's just not a reasonable proposition.
They don't need to ditch smartphones, there are more options than just an iPhone/Pixel or dumb phone.
But most people including myself just don't care about side loading. For those who do, there are options like a Fairphone, various Linux phones, etc.
A few people can live with just phone calls, but a sizeable majority use some additional apps for texting. Dumb phones won't work here.
1. Many people use a virtual text number, like google voice 2. Maybe even more folks use one or more app based texting services. I bet many users here have several on their phone:
Signal What's app telegram
There are probably 50 texting type apps in this category
These are dangerous attack vectors for people trying to remotely control your phone, but also important to talk to your friends.
I think we need a solution for these types of apps for a popular usable solution. I don't know how to solve the safety issue when running these apps, and I can't just "forward" text messages to my dumb phone.
Thirty years ago no one was buying smartphones from a major brand. No one was buying any smartphones at all.
But 30 years ago there were also no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
Nothing has changed, there are no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
There are many that do require SMS or a phone number of some sort at this point.
We are mostly saved by the part of the 70+ crowd who is completely computer illiterate and own significant investment resources. But that will only last 10-20 more years.
I doubt that. The world is a vast place with many governments and there are lots of major companies.
Require, maybe not?
But it's a comparatively huge pain in the ass to use a lot of government services where I live without a smartphone.
Our grandfathers fought in wars, but God forbid you have to go to city council to fill out a form every once in awhile
How does (great) past suffering justify (mild) modern suffering?
And my forefathers probably fought in wars against your forefathers. The world would have probably been better off, if they all had just stayed home. Nothing glorious about that.
One step at a time. First the citizens ought to ensure that their own government is actually aligned with them.
Citizens aren't even aligned with each other.
Citizens don't need to be aligned with eachother, but they should ensure that the government is aligned with the citizenry as a whole. Everyone should have the freedom to polarize in different directions and hold different opinions as each individual sees fit. The government is only supposed to implement the laws that most people want in common, not enforce alignment of opinion in the populace (that's an authoritarian regime). If people are allowed to freely misalign, then they'll be misaligned in different directions, and their conflicting wishes will cancel eachother out like random noise when they vote, leaving only what most people want in common to be written into law.
What is the 'citizenry as a whole'?
As a simple example, Finland's national government just passed a smartphone ban in schools. That's fine by the criteria you brought up, but I think it's utterly moronic.
Not because I disagree with the Finnish people, or their elected representatives on the issue itself: that's for them to decide. I disagree that this should be handled at the national level at all!
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).
In this case, I lack the imagination to see the reason why this issue couldn't have been handled at eg the city level, so that the good people of Oulo get the policy they want, and the good people of Helsinki get the policy they want.
Or even lower: there's no reason to even go as high as the city level, each school individually can decide what they want.
But just to give you the limits of subsidiarity here: I can see why you'd want to have a unified policy per school instead of per teacher or per class: the logistics are easier, and the individual teacher doesn't have to use their own judgement and authority on this. (Of course, individual schools should be free to let the teachers decide, if that's the policy they want.)
You can surely create your own example that cover more familiar territory, eg legal drinking ages in the US (which are ostensibly a matter for the states, but have been hijacked by the central government.)
I'm not sure if national legislation is the correct place for the ban either, but consistency is sometimes better than flexibility. The Finnish school system has always (well, since the 70s when the current system was designed) been big on equity and everybody following the same basic rules (though at the same time giving individual teachers quite a lot of freedom to organize their teaching – there are almost no standardized tests, for example).
Students would understandably think it's unjust if their school had a stricter phone policy than their friends in the next school over. On the other hand, the new legislation only forbits phone use during classes, and gives individual schools the authority to decide if they want to restrict it during recesses too, so there will in any case be policy differences between schools. shrug
There are fewer people in Finland than there are in Dallas, Texas.
"National level" sounds like a big deal but in real terms it's the same effect as your city wide rules for larger cities.
Well, that just goes to show that national level for bigger countries is even more overblown than for Finland.
You can generate your own examples, if that convinces you more. Eg there's no reason to forcible coordinate national minimum wages in the US, when that can be handled at city level. (Or at most at state level.)
> ...but I think it's utterly moronic.
It could be because the general population is genuinely moronic in this matter, and actually do want to implement smartphone bans for kids at the national level, or it could be because their government is not a perfect democratic system so the bill has motives unrelated to its stated purpose that are designed to be convenient for the government at the people's expense.
Even if we assume all democracies operate the way they're supposed to all of the time, some moronic policies will still be favored over wiser alternatives when most of the population hold the same moronic opinions. That is just democracy working as intended.
One important difference between an authoritarian society and a democratic one is that the democratic one makes everyone feel like they're making very important decisions for themselves at the societal level. People with new ideas convince everyone else to voluntarily implement their ideas, rather than force everyone else to implement their ideas. Societal change in a democracy does not happen until the majority has internalized the ideas associated with those changes and want them to happen. And I think this is really nice because life is miserable if all you do is go through the motions. Being able to control your own destiny is a good feeling and source of motivation.
There are many pillars of democracy that must be supported by the majority of the population at all times, otherwise the democratic system will degrade or even collapse. But this is simply the people getting the government they deserve. The democratic system does not deny the populace the choice of replacing it with an authoritarian regime by voting that way. If the people regret it later, they will have to relearn what they forgot and rebuild what was lost through hardship.
Circling back to private ownership of computational resources: this is one of the many necessary conditions for online freedom of speech, which recently became a necessary condition for democracy to continue to exist. The recent surge of authoritarianism around the world is largely due to the centralized moderation and ranking mechanisms used on social media platforms, which encourage the formation of large echo chambers. If we want to reverse this surge, we must move filtering and ranking mechanisms to the client-side (so that each user can decide what they want to see without affecting what others can see), and then popularize decentralized protocols for social media. And that, coincidentally, would also address the root cause behind the smartphone ban you mentioned. These things are impossible to do if individuals can't own compute. Writing the right to own compute into law slightly decreases the likelihood of a dystopian future where every consumer device is a SaaS terminal that can't run anything on its own. And in that future, all democracies around the world would collapse or be severely degraded.
Just to be clear: I'm not against a smartphone ban in schools (and not for one either). I'm just against a ban on the national level.
So assume the vast majority of the population wants to ban smartphones. Then I wouldn't call every town deciding to enact a smartphone ban 'moronic'.
Well if you want to really get pedantic about it, it comes from the government enforcing those restrictions, like the DMCA, patent, or copyright, otherwise people would just do it willy-nilly for the most part.
Also, government actions that restrict your ability to lawfully compute. If the government is restricting it, then isn't it by definition unlawful?
Yes, but that's why the rest of the text gives some more meat to right.
It's not so much that the government can't restrict you, but this law would raise the bar for what justifications would be necessary.
[dead]
"lawful" seems like an enormous loophole that makes this seem vacuous. If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted. How would the government restrict you from doing something lawful in the first place? A bill of attainder? That's already illegal.
It gives a legal foothold to those who would challenge later laws, akin to the bill of rights. Believe it or not, courts will honor that kind of thing, and many legislators act in good faith (at least at the state level).
The difference is that while they can restrict the what, they can't restrict the how. Yeah they could make training LLMs illegal, but they can't for example put a quota on how much training you can do. Passing a law to ban something completely is a lot harder than passing a law that puts a "minor restriction" in place.
Ultimately any law can be repealed, so the loophole of changing the law in the future always exists. The point is that any future change to the law will take time and effort, so people can be confident in the near term that they won't be subject to the whims of a regulator or judge making decisions in a legal grayzone which may come down to which side of the bed they woke up on.
Having dealt with lawyers for the past few months this is design
> If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted
Always been the case. An interesting question you might explore, is whether rights exist. And the question is not whether they ought to exist.
Of course rights exist, as a social construct.
Yes, rights are real in the way ideas are real, for what that’s worth. They’re not guarantees, as many tend to view them.
They only become tangibly real when those in power allow it. More of a temporary gift, quickly taken away when those in power are supplanted by a tyrant.
The interesting angle to me is that the same ideas seem to be sort of “inevitably re-emergent”. They return, even after generations of tyranny, where no one alive in society has been handed these ideas we call rights.
So it’s more of a temporary gift that we should appreciate while we have it, which is forever at risk of being taken away, but which will always re-emerge as long as there are conscious beings capable of suffering.
That's as strong a rule as you can put in a normal law. If you want it to restrict what laws the government can pass, you need to put it in the constitution.
I feel like this was a mistake: “must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety”
So, public health or safety, in the hands of a tyrant how broad can that get? I imagine that by enshrining this in law, Montana has accidentally given a future leader the ability to confiscate all computing technology.
In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
Almost every part of government is in isolation a single point of failure to someone with a tyrannical streak, it's why most democracies end up with multiple houses/bodies and courts - supposed to act as checks and balances.
So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
> In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
But that is not how tyrants actually operate, at least most of the time.
The most tyrannical country possible would be a "free democratic union of independent people's republics". Democracy has been so successful that most tyrannies operate under its veneer. This is in stark contrast to how monarchies have operated historically.
The trick isn't to ignore laws, but to make them so broad, meaningless and impossible to follow that you have to commit crimes to survive. You can then be selective in which of these crimes you choose to prosecute.
You don't charge the human rights activist for the human rights activism. You charge them with engaging in illegal speculation for the food they bought on the black market, even though that was the only way to avoid starvation, and everybody else did it too. In the worst case scenario, you charge them with "endangering national peace", "spreading misinformation" or "delivering correspondence without possessing a government license to do so" (for giving out pamflets).
"must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest" is exactly the shenanigans tyrants love. You can get away with absolutely anything with a law like that.
> In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
Sure, but legislators should generally avoid explicitly building the on-ramp to such behavior.
How has that been working in the US where both the legislation branch and judicial branch have willingly given their authority to the executive branch?
You would think the fact that I put "supposed to act as checks and balances." in my post would answer that but apparently not.
> So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
If an unchecked tyrant exists, do they really need the paper-thin facade provided by manhandling the English language to pretend that some law supports their actions?
Yes because tyrants still value the symbolism of pretext.
This is just making a slippery slope fallacy by circuitous means.
The point of all laws and thus the courts is that each new action provides an opportunity to debate and decide on whether an action is lawful, and thus determine whether it should proceed.
You are arguing that all such decisions would always be decided in favor of the tyrant because they're a tyrant ala a slippery slope: the law exists, all things will be declared lawful, ergo all things are allowed with no further challenge.
This can certainly be true, but it doesn't naturally follow.
Show me a tyrant that doesn’t have rules and laws. Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, Sadam Hussein’s Iraq, and Russia still have law creating and law enforcing bodies. A good chunk of those countries even hold elections.
Hell, even in medieval England the king didn’t have absolute authority and had to worry about political alliances abcs political support of the other nobles.
You should go read the dictator’s handbook. Think about it from the perspective is the tyrant - there’s one of you. How do you establish control over groups of other people? Just ordering people around doesn’t work. You need to create a power base. You can go broad and give riches back to the people or narrow and give riches to people who have power and influence already. Dictator’s generally go the latter route because you’re not at the whim of changes in political mood and individual problems can be managed easily. But you still need to tap into symbolism and other institutions to lend yourself legitimacy to avoid uprisings.
It sounds like you completely agree with the comment you replied to?
in that case they can just vote in whatever law they want or they can hold starving kids hostage and forbid anybody from helping - I don't think this law in particular will make any of it worse.
give a man a shovel, and a treasure map, but dont tell him he is digging his own grave.
Yes. That has been a problem. Several states outright ignored the scotus Bruen decision.
Yea a Supreme Court ruling 110 years after a law passed only for them to reverse course 2 years later. Surely that’s based on the constitution and nothing else.
Is your argument that you should only listen to Supreme Court judgments that you agree with?
Or is it that they have some settling in time before you need to actually pay attention to them?
How would you expect checks and balances to work when a single party controls all the branches? Is this a serious comment?
It seems strange (or maybe you are just young) that you think this. But both Democratic and Republican controlled Congresses have fought against excesses of their own President. The same is true for the Supreme Court in the past ruling against an administration of its own party.
There was an entire coalition of “Blue Dog Democrats” that came from red states as recently as 30 years ago.
Or did you really forget that even in Trumps first term that Republicans like McCain voted against Trump snd 10 voted to impeach him?
The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship. The behavior of republicans decades ago is irrelevant, and it's obvious that MAGA has learned lessons from Tumps first term.
Perhaps it's you who haven't been paying attention? I find older people have a lot of unfounded faith in these failing institutions, but if you try to keep up you'll see this isn't the same America you grew up in.
Yes way back in 2016-2020 when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
> it's obvious that MAGA has learned lessons from Tumps first term
Read all the words in a comment before replying to it.
2016 might well have been 1916. The state of US politics is night and day different now.
And 2021 was when the republicans decided to protect Trump after his half-assed failed coup attempt. He should have been locked up but the republicans decided to protect him.
How many Republicans were purged from party leadership after they didn’t vote to shelter Trump from the consequences of attempted election theft? His first term you had Romney, McCain, Cheney, etc. in Congress and a lot of people in his administration like John Kelly who had various lines they wouldn’t cross.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/trump-fascist-john-k...
Those people have all been purged. Any instinct you have for what Republicans will do which is older than 2021 is now actively misleading your judgement.
I get (and partly agree with) the point you’re trying to make, but do consider that the fact that Trump was ever elected at all, let alone twice, is really not helping your argument.
> The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship.
remember the "sanctuary city" thing? That kind of blind obeisance to the tribe and defiance to the federal government smells awfully like what MAGA does today.But let me guess: it's okay when your tribe does it?
So this is a fascinating example of left vs right thinking.
To those on the left, why you do things matter. Breaking a law that is widely regarded as unjust is considered to be a moral action as long as it helps people.
The difference is being able to understand that "defying the federal government" is neither an absolute moral good nor is it an evil. Why you're doing it is the more important reason.
> Breaking a law that is widely regarded as unjust
That's not the "why" for so-called "sanctuary city" practices. The answer is more pragmatic: local law enforcement needs all local residents to cooperate with them to be able to do their jobs.
If undocumented people are afraid to report crimes or be a witness, that hinders investigations and prosecutions of more serious crimes.
That is not left or right issue. Why you do things matters to everyone.
What you're talking about, which the left can certainly be said to have been guilty of, is selective enforcement, where people who purport the right motivations (read: politics) are fine to do things that others are not.
Well, no. It's the right, for example, that constantly saw the "spectre of pedophiles" everywhere, including a random pizzerias basement, but when it comes to Epstein Files and his friends, many of who are in office, they suddenly don't care. Leftists, are, at least as far as i can tell, very consistent in not liking child molesters.
There's a huge amount of rightists against ALL abortion, until they suddenly need one. I don't know of any leftists that are ever like "I think abortions should be legal except for that one person who I don't like".
To follow your format, apparently the entire left is okay with releasing convicted sexual predators back into society, when legally they should have been deported.
Now, I don't think the left is actually in favor of that, but their policies cause this to happen.
There's plenty of folks on the right who want to see the "Epstein Files" released. There's also plenty of folks on the right who are against abortions and still end up having the kid even though it will cause difficulties for them. If you're unaware of this, you may want to broaden how you're exposed to opposing views a little more.
And there are plenty on the right who call themselves “evangelical Christians” but constantly defend a theee time married adulterer who pays off prostitutes and brags about grabbing women against their wills…
The President of the uS literally admitted to being a sexual predator on tape.
> but when it comes to Epstein Files and his friends, many of who are in office, they suddenly don't care. Leftists, are, at least as far as i can tell, very consistent in not liking child molesters.
This is totally ahistorical. This was not too long ago a "far right conspiracy" as the right was genuinely concerned about it, and it's only that Trump is in the firing line for Epstein that the left has jumped on it as a cause. Which is the opposite of a principled stance.
No city is “defying federal laws” by not cooperating with federal law enforcement to enforce federal laws. In fact, the Supremr Court has specifically said that enforcing immigration is the responsibility of the federal government.
https://www.cliniclegal.org/resources/removal-proceedings/pr...
This doesn't fully capture it, because the right is clearly fine with lawlessness.
The distinction is the left cares about why, as you said, while the right cares about who. If the Right People are breaking the law (Trump, ICE, the youth pastor), it's okay.
If every accusation is an admission, GP admits it plainly: "it's okay when your tribe does it?"
I think another way to say this is that some people see laws as one layer in a stack of principles of varying degrees of generality, and believe that it makes sense to oppose a policy at more specific layer if it conflicts with a more basic principle at a deeper layer. Others see laws as just arbitrary dictates: you follow the law or you don't, and that's it, the law doesn't represent or instantiate any principles or ideals, it just is what it is.
I'm not sure the distinction here maps cleanly onto a left/right political axis though. People on the right also think that stuff like refusing to serve gay people or (at least in the past) standing in a schoolhouse door to block racial integration constitutes a form of legitimate resistance or protest against unjust laws. And there are certainly those on the right who believe that certain acts are okay (or more okay) when done by certain people (e.g., the homeless, oppressed racial/ethnic groups).
It does seem to just come down to different views of what principles are in that stack and what the priority ranking is. An obvious case is that many on the right would give certain tenets a central, foundational status on religious grounds, whereas it's increasingly the case on the left that religion isn't considered a legitimate basis for public policy. And in fact, the divide is even deeper, since many on the left consider that secular perspective itself central and foundational --- one side thinks certain things should be illegal because religion says so, while the other side considers it wrong for the law to even take account of what religion says.
In light of this what I find frustrating is that so many of those on the left (especially those holding political office) are unwilling to turn against those institutions themselves on the same grounds, namely that the institutions are subverting and impeding more basic ideals of freedom and justice. Democratic politicians shouldn't be arguing about this or that Supreme Court decision or what this or that Senator did or didn't do; they should be arguing that the Supreme Court and the US Senate are undemocratic institutions and should be swept away entirely, along with a good bit of other governmental cruft, in the furtherance of the root goals of democracy and equality.
Yes next up - look at all of those evil lawless people during the civil rights movement who dared stand up against Jim Crow laws
More recently, the difference between leaning on tech companies during an epidemic and a President leaning on companies to personally give him money.
> "leaning on tech companies during an epidemic"
The government partnering with businesses to restrict speech is actually a really bad thing. Thankfully we've pulled back from that now. Trump being corrupt and a garbage human doesn't negate that fact.
I think it would be interesting to hear your take on this hypothetical situation: I have been cursed by the Devil himself, so that whenever I say "xyzzy" and then the name of a person and then "plugh", that person drops dead.
Should the government restrict my speech?
The devil doesn't exist, nor does magic.
The law does speak on this though, already. If you run a gang, and you say out loud "Charlie is such a pain" and every time you say that phrase, the person you named is killed, you are also held liable for those killings.
So a restriction of speech.
Yep, lots of ways that we restrict speech. Criminal speech is not protected. Business speech is also not protected. Telling Eastasia about our new spy plane is also not protected.
Saying stupid, abhorrent, wrong, etc things online is, thankfully, protected. If you don't think that it should be, just imagine the person you dislike politically the most being the one who decides what should be allowed and what shouldn't.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Earlier you stated - and I quote - "the government partnering with businesses to restrict speech is actually a really bad thing" but now you state it's okay to restrict certain classes of speech. Is it bad or isn't it? Suppose every time I tweet "xyzzy", someone's name, then "plugh", they die. Would the government be justified ordering Twitter to ban me?
I don't actually need to use magical examples any more since you provided three of your own:
> Criminal speech is not protected.
So if I keep tweeting "kill this guy" and people are killing all the guys I name, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
> Business speech is also not protected.
So if I tweet "I'm buying Twitter for $420 per share" and then don't do it, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
> Telling Eastasia about our new spy plane is also not protected.
So if I tweet to Eastasia about our new spy plane, should the government partner with Twitter to restrict my speech?
This actually happened, on Discord. Was it really bad when the government partnered with Discord to restrict the speech of that War Thunder player?
So you're murdering people and asking whether the government should stop you? Obviously? Not just by restricting your speech but by using lethal force if necessary.
So you agree that speech which causes deaths should be restricted?
It's not speech. You have a gun that fires when you say a word. You having a setup that fires the gun when you say a word instead of pulling a trigger doesn't mean you are utilizing "speech" in any meaningful sense of the word, other than that the gun responds to a sound.
There is no gun involved. I say the words, and the person dies. Should the government restrict my speech?
Again, we don't live in a fairyland, we live in reality. A gun is real, your magic is not. If you had a gun that fired based on a sound, the fact that a sound is used does not matter. It is not "speech". Noise is not protected speech.
Likewise, if you had the magical ability to kill a random person with your magical sounds, you are not practicing "speech", you are using a magical technique in your make believe land to kill random people.
Yes, for some definition of "speech which causes deaths". This definition should include calls to violence but exclude, for example, vaccine skepticism.
There's a big ol' messy line between a powerful entity saying "I would like you not to do that" and "I'm going to stop you from doing that".
We don't want to be in some world where the gov can't ask people to stop being/hosting vaccine deniers.
We have pulled back from that with Trump suing companies who have said things against him and then paying him off - see Paramount, Disney, Facebook, X, and Google.
Not to mention the new press corp policy that everything that press says about the Pentagon has to be approved by the government. It was a policy so abhorrent that Fox News even refused to sign.
He even threatened to take away ABCs broadcast license because someone criticized a dead racist podcaster.
Conservatives all over the US - especially in “the free state of Florida” - are firing public officials who criticize him.
(and every time I dare say that Kirk was a racist who said a good “patriot” should bail out the person who best Pelosi’s husband almost to death, I get flagged)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
I like how the first quote on that link was taken out of context. It let's me know that the rest of those likely are as well.
The statement he was making was that programs like Affirmative Action and DEI can lead a person to think those things, and he doesn't want to think those things.
Not a fan of his, but if he's such an evil person, one wouldn't have to resort to twisting his words.
So what “context” makes this okay “ If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”?
What “context” makes it okay to call someone a “patriot” if they would be willing to pay to bond out the guy who beat Pelosi’s husband almost to death?
Did he also speak out against the unqualified people in the Trump administration like RFK Jr., and the entire DOGE effort? Where is the outrage about Trump appointing his own lawyer to be a DA who has never prosecuted a case because all of the qualified ones wouldn’t go after his enemies? Is it only “unfair” if a non White person (supposedly) gets a job they aren’t qualified for?
So he was “just saying what other people think”. He was actually a good caring Christian man that wouldn’t say a bad word about anyone…
Most of the time when “great men” die, their true believers quote what they said during their life. Not one of his supporters will quote his most famous speeches.
The “sanctuary city” label was applied to local governments doing what local governments are supposed to do. There’s nothing in the US Constitution which forces cities, counties, and states to enforce Federal laws. That’s why there are Federal law enforcement agencies, and more of them than most people know.
The FBI, CBP, ICE, US Postal Service, USDA, the Park Service, the Secret Service, the US Marshalls, the Marine Fisheries Service, USACID, US Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Office of Odometer Fraud Investigation, Administrative Office of the United States Courts Office of Probation and Pretrial Services, Tennessee Valley Authority Police and Emergency Management, DEA, ATF, all the departmental offices of Inspectors General, and a whole bunch more account for over 130,000 officers with powers of arrest (and usually armed, or will otherwise partner with armed agents from somewhere else).
Cities and counties should be enforcing city, county, and state laws. They are not political subdivisions directly of the federal government, and their taxes and resources should be spent on their own jurisdictions.
From what I can tell, all Sanctuary City means is that locals will not cooperate with federal law enforcement unless it is legally required. Which seems right to me? States are independent entities with their own laws.
Exactly, sanctuary city/state laws are an application of 10th Amendment reserved powers of the states, and particularly the principle known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine”, hinted at in in dicta concerning hypotheticals regarding the Fugitive Slave Laws in cases shortly before the Civil War and first applied as a basis for judgement by the Supreme Court in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).
Even where the Constitution grants the federal government authority to make laws and to provide for their enforcement, it generally does not have the power to direct states to use their resources to enforce those laws. Sanctuary laws simply restrict the conditions in which state or local resources will be used to enforce certain federal laws.
They just said they won’t be deputized to do something that’s the federal government’s responsibility any more than a city government is responsible for going after federal tax evaders.
Municipal government does not have any power, obligation nor responsibility to enforce federal law.
Lowering themselves to be federal snitches, they reduce compliance with state and local laws which actually impact the public, and create a variety of other problems that hurt the community. Where does it end? Should states investigate purchases that may enable the violation of federal law? You realize that there’s almost no limit to what can be technically constructed to be a federal felony. Why is immigration so special?
To conservative thinkers, sitting behind their keyboards in the cushy suburbs, the concept of states’ rights ends with the oppression of minority voting and pillaging of the environment. Anyone, regardless of politics, who is comparing that legal concept to support of the lawlessness the regime is carrying out should really look within.
sanctuary cities are there partly due to government trying to be (just a little bit :) ) lawless… if ruling party was obeying the laws there wouldn’t be any need for “sanctuary cities” so pick another example
your “tribe” in particular is *all about State rights” unless of course States do what the Tzar doesn’t like, right?!
Sanctuary city laws were largely driven by local law enforcement and community services agencies and the way fear of being targeted (personally, or family, or community members) by immigration authorities in the event of law enforcement or other government contact complicated enforcement of local enforcement of non-immigration laws and delivery of local services in communities with significant immigrant populations; mitigating that fear related to contact with local government and leaving enforcement of federal law to federal authorities improved the ability of local governments to serve their own priorities.
In my city, the origin of those laws was partially trying to push the national discourse for immigration reform but mostly due to wanting law enforcement, public health, and education to work better. Without legal paths, you inevitably get people who are joining relatives who are here legally, trying to appeal refugee decisions, etc. where those people are not causing problems but could be victims of crimes everyone wants to be reported and you don’t want perverse incentives like a minor who is a citizen being deprived of education or other support because they have a caretaker who is not a legal resident and doesn’t want to listen to themselves on official forms.
Sanctuary cities are there to shelter people who enter the country illegally. That's not the government being lawless.
They were not a reaction to recent ICE moves; you've no history, and have reversed cause and effect.
In the 1980s they were a great moral move originally by the southwestern churches, they've just expanded into electorate jerrymandering and virtue signalling.
So-called "sanctuary cities" have made the judgement that their law enforcement apparatus will be more effective if people who fear immigration authorities are willing to interface with it. They can't and don't stop enforcement actions by federal authorities (see Chicago, right now) - but they view active cooperation with those efforts as detrimental to other law enforcement activities. You might disagree with that assessment, but it is a straightforward exercise of the municipal power to allocate its own resources.
Claiming that they are "there to shelter people who enter the country illegally" is disingenuous at best. In reality, that is neither the goal nor the effect.
educated and sane comments like this don’t do well when debating issues that people believe politicians about :)
Nonsense, how does sanctuary cities anything at all to du with gerrymandering?
If people can vote without proving citizenship, then you can just import illegal immigrants who will vote for you.
This is a boogeyman that needs to die. Conservative groups have been trying to find evidence of substantial illegal votes for decades and the only illegal votes are the false electors that Trump’s cronies used to try to steal an election in 2020.
This is essentially the "strict scrutiny" standard, which governments have to achieve in order to violate your strongest constitutional rights (e.g. 1A). If you don't spell it out, then it might be delegated to a lower standard like "rational basis".
Correct.
This is how laws are written. A court would determine whether the state is abusing or violating this public safety carve-out.
And this exact method is how we got minimum lot sizes, setbacks, FAR, and a burgeoning affordability and homelessness crisis. It's a blank check.
Yes, the ability to litigate is key. Only a few can afford it.
Seems like a lazy way to write a law. Basically just gives any governor whose party controls the supreme court a blank check. The law should qualify what public safety means
You want discretion for judges so that they can respond to the problems of their era wisely rather than rigidly applying the ideas of another time without nuance
Unless those judges themselves have a fondness for an imaginary "great" time, and will apply their reasoning in a way that just happens to fit their ideology.
Law is either rigorous or it's not. When I'm told that the law is against me but gosh darn it the law is the law, I grow resentful of the "discretion" reserved for some but not others.
There’s no eliminating humans from human civilization. No risk no fun.
What drives me nuts is the way lawyers (of all stripes) keep praising "legal reasoning". None of it strikes me as even vaguely rigorous.
I'm not a lawyer so I could well be completely off base here. But if my perception is correct, I would much rather they admit that it's fundamentally up to someone's gut feeling. That's more honest than telling me that a bit of reasoning is airtight when it's not.
The true honesty is that judges may rule however they please, regardless of the reasoning. In many cases they require their intuition to guide them. In that sense, it is already up to their gut feeling.
At some point someone needs to weigh the facts, and they are given great discretion to do so. It is generally a good thing, because we have multiple layers of appeal to prevent obviously horrible outcomes.
So this legislation, like all legislation, provides guidance for the good faith judge to help weigh the facts. There is no guidance that will prevent a bad faith judge from ruling badly: You do not need a clause about public safety to get the ruling you want, but there is an argument that your ruling may perhaps be less scrutinized.
There’s a reason an attorney’s answer is always “it depends” :) No legislation is truly airtight from abuse.
A judge can rule however they please, but if it goes against legislated law or precedent, it can (and should) be appealed. Sure, if the highest appellate determines the law says something different than it really does, that’s that, but it’s not like most judges have carte blanche to determine the outcome of any legal entanglement on a whole.
> gives any governor whose party controls the supreme court a blank check
Here's the thing: this is not supposed to be a thing. Not supposed to be how things work at all, but it kind of does now.
So the trust implicit in the broad language of our laws gives - has been giving - a massive advantage to bad faith actors who obtain power.
It appears to be a law that is simply adding restrictions to what the state can do (like the first amendment, the best sorts of laws IMO). It’s not granting people limited rights. Any existing rights people had under the fourth or first example, for example, are still in place, this just sounds like further restrictions on the state.
What are rights besides restrictions on the state?
This phrasing is not by itself unusual; this almost mirrors the requirements for strict scrutiny.
Do tyrants care about law? They find ways to work around law, write new law, and rule by decree.
Democracy is largely following norms and tradition of respecting the people and laws, but it can also be ignored when those in power shift.
Agree - it feels a lot like emergency measures, which are broadly abused at every level of the government and by both major parties.
Yeah, so much that my feel is this law basically gives the state of Montana the right to confiscate computing equipment rather than the right to of the owner to have and use it. I understand that the intent of those involved in passing this was to protect civilians from the state, but such a broad and unspecific carve out just makes me think that a radical from either side could paint with quite a broad brush. “Who’s the terrorist today?” Kind of thing.
I know what you mean, but this is actually as strong as a protection in Montana (and probably elsewhere) gets. The burden is high. Montana's RTC bill had strong and competent libertarian input.
I see your point, but a tyrant doesn't need to follow laws in order to do tyranical things
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So this is probably just to attract datacenters with the promise there will be no recourse for the local environmental consequences and the horrible noise for neighbors.
This is exactly what's happening. There are some huge data center projects in progress in Montana.
Exactly. All of the people in comments here thinking this has any impact on right to repair or open source are thoroughly kidding themselves. Lawmakers don't get out of bed in the morning to fight for nerds or the working class.
Does The Hum fall under the 1st Amendment? ;)
That’s no hum, it’s the sound of shareholder value.
So, the bill:
* Reaffirms (state) government power to restrict individuals in computing
* Suggests that when a restriction infringes on your rights, but not on some specific fundamental rights, then then governmenty actions need not be limited.
* Legitimizes the control of infrastructure by artificial intelligence systems.
* Mostly doesn't distinguish between people and commercial/coroprate entities: The rights you claim to have, they will claim to also have.
Wonderful...
>revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.
They are going to seriously let it lose, when we talk about "revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time".
That's .. unexpectedly broad? A strict interpretation of that would mean no gaming consoles and certainly no iPhones.
Their fundamental promise is a gatekeeper that restricts a lot of things that are not only legal but many customers want to do, including trivial things like writing their own software.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources
If the government tried to block you from installing certain apps on your phone, that would fall under this law. Apple as a private company can still block whatever they want.
It does get a little interesting to imagine the interface here though: if I circumvent those restrictions, a strict reading would be that I'm allowed to because the mechanism by which Apple would stop me would be through the State.
Which in turn would put it in conflict with the DMCA.
There’s no conflict. DMCA trumps state law.
That seems like a correct interpretation and I don't like seeing it spelled out like this in a law. It seems more like a CAN-SPAM act than a step in the right direction.
So it's just a lot of hot air, simply because it is not the government that is restricting our right to compute. But the device makers, and software developers.
Google deciding to monopolize app installations is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
Device makers locking bootloaders is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
Bank applications refusing to run unless running on a blessed-by-google firmware on a device with a locked bootloader is a restriction on computing. Not the government.
> So it's just a lot of hot air, simply because it is not the government that is restricting our right to compute. But the device makers, and software developers.
No, it is only the government which can restrict these rights through violence and the threat of violence. Sony cannot restrict you from buying an Xbox or Nintendo.
But sony, microsoft and nintendo all heavily restrict what you can use their computer for, and what software you can run on it.
This is not a free-market issue. Yes, I am still free to buy another device. But if all device makers heavily restrict access, then this is a bunch of feel-good nonsense.
It is a free market issue, because when an oligopsony controls what can be bought and sold you don’t have a free market. These hardware vendors are controlling the market for software for their devices, and buyers are not free to make their own decisions about hardware they purportedly own.
You are also free to alter the device in any way you want as long as it doesn’t start emitting radio waves.
Modifying the hardware != running the software I want on the hardware I own.
So yes, your last statement is correct, but utterly irrelevant to this discussion.
> revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time
“You have 15 seconds to comply.”
Good job, Montana. There was a trend in proposed and passed policies that were eating at rights to own machines. Examples: DMCA anti-circumvention (right to repair and jailbreak), export controls for high-end chips and cybersecurity tools, proposals to weaken/negate e2e encryption or delay security updates, AI rules that you can't train past X amount (shortsighted for future of personal compute capacity), restricting individuals from crypto mining, etc. So basically a trend of restricting software use or modification on general-purpose hardware. Once the tiniest relevant policy lands, it tends to expand from there. Hence what Montana did.
I think this is just to make it so that data centers and crypto mining facilities can be built and operated where owners want. Makes it so zoning and environmental regulations can’t stop you as easily.
People need to be more skeptical. This is not going to be used to uphold individual rights, and that's not the intention. This will be used not only to fast track data centers, but to support companies like Flock and push back against any attempts to regulate widespread surveillance.
Aren't all of those federal efforts? This state law would have no effect on those.
Not sure, but to me the beauty of individual States who agree to Unite, is they get to keep all powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government, which creates 51 different A/B tests, to see which ones others would want to adopt or champion.
^^^ Ok, I just learned that concept from a recent tweet from Linus Torvalds.
Ug, this bill is all about preventing regulation of multinational corporations, it has nothing to do with the right for individuals to compute anything.
Yep, I'd like to think this was a bill to protect my right to run any software I want to on hardware that I own, but it's actually a bill to keep Montana localities (cities, counties) from regulating or restricting data centers (noise, power, etc) in the interests of their residents. It's a state preemption bill restricting local democracy for the benefit of big business and polluters.
"Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety."
They can absolutely be regulated, but you must prove actual harm instead of "I don't want any data centers near me because of (conspiracy theory I read on Facebook)."
Question nobody wants to talk about: will this prevent courts from issuing "no computer" restrictions on persons convicted or being investigated for crimes involving computers?
I have seen clients go for many years without cellphones because a judge cassually attached a "no computer" protective order. It is hard enough finding work as a convict or person under investigation, but 10x harder for those without cellphones and email.
It does look to be a nudge in that direction, but it's not a slam-dunk. From my non-lawyer reading of the text, it seems like it would depend on how well you can argue that a total ban is not "narrowly tailored."
These restrictions must be scrapped completely. Along with this barbaric "criminal record" they delegate big chunk of the population to an underclass, well, unless they are rich.
I disagree for most crimes at least. Most crimes are either going to be some form of illegal dishonesty (theft, fraud, etc.) or violence. I would hope the company I work for is able to screen individuals for such behaviors before hiring them. “Willing to lie/cheat/steal for gain” in particular is such a huge red flag that any company who hired someone and ignored such red flags could reasonably be sued for negligence whenever that employee inevitably commits another similar crime. There are examples of this in the news literally today.
"Most" crimes are posession and/or status crimes. Either you are caught with something illegal (drugs, guns etc) or you violate some sort of protective restriction (parole violations for guns/drugs/alcohol). That, and just generally being drunk or high, represent the bulk of crimes that land people in jail. No dishonoesty or violence is required.
And who says violence should haunt the person for the rest of their lives? It could be a single act in unfortunate circumstances. Person pays for it once and should be free to live the rest of their lives as normal unless they reoffend. Except some special circumstances companies should have no fucking business about private lives of their employees.
What a pile of crap.
You say that now, but if your family member were hit by a drunk driver who was only in your city for work, and the employer knew the employee had a couple of DUIs but had them rent a car for travel anyway, you'd probably want them to be held somewhat responsible. We can't have it both ways.
This is very transparently an attempt to prevent regulation of AI companies
can you explain? it seems like the shutdown requirements specifically read as regulation which would apply to ai companies
SB212 is an AI bill. It also includes some guidelines around AI-controlled infrastructure. But, as the source explicitly discusses, the focus clearly seems to be around preventing AI regulation of private individuals (individuals also means corporations in the US).
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
> The MRTCA stands in stark contrast to recent regulatory efforts in other states, such as California, Virginia, and New York, where proposals to rein in AI technologies have either failed or been heavily revised. Montana’s approach leans toward empowering individual users rather than restricting access.
> grassroots group RightToCompute.ai
Sure, I completely believe this model legislation drafted by ALEC is being pushed by a "grassroots group" and not an industry lobbying organization. I wish reporters would be more careful with their language.
https://alec.org/model-policy/right-to-compute-act/
Maybe someone could have just came up with in a vacuum, but it looks like a response to other attempts to restrict AI by saying that models trained with more than X amount of compute resources have to follow tons of extra rules.
And, per the article, the group pushing this is AI and blockchain companies.
I guess this is like the second amendment, except for computers and GPUs? I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Maybe I'm naive, and I am definitely uncertain about how all this AI craziness is going to break -- whether empowering everyone or advancing ultra corporate dystopia. But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
The federalist wing of the drafters of the US Constitution didn't think a Bill of Rights was necessary because they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
So they didn't even think things like the First and Second Amendment were even necessary.
Fastfoward 250 years and now maybe the idea of a "right of the people to own and self host their own software, shall not be infringed" doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
>"right of the people to own and self host their own software, shall not be infringed"
Count me in.
True -- I like this take on it. I wonder where we will be 250 years from now.
"The law is antiquated and should be repealed. The framers could never have envisioned Our Supreme Lord AI and how irrelevant individual compute is today when writing that law."
Our current form of government doesn't seem likely to last 25 years, let alone 250.
Laws generally continue across governments anyway.
There's an oft-repeated factoid that recognizable organized civilizations last about 10 generations or 250 years on average. And then there's Strauss–Howe generational theory. There's no magic formula or universal fate except it's risky to have lots of corrupt, stupid leaders, injustice, inequality, and/or bad circumstances that do everything to avoid rare, effective leadership with integrity and labor wealth growing faster than capital wealth. Late stage capitalism is omnicidal and suicidal because the greedy fools involved tend not to care about or plan for the future, including a cognitive dissonance to deny anticipation of domination by externalities like changes in youth public sentiment, demographic shifts, geopolitical balances, and climate change. The current richest people in the world are drug addicts, warlords, pedophiles, and those who erroneously believe public beaches belong to them personally.
> they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
That's a perspective, but it seems to me that the Federalists didn't believe that government should be limited at all. The Constitution is a genie granting three wishes, and explaining beforehand that one of your wishes can be to wish for three more wishes.
Personally, it's always seemed obvious that the Federalists and their children have been the worst intellectual current in US government. They never had popular support at any time, and relied on the manipulation of power and position to accomplish personal goals (which is really their only ideology.) It began with a betrayal of the French Revolution, setting the US on a dirty path (and leaving the Revolution to be taken over by the insane.) The Bill of Rights is the only worthwhile part of the US Constitution; the rest of it is a bunch of slop meant to placate and protect local warlords and slaveholders. The Bill of Rights is the only part that acknowledges that individual people exist other than the preamble.
The Anti-Federalists were always right.
I agree with you that what we should be working on is specifying, codifying and expanding the Bill of Rights, rather than the courts continually trying to come up with new ways to subvert it. New ways that are never codified firmly, that always exist as vibes and penumbras. Rights shouldn't have anything to do with what a judge knows when he sees. If we want to abridge or expand the Bill of Rights, a new amendment should be written and passed; the Supreme Court is overloaded because 1) Congress has ceased to function and 2) the Senate is still an assembly of local warlords.
"Fastfoward 250 years and ..."
... the 10th amendment is largely ignored.
Ha. You reach for the 2nd but fail to realize that of all the Amendments, there is more legal precedent torture to sidestep that prohibition than any other amendment save maybe the 4th, 5th, and 10th.
There is a big push to limit what kind of models can be OSS'd, which in turn means yes, a limit to what AI you are allowed to run.
The California laws the article references make OSS AI model makers liable for whatever developers & users do. That chills the enthusiasm for someone like Facebook or a university to release a better llama. So I'm curious if this law removes that liability..
Maybe you've forgotten that the US at one time tried to ban encryption. They will try again too, I'm sure.
It's not about private citizens, for all they go on about “protecting rights”; this is transparently about preventing corporations from having their datacenters regulated.
> but is this actually addressing a real threat?
US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
A state law wouldn't have any effect on those anyway.
> But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
This law is not about them coming for your laptop. It's about some massive corporation is not allowed to cover all the land in data centers. Which one of you has more legal lobby power?
The gov doesn't need to come for your laptop if you are out of the job and can't even afford that laptop because everybody pays an LLM company instead
Think about this like you're openai not an average Joe:
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes
> I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Yes, the threat of mandated computational devices performing mandated computations to do things in regular life. Currently, these come almost exclusively from private companies (at least in the free world), but I think it's a good precedent for a government to recognize the dangers here. To be really helpful, it needs to ban those private companies from doing what they're doing. But this is a good start.
No one made the joke yet?
Right to bear ARMs.
You're thinking about your own situation - that's normal, but not enough: there are still loads of folks who don't have a computer but are expected to interface with their governments (municipal, county, state) using a computer, and have had to pay disproportionately more being in the least affluent and/or most vulnerable demographic.
It's not about losing access to laptops, it's about guaranteeing the right to even have access to the same tools that folks like us think everyone already has access to.
That seems like something different though. My understanding is that this is not about the government handing out free laptops, the same way the second amendment is not about the government handing out free guns. Rather, this is saying people have the right to own general purpose computers.
As far as government expecting you to interface with them using a computer, I loathe this trend. And of course it's infinitely worse if they require a specific proprietary platform like iOS or Android. But I don't think this is about that.
I'm totally with you as far as requiring a proprietary platform, but at some point we do just have to cut off obsolete methods of communication. We can't just keep supporting them forever.
Methods of communication like "face to face" or "mail" are not obsolete. Yes you can support them forever if that's literally your job as the government. And it should be.
Mail is completely obsolete and we shouldn't spend money to support it. I can't think of anything stupider than writing a message down on paper and physically transporting it to its destination. Not one cent of my taxes should be spent on maintaining it as a standard means of communication.
Mail is the opposite of obsolete. Ever bought anything and had it shipped to you? You probably used mail. A paper letter is just a special case of mail.
My taxes shouldn't be spent on putting up walls around the government and juicy contracts with technocrats excluding people from being able to sort things out with government. If I must first pay some technocrat to buy their computing terminal to contact government then government failed me.
Yes, and it happens to be the special case we are talking about here since the entire thing is about communication with the government. If you refuse to use email you choose to segregate yourself and it should be your own problem to deal with that, not anyone else's.
if you are so crazy about not paying more tax than needed think that having to buy a device is also a tax.
also next you will say there's too much email spam so we can't waste taxpayer money making them go through it, so we can only contact them using the approved app on approved hardware with remote atteststion to ensure you didn't root it. if you refuse, it's your problem segregating yourself.
of course later that app will require you to first talk to an LLM. only if LLM decides your problem is important enough you can really contact the government. why waste taxpayer money on supporting various legacy means of talking to taxpayers if it can be spent on billion dollar contracts with tech companies instead
Well you are the one who insists the government should support any means of communication anyone wants to use. So really you are the one advocating for LLMs and stupid device attestation crap. I just don't have patience for people who can't use email.
Not support any means, but means most open to people. People are not born with a computer and a phone, they are born with two legs, two hands and a mouth. So if they want to walk to the office or send a letter by post they should be able to.
a government that says contact us only using whatever current tech we think is fashionable today... I don't care, fax, email, tiktok, chatgpt, neuralink... for me is a government that is trying to avoid talking to its people (and to enrich tech lobbiers)
This is just going to be used to shut down environmental objections to data centers. It will have absolutely no impact for individuals, imho.
The name and rhetoric of the bill sound great, but the actual point of the bill is to make it impossible to stop AI companies and cryptominers from building data centers in your residential neighborhood.
The EU and UK keep trying to undermine encryption, so I'd say there's a pretty clear risk to the freedom of general purpose computation.
The US has tried more than once.
Maybe they are trying to lure in more money.
It's not like second amendment due to "limited to those demonstrably necessary"
You're not alone wondering about that. I would much rather have seen something along the lines of:
- right to internet connectivity (along with restrictions against some particularly offensive practices impinging access, including ads and popups when they are intrusive enough to substantially interfere*)
- right to utilize methods that protect personal privacy, like off-cloud computing (which I guess is partly covered here) and encrypted communications
- limit the extent to which online Terms of Service can bind you (i.e. deem unenforceable some of the worst clauses making their way around Silicon Valley, e.g. vague catchall indemnities that don't arise directly out of a user's breach of contract or illegal activity, incorporating third party terms of service by reference without explicitly stating what those terms are)
- identify activities that must be explicitly opt-in instead of opt-out (e.g. newly-introduced settings or features when they reduce a user's privacy, consents to sell user information / behavioral advertising / advertising remarketing / etc.)
---
* Think about it like driving down a road. Imagine if you couldn't even get get down the street or across an intersection without bumper-car-ing into some giant "acknowledge", "agree", "go away" buttons, and having to swerve around billboards that randomly jump into your lane.
Montana likely passed such a law because they have a governor and a senator who both came from the tech sector in big ways (sold the same company to oracle).
That said, there are a lot of other legal hurdles that would prevent Montana from ever being significant to the tech sector, despite the fact that I'm certain many skilled people would love to live there. From being the only state to not have at will employment to having a completely out of wack tax system (ratio between income and sales tax for a state entirely dependent on tourism), to countless restrictions (and often necessary because of water restrictions) on building large amounts of new housing, it just sin't happening.
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It doesn't sound like anybody really knows or has any clue about what this law will do or be used for. Exactly what are the implications?
This law prevents future politicians from writing laws that place restrictions on AI companies.
I think this signals to data center builders that Montana wants their business, and this is really just a publicity stunt.
I feel super happy for the 5 people and 20 cows who will benefit. (This is intended less a jab at Montana specifically and more at state and national politicians who only seem to have political gumption when it concerns the needs of less-populated states with particular demographics.)
Montana is the 7th least populated state but it has become a hub for the ultra-wealthy.[0][1] Many of those people made their wealth in tech.
It's not that surprising that a state this small could be easily influenced to pass a law that bans AI regulation
[0] https://montanafreepress.org/2023/04/17/how-an-avalanche-of-...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/17/nx-s1-5077696
Neat doublethink.
"Right to compute" but does not provide anyone with any right, waives away potential future regulations for tech companies.
BUT who could possibly need an escape hatch from AI regulations? Likely not Nvidia or Google or Apple,...
Companies and agencies making AI drone swarms or whatever the next gen AI policing/surveillance tech though, this is a godsend.
I have to wonder, where the palantir connection is. Is it hidden or are they brazen enough to flount it openly yet?
Really? - I took away that this does give people the right to use computers and AI technologies. I.e. the government can't ban or encumber those things. But I didn't see the full text in TFA. Can you elaborate a bit on how this does not meaningfully create any rights?
It's more about government not regulating companies than people.
The part about people says there has to be good reason to restrict people, which doesn't really mean much.
Montana, which has the 4th largest population of millionaires despite being the 7th lowest populated US state, passes a law to prevent AI regulation. I don't think that it's a coincidence that many of the wealthy individuals that have flocked to Montana made their wealth in the tech industry
Why have they flocked to Montana? I had no idea.
Abundance of natural beauty and recreation opportunities
To maintain an appreciable distance from the plebes.
I'm not sure exactly what this law does, but I would like to do with a computer anything I could theoretically and legally do with my mind.
Eg. If I'm a shopkeeper and see some customer coming in who stole stuff from the shop last time, I am within my rights to tell them to leave the shop.
However if I use a computer to do the same, many countries would disallow facial recognition, keeping databases of customers without consent, etc.
OK, but be careful what you wish for. We might get regulations on allowable thought if that's what's necessary to regulate computation.
Oh wow, Greg Gianforte managed to do something in politics I don’t vehemently hate.
He’s not a very nice person but he did at least used to own a tech company.
I used to do presentations at educational technology conferences and many (30+)years ago I speculated that "in the future" computers that could create would be licensed. This was based on the observation that every significant past technology under user control was eventually licensed for permission to operate - radio, television, cars, the list is long.
you need better examples than radio/tv/cars
radio/tv share the bands which are very narrow resource so licensing pretty much have to exist else there would be interference abound (imagine competing TV station just driving around with a jammer on competition
cars have that + the fact infrastructure is built by public money. Allowing anyone on anything with no training there literally costs lives
Or, copyright wise, to earn money in before digital world you kinda had to not have too much of copyright infringement - while artist today might get popular enough to subside on patreon/other form of digital tips, before it wouldn't be possible
This doesn't really disagree with the parent's thesis. You're just giving the long explanation for each event.
Any significant technological advancement necessarily uses some shared public resource which will drive people to regulate it. For AI folks are trying to get a lot of random things to stick: the power grid, water usage, public safety, disinformation.
>Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
....what does this say about DRM enforcement?
Exactly. I was hoping that this law would be the pushback to the overzealous prosecution of DeCSS, people who defeat DRM locks in order to lawfully back up the multimedia data that they already paid for, etc.
Somewhat related: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read
I also wonder what the impact of the law is on TPM chips on computers (restricting your ability to boot whatever OS you want), the locked-down iOS mobile app store, etc.
Most of the laws which touch on DRM are federal, and so they override any state laws due to the supremacy clause.
I admit I'm not knowledgeable about this law but as it's written it seems fairly meaningless to me, as it could be interpreted in many different ways, and the exclusion is a hole you could drive a metaphorical truck through.
Here's the actual text of the law: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3078731
It's hilarious that the text of this law is blocked behind an impassible cloudflare computational paywall.
I don't get it, accessing this from EU no issue
So impassible that I didn't even see it
What homelessness problem? I have a house, don't I?
Yep. Use a modern corporate browser and you'll have no problems personally (or so I assume from everyone saying so, I don't use chrome). Use anything else (ie, not-modern corp browser like FF pre-XUL death or some modern non-corporate browser) and you'll get blocked. I'm still getting blocked, btw. And it is cloudflare's block page. And it happens from my residential (comcast) IPv4 and multiple test IPv4 from other netblocks.
It is real. People are being blocked. Even if you aren't.
The major context of this law is regulations like Executive Order 14110, of 2023 (since rescinded),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38067314 ("Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (whitehouse.gov)"—337 comments)
It's a nice gesture, but I'm not sure it will matter. AI is likely already on the Federal radar for superseding regulation.
As long as laws are restricted to business services it shouldn't conflict. This is the right for citizens to use computation, business regulation is always a layer on top of that.
Um. Montana resident here. The state also had quite strong anti-corruption (aka campaign finance) laws, since the copper baron days. But the US Supreme Court ruled that doesn't matter (because their corruption trumps any state anti-corruption law presumably). So don't expect this to amount to anything.
Here is the official text: https://bills.legmt.gov/#/laws/bill/2/LC0292?open_tab=bill
I’m all for this movement provided it’s actually focusing on the rights of individuals rather than empowering corporations to own and operate massive amounts of computing power unchecked. When I first read the article, I frankly assumed this was meant to limit regulation on AI. From what I’ve read in the law that doesn’t seem to explicitly be the case, but given the organizations involved, I fully expect to see more in that vein.
Interesting, has the EFF done a writeup/opinion on this legislation yet? I tend to trust them on breaking things down from the legalese and implications.
Damn right. Keep yer damn laws off my exocortex!
I love how lawmakers jerk each other doing jack shit at the expense of the public.
This is a long text that actually says nothing.
Any idea how “citizen” is defined here? Does this apply, like speech (and campaign donations), to corporations?
Yes. In written laws "citizen" generally means any person and/or organization subject to the laws of the state. It doesnt mean just living people who can vote.
Many a young law student has pontificated that as non-citizens, visiting tourists have no rights. There is no more loaded a word in US politics, and none more malleable under the law, as "citizen". It means something different in every context.
I mean, without this law, are the people not allowed to use computing? What exactly is the difference it brings? Does it force government to provide computing to all citizens?
Makes it harder for people to oppose construction of data centers in their back yard
Can someone give an example of a law Montana passed or tried to pass that this law now prohibits a future legislature from passing?
I don't like a legislature compelling a future legislature to not have power, isn't that really a state constitutional thing?
This is going to be used to fuck over people, no way this is a good thing.
its' time for government owned agencies to be more open to integrating intelligent systems. I would prefer if this happens in india too.
What useless drivel. If you already have property rights then you have the right to own and operate computers.
The main thrust of the law is directly self contradictory.
"Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes..."
OK then just make the usage you don't like unlawful and you are allowed to violate this "protection".
individuals also means corporations in the US
Honestly, this sucks for people living in montana. It's hard to view this as a positive for anyone but business owners.
What does this make with Montana?
performative lawmaking
I mean, isn’t there also law that says people have basic rights to food, housing, healthcare?
What will this law change, effectively?
If there a law saying people have the right to food?
Okay, sorry, I’m not from the US. I thought the constitution might have something along those lines. I’m clearly wrong.
No wanting to bash this new law, just wanted to understand what it’s supposed to effectively change.
There is no basic right to food, housing, or healthcare. Your premise is wrong.
No, definitely not, not in Montana. Maybe in France or Vietnam.
No...?
Looks like regulatory capture. What do the AI bros want to do that they require such law?
I guess it is future proofing to defend scraping. Scraping that ignores robots.txt