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Comment by dynm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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?

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.

I doubt that. The world is a vast place with many governments and there are lots of major companies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

No, I really don't think Google and Apple are using Android/iPhone cameras or microphones for mass surveillance.

> The government is.

Companies too.

Companies can't use violence against individuals who do things they don't like.

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)

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 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?

>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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

You can and get that in the UK, surely?

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.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What are you on about?

>in the US we don't give non-state organization power over other people.

False.

> 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?

> 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.

What restrictions do European governments impose on the state?

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.)

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'.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

"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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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 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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes way back in 2016-2020 when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

2016 might well have been 1916. The state of US politics is night and day different now.

> it's obvious that MAGA has learned lessons from Tumps first term

Read all the words in a comment before replying to it.

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.

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.

> 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.

give a man a shovel, and a treasure map, but dont tell him he is digging his own grave.

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.

It sounds like you completely agree with the comment you replied to?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I see your point, but a tyrant doesn't need to follow laws in order to do tyranical things

This phrasing is not by itself unusual; this almost mirrors the requirements for strict scrutiny.

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.

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.

Does The Hum fall under the 1st Amendment? ;)

That’s no hum, it’s the sound of shareholder value.

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.

This is exactly what's happening. There are some huge data center projects in progress in Montana.

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.

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.

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.

> revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time

“You have 15 seconds to comply.”

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