I think the main content of this law (https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3212152) is just two paragraphs. I'd suggest reading them yourself rather than relying on secondary description:
"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."
"When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a critical artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system that is reasonable and considers guidance and standards in the latest version of the artificial intelligence risk management framework from the national institute of standards and technology, the ISO/IEC 4200 artificial intelligence standard from the international organization for standardization, or another nationally or internationally recognized risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems. A plan prepared under federal requirements constitutes compliance with this section."
In particular, I think the reporting is straight wrong that there's a shutdown requirement. That was in an earlier version (https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3078731) and remains in the title of this version, but seems to have been removed from the actual text.
Before the law, I think the state government or local governments could (by passing a law) restrict computing for any reason, even without a government interest. Now, they'd have to repeal this first.
I know the whole 90s meme of 'I am a controlled munition' went around because cryptography was labeled an ordnance subject to export control laws, and therefore code that performed those kind of computations were forbidden to be sold abroad, liable to a felony.
What happens today? Government gets rights to source code, logs, and rubber stamps/rejects your code from executing in the cloud?
Government limits your access to commodity infrastructure?
Laws like this make it much simpler for someone to challenge a law or regulation. They don't have to convince the judge (and possibly appeals court) that building or using a computer is a form of protected expression, this law says it is.
It may seem kind of flimsy or non-consequential, but while it's not a massive change, it is a really change and it's constructive.
How? By default, state governments can pass basically whatever laws they want. They don't have (theoretically) limited enumerated powers like the federal government.
When you contextualize the law with comments like this
"The initiative... contrasts with recent restrictive legislation efforts in states like California and Virginia. Zolnikov, a noted advocate for privacy, has been instrumental in pushing for tech-friendly policies that ensure individual liberties in an evolving digital landscape.
"'As governments around the world and in our own country try to crack down on individual freedom and gain state control over modern technologies,' Zolnikov said. 'Montana is doing the opposite by protecting freedom and restraining the government.'"
And it's the normal framing we always see with this crap. This is more an attempt to protect corporations from regulation then it is to protect individuals.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I highly suggest getting something like a burner number. Google Voice and Twilio usually work for me, but sometimes they are flagged VOIP and blocked.
Most places that ask for a phone number refuse to accept Google Voice or Twilio phone numbers. It's specifically to guarantee you have a cell-phone assigned number. Can anyone confirm whether Anthropic allows Google Voice or Twilio numbers?
As you say, it's sort of a cat-and-mouse game, and I'd rather not play it. Fortunately, there are plenty of competitors that don't require a phone number.
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.
There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)
It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.
With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.
There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.
If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.
Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.
Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.
I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.
But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.
Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.
Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.
These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.
If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Pay for the service.
Then pay more to remove ads.
But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.”
And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
True, but also, businesses have used "coupons" for a long time. I saw one article where this was described as "selling the same product at multiple tiers".
eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.
Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.
I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")
When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
I don't mind sponsored ads that are mostly static inside the video or text. Also if creators accept sponsors that are too bad their reputation might be affected.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
A particular aspect of the discussion is also: What makes you trust that once micropayments are around ads will stop? Look at other services, like Netflix for example. They will happily have you pay and show you ads if they feel they can get away with it.
I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.
Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.
With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.
I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
This is exactly my problem with ads. They've turned into a spying mechanism that eats my battery, bandwidth, and privacy. Not only do the ad platforms want to track me but then sell their data to an innumerate number of "partners". I have no control or influence over how any of the data is used. I also have no meaningful way to opt out.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
For a few years in the webcomic & blog space there was Ryan North's Project Wonderful, which served unintrusive auctioned banner ads that were usually advertising another creator's genuinely interesting work; I have no problem at all seeing ads for things sincerely made by humans.
Mozilla tried this. But the only people who want this is consumers. Advertisers want as much info as possible to target ads so would never choose this option unless heavily pressured by consumers.
Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advertising as long as it works and they will pay an amount commensurate with how well it works. If a publisher chooses to run ads without tracking, whether that's a network like ours or just buyout-the-site-this-month sponsorships, they have options as long as their audience generates value for advertisers.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.
They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You could argue that search ads are pretty contextual although there's more at work there. Every ad in a physical magazine is a contextual ad. Physical billboards take into account a lot of geographical context: the ads you see driving in LA are very different than the ones you see in the Bay Area. Ads on platforms like Amazon, HomeDepot, etc. are highly contextual and based on search terms.
Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.
What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?
My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.
Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them.
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
What if the sender covered the micro transaction on the behalf of the receiver? People might be more inclined to send what they see as micro-gifts, rather than micro-obligations.
Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.)
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT.
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.
This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
> Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.
> rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
> You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.
They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.
Most people are not paying per call or paying anything. If the goal is to reduce half a million readers to a core group of thousands who will pay then this idea might work.
There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible.
The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.
It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?
The solution is called centralization by a middle man that takes a massive cut - eg YouTube Premium. Only Google makes real money off that, and the content creators rely on sponsors instead for their own revenue. So does it really work? I would despise a future where we solve micro transactions by giving up control to yet-another unnecessary body. Especially not even at the level of Visa or Mastercard, despite how much I dislike crypto.
No, that is absolutely 100% not micropayments, as the consumer is not paying per view/article/video whatever. They're paying a fixed fee and are not metered.
Good to know. Now I think I know why micropayments for news media never took off: because people who want to read news media probably don't want to waste mental cycles on keeping track of a micropayments account. They want a set-and-forget solution with a predictable cost. If micropayments can't fit those expectations, then the market probably wants something other than the thing we're calling micropayments.
Goes like the following:
Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.
Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
Nope! That's the fun part! All the misery from the downsides, none of the upside! But imagine how much worse it could be! /s
There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.
Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).
That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.
Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)
As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.
Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?
You already can with traditional finance. The only thing stopping that from being the case is that the news orgs don't want to sell their product that way, and you can't force them to. That's kind of a them thing. They get to dictate their terms, you don't like them, that's fine. Their answer would be you aren't their target demographic. Besides which, do you really want to create an arrangement by which someone sneaking in an XSS driven script will drive your browser to visit their entire catalog, and piping the content to /dev/null or similar, you getting charged for every GET?
The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.
Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.
Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.
I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
Don't want to end up on the Sanctioned Entity List? Avoid anything that might make you controversial to a Federal Bureaucrat, and never do business with or on behalf of anyone already on the list. That's pretty much the only criteria to get on it. It's considered to be under the auspices of "Foreign Policy" so is under the sole discretion of the Federal Executive.
A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.
Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...
As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.
Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.
If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.
Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.
But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.
Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.
And for those long investigation stories, you can sell the series cheaper up front and give access to all the stories related to that case. Or nickel and dime each post.
A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.
I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
What I find puzzling about these proposals is that it SEEMS like they could be designed to achieve 90% of the stated goals with almost 0% of the loss of privacy.
The idea would be that devices could "opt in" to safety rather than opt out. Allow parents to purchase a locked-down device that always includes a "kids" flag whenever it requests online information, and simply require online services to not provide kid-unfriendly information if that flag is included.
I know a lot of people believe that this is just all just a secret ploy to destroy privacy. Personally, I don't think so. I think they genuinely want to protect kids, and the privacy destruction is driven by a combination of not caring and not understanding.
I generally try to think of things like this in terms of the natural incentives of systems, politicians, and well-meaning voters smoking hopeium. But now with the revelations of how insidious the Epstein class is, I have to wonder if the reason all these digital lockdowns are being shamelessly pushed with a simultaneous urgency is really just because of a giant fucking conspiracy. The common wisdom has always been that conspiracies naturally fall apart as they grow, succumbing to an increasing possibility of a defector. But I think that calculus might change when the members have all got mortal crimes hanging over their heads.
Never mind thinking about how legitimacy was laundered through scientific institutions, and extrapolating to wondering how much that same dynamic applies to "save the children" lobbying NGOs and whatnot.
Better yet, require online services to send a 'not for kids' flag along with any restricted content then let families configure their devices however they want.
Even better, make the flags granular: <recommended age>, <content flag>, <source>, <type>
No - Kid friendly should be something site's Attest to and claim they ARE. That becomes an FTC enforceable market claim (or insert other thing here).
Foreign sites, places that aren't trying to publish things for children? The default state should be unrated content for consumers (adults) prepared to see the content they asked for.
Just say the whole internet is not for kids without adult supervision and leave it at that.
It doesn't even matter if you can get something that technically works. Half the "age appropriate" content targeted at children is horrifying brainrot. Hardcore pornography would be less damaging to them.
This gets complicated when you need to start giving your kids some degree of independence. I would also argue this could be implemented in a more accessibility-oriented approach.
Also, not all 13-year-olds are of equal level of maturity/content appropriate material. I find it very annoying that I can’t just set limits like: no drug-referencing but idgaf about my kid hearing swear words.
On other machines:
I do not want certain content to ever be displayed on my work machine. I’d like to have the ability to set that.
Someone who has specific background may not want to see things like: children in danger. This could even be applied to their Netflix algorithm. The website: does the dog die, does a good job of categorizing these kinds of content.
But, in essence, they want to strip the ability of parents to give their kids the responsibility you describe. No letting your kids use social media, look adult content, or whatever else. It's simply banned.
- It's much easier for web sites to implement, potentially even on a page-by-page basis (e.g. using <meta> tags).
- It doesn't disclose whether the user is underage to service providers.
- As mentioned, it allows user agents to filter content "on their own terms" without the server's involvement, e.g. by voluntarily displaying a content warning and allowing the user to click through it.
This exact method was implemented back around the turn of the century by RSAC/ICRA. I think only MSIE ever looked at those tags. But it seems like they met the stated goal of today's age-verification proposals.
That's why I have a hard time crediting the theory that today's proposals are just harmlessly clueless and well intentioned (as dynm suggests). There are many possible ways to make a child-safe internet and it's been a concern for a long time. But, just in the last year there are simultaneous pushes in many regions to enact one specific technique which just happens to pipe a ton of money to a few shady companies, eliminate general purpose computing, be tailor made for social control and political oppression, and on top of that, it isn't even any better at keeping porn away from kids! I think Hanlon's razor has to give way to Occam's here; malice is the simpler explanation.
The "problem" back then was that nothing required sites to provide a rating and most of them didn't. Then you didn't have much of a content rating system, instead you effectively had a choice for what to do with "unrated" sites where if you allow them you allow essentially the whole internet and if you block them you might as well save yourself some money by calling up your ISP to cancel.
This could pretty easily be solved by just giving sites some incentive to actually provide a rating.
As others have said, the goal is the surveillance. But this notion goes further than that. So many ills people face in life can be solved by just not doing something. Addicted to something? Just stop. Fat? Stop eating. Getting depressed about social media? Stop browsing.
Some people have enough self control to do that and quit cold turkey. Other people don't even consciously realize what they are doing as they perform that maladaptive action without any thought at all, akin to scratching a mosquito bite.
If someone could figure out why some people are more self aware than others, a whole host of the worlds problems would be better understood.
The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Whether it is stated (or even designed) to protect kids, if it does anything more or different from that goal, it will perform those actions regardless of what is said about what the System should be doing.
I have not once seen a proposal actually contain zero knowledge proof.
This isn't something exotic or difficult.
It is clear to me there is ulterior motives, and perhaps a few well meaning folks have been co-opted.
A ZKP will work as a base, but the proof mechanism will have to be combined with anti-user measures like device attestation to prevent things like me offering an API to continually sign requests for strangers. You can rate-limit it, or you can add an identifier, both of which makes it not zero knowledge.
Parent's proposal is better in that it would only take away general purpose computing from children rather than from everyone. A sympathetic parent can also allow it anyway, just like how a parent can legally provide a teen with alcohol in most places. As a society we generally consider that parents have a right to decide which things are appropriate for their children.
> A ZKP will work as a base, but the proof mechanism will have to be combined with anti-user measures like device attestation to prevent things like me offering an API to continually sign requests for strangers
Spot on! The "technical" proposal from Google of a ZKP system is best seen as technically-disingenuous marketing meant to encourage governments to mandate the use of Google's locked down devices and user-hostile ecosystem.
The only sane way to implement this is to confine the locked-down computing blast radius to the specific devices that need child protection, rather than forcing the restrictions onto everyone.
I'm not sure what I feel about depriving teens of general purpose computing devices, either, which is the logical consequence of both the pseudo-ZKP scheme and parent's "underage signal". I believe most of us here learned programming through being able to run arbitrary programs, and that would never have happened if we only had access to locked down devices. And that habit of viewing computers as appliances controlled by other people isn't going to go away on their 18th birthday either.
Overall I think while there is a reasonable argument in favor of age verification for some types of sites, the harms of implementing it would drastically outweigh any benefits that it should not be done.
Sure, I'm sympathetic to that idea. The point is that it leaves such a decision up to parents, putting non-locked-down computers in the same position as any other potentially-harmful thing you might want to keep away from your kids.
Keeping parents in control also lets them make decisions contrary to what the corporate surveillance industry can legally get away with. For example we can easily imagine an equivalent of Facebook jumping through whatever hoops it needs to do to target minors, perhaps outright banned various places but not generally in the US. If age restrictions are going to be the responsibility of websites, then parents will still have been given no additional tools to prevent their kids from becoming addicted to crap like that.
Shooting from the hip about the situation you describe, I'd be tempted to give a kid a locked-down phone with heavy filtering (or perhaps without even a web browser so they can't use Facebook and its ilk), and then an unrestricted desktop computer which carries more "social accountability".
I think banning facebook/instagram/etc is one of the special cases where it makes more sense to be enforced by the site, because people use these out of mainly peer pressure and network effect. If a majority is kept off, the rest have little use for it regardless of their personal wishes. Heck, I'd reckon most kids don't actually want to use them all that much. Regardless of technical details, giving parents this control will also cause a lot of resentment if most parents don't go along.
As opposed to censoring internet content in general, which does not work because there will always be sites not under your jurisdiction and things like VPNs. I don't support any such censorship measures as a result.
But why not both? I'm coming from a USian perspective here where I don't see much possibility of actual widespread bans of these types of products, rather just a retrenching to what can be supported by regulatory capture.
Also, we're getting the locked down computing devices anyway - mobile phones as they are right now are a sufficient root of trust for parental purposes. So it seems pointless to avoid using that capability (which corpos are happy to continue embracing regardless) but instead put an additional system of control front and center.
> don't see much possibility of actual widespread bans
Why do you think there would be regulation to honor the "underage signal", but not explicitly ban social media sites for "unverified" users?
> seems pointless to avoid using that capability
It's not pointless, because relying on it will soon make these locked down devices mandatory for everyone under 18, and they will keep using it past 18. Everyone will lose general purpose computing, along with adblocking and other mitigations that protect you from various harms. It also leads to widespread surveillance being possible as parents will want to be able to "audit" their teen's usage.
> put an additional system of control front and center
The problem should be controlled at the source, not the destination, if feasible.
This means any legislation should be aimed at directing device manufacturers to implement software that can respect content assertions sent by websites.
> relying on it will soon make these locked down devices mandatory for everyone under 18, and they will keep using it past 18
Okay, but in 2026 we're basically at this point. Show me a mobile phone that doesn't have a bootloader locked down with "secure boot." For this particular threat that we had worried about for a long time, we've already lost. Not in the total-sweeping way that analysis from first principles leads you to, but in the day to day practical way. It's everywhere.
The next control we're staring down is remote attestation, which is already being implemented for niches like banking. The scaffolding is there for it to be implemented on every website - "verifying your device's security" - I get that on basically everywhere these days. As soon as 80% of browsers can be assumed to have remote attestation capabilities, we can be sure they will start demanding these signals and slowly clamping down on libre browsers (as has been done with browser/IP fingerprinting over the past decade)
Any of these talks of getting the server involved intrinsically rely on shoring up "device security" through remote attestation. That is exactly what can end ad-blocking and every other client-represents-the-user freedom.
> The problem should be controlled at the source, not the destination, if feasible.
You've already acknowledged VPNs and foreign jurisdictions, which means "at the source" implies a national firewall, right?
Unless your goal is to undermine any solution on this topic? I'm sympathetic to this, I just don't see that being realistic in today's environment!
I agree with controls on addictive/exploitative platforms like Facebook or Instagram. These can be feasibly controlled at the source.
In principle I agree with keeping some content away from children, but I don't think any of the implementations will work without causing worse problems, so I disagree with implementing those.
> in the day to day practical way
There's a world of difference between practically required and it being illegal to use anything else, even if initially for a small set of population. You still have a choice to avoid those now. Moreover there is a fairly large subculture of gamers etc opposed to these movements, and open computing platforms will take a long time to fizzle out without intervention.
If you mandate locked down devices for kids, it will very quickly become locked down devices for everyone except for "licensed developers", because no one gets a bunch of new computers upon becoming an adult, and a new campaign from big tech will try to associate open computers with criminals.
> Moreover there is a fairly large subculture of gamers etc opposed to these movements, and open computing platforms will take a long time to fizzle out without intervention.
You kind of skipped over the distinction I made between "secure boot" and "remote attestation". Based on what you wrote here I'm not quite sure if you understand the difference between them. And in the context of locked down computing, the difference between them, and their specific implications, is highly important.
I'm not pointing this out to shoot down your point or something, rather I think you'd benefit from learning about this outside of this comment. But I'll be a little more explicit here to get you started:
The worry with secure boot was based around the possibility that all manufacturers would stop making non-locked-down devices. This has not really panned out - all phones basically have secure boot, there are many you can install your own OS image onto, and there are many escape hatches.
The worry with remote attestation is that website owners will be able to insist that you run specific software environment and/or hardware, and deny you access otherwise. On desktop web browsers, this is the WEI proposal that seems to have stalled. But on mobile, this is still going full speed ahead, both web and apps (SafetyNet).
The thing about remote attestation is that its restrictions take the same shape as current CAPTCHA nags, IP block based hassling, etc. When websites see that more and more visitors are compliant, they can crank up the pain. First it's invisible, then it's a warning, then it's a big hassle (eg lots of CAPTCHAs), and then finally it's a hard lockout. This can happen, led by specific industries (eg banking), regardless of any communities working to resist it. What you should picture is all of our old computers working just fine, but being able to access modern websites in a way that cannot be technically worked around.
it may be simple to sleuth out over time kid status or not, but i would be very uncomfortable with a tag that verifies kid status instantly no challenges, as it would provide a targeting vector, and defeat safety.
> I think they genuinely want to protect kids, and the privacy destruction is driven by a combination of not caring and not understanding.
Advancing a case for a precedent-creating decision is a well-known tactic for creating the environment of success you want for a separate goal.
It's possible you can find a genuine belief in the people who advance the cause. Charitably, they're perhaps naive or coincidentally aligned, and uncharitably sometimes useful idiots who are brought in-line directly or indirectly with various powerful donors' causes.
I'm surprised that this article doesn't appear to mention the RCT on semaglutide and alcohol use disorder by Hendershot et al. that was published in JAMA Psychiatry in early 2025 (though it's possible I missed it) https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.4789
This was largely portrayed as a great result in the popular press although personally I think it was a bit of a disappointment given all the amazing anecdotes https://dynomight.net/glp-1/
What made it a disappointment? Over only 9 weeks, which is a very short time for habit changes to take hold, there were measurable, statistically significant effects. And at the highest dose was just 1mg / week for one single week at the end, where the maintenance mode for many is 2.4mg / week.
Seeing such an effect in just 9 weeks, 90% of that time being at low ramp up doses, is astonishing.
The results for how much people actually drank in daily life were basically zero. No effect at all. The effects you're talking about are for a weird lab experiment where they sort of had people sit there in the lab and drink (or not). A huge percentage of people declined to participate in that experiment, too, which makes causality non-obvious.
The effects you're talking about are for a weird lab experiment where they sort of had people sit there in the lab and drink (or not).
Where people on GLP-1s -- in a randomized, double-blind study, notably -- chose to partake of less. I cannot fathom how you dismiss this.
It's a 9 week study at very low doses, and already a significant measurable effect was seen. Now if this wasn't a double-blind study I would dismiss it, but otherwise yeah, it matters.
People who have drinking habits will take a long time to adopt new habits. I would never expect to see baseline behaviour changes in so short a time. But their non-habit desire for alcohol clearly was diminished, hence the lab outcomes.
When you have lots of non-randomized dropouts from a randomized trial, that greatly weakens the causal link. The results are effectively non-randomized.
Meanwhile the evidence from actual drinking levels was much stronger (far fewer dropouts) and showed zero effect. Before this trial was done, you may have predicted that there would be positive results for the lab experiment but zero results in ecological conditions. But I think that prediction would be quite unusual. For anyone who expected results in ecological conditions (like me), this was disappointing.
It was a tiny study, and one arm had someone dropout because they had COVID. The difference was minuscule. You are being bizarrely selective in discarding the part you don't like, while holding the rest as demonstrative.
"But I think that prediction would be quite unusual."
Would it? Who in the world would guess that small ramp-up doses of a semaglutide (0.25, 0.5, and 1mg, the first two doses over 89% of the study duration. The average maintenance dose is 2.4mg) would immediately undo long-earned core habits over just two months? It's a rather absurd study.
Contrary to what many replies are telling you, the link clearly states that if you don't own a smartphone, you can check in online and then obtain a boarding pass for free at the airport.
(Not sure how easy that will be or if they actually verify that you don't own a smartphone, etc.)
>Contrary to what many replies are telling you, the link clearly states that if you don't own a smartphone, you can check in online and then obtain a boarding pass for free at the airport.
The press release says absolutely nothing of the sort.
Technically, the vast majority of users don't own their device. They are leasing it through their carrier. Then because it is HN, once the device is paid off, the user still doesn't own it as they cannot use it as they see fit and still must use it as the manufacturer sees fit. So this "own" word is potential for interpretation
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.
> 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.
> A more recent RCT showed that low-dose semaglutide reduced laboratory alcohol self-administration, as well as drinks per drinking days and craving, in people with AUD [72].
I think this quote is... wrong? Or at least extremely misleading? Here, citation 72 refers to a paper by Henderson et al. That paper did (sorta) reduced laboratory alcohol self-administration, but did not find any reduction in the amount that people drank. https://dynomight.net/glp-1/
> Semaglutide treatment did not affect average drinks per calendar day or number of drinking days, but significantly reduced drinks per drinking day (β, −0.41; 95% CI, −0.73 to −0.09; P = .04)
So they didn't find any reduction in (1) drinking, or (2) in the number of days that people drank, but they did technically find (3) a reduction in the number of drinks that people consumed on the days that they drank. So I guess what they said is technically correct... but I still think it's very odd not to mention the headline result that there was no actual reduction in drinking!
I don’t understand the math here. The average per calendar day didn’t go down, so the total drinking is the same. That total is distributed among the drinking days, which are also the same. So how can the drinks per drinking day have changed?
1. drinks/day declined in both groups and somewhat more in the treatment group but wasn't statistically significant
2. number of drinks/day basically wasn't different at all
3. drinks/drinking day didn't change in the placebo group but did decline in the treatment group
(These are all actually regression coefficients computed on non-random samples but nevermind.) Somehow it seems like what's happening is that 3 rises to statistical significance even though 1 doesn't.
> a reduction in the number of drinks that people consumed on the days that they drank
I can attest to this myself. I used to be called an "occasional binge drinker" by my endocrinologist. Now I'm just an "occasional drinker". It definitely has cut back my consumption, I'd say by more than half, if not more.
"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."
"When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a critical artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system that is reasonable and considers guidance and standards in the latest version of the artificial intelligence risk management framework from the national institute of standards and technology, the ISO/IEC 4200 artificial intelligence standard from the international organization for standardization, or another nationally or internationally recognized risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems. A plan prepared under federal requirements constitutes compliance with this section."
In particular, I think the reporting is straight wrong that there's a shutdown requirement. That was in an earlier version (https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3078731) and remains in the title of this version, but seems to have been removed from the actual text.
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