> Strict limits on governmental regulation wherein any restrictions must be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling public safety or health interest.
> Mandatory safety protocols for AI-controlled critical infrastructure, including a shutdown mechanism and compulsory annual risk management reviews.
Read: industry can do whatever we want, but the government also has to put up barriers to entry that favor large incumbents.
This has nothing to do with rights or even computing, it's just regulatory capture.
Annual risk management reviews definitely favor large incumbents. Large incumbents have the ability to hire and maintain compliance teams. That burden is definitely a barrier to entry to new competitors (though not an insurmountable one).
But it only applies to AI controlling critical infrastructure, you think this is an issue in practice?
I would think if a power plant deploys some AI model to optimize something or other, it would be on the plant operator to perform the reviews, regardless of who they get the AI from.
In practice, there will only be one or two "safe" AI vendors approved for such infrastructure. On one hand, that's probably a good thing. On the other hand, it's deeply anti-competitive and it's pretty much a recipe for indefinitely renewable contracts at arbitrary high prices that get passed on to taxpayers.
The shutdown mechanism would have existed anyway and a "risk management review" sounds exactly like the sort of toothless policy that's supposed to make people feel better without actually putting any limits or enforcement on the industry
You know if we're gonna pass laws to make it illegal for the government to interfere with the Torment Nexus, the least they could do is not gaslight us with the fucking name of the law. Just tell us the billionaires get to fuck the planet in the eye and the rest of us have to deal with it, at least it's honest that way.
Practically every law, and lobbying organization, is named for exactly the opposite of what it does. If I see the Puppies and Orphans Protection Act of 2028, I assume its purpose is to use puppies to strangle orphans. Proponents will point to the limitation on how many puppies you can use per orphan.
Similarly, if I see the People For X organization, I assume they are against X. The Committee for Green Spaces and Clean Air is guaranteed to be an oil company.
Once you develop that reflex, everything calms down. Though admittedly, I passed a sign for Fidos for Freedom. I'm not quite sure what Fidos Against Freedom does. I think they give dogs to disabled people, and they bark at you if you try to leave the house.
There is something that this tactic misses: when people try to do good things, the name of their organization or policy is usually pretty honest. In an environment like ours, though, that still means that your strategy of assuming the opposite meaning has something like a 95% expected success rate.
The second term for the "drain the swamp" president implies otherwise (it did take another cycle, but that arguably had more to do with covid than corruption).
I find it hard to imagine any evidence-based viewpoint in 2024 that would have led to a conclusion that Trump would be better for Gaza. The two party system doesn't give any room for choices on some issues, but that's hardly an argument that the two choices are equivalent overall.
Evidence? No. But 2024 wasn't an election (IMO) lost on failing to appeal to the centrists and R's. It was one lost by failing to energize the D's. I still assert that a lot of D's simply stayed home as opposed to "changed to R", and that's the most effective form of vote suppression: telling them that "both sides are the same, nothing matters so why bother?"
I've seen this claimed, but I'm not convinced narratives that emerge before another presidential election cycle hold up to scrutiny in the long run. The common narrative post 2012 was that Republicans needed to move to the left on immigration to stay viable, but that didn't happen and Trump won in 2016. The narrative post 2016 was that the Democrats needed to move right on social issues, and that didn't happen (at least not to the extent that people claimed they needed to) but Biden won in 2020. My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid, and but Biden wasn't able to last through the next cycle to another election to be able to potentially get more data on that theory.
You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all. Nobody challenged Biden's viability until too late, and at that point the party coalesced around a single candidate almost immediately. I'd argue that even if people were happy with her on that one issue, there would still likely be plenty of others that they were not happy with, especially when she was essentially starting from behind due to the baggage left behind from the baggage of being the VP of the president who couldn't even retain the confidence of the party through the election (not to mention how much she was sidelines for the first 3.5 years of the administration).
>My perception post 2020 is that a lot of people felt that Biden won only because of people being unhappy with Trump's handling of covid,
I agree with that. COVID was the breaking point of breaking points and Trump fumbled it especially badly. I certainly agree Trump would have won 2020 had it not been for his handling of COVID.
>You're not wrong that Gaza probably affected things, but the larger issue is that there was no primary at all.
That was a factor too. I see Gaza and the lack of primaries as the same factor: maintaining an unpopular establishment that didn't energize the party. For better or worse (much much much worse), Trump does energize his install base.
The core issue these past 10 years is that "what analysts say" have diverged much further away from what the people actually want. So getting a pulse on the ground is much more important these days than traditional means of surveying and reporting opinions.
It's not just "small business". If the barriers to entry are high enough, you can keep out pretty much any company that isn't already part of your oligopoly, pretty much indefinitely. That could be anything from a well funded subsidiary of another technology company to a foreign competitor.
Well, there probably are some in there. Data centre designers, comms experts, architects, electricians, etc. Lot of smaller organisations benefiting from the work.
It’s a good thing that businesses can make investment plans with legible rules to follow. Too many communities are blocking data centers for no good reason, and this preempts NIMBYs and unreasonable local opposition.
“What about my water?”- not an issue in this area.
“What about my electric bill?”- we’re signing long term contracts with local power companies or building out our own capacity; we eat the marginal costs and don’t increase your bill.
“What about noise?”- we’re far enough away from the nearest person that they cannot hear us; fans are x decibels at y distance; not a problem.
“I saw on Facebook that data centers poison the water and spy on me”- seek help, you cannot block us from building out and giving you oodles of tax money for this nonsense reason.
I don’t think it counts as NIMBYism if you don’t want it in yours or anybody’s backyard, ever. I would describe that as principled opposition.
Also, what happens when we don’t need such enormous data centers anymore? How many communities in the U.S. are saddled with enormous dead malls while the developers walk away with zero liability?
There is an incredibly good reason not to have datacenters in montana - a whole lot of the additional load will be from colstrip - one of the dirtiest coal mines left in the United States.
This research presentation from Benn Jordan will hopefully change your mind on the noise issue and its consequences. I highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
Long term contracts are routinely broken in bankruptcy without some sort of surety bond if things go sideways. This leaves localities footing the bill on maintenance if things do not turn out.
So it should be renamed Right to Datacenter Act. And here I thought they were giving people power over their private computers and being surveilled on them…
Reminds me of some bill in my state about Right to Farm and when you looked deeper it was about rights for huge corporate hog farms to dump waste in the rivers. The slimiest corps always do this 1984 level double talk when they name their bills. It’s a dead giveaway. Citizens United, oh wow cool this is about protecting citizens!
At the very least, it's a bit weird to be calling it a Right to Compute if the actual goal is to enable investments. It's hard not to be concerned about whether it's even about establishing a right at all, or if that's entirely posturing to try to build support for something that isn't really about rights at all. At that point, it's hard to trust anything else they're saying about the motives, since they've established that they're willing to fudge things to make it harder to argue against.
The point isn't whether it's bad or good, but that it establishes a pattern of inconsistency.
They just want to fire up Colstrip again, 4 huge coal power generation plants that literally print money. If you’re burning shit for AI it’s fine now I guess.
https://frontierinstitute.org/frontier-institute-statement-i...
Ah.