Good job, Montana. There was a trend in proposed and passed policies that were eating at rights to own machines. Examples: DMCA anti-circumvention (right to repair and jailbreak), export controls for high-end chips and cybersecurity tools, proposals to weaken/negate e2e encryption or delay security updates, AI rules that you can't train past X amount (shortsighted for future of personal compute capacity), restricting individuals from crypto mining, etc. So basically a trend of restricting software use or modification on general-purpose hardware. Once the tiniest relevant policy lands, it tends to expand from there. Hence what Montana did.
I think this is just to make it so that data centers and crypto mining facilities can be built and operated where owners want. Makes it so zoning and environmental regulations can’t stop you as easily.
People need to be more skeptical. This is not going to be used to uphold individual rights, and that's not the intention. This will be used not only to fast track data centers, but to support companies like Flock and push back against any attempts to regulate widespread surveillance.
Not sure, but to me the beauty of individual States who agree to Unite, is they get to keep all powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government, which creates 51 different A/B tests, to see which ones others would want to adopt or champion.
^^^ Ok, I just learned that concept from a recent tweet from Linus Torvalds.
