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When a "right to..." law is passed, there is usually an accompanying narrative that explains a past injustice that will be corrected. Matthew Shepard hate crime, Civil Rights Voting act, etc.

The absence of such a story makes me think this law doesn't protect shit. What exactly did a Montanian get killed or arrested trying to do with a computer that is now protected? Can I use AI during a traffic stop or use AI to surveil and doxx governemnt employees? What exactly is the government giving up by granting me this right?

Or is this just about supressing opposition to data centers?

Yeah I think it's pretty obviously the AI industry trying to ban its own regulation

> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.

  computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right

I don't necessarily disagree with the idea, but until profit is shared with taxpayers, this is a one-way transaction of taxpayers bankrolling AI companies.

I find your claim that there is a monopoly on computing laughable. No other technology has improved in quality or dropped in price as much as computers over the last 40 years. If this what you get from a monopoly, then we need more monopolies.

Modern semiconductor fabrication is a very narrow field.

As far as monopolies go I don't think it's our biggest concern, like you say.

If we want to continue to wage wars and seek conquest, it's not great to have it located in one/few countries. But instead if we want to work towards peace, we should continue breaking down barriers to trade (while maintaining protections for labor).

Regulation is just regulatory capture by incumbents and also a national security risk.

Looks like this one might be while in general the rule does not hold. Good regulations exist, and so do bad ones. Arguments without nuance often do more harm than good to your side.

Deregulation is just regulatory capture by industry and also a national security risk.

You argue that food safety tellregialtikns are just regularity capture?

Aggravatingly, some of it is. The organic food regulations are impossible for the small farmers who invented the idea. Only mega corps can do it, and their definition is not much better (if at all) than industrial farms.

It's still way better than Upton Sinclair's time. But it would be nice if the FDA and USDA were run by people who eat rather than sell food.

To start a restaurant where I live it's $50k in fees and mandatory paperwork before you can even get a construction permit. Alot of it is, yes.

And none of it prevents bad food handling practices by minimum wage staff.

> And none of it prevents bad food handling practices by minimum wage staff.

Your argument is that all restaurants in your area handle food unsafely? Or that some do flagrantly and without penalty? Or that one has once and you got sick and so all the regulations are worthless as a result?

Trying to understand what argument you think you’re making, here, and specifically how factually bereft and vacuous it actually is.

This is mostly signaling, but NY is currently considering a law to prevent AI systems from giving legal and medical advice: https://statescoop.com/new-york-bill-would-ban-chatbots-lega...

I don't think that this is a good idea. For medical applications, I can understand that LLMs are not the best solution, since they are so bad with numbers/probabilities. But for legal advice, I think they should be pretty good.

So the only reason I can think of to forbid such use cases is that people in those professions fear being replaced by machines.

Preventable medical errors kill 250,000 American every year, I can imagine LLMs could be both good and bad for that number, but on net, it is hard to say without just guessing. But if you ban the application of LLMs to medical care, you close that door before even seeing the potential on the other side. I think that is absurd.

> it is hard to say without just guessing

It really isn’t. How many surgeries do you think LLMs perform? How many of those medical errors would’ve been resolved by a chatbot? It’s easy to quote a big scary number and pretend like it has some vague relevance when you don’t actually understand the problem space.

Ok, so how many deaths from medicals errors have been caused by and prevented through the use of LLMs (since you say it isn't hard). Can you enlighten us and not leave us guessing?

I understand many deaths due to medical errors are caused by patients misunderstanding the advice they are given. You are saying you know exactly the net value of LLMs in this problem space?

I don't think that conclusion really follows because I don't think the ban works that way.

There's a big difference between ChatGPT writing a prescription and a doctor double checking his diagnosis using some kind of Claude code for medicine. ChatGPT writing prescriptions and giving medical device directly to people should absolutely be prohibited for now, but the second approach should be encouraged.

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Eh, if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event, I don't see any contradiction in doing the opposite.

> if states can pass restrictive laws on AI in absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event...

If you mean besides the extensive harm to air quality, the large land fingerprint of data centers, the massive strain on water resources and treatment facilities, the insane electricity demands resulting in skyrocketing prices pushed onto everyone else, the deafening noise pollution, and what they've done to the price of RAM, then sure. And that's just the data centers!

The usage of AI itself has resulted in all kinds of harm and even actual deaths. AI has wrongfully denied people healthcare coverage they were entitled to preventing or delaying needed surgeries and treatments. There's a growing list of LLM related suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots). The use of AI in parole systems has kept people locked behind bars when they shouldn't have been due to biases in the bots making decisions. AI used for self-driving driving cars have killed pedestrians and other drivers. There are thousands of AI generated harms tracked here: https://airisk.mit.edu/ai-incident-tracker

God I hate safetyism

I knew this would happen, safety is now considered "woke" haha

Not sure what you mean by “woke” but prioritizing safety at the expense of everything else is poisonous

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Yeah, I'm going to believe the many many documented cases of these problems in VA alone over your non-example

https://www.businessinsider.com/living-next-to-data-centers-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/data-centers-northern-virgin...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/opinion/data-centers-ai-a...

https://virginiamercury.com/2026/02/19/legislature-considers...

https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/02/04/virginia-lawmakers-look-add...

https://news.vcu.edu/article/northern-virginia-data-center-a...

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so the jobs have to be lost _first_ , then we can ban it?

Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that. We would all be stuck working on farms today, because we didn’t want to allow tractors or other machinery because it would take away farming jobs.

Instead of banning tech to save jobs, pass laws that make sure tech prices in externalities (tax carbon emissions), and find other ways to assist people who lose jobs (UBI, good social safety nets, etc).

Don’t stifle progress just because it makes us have to work less.

Right - fix the economy instead. Why should increasing efficiency cause people to have less resources - that makes no sense.

Because there are people who live off rent (in a broad sense of this world), and there are people who live off selling their ability to work. Increased efficiency and productivity may or may not benefit the second kind of people, depending on whether they can sell their labour to be used for something else.

So instead of figuring out ways to limit the ability of people to live off rent, we want to ban beneficial things that people could extract rent from?

This is like saying, "We don't like how landlords extract value from housing, so we are banning apartment buildings"

Well, usually we tax the landlords instead. But when the landlords make up the overwhelming majority of the legislature, this tend to not happen.

The situation with apartment buildings is even more quirky because the USA has quite ridiculous zoning regulations, which AIUI many landlords actually support? It's really a wonderful barrel of worms, and I am glad I have no paddle in it.

Banning AI does increase efficiency. It makes it more efficient for a working class family to afford to survive. What perverted definition of the word were you considering?

How is this different from saying "Banning mechanical farm equipment does increase efficiency, it makes it more efficient for farm workers to afford to survive"

You are fighting against productivity improvements when you should be fighting against people hoarding the benefits of productivity improvements.

That doesn't answer my question. My claim is that people working is efficient.

Your definition of efficient doesn't make any sense. If people can work less and produce more, that is the definition of efficient.

I agree that keeping everyone fed and sheltered is of primary importance... but wouldn't it be better to have everyone work less while doing that?

Let's have robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone. Why force people to work at jobs that could be done easier just to make sure we employee everyone? Might as well just pay people to move rocks back and forth.

Just increase taxes on robots and use that to pay basic income.

> Let's have the robots do all the hard work and then share the wealth with everyone

That sounds fantastic, except that in our capitalist economy the wealth will not be shared by everyone, and will instead be funnelled directly to the tech oligarchy, while workers get laid off. Until we fix that part of the equation, innovations to efficiency will continue to result in working people getting screwed over by technological innovation.

Sure, but this entire thread is about hypotheticals anyway.

It will be equally politically difficult to ban AI as it would be to grab some of the wealth generated by AI for the exact same reasons - either attempt would be fought against by the same tech oligarchs, for the same reason. To protect their money.

If we are going to have to fight them anyway, let's fight for the one where we don't have to work jobs that could be done by computers instead, while still having the same income.

And we don't have to get rid of capitalism entirely to spread the wealth. UBI can be used in a capitalist society, too.

A carpenter using a hand saw instead of a power saw just to keep more carpenters employed is not being efficient. It's Pareto-better to keep all those carpenters employed, earning the same salary for fewer hours.

Car dealerships would like a word.

Another example why these types of laws make things worse for people.

> Job loss is a horrible reason to ban something. Think about our history if we always did that.

The US has continually set up protectionist policies to preserve a local workforce. Automotive manufacturers, the shipbuilding industry, etc.

These are bad things

If the idea was that laws must be motivated by a negative occurrence rather than preemptive, then that'd follow yeah (if counting job loss as a reason to ban something, which I think is questionable). But note akersten is saying that it's normal for laws to be preemptive in both cases.

Just like when musicians were on strike and the radio people decided to play a recording over the air (gasp! a record!) rather than live performances.

A nice ban on playing recorded music would have saved those jobs.

Bad example. You are agreeing that copyright is owned by the people whose work an AI agent is trained on. Sure, come take a class of jobs, and then pay them in perpetuity to license the exposition of their work. For 75 years after the authors death, just like current copyright.

>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.

You don't think there's reasons pass laws banning AI...datacenters?

Because what state is banning the concept of AI? They're banning/restricting the creation of a type of infrastructure within their borders because they feel that is detrimental to their citizens. Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.

I'm already running an LLM locally. This is just me renting space in a data center. Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things? For the record my local models run off the solar bolted to my roof. Even including the data center I'm using 1/10th of the energy we were using on tube monitors back in the 90s. This is exhausting. My GPU would be demonstrably using more power by playing a videogame right now than when I run a local LLM.

Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?

This question is not the obvious winner you think it is. To me, and I am sure many, it sort of undermines your argument.

Even in the most ‘free' cultures, society has _always_ restricted people’s individual ability to do things that it collectively deems harmful to the whole society.

This is literally why America was founded. Too many people stifle innovation. Move to Europe if you want to be stuck in the 20th century frankly. That doesn't mean we can't take care of folks. But the ludites need to get the fuck out of the way. You're all exhausting.

And people in the late 1700s were just allowed to do anything? (The answer to that is obviously ‘no’).

I’m not even in complete disagreement with your opinion on data centers (like, people are coming up with noise, water use, pollution and traffic arguments about why a data center should not replace a recently controversially closed paper mill near me, which is ridiculous), but your argument doesn’t work. You need to change it if you want to convince people.

America was founded because rich people didn't want to pay taxes.

If it wasn't for America you'd still be using a shovel and hoe instead of writing code for a living.

Please, don't be so negative about the rest of the world. No one has any idea what would have happened if the US did not create their country the way they did. This is the same level of under-appreciation of humans that the ancient aliens people have when they say its impossible for humans to have built the pyramids. Lets be constructive instead of just hating on everyone else please.

I was born in Europe. I know this for a fact. The difference in "can do" culture between old world and new world is everything. There's a reason Europe still doesn't have a self landing rocket. They aren't even trying. It's crabs in a bucket mentality writ large. I wish it weren't so. Yet it is.

It's partially true but it's not as true as doomers would like. It's not America: innovation=yes, Europe: innovation=no. Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people. It has a lot of very poor people as a consequence.

> Most of the American innovation came from a small number of very rich people

Replace "came from" with "was purchased by" or "was copied by an entity with the resources to push the inventor out of the market" and you're getting a lot closer.

How about "was driven by"

This encompasses rich people telling others what to do, and it also encompasses others doing work they think they can sell to rich people.

I think in Europe, people are just overall a bit more chill, and happy people don't feel the need to join the ultra-competitive scramble to the top, they're fine doing enough work but not an extreme amount.

I don't even agree with that. In many cases the rich people at best paid the salaries of other innovative people and then claimed the IP rights and the overwhelming share of the proceeds.

Elon didn't invent anything about rockets or electric cars. He hired (or perhaps just bought a company that had already hired) smart innovative people and got rich off them.

Pharmaceutical CEOs aren't innovating anything but they get rich off the innovations of others.

Most of the people who innovate or invent a new tool or product don't have the capital to mass produce and market it and end up selling their rights, which others benefit from.

Very few rich people are involved at all in innovations. Technology, which is less capital-intensive to scale than other fields, is an exception where several rich folks actually were involved - Steve Jobs' design sense, Larry and Sergei's PageRank algorithm, etc. but even then most of the people actually innovating new things don't get rich and watch others with more resources copy them, outmarket them, and take the money.

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>Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?

When those things impact other people - such as by skyrocketing utility prices, overloading the electrical grid, and more.

I thought this was a free market? Or is that not how things work anymore?

Never has been. A totally free market doesn't work and has failed every time it was tried. You want one today, go set up shop in Somalia.

I can't respect that opinion. It's full of holes.

Holes such as what?

There have always been rules and laws. The US has never been a totally free market. Most of the laws and rules we have were written in blood by people professing a "free market" right to poison our people, rivers, air, and more.

America was largely a free market until the 1920s. Since then more regulations have actually increased the cost of living. The healthcare problem in America has a lot to do with increased regulations. For one we have a fixed limit on how many doctors can graduate every year. That was put in place by the medical lobby in the US. Ever since then healthcare costs have increased exponentially. Tale as old as time. This happens with every single new rule put in place. Rent control does the same thing. Prices just go up. This includes NIMBY laws.

The US does not limit the number of doctors that can graduate. The limit is on the number of residencies funded by medicare. If the private sector wanted more doctors in order to pay doctors less, they could just offer paid residencies themselves. Somehow the free market hasn't solved that one. This ignores that doctors' salaries aren't a significant cause of the problems and insurance companies are the true root of high prices.

Rent control stabilizes prices while more supply can be built, because it is in the interests of society for people to be able to afford to live, and we can't will additional buildings into place overnight. High eviction rates destroy communities and have many negative side effects.

In the absence of regulation, corporations lie, cheat, and steal, and have a massive power imbalance against ordinary people. No one has enough time and energy to research every option for everything in their daily life, and they rely on laws to establish safety measures they can rely on.

Oh you're one of those. You actually believe rent control works in the face of overwhelming evidence that all is does is increase the cost of housing. Fascinating. Pointless talking to you.

Rent control doesn't have to be "you as a landlord can't change no more than $X in rent." It can also be "rent increases on existing tenants in good standing are limited to X%.

What are the holes? There are places today with no government - perfect free markets. If you think perfect free markets are awesome, you can move there and do business there. It's a bit like telling someone who loves communism to go to China.

An absolute free market would, by definition, permit the selling of the service "restrict someone's freedom for me".

Not sure if that leaves it a free market. So if we're gonna be talking holes in the cheese - seems like you're reasoning in terms of a basically self-contradictory notion.

But truly, what do you reckon about the 1st point, in terms of the interpretation of market freedom which you use?

> Since when did we restrict people's ability to do things?

At least 4000 years ago, but that's just the earliest we have evidence for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu

I don't think you understand the qualifier. I meant in the tradition of liberal free markets that have unlocked human potential on the global scale. I'm saying no it's actually good that you don't have to ask the local government when you want to do something. If American style free markets didn't gain traction we'd still be doing subsistence farming.

The thing is, since we recognized that such a tradition led to the unfettered destruction of the natural environment which we depend upon to survive, we have decided that local governments should be responsible for preserving said environment by regulating the destructive actions performed by the liberal free market. Not doing so will even destroy our ability to perform subsistence farming in the long run.

So far all I hear is complaining about electricity prices. No one actually cares about the "environment". They are just mad that the KW/h is up 3 cents.

Then you are not replying to me in good faith. I didn't say a thing about electricity rates.

>>when did we restrict people's abilities to do things? That's literally what most laws are, saying what you can and can't do. This is like, a foundational understanding of what government/regulation is.

>>this is just me renting space... Okay, so a "network effect" is when things have greater impact due to larger usage. So the data center usage that you're talking about does not represent the overall impact of the data center. Saying "I only pour ONE cup of bleach into the ocean, so I don't see why it's so bad to have the bleach factory pump all its waste in as well" is a WILD take.

Why should we stop there? Let’s ban people flying on vacations, because why should our resources go towards some dork laying out in the sun? Air travel is horribly wasteful. Let’s ban people racing cars, that is also wasteful. We shouldn’t be using our resources to drive in circles.

How do we pick which activities are worth using resources? Which ones are too ‘dorky’ to allow?

Look, I am all for pricing the externalities into resource consumption. Tax carbon production, to make sure energy consumption is sustainable, but don’t dictate which uses of energy are acceptable or ‘worth it’, because I don’t want only mainstream things to be allowed.

I didn't say any of that in my comment nor express an opinion about this whole thing writ large. I'm only pointing out that it's not weird for legislature to preempt a real world use case by way of pointing out similar laws.

I'm going to do this again:

>>>>absence of a correspondingly negative motivating event.

What did you mean? Why do you believe there has not been a motivating event to ban data centers when those bans have happened, which is literally what you said?

In the context of the discussion a correspondingly negative event would have been along the lines of "we built a data center and then it exploded, we need to make sure that doesn't happen." Not "we're worried about the effects the data center might have," which is vis a vis to "we're worried about the effects banning ai might have." All I'm saying is neither of those last two are weird reasons to enact a law.

GP was insisting that "rights" named laws always come after some negative event and it is weird that we have this "rights" named law without someone being deprived of their computation or whatever. I'm disagreeing with the premise that that's weird by pointing out laws preempt real world events all the time, in either direction (restrictive or permissive).

> Maybe it's NIMBY/Luditte BS to you, but people not wanting their resources to go help ensure some dork can have a chat-bot girlfriend seems normal to me.

Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?

Because these data centers are at best overstressing utility grids and elevating prices for everyone and at worse running dirty generators and poisoning entire communities, for a start.

Oh no, we couldn't possibly generate more power! Impossible! We're at our limit!

China has 100 reactors under construction - meanwhile in the West, folks like you exist.

In the West the new datacenters popping up are mostly powered by gas.

If the businesses that want data centers want to pay the full construction costs for the new power plants, great. Otherwise consumers are paying for them in the rates they pay to energy companies.

It should not be considered shocking or controversial that people already hit hard by corporate greed and other effects of late-stage capitalism don't want to pay higher utility rates to subsidize the data centers being built by megacorporations who want to take away even more of their jobs.

> Why would it be your business, or anyone else's, to stop someone from doing this?

Because, in this country, we have “local government” wherein a bunch of people who live near each other have frequently banded together to make laws about the places they live. Surely this isn’t shocking news to you? Surely you’ve encountered this phenomenon before?

Why do you think you have a right to do anything you want, anywhere you want, no matter what?

I was really hoping this gave people the right to use their computers, but it really looks like it simply prevents "the government" from regulating the right to "make use of computational resources." So Google or Apple can still prevent me from using my phone for lawful purposes, the government just can't regulate it (and the government might not be able to write restrictions that prevent manufacturers from violating my right to compute.)

Google or Apple only hold an ability to prevent you to use your phone because the government itself enforces IP. So the restriction against regulations in this bill is only a partial and incomplete restriction against the government from interfering with people's right to compute.

Imagine if Montata required that all compute platforms sold in the state to be free of user restriction: That they be amenable to modification, that all source code, firmware and hardware specs be open, and when that is not the case - the company would be compelled to release the relevant information on pain of having assets seized, required to refund payments etc. That would have been a hoot :-)

Simply not sell to that state.

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.

Ah, finally something that the common man wants. A mandatory risk management strategy compliant with ISO/IEC guidelines

So the government is afforded the opportunity to constrict compute if for a government interest.

This bill seems to expand powers, not restrict

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.

How?

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?

How? By default, state governments can pass basically whatever laws they want. They don't have (theoretically) limited enumerated powers like the federal government.

Im not asking for policy mechanics, I'm asking for implementation detail clarification.

djb had to (with the EFF) spend years in court to establish (on appeal) that writing crypto code was a speech issue:

https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice

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.

"... the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system...."

This is a complete sham. Anything really geared towards protecting people would have protections in place before deployment.

Hmmm. "[...] the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system [...]".

I wonder why it is after rather than before?

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.

Pointless and deceptive. A real "right to compute" law would ban remote attestation, would ban discrimination against users based on the "trustworthiness" of their systems, would force companies to allow custom software and firmware as well as provide technical documentation and specifications to users so they can repair and modify the systems they bought.

Wrong. This is not how rights work.

You have the right to not provide custom software and firmware and technical documentation, the right to enforce remote attestation, and the right to refuse service to whoever you wish.

>You have the right to not provide custom software and firmware and technical documentation,

Just like all food sellers have the right not to provide documentation on the ingredients and nutrition of their products?

Correct. I buy food from vendors on the beach in foreign countries - it has no documentation. It’s a consensual transaction I choose to engage in.

In the context of this discussion, who cares what's possible in foreign countries?

> Just like all food sellers have the right not to provide documentation on the ingredients and nutrition of their products?

I agree that they should have this right. My personal anecdote explains that the citizens of other countries do have this right without the world falling apart.

>in foreign countries

It may surprise you to learn that this is not within the purview of Montana state law.

> Just like all food sellers have the right not to provide documentation on the ingredients and nutrition of their products?

I agree that they should have this right. My personal anecdote explains that the citizens of other countries do have this right without the world falling apart.

Your right to do all that should be taken away. Our freedom to own our computers is more important than your right to punish us for trying to do so by banishing us from digital society via remote attestation. Your only option should be to accept that we own our computers and deal with us on those terms. Refusing to do so should be criminalized on the same level as racism.

You have the freedom to own a computer.

> Refusing to do so should be criminalized on the same level as racism.

Racism isn’t criminal? At least not in any country anyone wants to live in lol

Holding racists beliefs isn’t, but many of the actions that those beliefs tend to lead in the absence of regulation to are.

Not the claim the person I’m responding to made.

With laws such as the Brazilian one or the one proposed in New York, I am curious to know what will be the future for computing. On one hand, forbidding and limiting people from using computers as they wish is somewhat impossible, as too many computers that don't have restrictions have already been produced. You can always use old hardware and, with open source projects, fork an old version that will respect your right to compute. At some point though it will be a problem as hardware no longer works and software becomes incompatible with everything. The thing is that those who will probably be doing it mostly are people that already grew accustomed to not live in an Orwellian state, while, on the other hand, newer generations will all be using new systems with these restrictions, as if they were normal. The smart ones will find ways of circumventing it (as if it wouldn't be hard to get your parents CC and verify it as if you were over 18).

Given that, they will be computing in a restrictive and controlled environment. I feel sorry for them.

I am going to college (Computer Science) as an older student with previous experience in programming, and it never ceases to amaze me that the current generation of students doesn't think out of the box and is completely dependent on ChatGPT. We all suffered from conditioning from governments and corporations throughout the years, but it is accelerating at an alarming rate.

Acts like this (the one from Montana) are positive, but unfortunate that they simply have to exist and somewhat irrelevant when the big dogs (California, New York and whole countries such as Australia) approve legislation that will promptly be followed by most companies/projects, which will in turn force this way of things happening everywhere else.

This won't touch age verification and surveillance laws, it's not meant to protect people, it's meant to protect the interests of capital

One of America's greatest strengths is the structure of it as a federation. It allows for states like this to take the lead in expanding datacenter infrastructure while other states can choose to shutdown such expansions. This was perhaps more significant in COVID-19 reactions in America, but datacenters have few such externalities and so this is an even more compelling example of variation between states.

The scaling of federal power with population is also significant as states like Texas that allow for more housing to be built will probably receive more seats at the next apportionment while states like California will lose seats. Overall, pretty neat to see the design of America work quite well like this.

I generally agree with this idea, but

> but datacenters have few such externalities

Is wild. Energy consumption is one of the biggest externalities that exists today, since global climate change is completely independent of location. Greenhouse gases do not care about borders.

Also wild when Musk is freebasing methane in Tennessee with zero consequences.

While it is not a true "externality", data center use of water is a strong community/regional cost that effectively removes 1 person/1 vote. Those with the financial resources to buy more water get the water, those without do not.

Perhaps you think that the distribution of financial resources reflects what is in society's best interests - that Meta, Google et al. have demonstrated their utility in ways that make them literally more important than people with insufficient wealth to outbid those companies for water.

Many of us do not.

What fictional universe do you live in where people are not getting water because they have been outbid by some data center? As for commercial use of water, we absolutely should do it that way instead of the archaic water rights system we have now.

It's not a fictional universe. It is precisely the waters rights system you've mentioned. Capital-rich entity buys water senior water rights, extracts water, others find their wells descending/drying.

This hasn't happened yet in New Mexico with a data center because these are new. But it has happened numerous times with other capital-rich entities that have bought water rights (sometimes, just cities buying rights from adjacent rural county land).

A small community near where I live no longer has functioning wells because new residential construction below them sucked the water out of the aquifer. They tried to drill deeper, without much success. County is now having to build a water line to the community.

"Datacenter water usage" is a comment I'd expect to see on Reddit--not a VC forum with allegedly intelligent people.

I live in New Mexico. I do not consider Hacker News to be a VC forum. For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn if I need some sort of credentials to get you to respond constructively to my point rather than with some hand-wavey ad hominem.

> For what it's worth (which is very little), I was employee #2 at amzn

Reminds me of a quote from some otherwise forgettable movie I saw: "My father left me with very little, except for all his money."

By "worth" in this context, I mean "authority to speak in a context claimed to be limited to a certain kind of person" (a limitation I do not acknowledge exists on HN, or anywhere, really).

For the record, my net worth increased by about $1M before taxes based on the 1 year of options I got at amzn. But not relevant in this context.

Could you elaborate on this? Are you saying that datacenter water usage is not a significant community issue? Or that such community issues should be irrelevant to VC conversations?

The former. Datacenters don't package water in a rocket and shoot it into the sun. They run it through a heat transfer and return it slightly warmer.

Sadly this does not force phone vendors to allow bootloader unlocking.

The name "Right to Compute" implies this protects individual users, but the actual text reads more like a shield for datacenter operators against local zoning and environmental review. Worth reading the bill itself (SB 212) before celebrating. The "after deployment" risk management requirement for critical infrastructure AI systems is also pretty toothless. Safety frameworks that kick in after you're already running seem backwards.

I really dislike how 'compute' as a noun took over 'computational' as an adjective. I just find the sentence 'I need more computational resources' flows so much nicer than ''I need more compute'.

"Right to compute" sounds to me more like they're using "compute" as a verb, which predates "computational" by a couple centuries.

Someone said "right to computers' and someone else said "that sounds dumb...make it compute!"

Interpret the word "compute" in the title as a verb, not a noun. "I have the right to compute" is analogous grammatically to "I have the right to vote" or "I have the right to assemble"

Glad Montana is securing the right to do math.

It's hilarious that they think it needs to be codified into law. As if the right to do math wasn't intrinsic, and could be even theoretically be revoked by the government, lol.

I think it betrays cynicism about the tendency for single-objective optimizing market actors to rent-seek and cartelize. I don't think it's a stretch at all. On the surface it would be equally preposterous to suggest that breathing could be theoretically revoked by the government, which truly is preposterous but we do have those laws in place depending on whether the air you breathe has "illegal substances" in it. But then again, explicit revocation is a high bar when you can throttle the free use of computational resources by regulatory capture: the AI incumbents could say, for example, that AI is so dangerous that it must be kept out of the hands of the unwashed masses. Another excellent strategy (with a rather high bar to entry) would be to distort the markets themselves by ensuring that your prospective renters can't afford basic compute.

The "compute" in "right to compute" could also be a verb, though. :-)

How about "we've got the best nuclear"

Compute is the...

FTA: right to own, access, and use computational resources

It's a verb.

Well, language evolves, and I personally prefer compute as a noun when talking about resources. It's great though because we can each say it in our preferred way without judging one another.

I agree. This is language evolving. If someone from the 16th century could hear a modern well-educated person speak English today they would likely be horrified at how degenerate it would sound to them.

So I don't think current English is in some perfect state that should not change.

On god.

Please don't judge me for what I say, or do, or who I really am.

It's a verb, not a noun.

It can be used as both.

They are so proud to hand over all control to the corporations, while pretending this is a consumer protection centered build - wild

That's how fascist bootlickers roll.

The interesting structural tension here is that "Right to Compute" framing appeals to individualist/property-rights instincts, but the actual beneficiaries are hyperscalers and large data center operators. Individual compute rights already exist — nobody is stopping you from running a server.

What the bill actually does (based on typical legislation of this type) is preempt local zoning and environmental review for large compute facilities. That's a legitimate policy choice, but calling it a "right" is doing a lot of rhetorical work.

For comparison: Wyoming and Texas have done similar things for data centers via tax incentives rather than regulatory preemption. Both approaches get data centers built; they just differ in who captures the value.

From the folks that brought you the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind!

what a weaselly name, this would make the most cutthroat ad exec blush with embarrassment

Montana is both cold and sparely populated, so I figure data centers would be good there. Also, I figure Zefram Cochrane could use all that compute for his warp theories in a few decades.

I expect that access to inexpensive energy is more important than the population density, typical ambient or "favorable" state laws (this law doesn't seem to really do all that much).

Like the region I live in is cold and has lots of water, but we import energy, might as well build closer to the regional mega cities (where it is still relatively cold, with relatively abundant water). There is some kerfuffle going on in the county here about preventing data centers, and I can't imagine there is even anyone interested in building one.

What about a “right to create act” giving people the right to create things and not have their creation be ingested to train ai for billion dollar companies?

Some sort of pre-emptive auto-opt-AI't.

It's ridiculous that AIco's arguments are dwindling down to "it's not copyright infringement to ingest others' work and make 'derivatives' [which often are identical to original authors' works]."

----

We desperately need younger politicians, who can not only keep up with information more sharply (i.e. aren't legally decades-retireable), but also are of the age where their own children are being affected by government re-funding flows away from youth/education/future.

At this point I'm willing to concede that our future probably has companies' individual LLM/genAI products competing against one-another, as digital politicians ["the digital pimp, hard at work... we have needs"--Matrix' Mouse]. Nobody knows how either flesh nor silicon congressmen work, inside; but I think the latter could act more human[e]ly...

Do you believe that for younger people this question (about derivativeness) is clearly settled? If so, how?

I would hypothesize that younger people are less-inclined to feel guilty about using pirate TV services. I think they're also more invested in the future, and aware of dangerous technology's pre-eminence.

OK, but what about "LLM-generated work is clearly derivative of the training material" ?

Excuse me, the article states that this bill was signed on april 17th of last year. How has this become suddenly relevant now?

I would say considering there has been almost a year since this bill was signed, what happened since then? Was it applied to hurt people's interests? Did it drive investment?

Are Montanans demonstrably better or worse off because of this in some way?

Do I have to back in age verification to my OS?

Most of the comments are cynical. I read this, at least the "right to compute" part, as a reaction to the current onslaught of censorship and age verification laws. Which is a good thing.

The AI part honestly looks fairly harmless, just applying existing standards, but I may be wrong there...

I want a right to compute without having to identify myself, or otherwise give any information about myself to the computing system itself.

I was hoping for that as a reaction to the current tyrannical movements worldwide to end anonymous personal computing.

This is extremely light on details, but I'm pretty sure "Right to Compute" has absolutely nothing to do with software freedom and everything to do with making it harder to oppose giant datacenter buildouts for AI companies, so they can blast you with infrasound, spike the price of electricity and RAM, and build surveillance systems to take away your rights.

My thoughts exactly. I reads a lot like they are trying to minimize the state's power to regulate AI. I'm not sure that's such a good thing. Regulation is one of the only ways that we can manage the ``bads'' that come with any new technology. In the US, we've never been very good at regulating new technologies before industry stakeholders entrench themselves in the lobbying circuit.

Well they do define compelling government interest to include

> "Compelling government interest " means a government interest of the highest order in protecting the public that cannot be achieved through less restrictive means. This includes but is not limited to: (a) ensuring that a critical infrastructure facility controlled by an artificial intelligence system develops a risk management policy; (b) addressing conduct that deceives or defrauds the public; (c) protecting individuals, especially minors, from harm by a person who distributes deepfakes and other harmful synthetic content with actual knowledge of the nature of that material; and (d) taking actions that prevent or abate common law nuisances created by physical datacenter infrastructure.

D seems to address that potentially.

Proactively shielding themselves from the eventual, justified, realization that spiking a population's price of water and electricity such that they cannot use them IS an externality just as bad as polluting the water supply.

Yeah, I have relatives in Ashburn VA with over 200 data centers running and it's practically uninhabitable /s

Repost from 4 months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865289

TL;DR: Basically the AI industry trying to ban governments from regulating it

"right to compute"

Oh cool!

Look inside

No mention of:

- Self-repair

- Self-service

- Hardware and software modifications

- Protecting consumers from proprietary anti-circumvention tools

- Bolstering open source

- Better access to technology in early ages (through funding primary schools and libraries)

- Dedicated computer and Internet crisis response teams to tackle disinformation, cyberattacks, cyberbullying, and state-sponsored attacks

- Improving citizen's access to End-to-End encryption software - Sovereign AI and software

Very cool, Montana. What a load of nothing.

I encourage anyone here to just read the bill text instead of this article. It will pretty clearly resolve any confusion caused by this article.

montana: where you can compute freely but the nearest data center is 400 miles away and the latency is measured in geological epochs

The article is full of PR-speak. What is really going on in this law?

What an egregiously disingenous piece of legislation. Not surprised.

This is why Montana Civil Defense survives when skynet goes rogue.

It amuses me how contradictory the two bullet points from the article are.

- 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.

How were the necessity and scope of the second rule shown to satisfy the first rule?

You can read the actual bill here: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3212152/Montana-2025-S...

In essence, it doesn't really mandate anything; it says you should have a plan, and only for "critical infrastructure facilities":

"Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by critical artificial intelligence system. (1) 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."

So it's essentially lip service to AI safety, probably to quell some objections to a bill that otherwise limits regulation of tech platforms.

I did read it. The point is there are no findings that justify the regulation in light of the grant of rights in the same bill. The only WHEREAS that approaches the level of a finding amounts to "many are saying..."

The 2nd rule is clearly intended to be a shield and distraction. It's there to pretend the law serves the public, when in reality it's designed to defend datacenter builders from the public interest. Politicians can talk about meaningless sci-fi concepts like SkyNet and how it can defeat it with off switches, instead of real issues like noise pollution, tax giveaways, electricity prices and mass surveillance.

> any restrictions must be demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to a compelling public safety or health interest

This should be the default policy on regulation. We shouldn't need a specific law to enact it.

Probably one applies for individuals while the other, as described, applies for infrastructure.

Orwell called it “double speak”

Not quite. He coined "newspeak" and "doublethink".

We need the opposite, and you'd think Montana would be leading that opposite effort.

I need the right to not use a computer for any reason whatsoever! Every business transaction, doctors visit, buying food, it all requires an app or a phone these days. it will only get worse. We need the right to not use some techbro's app in order to survive.

> Apr 21, 2025

why is this posted now?

> “This bill will help position Montana as a world-class destination for AI and Data Center investment.”

https://frontierinstitute.org/frontier-institute-statement-i...

Ah.

> 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.

Including a shutdown mechanism and doing an annual risk management review favors large incumbents?

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.

But the overall picture is they are creating a lower regulation burden than California etc but you think this favours incumbents?

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

Contrary take: it's easier to move "should" regulation to "must" regulation than it is to create the latter from nothing.

E.g. HIPAA security rule updates

Not to mention 100K in consultancy fees for compliance.

Why would the industry need any limits or enforcement?

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but it’s funny either way.

Damn I saw the headline and though it was a bill about general computing

Yes I was wondering if the right applied to people who aren't age-verified.

No, that kind of computing contributed a great deal less to election campaigns, so obviously not.

There are no small businesses building data centers.

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.

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 "good" news is that if the group is trying to do good things, they usually fail or remain quite small, so you never see them.

So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

All I can think of is Dr. Augustine from Avatar. "They're just pissing on us without even the courtesy of calling it rain."

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They can't be that blatant, that's how you lose your next term

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).

You cant drain a swamp by filling it with billionaire alligators.

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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 mean that seemed to happen anyway...

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?

"We don't want you here" sounds like a perfectly good reason to me.

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.

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

>not an issue in this area.

Definitely don't live in my area.

>we eat the marginal costs and don’t increase your bill.

my electricity bill vehemently disagrees.

> giving you oodles of tax money for this nonsense reason.

You've never heard of tax avoidance, have you?

https://itep.org/trump-meta-tesla-alphabet-amazon-obbba-taxe...

I read "position" as "poison" a few times before I got it.

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!

And is that supposed to be a bad thing?

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.

It's legislation to prevent the regulation of AI and data centers. Yes, that's a bad thing

If it was a good thing they wouldn't mislead everyone by naming and positioning it as a bill protecting citizens just to trojan horse it in.

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.

Positive rights are stupid.

"The initiative, propelled by advocacy from State Senator Daniel Zolnikov and organizations like the Frontier Institute"

Always follow the money: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Frontier_Institute

The tragedy is that 'right to compute' is such a great name for something actually useful. Requiring OEMs to allow users to load any OS they want, requiring OEMs to allow full control over a device/OS ('root access') etc.

Instead, it's wasted on AI slop.

Yeah, "you can own compute hardware" doesn't really help if nobody makes hardware that can be owned.

"Write to Computer 2.0" sounds good to me. Might as well slipstream.

The "Citizen Right to Compute" complement to the "Data Center Right to Compute".

Use the latter as leverage for the former. What politician wants to be seen downvoting (comparable) individual's right they already gave to data centers?

(2025)

Is it for citizens or billionaire citizens?

So what does liberal even mean these days? California is passing bs like age verification in OS and Montana is protecting my right to leave the way I want in my own home, running whatever AI models suit me as long as I am not bothering anyone. That's just another "none of government business" personal freedom issue like pot or sexuality, why aren't blue states all over it. And yes, using tuned LLMs can be like an acid trip, but the distance between having a trip at home and tangible harm is much greater than in the case of access to guns, knives, power tools, cars and rodent poison yet at least some of these are widely available to law abiding citizens in every state. Government interventions can be staged at the points where there is evidence of actual imminent harm, like problematic public behavior. Why are Democrats the new "Reefer Madness" pearl clutchers and why should I still believe they have anything to do with living the way you want?

1) Right now, as things stand, the Democrats are our only alternative to something far more evil. Until we ratify a new constitution which implements a proportional, parliamentary government, the two-party system means you have to pick the lesser of two evils. In the interim maybe we can banish the Republican party to a niche constituency of openly reprehensible racists and bigots, and set up the Democrats as the new right wing and the Greens as the new left wing, but right now it is morally incumbent upon every American to vote Democrat.

2) Read your Marx. Liberty doesn't arrive from toxic individualism, it arrives from the fulfillment of man's nature as a social-creative animal. AI is a tool used by the bourgeoisie to further alienate us from each other; as is right-libertarian individualism.

"Datacenters are people, too!"

So drm is now illegal?

IANAL but iirc DRM is governed by federal law, specifically the DMCA. A state law cant override a federal statute, so even if Montana's law were interpreted very broadly, it couldnt nullify the DMCA

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This is a law designed to force data centers to be built. This is nothing but a bipartisan corporate handout. Nothing to celebrate. The law makers should be ashamed.

EDIT for the downvoters, from the law:

> Any restrictions placed by the government on the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.

This basically means you can't use government action to stop the building of a data-center.

Maybe some people disagree with governments interfering with this - not saying that’s how I feel but that could be the downvote reason.

Your explanation seems reasonable.