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Government Technology

Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments (apnews.com) 168

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments. From a report: Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state's economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday. The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services. The measure to further economic development with the "alternative form of local government" has not yet been introduced in the Legislature. Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address delivered Jan. 19. The plan would bring in new businesses at the forefront of "groundbreaking technologies" without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that previously helped Nevada attract companies like Tesla. Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a "smart city" in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed.
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Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments More

Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments

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  • Neat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:16PM (#61031558)

    A timely reminder we live in a megacorp dystopia.

  • What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by caladine ( 1290184 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:17PM (#61031566)
    So instead of the "company store" it's now "company government"? How could that possibly go wrong?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by zieroh ( 307208 )

      Came here to say this, leaving satisfied.

    • Maybe we should ask Disney Florida?

      • Well, the Reedy Creek Improvement District has vast powers (but not over elevator inspections, for some reason) but the towns -- the very very small towns -- are Bay Lake and Lake Burns Vista, with a total population of 57 (and all chosen to be loyal company folks).

        Walt liked the idea of owning a town but no one went along with it and then he died.

    • Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:43PM (#61031680) Homepage Journal
      To be specific, pro validate escalation.

      We see this with police departments. For example, transit firms can have police departments. You can get a van, drive people around, and do all the things police do, like DNA tests and other invasion of privacy.

      Think of how more power a government has than a police force. The power to file liens for taxes and force people out of their homes. The power to request all matter of private records. There will be nothing that the company does not know about everyone living in the town.

    • Nevada has a long history of not following national political alignment, but . . .

      We've had good and bad governors from both parties. And we don't follow party lines; when I got here we the governor a pro-life democrat who dated a pro-abortion republican.

      Until now, though, we never had a simple party hack elected governor from *either* party.

      I'd been hoping for months to see him do something other than mimic whatever stupid thing Newsom does next door on a two week delay.

      There was even a flash of hope when

  • A nice example... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:17PM (#61031574)

    A nice example of fascism in the making. And yes, it comes in slightly different flavors but the main theme - industrialists/old money directly in control of gov't - remains unchanged.

    Way to go, Nevada!

    • Re: A nice example... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:20PM (#61031588)

      Not different from what Mussolini originally imagined. Remeber, he said fascism is defined as the merger of industry and state. What we now call privatization.

      • Re: A nice example... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:49PM (#61031700)

        No, privatization is the exact opposite of that - industry does industrial things and the government governs - there's a separation. Merger doesn't imply a direction.

        What we have in this case is industry absorbing the government. In a communist/socialist system you get the reverse: the government absorbs industry. Both constitute a merger, and both are bad.

        • Utilities? Check. Prisons? Check. Military? Check (read up on how many PMCs we use sometime, it's terrifying).

          So let's go further. How about schools? Yep, we've done that. Fire Department? Yep. That's been done. Police? There are examples of this if you go looking.

          And legislation? Do some googling about how lobbyists write the majority of our laws. It's good fun.

          Point is, you can privatize anything, e.g. hand it off to individuals based on how much money they have (which if you know anything abo

        • No, privatization is the exact opposite of that - industry does industrial things and the government governs - there's a separation. Merger doesn't imply a direction.

          What we have in this case is industry absorbing the government.

          You're forgetting that for something to be "privatized" it has to start as public good. Think public land, public roads, public utility...
          THEN, government, out of the goodness of its heart, decides to make things "more efficient" by sparing the public of all that cumbersome ownership - and selling or simply signing away public good to private interests.
          Usually, said "government" and "private interests" are at the very least joined at ass and mouth. But sometimes they are one and the same.

          I.e. Privatization

      • ... call privatization.

        No, the USA now has government-sponsored monopolies: Capitalism minus the free market. It would be great if prisons had to bid for prisoners but instead (NY city) government guarantees 96% bed-occupancy. How does a for-profit enterprise that already has 100% of the market, grow profits? Not in any way that benefits the rest of society.

      • > merger of industry and state. What we now call privatization.

        Huh? *Privatization* (separating government from business) is the same as putting the two together, merging them? Is it opposite day?

        When the government and the business are one and the same, that's called socialism, or communism. That's "merger of industry and state".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Way to go, Nevada!

      We can always count on new ways to innovate more decline and failure from our Blue states.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by LVSlushdat ( 854194 )

      Oh yes, we REALLY REALLY love our governor (NOT)... He's a chip off the ole Biden asshole.. Fascism is the democrats (they REALLY need to change their name to "communist party", because they damn sure aint democratic) end-game.. They're gonna try their damnest to shove communism down America's throat come hell or high water..

      • Your comment is a joke, right? 'cuz none of it makes a bit of sense. Humor is the charitable interpretation here.

        Handing your town to a corporation is the opposite of communism, and besides, while some Dems have expressed interest in creating a modern social democracy (like some happy European nations), no residing-above-the-dirt Democratic politician has expressed the slightest interest in communism, AFAICT.

        I'm a Biden voter, and while I don't think he's the perfect solution, he's experienced, smart, and a

      • Did you miss the Republican president mounting a coup, and the Republican establishment supporting it? Tell us again about how it's the democrats opposing democracy, we could use the funny

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ddtmm ( 549094 )

        Oh yes, we REALLY REALLY love our governor (NOT)... He's a chip off the ole Biden asshole.. Fascism is the democrats (they REALLY need to change their name to "communist party", because they damn sure aint democratic) end-game.. They're gonna try their damnest to shove communism down America's throat come hell or high water..

        Ya, because if it isn't democracy, it much be communism. Good logic.

  • Yeah... no (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:18PM (#61031582)

    We've kinda tried this before [wikipedia.org]. A lot of them initially mouthed high ideals, but ultimately, there was just a lot of exploitation. Sound familiar? What's old is new again, I guess.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Looks like Hookers and Blackjack are back on the benefits list!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Only if you're the hooker or the blackjack dealer, at which point it's not called a "benefit" and becomes your "job".

  • Disney World is set up this way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Greeneland ( 598616 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:24PM (#61031612)
    They have their own fire department, police, etc. If you want to research the subject, it is a datapoint with a lot of years behind it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kevoco ( 64263 )

      Came here to mention Disney World, too.

    • Mining towns did it first you know. Those have a whole mess of data points.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Sure, but Disney carefully controls who lives -- and owns property -- in the Reedy Creek Improvement District (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_District) so that the governing body is democratically elected, if only under the thinnest technical pretense of democracy. They don't provide schools for the children (if any) who live there, and they contract with state police and the county sheriff's office for law enforcement. It's a far cry from what is described in TFS.

    • Many companies do this much without the municipality designation, and a few based on a single resident as a puppet... but the idea of going back to company towns is a bit scary. Not sure how different it is than planned communities like Summerlin, so the details will be interesting.

    • Wait, their own "police" vice "security" or 'security guards'?
      You mean with the power to actually arrest and use deadly force and to serve arrest/search-warrants?
      I find that rather hard to believe, wish a source had been sited.

      Company towns are doomed to abuse and corruption of power.
      Some government function should never be privatized, like prisons, courts, police, military

  • EPCOT but worse (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Etcetera ( 14711 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:26PM (#61031618) Homepage

    There's a "company town" where a company really is trying to develop new living environments and needs the ability to control the geography and commercial paradigms of the location in a way that would normally require a municipal charter to do it (think the Reedy Creek Improvement District [wikipedia.org], which effective IS Disney World, and was designed to help facilitate things like EPCOT [wikipedia.org]), and then there's a "company town" used basically to house the employees necessary on site to mine a resource, and then there's whatever the hell dystopian thing is these tech companies want.

    Dear Lord, Nevada needs none of it. Even Bullfrog County [wikipedia.org] was eventually rejected. This seems even worse of an abdication to tech companies that no one should trust as far as they can throw them.

    • There's a "company town" where a company really is trying to develop new living environments and needs the ability to control the geography and commercial paradigms of the location in a way that would normally require a municipal charter to do it (think the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which effective IS Disney World, and was designed to help facilitate things like EPCOT)

      Oh man, you've drunk deeply of the kool-aid. The Reedy Creek Improvement District isn't about things like EPCOT. It's about freeing

      • The original vision for EPCOT was exactly what Etcetera mentioned. Walt had visions for the future that went far beyond mere theme parks. Ever wonder why EPCOT is in all-caps? It's an acronym:

        Experimental
        Prototype
        Community
        Of
        Tomorrow

        People were supposed to live there. It was supposed to have all of the municipal services of any city, and then some. So yeah, it needed to be an actual municipality. You can see the tiniest hint of that vision in Celebration. But EPCOT would have been much more than a mod

        • But then Walt died, his vision died with him, and his heirs turned it into the "meh" theme park it is.

          It would have been interesting, but wonder bread through and through. A product of it's time.

  • Seen it. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:31PM (#61031636)

    If you wonder how this why this is a bad idea, just watch Incorporated [wikipedia.org] where corporations are given the power of governments.

    • Do they make war on other corporations?

      • Yes but they try to avoid anything being official. They killed on of their own scientists (who had found how to make a vast wasteland into arable land) in a nuclear strike to prevent an invading corporation from getting the technology, despite losing the knowledge entirely in the same strike. Very much a "if we can't profit from it, neither should they" choice.

  • Self-contained semi-autonomous corporate entity, blessed and sanctioned (in the sense of authoritative approval) by the outside government, maybe? Something like a US Indian reservation/nation, where there's a higher level of autonomy and subsequent risk due to those sanctions.

    Would the personal protections of the US Constitution would apply evenly within that space? Doesn't seem like they would as it's within a corporate entity. One could set up a not-independent alt-world where inhabitants shared with the

  • Yes because we don't need a bunch of elected nincompoops getting in the way of our true leaders.

  • They should just declare that corporations are religious entities...gods, really...and immune to taxes, labour laws and any other impediments to complete and utter freedom from responsibility. For corporations, "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law".

  • What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @01:59PM (#61031762)

    Why would a tech company purchase a huge swatch of land in Nevada to make their own town, only to have their employees work remote from other points in the country?

    Seems a little out of touch with where tech is right now. They realize that they can be just as effective with remote employees and save buckets of coin on leasing, utilities, etc.

    What Nevada should be doing is working on building super tech-friendly communities with high-speed internet and other geek-favored features. Throw in some "We'll pay you 10k to move here" things like other cities in the US have done to bring the remote tech workers in. They'd get the same tax benefit but none of this "company town" nonsense that I don't believe anyone feels would end well...

  • Las Facebook will have non-voting citizens like non-voting stock.

  • Lack of "groundbreaking technologies"?

    From what I can see, local government tends to be more responsive to its citizens than state or federal government. I personally would consider "working better". When individuals or groups of individuals with personal and business connections to the people running a town have too much clout, we have a word for that: corruption. Making corruption the legal foundation of a town's government wouldn't fundamentally change its character.

    Now towns do have perennial problems

  • The definition of Fascism.

  • Private sector government? Sign me up (Score:3, Funny)

    by Buffalo Al ( 7659072 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @02:25PM (#61031878)
    We all know this autonomous zone would run better than every city in America. Where do I sign up?

  • The two big tech hubs in the US for the last 70 years have been greater Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

    What do they have in common? M.I.T. and Stanford encourage their alumni to commercialize what they invent in school and offer cheap licensing to alumni and not so cheap licensing to others.

    Compare that with the Netscape saga where Andreesen wasn't allowed to use the Mosaic code he wrote in college at Netscape and his alma mater licensed Mosaic to Microsoft so that Microsoft could compete with Netsca

    • While most Universities object to alumni getting rich off of IP owned by the University.

      Well you should know Slashdot's stance on IP*, so saying this is a negative will not go over well.

      *Never mind higher education in general.

    • What does MIT have to do with silicon valley?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by micheas ( 231635 )

        What does MIT have to do with silicon valley?

        In theory nothing. But it has a lot to do with the Boston Tech scene which is where a large percentage of the US biotech industry is. Companies like RSA came out of M.I.T.

      • That would be the Boston in

        greater Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

  • So, if the companies operate similarly to county governments, will there be elections? Can they impose taxes and fees and operate prisons? Would the companies provide all the services that true governments provide and also assume the same liabilities that true governments provide?

    It seems to me that no company would ever consider acting as a true government. Most companies see maintenance of basic computing systems as something that should be outsourced, so why would they take on responsibilities like sc

  • Ordering a Pepsi would be a capital offense in Atlanta. (Right now, it's only ostracism and possibly light jail time.)

  • And if you take another job? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ThomasBHardy ( 827616 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @02:55PM (#61032016)

    Can you imagine? You get an offer to work for another company. A great offer, and you accept.

    When you resign from your current company, they ask for your laptop, ID and also the deed to your house, and you have 2 weeks to leave.

  • In LA, we have sidewalks that are no longer passable because they have become permanent homeless camps. More and more people are out of work, and joining those ranks, innocent families ending up shoulder to sholder with crackheads and gangbangers. Our governor is hobnobbing with the elite, eating meals that cost $350 pr. patron. People are fleeing California in droves.

    So what does this have to do with Nevada? Well this is another loud proclaimation that the ones who are not part of the social elite can go f

  • ...seem to me a much better vision.

    [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Congratulations on your new role at MCO corp. Your HR coordinator's name is Judge Dredd.

  • Nevada is long used to "businessmen" running their various levels of government. The quotes are there to highlight that some businesses may be fronts for, or affiliated with, some variety of organized crime.

    Sex work is legal in Nevada (on US 50 headed west into the state capitol, Carson City, there used to be an interesting set of billboards, alternating various religious messages with advertisements for brothels), but not in Las Vegas, because certain "business interests" find it more profitable to use un

  • And this is his poster child?

    Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a "smart city" in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed.

    It reads like a cross between a mirage and a ponzi scheme

  • We're already there (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @04:26PM (#61032346)
    We already live in what Sheldon Wollin calls Inverted totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    Unlike traditional totalitarianism which follow a leader, with inverted totalitarianism you still have the veneer “freedom” ie: voting, courts, laws, etc, except all the levers of power have been seized by corporations. Bills written by corporate lobbyists passed by our owned “representatives”, Citizens United- giving corporations all the “rights” of person hood with none of the responsibilities are just 2 examples of proof. This is not limited to Dem’s or the GOP, both parties have been sized by corporate money.
  • So taking the concept of the 'mining town' to the extreme? The very definition of Hell, living and working in the same place? The Company is police, judge, jury, and executioner? Terrible idea, they should be shot for proposing something like this.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Rather than 'new powers', this kinda sounds like they are deregulating and not stopping large landowners from incorporating... scaling up HOAs for extra freedom!
  • I wonder if some C-level leaders will believe they can now be like kings. This is fake sovereignty, which can be removed by another Nevada law.

  • This is effectively the same situation the coal companies had in places like West Virginia 100 years ago. The miners all lived in company towns and borrowed against their pay to shop at the company store. How did that work out?

  • Prostituting itself and anything and everyone for another dollar, when they are fine as it is now.

    What is wrong with these people ?
    DOnt they have a life or anything better to do than just trying to grab more money ?

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