This is...kind of my fear though. We need some pragmatism in politics but the American public fucking hates anything other than "my team best team forever". I say this as someone who is staunchly more left than probably 95% of everyone here... Building an algorithm that ensures absolutely any deviation from the trend is swiftly punished brutally is not necessarily a feature of a functional society.
You may think you want this because of Sinema and Fetterman but...we already know they're shitheads because...they blatantly do shithead stuff. Replacing the time spent gleaning all the nuance behind a vote with a party whip algorithm is not going to somehow make voters better at voting.
Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily. The police routinely escalate interactions as a matter of procedure until they end in shootings.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
> Hundreds of people have been tracked down and killed with flock cameras unnecessarily.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
That's the thing though. My hobby projects have been doing better than ever. My job is more or less the same it's always been, just with more unit tests (that cover...who knows) and slightly better tooling/CI because it's now less tedious to fix that shit when it gets mangled.
AI is very good at creating small codebases. It still sucks shit at maintaining huge ones where someone needs to understand how the codebase works.
I've seen what happens when companies just vibe code an entire mega codebase and it's really bad. AI is fucking terrible at grand architecture decisions.
It only takes the combined weight of the entire free press, a complete social media blitz and hundreds to thousands of citizens risking felonies to just straight up destroy the cameras.
Can I just take this moment to mention that I think we need a better system for car registrations across the board? I don't like that there are all these edge cases with titles, insurance, inspections/smog, window tint, plate expiry, taxes etc whenever you move or even travel. It feels like we've just turned vehicle ownership into a profit opportunity for the police to harass everyone over completely inconsequential nonsense the second you cross any state line (emissions/insurance aren't nonsense but bear with me pedants). Similarly it creates a mountain of work every time you move.
I wish you could just register under an LLC or trust or something wherever and have a generic plate that can go anywhere and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country.
Alternatively allow people to keep their plates indefinitely like phone numbers. Yes, this creates arbitrage opportunities but maybe we should be bringing up the standards of the arbitrage states instead of having assholes threaten everyone with guns for random infractions.
I'm kinda just throwing ideas out there but this current system is Kafkaesque.
Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.
As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.
The UK system associates the plates with your car. This incurs basically two pieces of paperwork online when you sell it, one of which is also annual taxation.
The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.
However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates". Number plates aren't a secure document. They have no authenticity markers. So you can just.. print your own, slap them on, and you're very unlikely to get police attention. A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.
> A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.
Only these are "ghost plates". So called because the letters appear faint, or ghost like, on ANPR cameras.
Using illegal plates, either ghost ones or cloned ones (where they're real plates but for the wrong vehicle) are not loopholes, any more than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff is a "loophole" for property ownership.
> However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates".
We don't call fake IDs either a loophole or "ghost IDs". When presented as identity documents, they're fraudulent identity documents. It doesn't matter if that ID is being presented to a bouncer in order to get in to a bar, or to everyone who cares to look at your car's bumper while it drives down the motorway, it's still a fake ID.
The car wasn't registered in my name, it was registered with my parents and I was an authorized driver. Realistically, it's a question for the insurance company I imagine. Can an authorized driver have a driver's license from another state? Seems like an odd geographic limit for a national insurance company to make.
Considering that half the parking lot of my building was out of state plates, it seems like it's not a huge concern for anyone.
Nope: moving to California just to attend school does not grant residency status.
It’s not 30 days it’s 20 but it isn’t “bringing into the state”, it is becoming a resident of the state, and that has more requirements than just showing up for a month.
its not abusing a loophole. if something isnt in a state for more than 50% of the calendar year the state should have no claim to it. its a federal matter at the point cross border taxation IMO.
As a reminder, we’re talking about a (hypothetical) 183-day rule for car registration here (as opposed to the ~30-day one we currently have, which makes loopholes that we discuss here absolutely impractical).
Moves to different states are just not that common for the average American, and I would prefer for states to retain the power to implement their own policies in this area. I would not want to see e.g. California unable to change emissions policy because Texas isn’t on board.
Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
I’m not sure what you mean by not that common. The ta millions of people a year- yes maybe it’s only ~1% of the population, buts it’s one percent every year, and I quarter you it’s no evenly distributed.
In my experience there's enough slack in practice for these edge cases. At least in CA, it's very strange for a cop to cite a tourist because their car is not road legal in CA but is road legal in their home state. I've known many people who just get off with warnings, sometimes years after they've actually moved to CA (and just never bothered re-registering their car their, even though that's technically legally required). Ofc YMMV
California is strange (for various reasons) but one of them is that it has a very large population, and a very long border with other states, and yet very little population near the borders (unless you count Mexico).
California's borders are bit strange for a state, but they're perfectly normal for a country. When the borders were decided, there weren't really any existing political boundaries to discuss except Mexico, so they went with geographical boundaries. The Sierras to the East, the Pacific to the West, the Cascades to the North, and Mexico to the South. The only place they really needed to smack a line on a map was in the middle of the Mojave desert, where they just continued the line from the Sierras to the Colorado River.
Some of the other western states share it - because the land is so empty - but the midwest and east often have major population centers at or very near to a border.
I seem to remember California was close to or even beating Texas for "percentage of residents who have never left the state."
What portion of the military do you think owns vehicles that have tints that legal where they live but illegal on the other side of a state border within an hour of them? That still seems like an edge case to me.
And states do not require active service members to reregister their cars when they have moved on orders.
They do still have to comply with local laws, which makes sense. Just because you have Florida plates does not mean you don’t need all weather tires in Minnesota.
I'm aware. I'm stating explicitly that I think that at any point in time, the number of service members who have tinted windows that are legal where they are stationed but would be illegal in a state that's within an hour from there is very small. I asked you to elaborate on how many you think there are, but it honestly doesn't sound like you think there are very many either based on your responses.
Based on the number of Hawaii/east coast/even a couple US forces (Germany) plates you see on the road near major bases in the Kitsap peninsula in WA…quite a few.
I'm not going to remove my legal tint to comply with rules for a state I don't live in. It's incredibly unlikely I'd get pulled over for it, but it is possible if a cop wanted a reason to pull me over.
If you go by the letter of the law (your legal residence is another state) then you should apply it uniformly (your vehicle's tint is illegal where you currently are). You can't pick and choose which technicalities apply to you.
If you go by the spirit of the law, then a grace period would be reasonable to apply to infrequent visitors. However, you travel there daily, so that does not apply to you.
Doesn’t really seem like you have a leg to stand on here.
Their tint law is stupid. See my previous comment on Crosstrek vs Impreza. Also, I've never heard of anyone getting pulled over for tint unless it's like really dark, so I'm not concerned, just pointing out it's ridiculous.
You're certainly entitled to think the law of a state you don't live in is stupid. The state you don't live in is equally entitled to not care whether people outside the state think a law is stupid.
>Also, I've never heard of anyone getting pulled over for tint unless it's like really dark
Idk about the rest of the country, but in my experience in the southern US it's a pretty common tactic to pull you over for assumed illegal tint to try and catch you for other charges. Especially if you aren't white.
Every time somebody decides to ram their suburban up the ass end of my car and flee the scene, the first thing the police ask is "did you get a good look at the driver" followed closely by "did you see the make/model/plates" and "what state was it registered in?" I don't have a lot of sympathy for windows dark enough to prevent me from making out the driver, the blatantly illegal license plate hiders so common in CA, and other such nonsense. If we want to adopt a policy of registration/licensure/insurance/whatever not being legally required for privacy reasons or something then that's one thing, but current policy tries to make sure people are responsible for their actions with a relatively small impact on privacy, and unless you're arguing against the broader issue then I think any tint law complaints are misplaced.
>the first thing the police ask is "did you get a good look at the driver" followed closely by "did you see the make/model/plates" and "what state was it registered in?"
If your argument for this law is that it forces people to incriminate themselves, that's really an argument that the whole thing should be thrown out.
Under no circumstances should you be able to be compelled to assist in your own prosecution, either directly or indirectly.
That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
Your position boils down to: "I should be able to commit traffic violations anonymously because anything else is an infringement on my 5th amendment rights".
Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
>That law has nothing to do with incriminating yourself (it's more about safety), but even if the law was specifically "so someone can see into your window and identify you if you do something bad", that's still not self-incrimination. Self-incrimination is requiring someone to testify against themselves.
You are requiring someone to take action that will assist in their own prosecution. That is the goal as per your own statements, and is the obvious primary purpose of these laws.
If that is not compelling someone to self-incriminate, what is?
>Basically you're saying that any law is invalid if it makes or ensures that any kind of wrongdoing visible to witnesses. That's absurd.
No, i'm saying that if you make a law whose primary purpose is to assist in the prosection of those who are compelled to follow it, that law is invalid. If you make a law that incidentally requires someone to assist in their own prosecution, then the law may be valid, but the usage of that information in prosecution or investigations is invalid and falls under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
I see no difference between it and compelling people in court to testify against themselves, because the only difference is where the self-incrimination is happening.
There are limits on the laws of a State when it involves inter-State commerce.
The US Supreme Court recognizes a general principle that you can transit a State with things that are illegal in that State. An individual State cannot impose a de facto ban on commerce between States, which includes the right to transport goods through a State in the normal fashion regardless of the laws of that State.
I know the interstate commerce clause often is used to justify some things that don't really seem to pertain directly to commerce, but we're talking about a law that's ostensibly a safety/accountability feature on road vehicles. I'm not convinced a court would allow you to like, drive without a seatbelt if you drove a car without seatbelts from a state where they won't required (not sure if there are any of these left? New Hampshire didn't require them when I was growing up in Massachusetts, but I haven't lived there for over a decade now so I have no idea)
I have a 1965 Mustang that I could legally drive without seatbelts in Massachusetts if I wanted to, as it was originally not equipped with safety belts.
Buying a car in the past when laws were different does not seem legally equivalent to buying a car today in a jurisdiction with different laws. It might be in some cases, but my impression is that the law is perfectly capable of distinguishing between those circumstances and it's possible to have them treated differently.
I'd be interested to know what case recognizes such a general principle. I would recommend not publicizing that you are transiting with cannabis from Oregon to Montana through Idaho, for example.
IIRC, the pivotal case involved individuals arrested for possession of illegal firearms while staying in a hotel. The firearms were being moved between States and were legal in both the origin and destination States but not in one of the States they were transporting them through.
The court viewed this as unconstitutional interference in the commerce between the origin and destination States, which seems correct on its face. There must be evidence of intent to distribute the firearms in the State where they are illegal. This case created a safe harbor for mere transport of goods between States.
Cannabis is different because it violates Federal law. It is technically illegal everywhere even though it is legal under State law in many locales. The Federal government has chosen to not enforce this law in States where it is legal, largely because enforcement could create a Constitutional case that could bring into question Federal authority to enact those and many other laws.
Yes because people can't be expected to make expensive modifications to their vehicles while visiting another state. And the law in Minnesota is ridiculous especially in situations like a Crosstrek vs an Impreza. They have the same body but the allowed tint levels are different because one is classified as an SUV and the other as a station wagon. I could lift my Impreza and make it look exactly like a Crosstrek, but the tint would still be illegal. I find that funny.
Okay, so if I buy something expensive, and then go to a different state, I should be exempted from laws saying it's illegal because I happen to disagree with them? That seems way more "funny" to me
That's not for you to decide, though. If you don't like a law, work to get it changed, don't visit the place that has that law, or stop doing what is breaking that law. Those are your options.
Yeah, this is starting to feel like it's creeping into "sovereign citizen" territory, like opting out of laws that you don't agree with is somehow a valid legal argument
There is no logic to their tint law. I live in a community that exists in 2 states. And civil disobedience is morally ok. Anyway, nobody is going to pull me over for my tint and if they do, that's fine, I know I'm risking a ticket. It's not that serious.
Again, that's just a personal opinion. I could have that opinion about any number of laws and choose to disobey them because of that.
You're certainly entitled to the opinion that the law is indefensible and should never be followed. It's just weird to me for you to treat this like some sort of obvious objective view with no reasonable grounds for disagreement.
This is the cost of living in a federated republic. Power is diffuse across the states so they all have different opinions on how to go about things like vehicle registrations and insurance. The only alternative is for states to relinquish the power over vehicle registrations/plates/insurance requirements to the federal government which could enforce a universal standard, but I'm sure given current events you would see why that would be a terrible idea.
I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.
Even within California there are smog-exempt counties. This makes perfect sense, things like excess NOx simply don't matter if the population density is low enough which incidentally is also true of a lot of the rest of the country. CA is the strictest with smog-related, going as far as barring federal (non-CA) vehicles from being registered unless they're 7500+ miles on the odometer. Tint should be limited to 70% VLT nationally really, but that's another topic. Other than that some north-eastern states have safety inspections which makes total sense given the rust. By developed country standards we have it very easy.
I ran into a fun one when moving out of the country. Chrysler Town and Country I had bought in Washington state, we were flying out from CA. My thought was to unload the vehicle in the last week before flying.
Except no one would buy it, not even Carmax or any of the other "cash for cars" places! Turns out, the car was originally manufactured for Canada, and California doesn't recognize the Canadian smog regulations, even if the car was functionally identical down to the catalytic converter. No one would take the damn thing because they couldn't re-title it. I finally found one guy who would who seemed like he was taking a decent sized risk, but since I gave him a good price he decided he'd just give it his best shot. For all I know he may have had to (illegally) drive it to Nevada just to sell it.
> and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country
To rephrase, you're asking that the same license plate work across all of the European Union.
To realize why this is unrealistic, one has to go back to history and understand the core concept of the United States of America. It's right there in the name itself. It was a compromise to unite and bring agreement across all these disparate states that were in their very own right entire countries (and most, even till date, most states in the US continue to be larger, geographically than most countries in the world), agree on some very basic terms so there could be trade across them, kind of like the European Union.
> but this current system is Kafkaesque
Of course, this license plate registration thing was optimized for tax and fee collection, and it does that job very well. All it takes is for someone to run for office and say they're going to overturn it all.
That standardizes the visual appearance, but not the semantics or issuance of the plates. EU residents are generally required to re-register a car when changing which country they reside in, which in turn has its own rules for what constitutes permanent residence.
And by comparison, all jurisdictions in the US and Canada have long agreed to a common set of physical/visual standards for license plates, despite variation between jurisdictions on the rules for registering vehicles.
I do love the variety of license plates in the US and Canada. My favorites are the bear shaped plate in NWT and the reproduction small plate in Delaware. Those are the only two I can think of that fall outside of the standard shape but are still.compatible with the screw hole pattern.
Nobody seems to recognize how deranged it is that we drive around with easily identifiable numbers plastered on our vehicle. This has seemed weird and privacy-violating to me since I was a kid, yet even today when people complain about Flock cameras they don’t complain about what the cameras are looking for.
What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?
And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.
It's only required on public roads. You can drive on your own property all you like without plates.
I'm all for privacy for things that are truly private. But wanting to secretly consume public resources and remain unaccountable for harm to others is what I think is truly absurd. Although it's an increasingly popular one recently.
That's funny. The vast majority of people's "own property" they could drive on would be on average about 50 feet. I grew up on 3/4 acre lot, and my dad let me drive up and down the drive way to practice before I had a license, so I get what you mean. Just funny that it's such a bold suggestion knowing that it's applicable to such a small number of people
I'm pretty sure, most of these weird laws are for farmers/ranchers. For whatever reason, they chose to word it more generically that sounds ridiculous applying it to everyone. Just like the whole red dye diesel, farmers just get special carve outs to give them a fighting chance on surviving to be able to provide us affordable food.
That is more because the gas tax is intended to pay for the roads. Red-dye diesel is declaring your intention to use the vehicle exclusively off-road, and thus not needing to be subject to the gas tax.
I contend that the only sensible way to measure freedom (of which privacy is an aspect) is within the context of societal interactions. It's not particularly interesting to move to the middle of nowhere and be able to do do what you want while not interacting with others (what it takes for "on your own [real estate]" to be meaningful). The pertinent metric is how well society can maintain a level of individual liberty (ie tolerance) as it scales up in density of interactions.
And nobody said anything about wanting to be unaccountable for harm. Rather it's a matter of being vulnerable to ne'er do wells. When we get a US GDPR equivalent with teeth, develop a widespread societal taboo against the surveillance industries, and so on, then we can talk about an equitable tradeoff with accountability for harm. Until then, the dynamic is an overwhelming vulnerability.
That analysis seems pretty confused to me. Freedom without accountability for harm to others is nonsensical.
As is dramatizing license plates as "overwhelming vulnerability". Just look at the US's 40k traffic deaths per year, with countless lesser injuries and accidents. Balanced against which specific harms of license plates?
The problem with Flock, etc, is their massive, unaccountable, for profit surveillance, which uses much more than license plates, and is working hard to move beyond them.
Nobody but you has said anything about "freedom" from accountability for harm.
The specific harms are exemplified by things like Flock, but also individual businesses tracking, private investigators, etc. If you want to stop that harm other ways, I've already agreed that I would find that acceptable. But until something actually changes on that front, it's not really an argument!
Given modern technology, we can imagine different ways that would provide less of a general vulnerability while actually providing more of the accountability you're putting foremost. Imagine say e-ink plates or a radio beacon that rotated the broadcasted identifier every minute, only being linkable through a database with an audit trail, etc.
Setting aside how things are, I'm curious about this thought experiment:
> You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.
Do I have a right to feed myself and my family?
If yes, is that right absolute or relative?
If absolute, and my ability to feed requires me to commute in a car, is having a car a right or a privilege?
Next, assume I cannot use my legs and need an electric wheelchair to move around. Do I have a right to an electric wheelchair? What if that electric wheelchair has 50 miles of range which is more than sufficient for my daily commute and more.
Am I now at an advantage compared to a person who needs a car for that exact same commute?
There are no "absolute" rights. All rights you have are limited by the rights other people have. You don't even have a truly absolute right to your own death in most places.
You do not have a right to drive a car in the United States. It is a privilege for which you must be licensed, which necessarily means you can lose your license and not be able to drive. There are medical conditions which absolutely prohibit you from driving. At least in the state where I did Drivers Ed, if you had certain kinds of seizures you could not drive again until you'd been seizure free for 18 months. It is your responsibility to arrange your life to match that.
No matter what other thought experiment you create, you do not have a right to drive a car in the US, it can be revoked quite easily.
But, realistically, outside of a couple major cities that have public transportation, you need to drive a car to survive, so all that really does is criminalize a segment of the population.
I am thinking in the extreme that is unconstitutional however, as how can you have a right to life and liberty if you can’t earn a living, buy groceries, or go to DisneyLand?
> But hey, I'm sure you're the first to vote against any measures that would actually improve things like urban density or public transportation.
To the contrary.
I don't believe in being punitive and taxing people who live a life different from mine or hold conflicting beliefs.
I don't believe in lecturing people on how they should live their lives as long as they don't start to lecture me on how I should mine.
If someone wants to live in a rural county and drive to and from work or groceries 20 hours a day, they're welcome to. They are adults.
If someone on the other hand wants to live right next to the train and bus station, so they can take a ride right out of their balcony, they're welcome to do so as well. They are adults.
I do not assume a right over another person's decision and freedom to choose how they want to live their own life as long as they don't tamper with my own. We are adults.
The United States was built on these very ideals: mini, hyper-localized governance than a larger centralized governance that is not in touch with the people they govern.
Unfortunately, that philosophy has been lost to time, and people in coastal cities in California seem to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing ranch hands in Montana what to do and how to live their lives.
> The United States was built on these very ideals: mini, hyper-localized governance than a larger centralized governance that is not in touch with the people they govern.
That's a common tale of American mythos, but it's not really an accurate portrayal of American history. Hyper-local governance only really existed in New England and never spread outside of it. Most governance centered on states which are--let's be frank--small countries: the median state in population and area is around 40th percentile among world countries, so smaller than average, but not by that much. And if you look throughout the history of states' rights in US history, invariably those advocating for states' rights are bleeding hypocrites. Note that, e.g., when the southern states established the Confederate States of America, they expressly forbid their own states from having the rights they were claiming for themselves in the antebellum period.
Indeed, in many cases, the more localized governance really turns out to just be people who have lost the political debate at the national level, and thus unable to impose their views on everybody, settling for imposing them at the state level and eagerly oppressing those within the jurisdictions where they can win from exercising their differing views.
>how they want to live their own life as long as they don't tamper with my own. We are adults.
lol, you were then eaten by a bear of your own making.
You see, when you're deathmobile is f=mv2 down the highway you present a clear and present danger to every one around you. It doesn't matter if your 5, 55 or 95 physics gives zero shits about your libertarian ideas as your broke ass kills 3 people and leaves one a quadriplegic requiring millions of dollars in care for the rest of their miserable life.
>Unfortunately, that philosophy has been lost to time
Yea, guess what happens when you connect the world together so were milliseconds away digitally, and 3 days away from each other with modern travel. Suddenly the dumb shit we do effects everyone around us and in our profound ignorance make the world worse for everyone around us. Hyper-localized doesn't exist unless you want to dump all telecommunications in the trash and burn all the cars and planes the go back to horses.
You act like the founding fathers, if transported to today, would be completely incapable of making logically informed decisions based on the current state of the world, and not a world 250 years in their past.
> and people in coastal cities in California seem to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing ranch hands in Montana
And the people in Montana are perfectly fine with making laws at the federal level that effect people in California.
Continuing that thought about the "coastal cities lecturing the ranch hands in Montana", those ranch hands in Montana have far more power in the federal government than those "coastal cities", so in reality they're the ones generally enforcing their policies on the overall country.
California has about 732,000 residents per electoral vote, Montana has like 280,000 residents per electoral vote. Despite CA having nearly 40 million people they still only get 2 senators, so their influence in the Senate per voter is 1 vote per 20 million people while Montana senators only have 570,000 people behind each vote.
> Unfortunately, that philosophy has been lost to time, and people in coastal cities in California seem to feel perfectly comfortable lecturing ranch hands in Montana what to do and how to live their lives.
The rural folk in Wyoming and Montana get far more say relative to their populace on how Californians should live than vice versa.
It's not urban versus rural. That... is just another variation of having more vote proportional to your land. Land doesn't vote, people do. But in the US, land also votes some, which seems ironic given a nation founded in part on getting away from rights largely embued by how much land you own.
To be fair, it's only privacy-violating if you have access to a way to lookup who owns the blue Toyota Corolla with license plate 1ABC234. The Driver Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal to disclose PII based on a license plate
A single bumper sticker or distinctive paint color or a dent in the door can be just as immediately identifying as a license plate at that level. Even in places where the plate is always the same for the car and doesn't change when it's sold, it's just a way to tell one vehicle apart from another.
Case in point, my user name is a license plate number of a total stranger, and I imagine you'd be hard pressed to even tell me the color of the car, let alone their name and address. I'm not asking you to doxx someone, but saying it's not trivially easy for the average person, even when considering the boatload of data broker information out there on every individual.
We used to do this in Wisconsin for hunting. Large permit tag you had to clip on your back, looked just like a license plate. They got rid of it about a decade ago when everything was going digital.
Do you wear a name tag in public with your SSN, or some unique identifying information on it? If not, why not?
If I asked you to vote on this, would you vote in favor for it?
Why not? People can strangle other people so it makes sense to know who is who at all times in the case that someone strangles someone else and then tries to run away.
If this isn't making sense yet - This is as sensible as expecting software engineers to walk around with equipment that prominently display uniquely identifying information because computers can be used to hack and doxx people.
The fact that license plates were/are necessary is to address shortcomings of technology.
Most states in 2026 are slowly removing the need to display license plates at all because it never made sense but had to be done to address shortcomings that are no longer so in 2026.
If you think that the chances of a random person strangling someone else is the same as the chances of a person with a gun shooting someone else, I'm not really sure what to tell you.
Don't plate numbers technically belong to records held by the state? They aren't really private information for an individual (and I think you can request new numbers at any time, no?).
I think the only reason we enforce showing the plates is so the police can easily see if a vehicle is allowed to be on the roads from their own vehicles during traffic stops. We don't have police out patrolling for gun owners, but if we did I bet we would see more public "gun registration plates" for convenience purposes.
As for drivers licenses at bars, again, it's just convenience. We could split all that info into separate little cards and only show what we need to, but we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
> we've collectively decided the risk is very low that a bar or supermarket is going to track our address and DOB as we flash them to buy booze.
That's not "low risk"; that actually happens, a lot. Many bars and supermarkets will scan the barcode on the back of your license when they do the check. Of course everything on it goes into a database to help build a profile about you.
The beauty of digital licenses (ie as implemented by iPhone) is you can restrict the information provided so e.g. a bar or grocery store only gets your age.
> And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)?
That's just the US being stupid and using driver's licenses as primary identity documents. (And if you don't have a passport or other ID document, you're part of that problem.)
(Fun fact: I have 2 passports, 1 driver's license and 1 residence permit. None of those have my address. To be fair, they all have my DOB, that's really considered mandatory for any ID document around here.)
I don't think it's deranged at all, driving is a privilege not a right, you need a license for it, and a license for almost anything has requirements to follow.
The requirement to identify the vehicle for enforcement of the licensing requirements is not at all strange.
Don't get a license if you don't agree with the requirements for it. Would you be saying the same thing for aircraft?
It is worth considering that without being able to identify people then only unacceptable behaviour that rises to the level of needing and having an immediate response can actually be punished.
It's the qualitative change than comes with the change in quantity and ease of monitoring (and accessibility of that info) that means being identifiable is so much worse now days.
Unless you're willing to spend money, you can't just go online to find the registration info for a plate number. It's not impossible, but it's definitely not as simple as flipping through the pages of the phone book to look up someone's address and number.
Tell that to felons. Or people with diagnosed mental health issues of certain types.
The idea of a "right" is hilarious. Whenever you have an entity (like a government) that has the power of force or imprisonment over you, everything is a privilege.
I can't think of very many "rights" that haven't been abridged, curtailed, or violated by governments in ways that have been held to be legal when reviewed by courts.
I was with you in the first paragraph. As I was reading I was reminded of old Cold War-era Soviet Union.
You lost me in the next paragraph where your solution was to centralize even more into a committee that has the power to bulldoze over more locally relevant needs and desires
That's kinda what I'm getting at I think. We've created a patchwork hell full of arbitrage and petty harassment and everyone's just kind of fine with it
Similarly, the car purchasing process is a nightmare. Carvana faced that one the hard way trying to sell across the US and ended up forming their own lobbying band to push for digital and electronic titling and registration.
The problem is you’re optimizing for bureaucratic efficiency over the needs of the people. There’s even issues with that at the state level that would be way worse.
So many Californians live in valleys that trap pollution. Strict emissions regulations have an immediate, tangible impact. South Carolina doesn’t have the same local issues and their standards vary. Likewise, tint stuff is mostly a police / safety issue, and is more of a problem in major metro areas. High tint is an issue in the Bronx. Not so much in rural Alabama.
I’d argue that the worst part of the system we have now is that we have a weird hybrid as disenfranchisement has become a political priority. Integration between states is driven by compacts between states and Canadian provinces and mediated through private entities like AAMVA and NLETS. That has facilitated other sharing agreements with insurers and other entities that is a serious and significant privacy violation.
We should be able to get a free passport card for identity, and make driving privilege licensure, vehicle registration, etc a purely state matter.
> The problem is you’re optimizing for bureaucratic efficiency over the needs of the people.
There's a reason there are 50 states and not just one federal land. The needs of the people of Montana are definitely different than the needs of New Yorkers, so expecting the two states to have the same laws is just illogical. It's also why things like the electoral college is a thing to prevent the population centers dictating what the rural people have to do.
The electoral college was created because citizens couldn’t reliably be expected to travel to vote. That time has long since passed, since voting stations are generally (modulo places that are actively shuttering them to disenfranchise people) scattered around enough that it’s not arduous.
Plenty of other countries with rural areas seem to do fine without one. They also usually have much better / more granular representation, instead of a hard cap of 435 for a population that is orders of magnitude larger than at the country’s founding.
We will not all (even 80% of us) be using electric vehicles in 10 years, or even 20 years. I don’t think even half of new vehicles will be fully electric by then, let alone half of all vehicles on the road.
The kind of pollution created by brakes and tires (namely, particulates) is much easier to filter out than the kinds of pollution created by internal-combustion engines and their fuel tanks.
I wear a cheap disposable N95 mask when I walk along busy streets, which filters out probably at least 98% of the particulates. (The "95" in "N95" stands for 95%, but that is 95% of the particles that are hardest to filter: both smaller particles and larger particles are easier to filter. So since it is quite unlikely that all or most of the particles produced by brakes and tires are precisely the size that is hardest to filter, I estimate that my cheap $2 mask that can be reused for dozens walks is probably filtering at least 98%.)
In contrast noise pollution and tailpipe pollution and fuel-tank-evaporation pollution are much harder to filter (at least for pedestrians on the move) so a drastic reduction in one and a complete elimination of the other two is an extremely welcome development.
Specifically, the gaseous pollution from tailpipes and fuel tanks is composed of many hundreds of different compounds, many of which can be effectively absorbed by filtration media, but many of which cannot be. I don't bother to try to filter out this kind of pollution (i.e., gaseous) when I walk along busy streets because the filtration media makes the mask much bulkier and heavier than my N95 masks are and because the filtration media costs more (even plain activated carbon, the cheapest and most useful media for gases) and remains effective for a much shorter duration before it must be replaced.
Yes, states are not only fine with determining their own driving laws, they want to determine their own driving laws. People do not have uniform opinions on what our laws should be.
Someone could compile every vehicle regulation from all the states into one common list. It'd be more restrictive than any single state, but it would be consistent. And if someone doesn't like it, they can fall back to their local laws.
this pretty much exists. thats where the malformed plate info generated by Fluck gets input and results in drivers of partial match plates 4 to 6 states from the away getting pulled out of cars at gunpoint. registration is just a different dataset in the same system. 20+ years ago most PD dispatches had a terminal dedicated to out of state registration lookups... today its in the patrol car.
In inherent to the fact that the US is a federation of States. It does create extra bureaucracy, but the alternative is a unitary state, which the US explicitly avoided in its founding and which most Americans would be opposed to today.
Vehicle registrations are just par for the course.
Hey if you're interested IBM just developed one such system for the Quebec government (called SAAQClic) that was supposed to cost 638 millions but ended up costing 1.1 billion. We are desperate to monetize it so anything you want to pay to license is fine with us
Window tint isn't nonsense, either. I think every stanced-out pickup with a tinted windshield should be apprehended and destroyed the instant it crosses my state's line.
States have so many variances on what kind of tint is legal and sometimes just absurd rules. For example, Minnesota has very little limitations on tinting SUVs but strict limits on cars. A Subaru Crosstrek is pretty much a lifted Impreza. The tint on my Impreza is illegal in Minnesota, but would be legal if it was a Crosstrek.
Except that states want their pound of flesh; California is definitely no exception.
There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.
It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.
So a race to the bottom on licensing/taxation/safety/insurance/emissions? But only for those wealthy enough to have family trusts?
No. Each state needs the power to set minimum standards as to who can drive what. I don't want to see millionaires be allowed to drive around without insurance in unsafe cars simply because their daddy purchased them a share in a Delaware family-held plates LLC.
Ya, good luck trying to defend your 2$ out-of-state trust in local court when it is sued after not having proper insurance to cover the cars it "owns". But wait, you won't even be allowed into court as you need to be a lawyer to represent a corporate entity.
That would be great, but the railroads have torn up most of their own lines and refuse to move anything that might be needed inside of a month from ship date because PSR means they only run one mega train periodically. They also routinely refuse profitable runs because they're not as profitable as their other runs and they calculate success only in terms of profitability rate.
US railroads think the ideal railroad is one that owns no track and carries no freight.
I for one welcome the incompetence. Godspeed to whoever is able to deploy a build to the whole device fleet that burns SoM boot protection fuses to an image that doesn't do anything hard bricking their entire network.
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