California closed the Montana license plate loophole(thedrive.com) |
California closed the Montana license plate loophole(thedrive.com) |
Our willingness as a society to tolerate the expense, danger, and health issues brought by extensive car use will be looked back on with bewilderment. You can start to see the insanity when a 'classic' car drives by. It's noisy, heavy, dangerous, and smelly. It's allowed to noticeably pollute any area it passes through. We've made progress, but that level of noise, danger, and pollution is how every car on your street used to be.
Car culture has a unique flavor of regressive entitlement. Every bit of societal and legislative progress that has made cars cleaner and safer has been fought tooth and nail by this group.
Our government created a vast, expensive, open to use resource in roads and infrastructure, offers minimal restrictions an licensing for its use, barely enforces existing safety laws, and the combustion crowd shows outrage at the loss of their illegal activities.
I wish our culture was less tolerant of this behavior. It is a tiny percentage that costs the rest of us constantly. Sometimes its a motorcycle club, others it just rich people shucking the social contract. I'm looking forward to the last Harley getting recycled.
Many of the reactions to this are indignant, as if people should be allowed to evade taxes when then have fancy cars. My top level comment attempts to point how our culture seems to defend illegal, immoral, and antisocial behavior when it surrounds cars.
California's "You actually have to pay what everybody else is paying" is a very fair, prosocial stance
There's artistic merit in historic industrial design & engineering, and keeping those things in an operational state; for which I am willing to tolerate the occasional puff of blue smoke.
I'm a newcomer to this hobby, and am amazed how this resentment has perpetuated since their muscle cars were neutered in the 70's by emissions regulations. The resentment has transferred to subsequent generations who were not alive then, who still complain about all the emissions and efficiency efforts that carmakers undertake. Too much unnecessary machismo hanging around.
Dream on. It'll never happen.
When did we decide that isolation was freedom.
Let's say there are two classes of software engineers: A and B.
- A get paid $50k/year
- B get paid double that.
The reason why A gets paid lower is because they are commodity software engineers. Due to supply and demand, there is an oversupply of these commodity engineers which make them so cheap. They are very hardworking but so are B.
B are very high quality, creative, high impact engineers. These are highly capable people and due to biology and how IQ is distributed, naturally their numbers are way limited than the class A. Due to their productivity, impact and supply, their market price is higher.
Given the same inputs, B produces way more useful and valuable (to society) outputs than A. Their incomes reflect this.
From a voting perspective, members of both A and B both have the same number of votes.
Now questions:
1. What are your thoughts if A passes laws and regulations where their class doesn't pay any taxes but B's pays 60%?
2. given that software engineering is an extremely creative process, problem solving ability typically scales with IQ, and IQ follows a bell distribution, the literal volume of A is much higher than B, aka laws that put B at a disadvantage get passed incredibly faster than the other way around (due to sheer volume in a democratic process).
Do these resonate with you? Are there any logical fallacies in these statements?
If so, what are your thoughts about them? What should class B do?
If someone doesn't like California's taxation (or government), they are free to move out of the state, but they can't have it both ways - they don't get to live in California but register assets outside the state to avoid the taxation.
The management was mostly of the opinion that gas prices would come down eventually, so there was little interest initially in making anything more efficient. Also, since small, efficient, cheap cars had miniscule or negative margins, there was a belief that competing in that market was optional.
In exchange, consider extending that same optionality to others whose preferences are different from your own.
Here was my summer vacation this year — good luck with that lmfao https://i.ibb.co/5XxDvbyK/Emi-2026-10-06-18-12-00.png
Besides, it would be illogical--and unlikely--for Class A to tax Class B that much. If they did, and the predictable consequences followed, Class A would likely adjust the tax rate keep the population of Class B at an equilibrium state.
Let's stick to realistic what-if scenarios, shall we?
What would be Class A's motivation for keep the population of Class B at an equilibrium state?
> Let's stick to realistic what-if scenarios, shall we?
Prove to me then, that this is not how it happens right now or has happened for the last century.
Software engineers who make mid six figures and even 7 after bonuses and RSUs, working at high-frequency trading firms or the MAG 7 pay way more taxes than most of the typical Hacker News population does, and I would bet that population is faily well paid than the average random person.
That's not the way proof works. The burden is always to prove the presence of things, not the absence of them.
I'm not exactly sure what your angle is here. Why don't you just clearly set forth what your position on taxation is, and save us all the trouble?
Would you be in support of passing laws and regulations that cap A & B's taxes to single digits too?
According to Detwiler, Tennessee did not bother to notify him in advance that he was in violation. Instead, they sent heavily armed men to his place of business, handcuffed him, and took him to jail. His bond was $20000.
Detwiler spoke out publicly on his Youtube channel about the arrest, claiming that he was targeted specifically because his celebrity status would bring attention to Tennessee's position on the loophole. Shortly afterward, Detwiler was arrested a second time at the airport while returning from a trip abroad, and charged with a separate Montana loophole violation.
Detwiler says that Tennessee authorities visited his accountant months before he was charged, asked her specific information about his vehicles being registered in Montana, and told her not to let Detwiler know about they were investigating him.
Why would they? The people who use these "loopholes" know exactly what they're doing.
The law permits the behaviour, don’t like it? Change it.
Why should white collar crime deserve a lighter touch? This wasn't a no-knock raid in the middle of the night.
I wonder if the Montana plates 'loophole' would be as well 'exploited' had it not been for the fictional world of YouTube.
... and she complied. Looks like he chose his accountant poorly.
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.
also the new hot thing in california is to have dealer plates on your million dollar car. you never register it, never pay taxes, but it’s still legal to drive. you just need to own a dealership, but on paper again that’s not hard if you’re rich
An estimated 60,000 motorists — mostly in and around Naples — have been enticed by the promise of 70 per cent savings on road tax and insurance fees to transfer ownership of their vehicles to shell companies in Poland and register the vehicles there, according to an industry group.
Now with Italy’s general election looming, Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition has announced “the elimination” of the unpopular annual road tax that helped spawn the evasion schemes. The bollo auto will be cut for an estimated 14.5mn small and midsized vehicles — a giveaway that will cost Italy’s already strained public coffers an estimated €2.4bn in lost revenue next year” [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/74e70f0c-3788-4343-93d7-9c8740ee2...
The first crackdown was also before the pandemic and being Polish and in-and-out of Italy I fully expected to get caught in the crossfire, but that never happened.
Apparently I was driving too much like a tourist - indicators and all.
That being said a few people from the local Polish community got into trouble, but it always first due to driving into a Zona a Traffico Limitato with a car that shouldn't be there - plates notwithstanding.
Luckily the loop hole is being closed by the Polish authorities after it became popular.
That's a crazy amount of money for a third-party liability insurance.. It looks like insurance cartels are having a field day..
Scheiner specifically emphasized that the interstate registration system avoids requiring a vehicle to pay more than one full registration fee.
Why do you think they made this new law? It gets them to what they actually want, which is collecting tax.
Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..
The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.
The article calls the ownership entities "fake LLCs". They were in fact completely real kosher Montana LLCs. The issue at hand is that CA wants to disallow the case where the LLC is owned by someone who is a CA resident. That's not the same as "fake".
Finally, anyone from California should experience the Montana DMV (called MDT here). It's like checking into the Four Seasons compared to the CA DMV! You can phone them and they'll answer within a few rings and help you out. You can go down to their office at the court house and perhaps have to wait in line for 5 minutes, but perhaps just walk straight up to the counter. They will help you figure out vanity plate letters, endlessly checking whether ideas you have are already registered. I almost make up excuses to go to the DMV, it's so nice there. Montana also has a system of sponsored plates. There are about 100 of them, which allows you to choose a plate of almost any color, which is nice if you want it to match the car color.
[1] Why do that? Well there are 100X more cars for sale in CA, and the prices are lower.
On what? Genuinely curious what class of vehicle you’re buying and selling. I’m assuming it’s…not Camrys.
It's... ridiculous.
As I understand, a fairly large number of people register cars in Montana while never living in the state.
Edit: Just to add, maybe the scenario you described should be cracked down on, but it feels like less purposeful avoiding/evading a tax. My opinion is that could come afterwards, with more warning given to people.
Also, please consider this is just for registering the vehicle, gas taxes actually pay for road use.
No, a significant chunk comes from the general fund and the federal government.
The law could benefit from a "content crime", similar to a "hate crime". If you break the law, for the purpose of creating content, you get fucked in the ass. That would have worked for Whistlin'. "You voilated TN tax law, while being an internet clown".
Living in an east coast metro area, owning a 20yo car that doesn't pass smog and needs a lot of work to get there is a thorn in my side. So I've got a car I can't register and slowly fix on weekend. It'd prefer an additional tax on my registration for not passing smog, rather than not be able to register it and the car be rendered illegal.
This is one of those functions best handled at a national level and dispersed proportionally back to the states based on population relative to total registrations. It doesn’t have to mean the end of local or vanity plates (those could still persist with local DMVs functioning as federal tax collecting agents), but moving to a national or international scheme makes increasing sense.
The real loophole for normal people is that CA outsources smog checks, there are facebook groups advertising that they will pass your car -- the one without catalytic converters, for example. California is this interesting blend of lawlessness and rule-following, high taxes but also tons of absurdly low taxes (think Prop 13).
so everyone should just pretend that they’re paying sky high taxes and let the broken tax sheltering strategies land poorer people in prison and never talk about the effective ones to anyone except your lawyer
> If anyone running the business is a California resident (by the updated definition outlined above), then the whole business is a California resident, and any assets (including Lamborghinis and Bugattis) held in the state are subject to California taxation.
I mean, we can continue to pick apart the legal language, or we can acknowledge that if people invent elaborate loopholes to avoid paying taxes, the State will adapt and create elaborate corrections to collect those taxes. This is just a cat and mouse game of greed vs. fairness being played out in real-time.
It's due to the asinine carb laws. Even if you have a car that would pass smog, they won't let you register it. I don't see this doing anything when a ton of vehicles get a pass. For instance, all motorcycles don't fall under this rule and they are the biggest polluters out there.
It's just dumb.
All these complaints people have about cars - yet don't see any legislation out there that's bringing the clean energy public transit revolution. Just more rules without any relief.
Yeah this is kind of explicitly what most people living there seem to want
i doubt there's all that many beneficial owners of montana businesses that live in california, but surely there are many nevadans and oregonians that straddle the border and will get unfairly caught up in this.
The California DMV is a fees collection arm and not customer friendly. For example, a lot of Californians don't even know that there is something called PNO, or "planned non-operation", a status possible for vehicles they don't plan to run or use on public streets, where they stop paying recurring registration fees that are now in the hundreds of dollars a year.
Every year, I'm aware of at least a few people who do not have an operational car or have a second car in their garage that they are still paying registration fees for, or the state of California places a lien on their unused vehicle, just because that person is unaware that they can just stop paying registration fees on their car by filing a PNO in time.
First you have to know this PNO status exists, and then you have to file it correctly within a short 90 day window. There are no exceptions, even if you prove you were in a coma or out of state or country. I'm not going to go into the details of how draconian the process of bringing a car out of PNO is. For example, if you have a car that has passed smog in October, you put a PNO in October and you bring it back out of PNO in November, they're going to make you smog it nonetheless - pretty expensive process that costs now atleast a hundred dollars all in, which runs counter to California's own policy of not requiring a smog within 90 days of the recent smog test.
If the DMV was customer empathetic and friendly, they would have by default, placed any cars that have not been registered in time, on PNO. Later, the person who pays the registration then automatically gets their car moved from PNO to registered status.
However, this is not how the DMV operates: They will continue to tax you and fine you and add interest on top of all the fees for a car you do not plan to operate.
So all the debate about whether this is right or if there is another way of doing it etc is missing the entire point because none of that is the objective.
The entire point is to collect taxes and fees to fund a ballooning, unchecked and ever-growing expense account.
Is dumb.
You want comprehensive enforcement with reasonable penalities.
You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.
You and I both benefit from having fire departments even if our possessions never ignite. The same is true for all sorts of common infrastructure.
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 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.
Pretty sure that's illegal, no? You have 30 days after bringing a car into the state to register it with the CA DMV.
Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... for my out-of-state Model 3
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2024-sta...
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.
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
this is a very local need of some people. they are a minority, and they want some accomodations.
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.
The whole edifice is absurd.
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.
You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.
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.
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.
Actually a very sensible proposition.
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.)
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?
That would be fantastic. Wish we could implement that.
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.
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.
Vehicle registrations are just par for the course.
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.
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.
It would be nice though, if you could just buy a car across the border and drive it home. I doubt the EU will ever be that integrated.
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.
https://www.californiadealeracademy.com/articles/the-importa...
You're technically correct, but a dealership is one of the most highly taxed entities in California. In any city or county, a dealership, dollar for dollar, pays one of the highest taxes than any business there.
So this recommendation is similar to stabbing yourself in the stomach and waiting to bleed out so that you weigh less on the scale - there are other details, most people don't care about, with those dealer plates on one's million dollar car that has to do more with insurance, liability and taxes than fees to the CA DMV.
> someone actually has to pull over the montana plate owner, then the state has to sue them for tax evasion, build the case, etc. Thats just not gonna happen
But that's because that's not the path the FTB follows!
The reasonable path that has been taken is the FTB finds out that you, as a Californian, own plates in Montana and send you a bill for the registration plus fees and punitive damages so you reconsider pulling the stunt again. If you don't respond in 90 days, it's sent directly to your bank as a demand letter. If you have at least one bank that has a California domicile, that bank is going to pay out from your funds immediately.
That's true for most dealerships, but most of the taxes are transaction based (probably some for property tax on inventory though). If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes.
Not my style, I just left the state when I was tired of everything. I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts.
but it's only worth the effort if you are rich enough to buy cars that incur substantial tax and reg fees. you still need to have insurance and the dealership kind of insurance costs a lot. you probably aren't going to get umbrella coverage to include it either, so you'll have more limited liability.
If we agree that owning a car for most people (I'm sure there are exceptions for collectors etc, that don't concern me) requires either paying registration or the PNO, why is not the PNO automatic choice until someone pays the registration?
That way, any car not registered is already on PNO and the owner has to do nothing. What's wrong with that?
Why is PNO not retroactive? Why is its active window only a short 90 days?
Cops can still pull over an late/unregistered car and ticket it. CA civil code authorizes the towing of any car that's due registration at the owner's expense, so why these additional restrictions?
> so doing it automatically would still result in an unpaid bill
I would imagine a $20 bill would be appreciated by most people over a $200 one.
A 20% late fee on a $20 bill is still lower than on $200.
And the problem with that is that at some point people just vote with their money, their feet and the future wealth they're going to create and GTFO to greener pastures.
There is such a ting as diminishing returns on insane taxation. France is an example. But billionaires leaving California is a thing too.
I did personally decided my native country gave me jack shit in return for my taxes: the only thing it'd give me would be ever more public servants collecting ever more taxes, all the while driving my native city (Brussels / Belgium) into the ground.
So I packed my stuff and left for a country with less taxes and which is, IMO, better managed and where you don't feel like the state's only mission is to turn you into someone poor by seizing all your wealth.
Details are important and very hard to get right.
As long as nothing about this crosses state lines (ie they’re not trying to regulate out of state businesses or property) there’s not a lot to go on. Several states have taken similar steps to close this loophole. Famously the YouTuber whistlindiesel got arrested in Tennessee for this and the case is still pending
https://www.thedrive.com/news/is-the-government-making-an-ex...
Record-keeping required to support the proration of fees.
I'm relying on the paraphrasing in article rather than the text of the law itself, but this says that it only applies to assets held in the state.
(surprised pikachu face)
> You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.
This depends entirely on what the goal of the law is.
Paying tax on a vehicle driven in a state is not unreasonable. And holding the executives of a shell/numbered/privately-held/tax-dodging organization liable for taxes owed is not draconian.
The problem is that this was hard to enforce, so now they have changed the law to something much simpler: if any corporate officer or beneficial owner is a resident of California, then the business is subject to Californian taxation.
The person in question was arrested and charged with tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return. What he is alleged to have done is illegal.
The state was under no obligation to alert him to the fact that they believed he had committed tax evasion and filing a false sales tax return before they arrested him and charged him with a crime.
What he seems to have expected was an opportunity to pay to settle a criminal charge before it landed him in cuffs. This I should be able to pay to make it go away attitude seems especially prevalent in American society today.
This Montana car registration scheme is, I believe, often referred to as "loophole" not because it's legal but because so many people have been able to get away with it without consequence that it is seen by many as relatively low-risk.
The tax evasion comes in when you fail to pay the use tax due and make false declarations or intentionally omit information when you make representations to the government (i.e. in tax filings).
The individual in question could have set up a Montana LLC, purchased a vehicle through it, paid the use tax due when he moved it to Tennessee and changed the registration within the 30 day limit.
Of course, there is no benefit of going out of your way to buy a car in Montana if you don't intend to drive it there, but the charges against this person relate to his failure to pay tax, not the mere fact that he set up an LLC.
Gregory v. Helvering, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1935.
Edit: So if it's a legal arrangement that reduces taxes, then yes, it's legal.
It works for the billionaire class, why shouldn’t it work for everyone else?
This is what’s ultimately going to kill what’s happening in the US today: when people in power decide that the rule of law is just a suggestion, they’re going to find that there are people willing to use that against them in ways that they’re not going to like.
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club...and you ain't in it!"
When it comes to financial crime, billionaires get benefits, plebs get prison.
You can get married in multiple states - though some states may share, most don't share marriage registration. Nothing will stop you. But you're still breaking the law of bigamy.
This is the deal at this point.
The evidence of knowingly evading taxes is likely in encrypted text messages and emails that can be trivially destroyed.
Thats primary school level of math that in 2026 would be trivial yo implement, if fairness is the goal. We have such thing in Switzerland, you dont pay flat yearly fees/taxes/insurances if you register your car in december for example
Re: the pro-rate for a December registration, in California at least, registrations are renewed on the date you first registered, not based on the calendar year, so there's no need for a pro-ration.
Coming from $300/yr colorado insurance its a steal
I'm full time in a camper right now so this entire conversation is extra fun because I don't have a physical address anywhere which is a whole other ball of worms just insuring and registering my truck.
Oh wait, that's what it is.
If doing something isn't legal, then it's not a loophole. It's just something that someone thought they could get away with if the government didn't notice.
Sounds like this was never legal in Tennessee; calling it a "loophole" isn't correct.
When it comes to law, "simple" and "absolute" are basically mutually exclusive.
If the law is written simply, then lawyers will pick apart even the slightest ambiguity and the spirit of the law becomes irrelevant.
If the law is absolute, then it becomes verbose in order to close the loopholes.
You cannot reasonably create a law that covers all situations in their entirety. Even if you could, it would become obsolete the second it's in effect
The world isn't simple and absolute, and the law isn't a computer program.
Both hits are the same, resulting damage/death same. Law differentiates on (proven or disproven) intent and resulting sentencing difference may be huge. Or at least should be. World and people are unfortunately anything but simple generic use cases.
Million other cases proving there are good reasons to take intent into account, even if surface for mistreatment is not small. Unjustice otherwise would be bigger IMHO.
Government doesn't just give up power like that. And they sure don't give it up over the kicking and screaming of the myriad of industries that benefit as middle men and over the kicking and screaming of the "there ought to be a law" class of useful idiots that exist for every exist of policy.
If she was doing it for him, she was likely doing it for others and thus it was in her best interests to stay silent for one to protect the revenue stream from the others.
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.
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.
That said, I've moved across state lines before and didn't find it that inconvenient. I just had to re-register and do a smog check.
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.
Do you have a reference? I have not read this, and California is going the opposite way.
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.
VAT I guess being the interesting part given the original topic.
Most dealerships in the last three decades have not owned their own inventory for a long time. Trade-ins are held by dealerships in a manner very different than just "owning" them outright. These are all financed, leveraged deals.
> If you have a sham dealership that primarily exists so you can have dealer plates and to massage transactions on your personal vehicles, you can probably avoid a lot of taxes
I would imagine you have not worked at a dealership or don't own one, so let's not continue this discussion further because you are severely underestimating what it costs in California (both in time and money) to be a dealer.
> I'm happier where I landed, but if people want to live in California and use out of state plates, that's less people where I am, so go nuts
It's actually great to talk to a transplant because most of my relatives and friends have moved to other states, whereas I've stood steadfast.
Are you happy where you are? What made you be in California? Did you grow up here? Was it for work?
Would you come back if California was split into two, where one part of California was closer politically or regulatory to Texas or Florida?
Fair, but I can't imagine it takes that much time if you don't actually do any transactions or hold any inventory, except for the transactions around the cars you want to drive. I don't know what it costs to be a licensed car dealer that doesn't actually do any transactions, but for a lot of people, it's not really about the money, it's about exploiting loopholes so you can pay something else instead of sales tax on your fancy car.
I was born in Southern California. I went to Milwaukee for college, then came back and got a job in sillycon valley. I'm not going back (except to visit), it's too crowded and I don't like people. Especially in places with weather I like. For roughly twice the price of my small house on a postage stamp lot, I'm on 8 acres with a house that's too big... I did well in the startup lottery, but I can't afford to go to an open house for 8 acres anywhere in California that I'd choose to live.
Caveat: ifn my kiddo establishes himself in California and has kids and would like us closer, we'd probably consider it. He's in high school right now, so that's some time from now. We will want to downsize to a smaller house by then (although probably still don't want to be close to neighbors)
And regardless, the default is not PNO because not-PNO is the default. The vast majority of people will be driving on public roads and won't be eligible for PNO.
Did you even read what was written?
Uh … okay, it isn't immediately obvious to me why that would be. My landlords insist on (literally) weekly leaf blowing, regardless of season, and so every Thursday the air outside the apartment is quite literally unbreathable, as it is slaked with dust and exhaust, and literally unbreathable inside if I were to open a window (i.e., living here, I have to remember to always close the windows prior to Thursday). Not to mention the sound.
Banning the gas ones fixes a portion of the problem, I suppose.
I don't think I'd care as much if the cadence was something reasonable, like monthly. One bad apple spoils the bunch.
The ban is useless because the only way to enforce it is to catch it in the act (in my town). Basically impossible. So it is a ban that could be enforced (other ways) but instead is just a suggestion - and not one that most people follow because there are almost no repercussions.
- Pollution
- Noise
Regardless of the source. If someone comes up with a magic silent gas leaf blower which doesn't pollute, that's okay.
But gas leaf blowers are easily replaced by a much less neighbor-hostile alternative.
I told him I appreciate the crew coming out and fixing it right away.
"We have a permit."
It costs around $200 at City Hall to pick up a permit.
If its just a monetary fine then there’s little reason to arrest somebody to immediately release them when you could’ve just told the accountant he needs to pay a fine or he’s going to be arrested.
It's akin to intentionally defrauding the state.
A quick Google search indicates that willful tax evasion is a Class E felony in Tennessee, with a potential prison term of 1-6 years.
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
For example: The tint that Florida law allows is way, way darker than what Ohio law allows.
But the Ohio Revised Code has carveouts that make it perfectly legal for Florida Man to drive his darker-tinted Florida-registered car in Ohio.
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.
There are all sorts of laws that apply in one place but not others. Why do you think tint or vehicles should get special treatment?
If I buy legal weed in Colorado and take it into Utah, it doesn’t matter that I’m not an Utah resident, and that the weed is legal where I bought it.
https://www.estartcoalition.org/
I suspect eSTART is... a start to what you're looking for.
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.
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.
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 won't even be at 50% electric in 5 years. I doubt we'll even be at 50% of cars being sold being electric in 5 years.
People who claim they want privacy while acting in society instead want something else, usually a lack of accountability.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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.
I mean you do have to live close to a (tri-)state border to pull this off, but it’s probably doable.
I seem to remember California was close to or even beating Texas for "percentage of residents who have never left the state."
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.
Problem solved.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-road-taxes-fu...
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.
Yeah that's the American spirit right there
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
