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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've seen car dealers in MA use Montana dealer plates. At the very least they are cheaper, avoids $220 / year excise tax and registration fees vs. $25 for Montana. I don't think it helps with any sales taxes- dealers don't have to pay when they buy cars, unlike customers. It would help if dealer uses the car personal reasons instead of just having it for resale.
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.
Montana person here. I'm on the other side of this trade: trying to buy cars in California[1] that I'm going to register in Montana. My experience has been that it's very hard to exploit this "loophole". I know that because even not trying to exploit the loophole. I have to jump through hoops to prove to a dealer that I really live in Montana. And then the car has to be either put on a transporter, taken to the border (or all the way to Montana), or driven by an employee of the dealership to the border. Then we have to get paperwork notarized by someone at the border that the vehicle really left CA. You also have to pledge in writing that you wont bring the car back into CA except for maintenance. I've had dealers in LA just plain refuse to sell me a car because I lived in Montana. So it was not in recent years anything like as easy as "put a Montana plate on it" <waves hand>.
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.
I don't get how it's constitutional for them to levy a tax on an officer of a company that does not live in the state just because one officer of the company does live in the state. Even weirder the law does not require the one officer that does live in California to have a company car. In other words they are trying to tax out of state cars with no proof those cars were ever in the state. This is gonna cause a mess in the courts.
They're not levying a tax on an officer of the company, they're levying a tax on the company if the company brings assets into the state within 12 months of purchase (so the whole point is there is proof the cars are being used in the state). But since a company can't go to jail, the California officers operating the company are on the hook if the company happens to have weirdly empty balance sheets and can't collect what is owed. And this bill specifically only targets any-share owners of just "shell" companies, which tend to have those weirdly empty balance sheets. Normal companies fall under existing california laws.
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.
They only tax the assets that are held in the state. I don't know where you're getting that they will tax out of state cars.
> 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 think the tax hole loop is a bit annoying but I also find it annoying that CA won't allow you to register a shitload of cars in the state, period.
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.
California is over-regulated and over taxed, "the government knows best, give us all your money and we will take care of you and save the planet". Just leave people alone and let them have a good life and do what they want within reason without trying to suck the life out of every penny.
> “The bill would hold any officer, manager, partner, beneficial owner, or member of a shell company personally liable for any unpaid taxes, and any interest and penalties on those taxes, the nonpayment of which may constitute a crime, due on the purchase of a vehicle, vessel, or aircraft.”
Is dumb.
You want comprehensive enforcement with reasonable penalities.
I don't think it will hold up in federal courts. This seems to apply to cars that the company officer who lives and drives in Montana as well. If this only applies to cars used more than 50% in CA is would hold up. Of course truck drivers who mostly don't drive in CA but that is home may find an out with that plan.
> 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'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.
The core of the law, ie who is expected to register their car in CA and what state sales taxes need to be paid has already been in place for years and likely already challenged. This is just a modifier to address a particular loophole.
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
Details matter and the article may have them wrong, but my reading is this accidentally covers out of state cars as well. I'm not going to look up the law to see who is right though.
The cars are registered in MT but they’re under CA jurisdiction if they are primarily driven here. That’s the literal loophole. CA is not trying to force people to pay CA registration and sales tax on cars kept and used primarily out of state.
That is the intent of course. However it is really easy to write a law that missing important details and so despite the intent cover all cars regardless of where they are used.
Gas leaf blowers are a menace to society that should not be allowed in any urban or suburban area. (If you want to use one on your farm or whatever, go for it.)
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.
There are some unavoidable sources of noise, so I'm not sure a blanket noise restriction is going to work. If someone is doing home renovation and the contractor needs to run a saw for a while, it's just going to be loud. Sometimes someone needs to jackhammer up a slab of concrete, or chip up tree pruning debris. Etc.
But gas leaf blowers are easily replaced by a much less neighbor-hostile alternative.
If it is a blanket leaf blower ban, that is indeed asinine. However, I will gladly support a ban on two stroke engines for leaf blowers the same way I support requiring drivers to wear seatbelts.
> If it is a blanket leaf blower ban, that is indeed asinine.
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.
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.
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.
No it isn't. Choices we make must consider externalities, tragedy of the commons, etc. Otherwise we're not bearing the full cost of and responsibility for our decisions.
I find walking with transit more freeing. You can just go anywhere, no dealing with parking nor worrying about a massive expensive vehicle. You don’t need to apply for a license and take classes before you can do it, and people of all ages can safely participate. No worrying about taking the same modality back either.
I am not overfond of Harley noise; and I understand that some people really object to the VOC-smell of poorly-tuned carburetors...but this is a bit much.
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.
Still is pretty pollutant. You just don't see the brake and wheel dust as much as the fumes coming out of the car dusting everything with lead like they used to.
>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.
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.
You might be young enough to not remember how much engine performance turned to suck after about '74, and stayed that way for 15 years. Those '70s changes were worthwhile, but the 90-10 rule absolutely applies here.
I am too young to have lived it, but I have read about the Malaise era. To me, it's just when American car manufacturers had to start competing globally, and couldn't, so kept making the same giant V8's, but with 160 hp.
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.
This isn't about the state getting more money out of you. This is about shutting down on the tax dodge. Pay your taxes. If you don't like your taxes, vote to have them changed, but don't complain that you can't cheat your way out of the taxes that everyone else is paying.
> Pay your taxes. If you don't like your taxes, vote to have them changed, but don't complain that you can't cheat your way out of the taxes that everyone else is paying
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?
That's a highly contrived scenario. In reality the rich guy who employs both A & B is using tax avoidance strategies (including registering their Ferrari 812 in Montana) to pay single digit tax on their actual net worth growth and debt taken out against it, while A & B pay 20-35% on their W2 income.
Have you just now discover what a tax is? It's a means for residents to pay for the government of the state in which they live.
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.
Which seems like a reasonable way to go about it? If you’re in California and taking advantage of the benefits the state offers, you should be contributing towards it?
Yes, it is of course completely reasonable that California residents should be able to register their cars in Montana, where they don’t live. Why would the stat want to put a stop to things like that other than to squeeze their residents for more money?
Next headline: More wealthy people leaving California.
These shenanigans with vehicle taxes happen whenever a neighboring state has a significantly better deal. People register vehicles in friends or families names who live in that state, or form a legal entity there which can own the vehicles. Of course then the high-tax state writes more and more convoluted definitions of "residency" for the vehicle to make it subject to taxation, which are either hard to discover/enforce as a practical matter or someone finds a new loophole and the avoidance games continue.
No wealthy person is going to save money by relocating from California to avoid a $30-40k tax bill on an exotic car. Wealthy people have a beach house in California because they like California.
The people who relocate to avoid taxes are upper-middle class people who are overextended on their finances.
Disagree - wealthy people don't become wealthy by giving all their money to the government. Expensive cars generally retain a decent value, but the taxes paid evaporate.
Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
Well they go through the trouble to form an LLC in Montana to own the car, to (illegally) avoid that tax bill. So clearly the tax isn't something they are just happy to pay. The LLC probably owns the beach house too, for some other tax dodge.
But you can’t buy a beach house in Montana.
The point being they still prefer living in California while mooching off residents who paid for the roads they want to drive on.
...and yet, the number of people willing to emigrate to live next to the "rich sociopaths" of sportscar-owning California is far greater than the # trying to emigrate to live amongst the poor, kind people of, say, Cuba.
What are you talking about? HN was a site for people aspiring to BE the rich, in the sense that it was operated by and revolves around a startup accelerator.
I don't know where you heard this, but it is not true. HN is filled with people with many opinions about the rich, and also many rich people, and has always been.
Startup News, created by a founder of the venture capital incubator Y Combinator, did not ever uniformly hate the rich. It is sponsored by the extremely rich, and only exists because they wished it into existence and maintain it.
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.
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
Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.
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
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2024-sta...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.estartcoalition.org/
I suspect eSTART is... a start to what you're 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.
The whole edifice is absurd.
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?
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.
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.
Actually a very sensible proposition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh wait, that's what it is.
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.
> 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.
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
Is dumb.
You want comprehensive enforcement with reasonable penalities.
You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.
Details are important and very hard to get right.
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.
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...
Did you even read what was written?
(surprised pikachu face)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When did we decide that isolation was freedom.
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
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.
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.
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.
These shenanigans with vehicle taxes happen whenever a neighboring state has a significantly better deal. People register vehicles in friends or families names who live in that state, or form a legal entity there which can own the vehicles. Of course then the high-tax state writes more and more convoluted definitions of "residency" for the vehicle to make it subject to taxation, which are either hard to discover/enforce as a practical matter or someone finds a new loophole and the avoidance games continue.
The people who relocate to avoid taxes are upper-middle class people who are overextended on their finances.
Many people don't relocate, but instead try to figure out a way to save a bunch of money on a large purchase - why pay more if it can be avoided?
Good! I do not understand why people think this is a bad thing. I would rather be surrounded by poor, kind people than these rich sociopaths.
Funny, that.
Now comments like this, defending losers with lambos, are seen as admirable.
I don't know where you heard this, but it is not true. HN is filled with people with many opinions about the rich, and also many rich people, and has always been.
Startup News, created by a founder of the venture capital incubator Y Combinator, did not ever uniformly hate the rich. It is sponsored by the extremely rich, and only exists because they wished it into existence and maintain it.