Anything to keep taxes from going up:
The California Legislature is considering a bill that would allow the state to begin researching the use of electronic license plates for vehicles. The move is intended as a moneymaker for a state facing a $19 billion deficit.
The device would mimic a standard license plate when the vehicle is in motion but would switch to digital ads or other messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds, whether in traffic or at a red light. The license plate number would remain visible at all times in some section of the screen.
The guy pitching this says it’s an “opportunity for the state to harness some of the creativity and technical expertise of its private sector.”
Clark
I don’t live in California, but I would gladly pay higher taxes not to look at ads on license plates.
Punchy
I bet the police are in full support of a bill that denies them the opportunity to run the plates of a car in hot pursuit. And I’m sure the “number is visible at all times” works when it’s in size 2 font.
Not to mention, distracting advertisements are exactly what drivers need. I hope the ads call for one to “text this number!” or “twitter this promotion!”, just for karma.
Keith G
And when one purchases the plates (made in China), will there be an option on buying an extended warranty on the electronics? That’s where the real money is made.
ricky
The third generation of Okie infiltration is complete.
cleek
i’ve always wanted a sign on the back of my car that could light up to say things like “BACK THE FUCK OFF, DIPSHIT” and “THOSE ARE SOME MIGHTY FUCKING BRIGHT LIGHTS, ASSHAT”
BigHank53
Don’t they have some state senators’ wives they can force into a brothel? That worked for Caligula….for a little while.
me
Hopefully, some enterprising people will cause it to “malfunction” in interesting ways.
Ash Can
What I get a charge out of is that this bill, if it passes, won’t even mark the beginning of the use of these little pieces of crap. All it does is to “allow the state to begin researching” their use. In other words, it sets up an office and salaries for a group of
legislators’ nieces and nephewspeople to do some reading, make a few phone calls, and drive around Silicon Valley and visit companies on the state’s dime. Whether or not they come up with anything is immaterial. And, not knowing anything about the legislation myself, I don’t know whether this research is open-ended or has any kind of deadline. As far as I can tell, all this does is provide a make-work project in a state that has no business spending money on bullshit like this.Tim O
please, shoot me, please, I’m begging you. I can’t take anymore.
WWWWWait a second, is that license plate porn?
I feel so alive!
MikeJ
They’ll need some sort of wireless receiver to change the ads. I expect the protocol to be broken within a week and low power xmitters to be in cars the week after that. As you drive down the street you could reprogram plates. Almost impossible to catch.
Zifnab
Exactly why would I want to put such a travesty of capitalism on my car? I can totally see rolling around the OC in my Bentley, pulling up to the valet at the local country club, only to have an ad for hemorrhoid cream appear on both ends of my vehicle.
Is the California government genuinely trying to fill the budget gap? Or are they just using this opportunity to plumb the well of truly fucking stupid ideas?
Tom Hilton
It sounds awful, but let’s be fair: California has a $19 billion shortfall, the legislature has to have a 2/3 majority to pass a budget, more than 1/3 of the legislature is Republican, and in any case Arnold has said he’ll veto any tax increases the legislature passes. Shitty hare-brained money-raising ideas like this are all we have left.
Fuck you, you fucking Republican fucks.
stevie314159
Let’s get creative.
Build a Breathalyzer into the steering wheel and take continuous measurements. Then post the results on the rear electronic license plate, so I can see if the asshole in front of me is dangerous.
Rommie
@MikeJ: Indeed. The ability for a hacker to put whatever they want on a large amount of plates in a given area? That’s a golden carrot.
Then you have the thoughts about what the police could do with it.
MacsenMifune
How far are we away from the Futurama dream ads?
Chad N Freude
This fits very nicely with the electronic billboards that change every thirty seconds that have sprung up all over Los Angeles, and the multistory megasigns that are plastered onto the sides of office buildings, and the buses wrapped top-to-bottom-end-to-end in movie ads. I propose that we tattoo advertisements on legislators’ foreheads. Beats hell out of raising taxes, and it would create jobs for tattooers.
QuaintIrene
I was gonna say, how much longer before California starts to look like the opening city scenes in ‘Bladerunner?’
(Movie was on last night, so was on my mind.)
Mako
California could balance its budget if only we could find a way to make parking ticketing more efficient…
Rosalita
This made me LOL and then I imagined how fucking annoying it would be seeing all that going on when you are stuck on the freeway…
Rosalita
@cleek:
yeah, for when the perennial “brake test” doesn’t give them the message
MikeJ
@QuaintIrene: A new life awaits you in the off world colonies!
Allison W.
Are they planning on paying the driver to put ads on their license plates? Not going to use my car for advertising and I get nothing back.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I will learn cracking for this.
RedKitten
Exactly. Now THAT could raise some revenue. I know I’d gladly pay a pretty penny for one of those, especially if I could get a front plate that could be read in the rearview mirror of the guy ahead of me, that would say things like “Would you PLEASE pick a speed and stick with it?” or “Choosing a lane might be a nice idea, jerkwad.”
PeakVT
Just what the world needs: more visual pollution.
JGabriel
Future Hollywood Movie Scene:
.
tkogrumpy
Cripes onna crakka, the world is officially over.
Steve M.
If this flies, the textbooks are next.
tkogrumpy
@cleek: My imagined message was ” you have ten seconds to back off, before I light up the 20 MM gun.
Erik Vanderhoff
If there’s one thing us Californians are protective of, it’s our cars. Sad, but true. This sounds like a great way to kick out most of our legislature…
Randy P
@Mako: They should study in Philly and DC.
In Philly, I’ve gotten tickets (a) when I pulled into a bus zone to run into a store and tell my wife I was outside in the car, (b) at a meter within 2 minutes of expiration.
Rumor has it the meters have sensors, and that if they sense a vehicle nearby when they expire, they’ll send a message to the parking authority truck to check it out.
And in DC, they’re so efficient they have a reputation for ticketing you 5 minutes BEFORE the meter expires. Just try to contest that and see who they believe.
El Cid
Remember, for conservatives and private enterprise anti-tax fundamentalists, movies like Idiocracy and other futurist dystopias of capitalism and marketism gone rampant are, instead, instruction guides and inspirational imagery.
tkogrumpy
So how long would it be before these “license plates” started measuring two feet high by four feet wide? The pressure would be unstoppable if advertisers were paying by the square inch.
Randy P
@Steve M.: For their 75th anniversary issue, Esquire put out an “E-Ink” cover that used electronics so thin they could be embedded into the magazine cover.
So it would be pretty simple to do the same thing on, say, the outside and inside covers of a hardback textbook. And have rotating ads that updated as new ad space was sold.
PaulW
Next idea to avoid paying taxes in California: raising tax rates on neighboring states! There’s a shitload of money to be had in Nevada and Oregon!
Jesus Goddamn Christ, California. Man Up And Pay Your Damn Bills!
Hiram Taine
@RedKitten:
What, you think these people look at their mirrors?
It is to laugh..
Ella in NM
Brought to you by the same shyster’s who sold cities across our state the “Red Light Camera” pyramid scheme which nets 25% of a $100 dollar ticket to the municipality. Sounds like a simply unlimited revenue stream, eh?
Except that the damn things go off for a whole host of other reasons, including grandma going 1mph over the speed limit through the intersection, which leads to costly appeals by the citizenry and a very unpopular City Council during an election year.
Joel
Crossing the government with advertising.
What could go wrong there!
sherifffruitfly
And car theft and such will skyrocket with that, due to the proliferation of hacks that let people change the plate # displayed.
RedKitten
@Hiram Taine: Good point.
Silver Owl
Nothing like annoying the living chit out of people every second of every day every where they go. Like I want to sit behind a car and be inundated with more crap advertising.
Randy P
@Hiram Taine: Hmmm. I wonder how hard it would be to use a laser system of some kind to paint the message on the inside of their windshield instead.
FlipYrWhig
Or, perhaps, while idling in front of a bank being robbed.
MikeJ
@sherifffruitfly: Change the plate number? Hacks? Why bother? Build your own. Any hardware deployed on that scale would have to be cheap. Cheap enough that you could go to Fry’s and buy the parts and slap it together.
You could change your plate number once a mile. In fact, when the ad come up is a perfect time to do it. If you were really clever you could pick a new number based on the shapes of the characters in the old number, so when the plate number shrank and grew it would change, but look similar enough that only the most observant would catch it.
cleek
every day we creep closer and closer to the world of Infinite Jest.
twiffer
one would expect they would require permission from vehicle owners to run ads. so, problem #1is getting people to agree to have the damn things in the first place. granted, this is likely easily overcome by having it be an opt-out agreement: get the digital advert plate unless you request not to.
other problems i foresee, besides the damn things getting hacked. will they require driver approval for the ad content? because, if, say we wind up with ads that run counter to an individual’s beliefs/moral code, then CA will have to factor in the cost of the lawsuits. also, the paranoid part of me considers the state can now track your car via your plate.
and yes, they will be hacked. all in all, i cannot see the actual benefit to anyone but the company that sells the initial tech.
Martin
And for the cars that don’t have a 12V DC connector at their license plate?
This plan will go nowhere.
Kryptik
This is such an awesome idea, not like that silly idea of taxes. That never works and it only steals money from people! Ad License plates are SOOO much better than the absolute evil of…ghhasp….TAXES!
Mnemosyne
@Kryptik:
Maybe we should just call everything a “fee” or a “commission” instead of a “tax.” Either that, or make banks/credit card companies/retail stores start talking about the “tax” they charge to let you have a credit card.
Lurker
@cleek:
FWIW, ThinkGeek has a scrolling LED license plate frame, but I do not think the message can be changed while driving.
Comrade Kevin
Posts like this are a lot like nutpicking blog comments. This idea won’t go anywhere, but yeah, ha ha, it’s a great way to laugh at California.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Kevin:
If my state doesn’t want to be a laughingstock, then they shouldn’t do stupid shit. At this point, I feel like our legislators are experiencing Stupid Envy and trying to figure out a way to compete with Arizona in sheer idiocy.
Not to mention that they’re so desperate to find ways to raise revenue without the dreaded word “taxes” being attached that they’re even willing to sell my DMV information to advertisers so they can show ads from the back of my car without my authorization.
licensed to kill time
Good gawd. Creeping ads everywhere, I can’t stand it. Cleek mentioned Infinite Jest, I’m thinking Blade Runner, too. We’ll have those talking ads in space before you know it, no more stars when you look up at night just a humongous talking boner pill guy throwing a football at the moon or something.
Jamie
Random thoughts.
I thought they called that, “taxation”?
[…]
– Hm, digital displays for conveying license plate numbers. Never mind hacking, although I have to imagine, like everything fucking else ever released with a chip in it, it will be very hackable. Why wouldn’t people avoiding redlight cameras, etc. not just make a reasonable-looking own-version? Change your plate number at will.
– Follow-on thought that just occurred to me – CnC machines are getting a lot cheaper. Making your own dumb plates will be correspondingly easier and cheaper.
– Who pays the increased cost of replacing a piece of stamped metal with an bright, all-weather LED frame designed for abuse with reliable wireless connectivity?
– Who pays for the wireless network to deliver ads?
– Lots of lawmakers have hardons for GPSes in cars, supposedly for “better” taxation, but pretty transparently as a method for creating either realtime car location, a location audit trail, or both. GPS chips are cheap. Why not throw one in here as well?
– “Crash here to buy now!”
trollhattan
Sooo, we cannot use cell phones or text whilst driving because they’re dangerous distractions, but they want us to be mesmerized by the ass of the car directly ahead anytime we’re stopped? Nice.
I freaking hate electronic billboards and consider them an obvious safety hazard in the distracted (and blinded) driver realm, but Clear Channel and CBS and the other billboard owners assert that their property rights and the magikal Free Market(tm) make them A-OK.
Yes, Ladybird Johnson was a commie!
The Populist
It’s been shown that cutting public employee salaries isn’t fixing anything. Pensions are not the problem at all.
It’s a tax system issue where the elite get away with paying nothing. Sorry righties, somebody needs to grow a pair and admit that we have to raise revenue in order to fix the state. Don’t tax business since even start ups pay the state the minimum $800 regardless of any revenues coming in. Tax rich guys, their yachts, remove Prop 13 which is the ultimate elitist law to ever be on the books. Time for people to wake up and fix this by doing what is necessary.
Calouste
@Jamie:
I don’t see that there is anything wrong with putting GPS chips in lawmakers’ cars. Sounds like an ideal population for a trial version.
Mnemosyne
@Jamie:
At least it would encourage me to ride my bike to work 5 days a week instead of only two.
Paul in KY
This reminds me of that Futurama episode where Fry is getting ads in his dreams & he complains something like: ‘We never had ads in our dreams! We had them on roads, in movies, on TV, at sporting events, in the sky, on people, on food, etc. But in dreams?! No way!!!’
Another step on the way to the total NASCARization of America.
Paul in KY
@MacsenMifune: See you beat me to it!
Jamie
@Calouste:
I don’t see anything wrong with putting GPS chips in lawmakers. We proles deserve some warning, don’t we?
… Who was that turd that was talking about chipping the messicuns like pets a while back? Not GPS, but this way, perhaps aides could find Appalachian Trail hikers more easily and avoid giving us more amusement.
Catsy
This will never happen, and in the unlikely event it does it will fail so spectacularly that the idea will be completely discredited.
1. The moment even one of these license plates is active, it becomes presumptively legal for your license plate to be a digital display. License plates now are difficult but not impossible to convincingly forge; for small-time criminals it’s simply not cost-effective. Not so with digital–hacks and how-tos will be on the internet within a week or less, and probably even before they go live. It will be impossible to trust what is displayed on anyone’s license plate, and impossible to validate in any way for anyone other than a LEO with access to the DMV database.
2. In order to display ads, that content has to come from somewhere. Unless you are physically plugging your license plate into a wired connection periodically, that means the content will be wirelessly either pushed by an external source (meaning the license plate must be a receiver) or pulled from an external source (meaning the license plate must be a transmitter). The former means that hacking people’s license plates is a matter of when, not if. The latter means you suddenly have millions of mobile wireless transmitters competing for bandwidth, which in CA is a recipe for bringing the city to a screeching halt.
If you create a digital device, someone will hack it. If you create a digital device that takes external input in order to display variable content, someone will hack it easily and trivially. See iPhone, jailbreak. Hell, I have a friend who hacked the computer system in his Prius, so it’s not as if hacking your car is breaking new ground or anything.
There’s a reason we don’t have e-wallets yet.
Tax Analyst
@cleek:
Man, I second that sentiment. It seems a lot of motorists don’t understand how much distance is required to stop a car at 75-80 mph. And just the other evening I was in front of this monster truck that seemed to have klieg lights instead of headlights. It nearly blinded me in my rear-view mirror, so as soon as I was able to I got into another lane.
Ruckus
@Tom Hilton:
Fuck you, you fucking Republican fucks.
I like the way you think.
Ruckus
@Chad N Freude:
Instead of a simple tat..
How about stenciling with a sledge hammer?
Tattooing with a tazer?
asiangrrlMN
Oh, hell, no. No no no no. I already hate the changing billboards and the electronic messages that flash overhead. I only watch things on DVR so I can fast-forward through the commercials. If I’m watching live (sports), I mute and don’t look. You want to see an increase in road rage? You will if you install this option.
@PaulW: You said it best. Pay. The. Damn. Bills. CA.
Jay in Oregon
@twiffer:
Only if the ads were for, say, Planned Parenthood. Or ACORN.
I am going to assume that you mean in an always-on, RFID instant scan kind of way, since the whole point of license plates is to identify your car…?
Jay in Oregon
Also, when I read this kind of story I can’t help but think of the late great Bill Hicks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
Dr. Squid
WOOOOOO!!!! Bring on the Brawndo!
twiffer
@Jay in Oregon: yes, or a gps chip installed. they’d sell it as a free lo-jack type device. should have wrote “track your car’s location” (though i would submit that “tracking” is different than “identifying”).
what if you have ads for bacon show up on the plate of a devout muslim or jew? or even a vegan? and so on. there is no end of things to piss people off.
fucen tarmal
@Chad N Freude:
i would very much support placement ads in the form of logo patches on the suits of legislators…you know top donors get bigger patches in prominent locations on the suit, tie, lapel etc….like nascar, but informative.
fucen tarmal
@Joel:
the truth might leak out. truth as the energy released in the nuclear fusion of government and advertising leading to an atomic age of radioactive bullshit, understood as such, but inescapable none-the-less.
Mnemosyne
@twiffer:
All they’ll have to say is that it will protect The Children when they get abducted by murderous strangers and Californians will flock to vote in favor of having the government GPS everyone’s car.
That’s just how we are out here.
silentbeep
I live in California. The mess we are all in at the local government level is no f’ing joke. I don’t care, let’s pimp it. I’m desperate.
Kered (formerly Derek)
@silentbeep:
No, retard. No.