For people who have been there for a while, remember that there’s almost certainly an internal propaganda campaign trying to refute any negative stories that come out about Meta. I’ve heard enough from people who have interacted with Meta employees to know that it’s almost a cult; and when you’re getting paid twice a month, it probably doesn’t feel as toxic and more transactional. That probably makes it more of a frog-boiling than it would seem from the outside; even smart people can get taken in by a cult.

People who have started more recently, though, have less of an excuse.

Unless you physically go to the state department office in DC, you’re fine. All online renewals and all other branches use the old design.

Yeeesss. Eat each other. Dooooo it.

In theory, constitutionally-speaking, Congress doesn’t have jurisdiction to command that, and trying would cause a judicial battle that could last long enough for grown-ups to take back over.

Yeah, but with drinking ages, states keep records of births and it’s easy to add 21 to those, and the federal government can easily subpoena the records to see whether they’re telling the truth. Plus, there wasn’t a whole ton of political will to resist the drinking age change. But with EVs, there’s a ton of political will to keep this from happening (including, notably, from the richest man in the world), which means that EV-friendly states like California have all the motivation in the world to find creative ways around such a law.

I could see them levying the tax, but also offering an EV registration fee credit that offsets it exactly, or not keeping records on the number of electric vehicles registered (that seems like it would be tricky, since it’s easy to identify Rivians and Teslas), or finding some other clever way to tie this up in court until an adult gets into office and cancels it.

No. The registries are all state-level, though many states do allow other states to query their systems.

My understanding is that this time they want to force the states to collect the fee on behalf of the federal government, with the threat that they’ll withhold federal funding if the states don’t do it. I don’t see how they could possibly enforce that either, though.

Cars and drivers are registered on the state level, yes. There’s an agreement that licenses from every state are valid in every other state, and infractions in any state are prosecuted by the jurisdiction in which it happens. There is no national registry, no. States can (and do) collect taxes and registration fees from drivers who reside in that state, but they don’t typically collect on behalf of the federal government.

I don’t know that a Trump voter holds the same culpability as a Confederate soldier.

That’s the excuse. But phone numbers tied to names are available all over the dark web and the light web—that’s a fundamentally worthless data point by now. They don’t actually want that, they’re just saying it so you think it’s for scam prevention.

If it were, they wouldn’t tie it to storage space. That doesn’t matter to scammers and spammers; they’d require it for sending to more than x recipients per month, or for API access, or for any number of other things. The one thing spammers and scammers don’t need is storage space. They just need a trusted email gateway and IP address.

Storage is incredibly cheap, though. If Google used S3, the cost for a 15GB account would be pennies a year, and since they host their own architecture it can be orders of magnitude less. This isn’t about recouping costs. This is just about shaking users down for more subscription money.

Yeah, this here is exactly the reason why anytime I have to migrate from any piece of software I’m migrating to something open source and standards compliant.