subhobroto

> probably some for property tax on inventory though

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?

> 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.

> Class A would likely adjust the tax rate keep the population of Class B at an equilibrium state

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.

> while A & B pay 20-35% on their W2 income

Would you be in support of passing laws and regulations that cap A & B's taxes to single digits too?

> Every time you pay your registration in CA (either online or through the mail) they ask if you want to register PNO or not

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.

> you just need to own a dealership, but on paper again that’s not hard if you’re rich

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.

There seems to be a lot of varied and interesting perspectives and lengthy debates on this thread, but the core issue is California is in debt and needs all the money it can get.

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.

No. Not sensible at all.

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.

Setting aside how things are, I'm curious about this thought experiment:

> You have zero right to a car. It is a privilege, one that you should be able to lose a lot easier.

Do I have a right to feed myself and my family?

If yes, is that right absolute or relative?

If absolute, and my ability to feed requires me to commute in a car, is having a car a right or a privilege?

Next, assume I cannot use my legs and need an electric wheelchair to move around. Do I have a right to an electric wheelchair? What if that electric wheelchair has 50 miles of range which is more than sufficient for my daily commute and more.

Am I now at an advantage compared to a person who needs a car for that exact same commute?

> 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.

> 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?

FUD is nothing new in our industry.

The same playbook had been used, for eg. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago.

This is the *exact* same playbook used to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know put their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point. This FUD, even if it succeeds, only slows down, not stop, open source adoption. Eventually, open source always wins because people want something that they can control and manage costs.

Unless OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., will forever subsidize tokens, where it would never make sense for people, even after discounting 3rd Party/managed vs local/airgapped/self-host AI for risk, self-hosted AI, this FUD battle will eventually be lost, like it always has been. It is surprising to make this statement in late 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic have not even IPO'd yet, and there is discussion in the streets that they'll IPO at trillions of dollars, something that is historically unthinkable, but history indicates otherwise: that in a decade or so, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be footnotes in history and LLMs are going to be commodity with tokens selling all the way from unthinkably commodity to then-frontier intelligence prices.

We will tell those generations fond stories of how computers with hungry NVIDIA GPUs that could run quality language models in 2026 cost a month or two worth of a dev's salary, while the then-current generation phones that fit into a pocket has way more compute capability, were already AI native and were cheap as chips.

Citadel are using which models on bedrock and for what purpose?

Core portfolio research? Update Confluence pages and JIRA tickets? Create marketing copy?

> but they will probably soon have a GPT-bio that they license to Pfizer and a GPT-quant that they license to Citadel, rather than keeping those valuable capabilities in the public models

Nein. Neither Pfizer nor Citadel are going to use a hosted model - their whole business is IP. They will invest in self hosting models. Self hosting is becoming a big deal in the industries you're talking about.

Why?

Neither Pfizer nor Citadel wants to pay a supplier/vendor to build a core capability that the supplier/vendor will turn around and sell to their competition.