© Eric Peters Auto
In the original
Terminator movie, Reese - the heroic resistance character sent to our present from a horrific future in which machines tyrannize humanity - displays a bar code embedded on his arm to convince Sarah Conner he's not nuts and that his story is all-too-real. The bar code, of course, is used to scan
people instead of groceries.
Creepy sci-fi in 1984, when the first
Terminator movie came out.
An even creepier reality this 2012 - a time when men use machines to tyrannize man.
In Virginia - my home state, but by no means the
only state looking into this - lawmakers are "studying" the idea of bar-coding license plates and possibly even embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into them so that every car - and thus, every
driver - can be more readily kept track of.
Ostensibly, for mere revenue collection.
© Eric Peters Auto
The Virginia soviet - er, DMV - issued a report (see
here) about a week ago bemoaning the loss of toll fees resulting from cars being able to slip through the revenue gantlet, particularly along the I-95 corridor near Richmond, where automated toll machines are supposed to snap pictures of toll both scofflaws and send them a piece of payin' paper in the mail. It is insufferable that anyone escape paying "their fair share" to use roads they've already paid more than their fair share to use via motor fuels taxes and all the countless other taxes each of us is already forced to pay.
But toll-skippers are small fry - just a convenient
excuse to bar code and chip our cars. And thus, us. The DMV soviet's study estimates that, at most, $70,474.73 is lost each year to toll non-payers. Chump change - for an entity that disposes of $85
billion annually (see
here). Seventy
thousand? It's amazing they even noticed it. Probably, that amount of other people's money is spent on lawmakers' mini-bar incidentals in a month.