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Boy, does the stuff about cars hit home. When I was poor I had to drive on tires so old that the steel was exposed. The worst was when my insurance got cancele

Boy, does the stuff about cars hit home. When I was poor I had to drive on tires so old that the steel was exposed. The worst was when my insurance got canceled because I couldn't afford it. This led to a chain reaction of absolute dumpster-fire awfulness: - Can't afford insurance - Insurance gets canceled - This automatically triggers registration getting canceled - I can't stop going to work, and there's no public transit where I lived, so what choice do I have but to keep driving? - Highway patrol scans my plate, notices I'm not registered, pulls me over - Car gets impounded for not being insured, which is actually the more lenient punishment, because (as I learned that day) not having insurance is a criminal offense - Can't afford the ticket I got for not being registered, so my license gets suspended for non-payment So because I couldn't make an insurance payment, my registration got canceled ($), my car got impounded ($$$), and my license got suspended ($). And is any of this money going to fund public transportation? Of course not. I did eventually get my car back, got new insurance, re-registered, and reinstated my license, at great personal expense including the time it took to go to the DMV (the nearest one of which is in the next town). But it was another year before I could afford to replace my tires.

vmception 6y ago
> because (as I learned that day) not having insurance is a criminal offense > Can't afford the ticket I got for not being registered so here is where you got lucky, not having prior outstanding non-payment or not having prior potentially or actual criminal offenses on your record. non-payment of the ticket would have led to harsher punishment upon your next infraction, which is much more likely to happen when your neighbors and the police are looking specifically at you all the time, which may have been your experience but just food for thought for anyone browsing this thread.
- throwaway284239 6y ago
  I know you didn't mean it this way but I would not describe any part of this experience as "lucky." But you're right. The patrolman came right out and said that he was knocking down the no-insurance charge to an unregistered citation because I didn't have a criminal record. What he didn't know is that I do have a criminal record, just not in that state. Guess his systems don't connect to the federal ones. So yeah. "Lucky" is right. What galls me about this is that if you look at any of the individual steps in isolation, it sounds perfectly logical, or at least there's an argument to be had. And that's the level at which we argue about these things when it comes to passing laws. But when you look at the whole thing end-to-end, it is crystal-clear that there is a sum greater than its parts, and that sum functions to drive people who are in poverty even further into poverty. In this particular case there's the additional unintended consequence of prioritizing the flow of money over actual vehicle safety.
  - vmception 6y ago
    yes, it takes an outside perspective to identity the luck involved because people in every socioeconomic class and background all have their own challenges that they faced whether they will receive empathy for it or not for your post I was mainly aiming to point out to others how a cycle effects a large portion of American society, disproportionately affecting minorities relative to their population. The prior unpaid ticket and prior leniency leads to the harsher penalty for the next infraction, which is all more likely to happen when there is an assumption of suspicion and over-policing. This practically ensures that violent infractions become the only choices available to people and harms our collective society. Despite there no longer being racially exclusionary laws, and despite there (typically) being no individual person consciously trying to disenfranchisement someone, it is still easy to quantify how a result becomes so common.

vmception 6y ago

> because (as I learned that day) not having insurance is a criminal offense > Can't afford the ticket I got for not being registered so here is where you got lucky, not having prior outstanding non-payment or not having prior potentially or actual criminal offenses on your record. non-payment of the ticket would have led to harsher punishment upon your next infraction, which is much more likely to happen when your neighbors and the police are looking specifically at you all the time, which may have been your experience but just food for thought for anyone browsing this thread.

throwaway284239 6y ago
I know you didn't mean it this way but I would not describe any part of this experience as "lucky." But you're right. The patrolman came right out and said that he was knocking down the no-insurance charge to an unregistered citation because I didn't have a criminal record. What he didn't know is that I do have a criminal record, just not in that state. Guess his systems don't connect to the federal ones. So yeah. "Lucky" is right. What galls me about this is that if you look at any of the individual steps in isolation, it sounds perfectly logical, or at least there's an argument to be had. And that's the level at which we argue about these things when it comes to passing laws. But when you look at the whole thing end-to-end, it is crystal-clear that there is a sum greater than its parts, and that sum functions to drive people who are in poverty even further into poverty. In this particular case there's the additional unintended consequence of prioritizing the flow of money over actual vehicle safety.
- vmception 6y ago
  yes, it takes an outside perspective to identity the luck involved because people in every socioeconomic class and background all have their own challenges that they faced whether they will receive empathy for it or not for your post I was mainly aiming to point out to others how a cycle effects a large portion of American society, disproportionately affecting minorities relative to their population. The prior unpaid ticket and prior leniency leads to the harsher penalty for the next infraction, which is all more likely to happen when there is an assumption of suspicion and over-policing. This practically ensures that violent infractions become the only choices available to people and harms our collective society. Despite there no longer being racially exclusionary laws, and despite there (typically) being no individual person consciously trying to disenfranchisement someone, it is still easy to quantify how a result becomes so common.