I'm an engineer, I solve problems.

Not problems like 'what is beauty?' Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. I solve practical problems.

I buy my gas just before crossing the boarder. Drive around on it and cross back to refill. So they have taxed me for miles that I did not drive in the state.

No, you weren't. You weren't taxed on the miles you drove at all. You were taxed on the gas your purchased. The state where you purchased the gas has every right to tax it. What you did with that gas later was of no matter and makes no difference to the state's right to tax the sale.

Yeah, you can think of gas tax a consumption tax in stead of use tax.

No, you can't think of it as either, because it is not either of those things. It is a sales tax. It is a tax on the sale. The state where that sale takes place has the right to tax it.

They don't need to guarantee all the mileage they tax is in-state now, because they aren't taxing mileage now. When they start, they'll need to do so, hence the GPS requirement.

A deal where you had to opt out and agree to be tracked in order to avoid an unconstitutional tax would not likely pass the first legal challenge either. My opinion is that the whole deal is unworkable unless you implement their privacy-violating Rube Goldberg set up, and it should just be abandoned.

An additional point. What about out of state driving?

Out of state driving will not be taxed. That's why they need the GPS.

The other side of that. If gas goes down in OR due to the elimination of the state gas tax, won't drivers from states next drive in to buy gas and screw their own state?

Of course they will. It's a common occurance when you have two jurisdictions with different consumption tax policies next to each other. I imagine Oregon is looking forward to picking up the additional business.

GPS tracking seems needless compared to just doing bi-annual odometer checks and billing based on that (registration requires bi-annual smog checks for all gas cars already)

As I've stated in other posts, they can't do that. It's unconstitutional for them to tax out-of-state mileage, so they have to have some way of knowing what miles were in-state.

They don't tax your out-of-state mileage. That's why they need the GPS, so that they can tax only miles driven in Oregon.

Wouldn't a simple wheel odometer work just fine for this? All you're tracking is miles traveled.

No, because that's not all you're tracking. You're tracking the miles traveled *in Oregon*. Oregon can't tax anything outside Oregon, that violates the US Constitution. So they have to prove to a reasonable standard that all the mileage they're taxing was driven in Oregon.

READ my god damned ODOMETER every year when I have to do my registration and whenever I sell the fucking car therein.

That doesn't work. Oregon can't tax the miles you drive outside Oregon--the US Constitution explicitly forbids state taxation of anything outside the state. They *have* to know not only how far you've driven but where you drove it to impose this tax.

I think they need to junk this tax entirely. It's not workable without unacceptable intrusion into your personal information.

The only important thing it doesn't yet do is DH.

Then I guess it'll only be used in the National League.

Its hard to get a summer office job if you dont know the major parts of Office, or an equivalent.

Well, there's Dwight Schrute, and Jim Halpert, and Pam Beesly, and...

Wait, those are the major parts of The Office. My bad.

It's not different than a calculator making you a better mathematician versus just helping you along

It won't even help you along. Calculators do arithmetic, not math. Most professional mathmaticians work with pencil and paper, although computerized proofs have become common and they no longer *exclusively* work with pencil and paper. Calculators don't come into it, though. Their work has nothing to do with calculating numerical results.

Until you can point at a device that enters text more efficiently than a keyboard, being able to type will remain an essential skill. You can't do that now, and frankly I don't see anything on the horizon that will. Magical mind-reading device might (or might not) do that, but we can worry about that when we have some.

They already do that--it's called Twitter.

The old joke is, "Half of all spending on advertising is wasted--the problem is that we don't know which half."