Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino

Unrelated to the license plates, but the war is remembered differently in Canada, in Britain, and by historians. I think Wikipedia has it right calling the war "indecisive". In Canada, the war is remembered as the time we trounced the Yankees and burned the White House. The Brits don't think much of the war at all. Historians say its much more complicated of course, but the key facts to remember are (despite what the Canadians say) the troops that burned the White House were British regulars, not Canadian militia, and that the militia was highly unreliable and had significant levels of desertions (despite the national pride now). It's also good to keep in mind that Britain was in the midst of a total war with Napoleonic France and that the Americas were a sideshow. The US distinguished itself early with the frigate battles, like the Constitution vs Java, but then there was the Shannon vs Chesapeake.

> I believe you payed a few extra dollars for the commemorative license plate.

I am absolutely 100% positive that I neither paid extra dollars for the War of 1812 commemorative license plate, nor was offered an option -- this was the "standard" plate in 2012, no other "standard" plate was available, this was what you got unless you wanted to pay for a "specialty" plate.

Perhaps in 2013-2016 it was different. Or perhaps if you already had a standard pre-2012 plate, you could pay to replace it with the commemorative one? But if you were getting new plates in 2012, you got this one as the default option. I am sure.

Other interesting historical facts about the War of 1812 include all the native indian nations who allied with Great Britain in the desperate futile hope that somehow they could stop their inexorable disposession and ethnic cleansing by the USA.

That's a pretty one-sided description of the War of 1812. The whole thing was a bit of a fiasco and an attempted land-grab of territories controlled by Native American nations allied to the British by hawkish Senators from border states who wanted to make a name for themselves by advocating for it. The war ended with the British agreeing to status quo ante-bellum, even though America started the war. The general upshot is just that the British-allied Native Americans were, by treaty, supposed to have their territorial integrity respected but the British didn't think it was worth the hassle to enforce those provisions so those Native Americans all got pushed aside.

It doesn't really have clear "winners" or "losers." Really more like Britain getting stung by a bee while it was in the middle of something (War with France) and finding that rather inconvenient, but successfully fending off the bee's (America's) attempt to take its house.

The US declared war. They were pissed off about many things, but one of the more notable ones was that they were frustrated that the UK was supporting the sovereignty of Native American nations, which hindered the westward expansion that many people in the US viewed as their birthright.

The UK was actively making concessions to try and avoid war. The United States declared war anyway.

The UK then taking the fight to DC was absolutely fair game. People are allowed to fight back when you attack them.

I can think of at least a dozen other undeveloped peoples who successfully kept the Brits, then the worlds superpower, at bay. Superpower or not, infantry was never the British forte. In my opinion, logistics was. But logistics wins wars, not battles.

It was also during the attack on Baltimore that Francis Scott Key wrote the words to the Star Spangled Banner, a point of pride for Maryland

> The war is prestigious to Maryland because over 3,000 militia members from Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania successfully kept the worlds superpower at bay, saving Baltimore and probably the rest of the country.

They didn't learn from it, because at the other end of the war, the British regulars were decisively handled by another ragtag group that they didn't think much of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans

The European way is even plainer: countries choose either black on white or black on yellow.

The country puts their code ("DK", "S" etc) on the left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_vehicle_registration_...

Eh, I like my choice of plate design here in NC.

Our previous, Save The Honeybee: https://scontent-iad3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/138097239_1...

Current, NC Aquariums: https://www.obxtoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/NCA-plat...

Next, Venus Flytrap: https://i.redd.it/v1d1vce3uks31.jpg

Funds from these support the cause on the plate typically.

They could change the law in MD allowing these plates to cover the URL with a sticker. Hopefully of a url of your choosing.

To be fair the Maryland flag is easily one of the best state flags. It fails the "Could you easily draw it from memory" test but the design and color scheme more than makes up for that. I'd put it everywhere too.

$20 then $10/renewal forever. Renewal I guess is every two years?

As far as I could tell, my options for doing that were:

1. Reporting my plate as stolen or damaged (assume there's a replacement fee, don't know how much)

2. Paying $20 and then $10/year forever for a "specialty" plate.

Granted, even though I'm complaining about this like a grumpy old man, I have spent probably 20 minutes on three occasions looking into it by googling. If someone can find a free way (or even reasonable one-time fee) for me to get a standard plate without having to lie about it being stolen or damaged (or getting someone to steal or damage it haha), do point me to the procedure. In general, as expected, doing most anything with the MVA is a really confusing maze of bureaucracy, so I have some conditioned fear of trying it even if there is a procedure (but I haven't found one).

I am now wondering what, say, Jehovah's Witnesses did, I bet they and/or other religious groups would not be okay with a flag on their car for religious reasons.

"You can just" and "Can't you just" phrases should trigger you to think twice.

The phrases show poor empathy on your part: It's a hassle to go to the RMV and get another plate, it's a hassle to update any place where your plate needs to be registered, it costs money...

If you give more money to the incompetent agency, yes.

Of things that built the society I enjoy today, I am fully aware that, for instance, enslaved labor and stolen land built the society I enjoy today -- I am not in favor of the government forcing me to advertise that fact positively on my car.

Certainly human history is full of war and violence, and that is what has led to where we are, sure. That doesn't mean we need to glorify it. Or that the state has to impose the glorification of it on car identification plates.

What's with the proto-fascism on HN these days? Scary times.

Even though the original company went out of business, maybe the trademark is still owned by someone. They could use ICANN's dispute channels to challenge ownership of the name.

Domain was last updated in Nov 2022. It's been displaying this since at least December: https://web.archive.org/web/20221202223252/https://www.stars...

So it's taken over half a year before the media to notice.

They should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org."

The plan would have been to change this later to read md.gov/starspangled200, which will 301 redirect to maryland.gov/starspangled200, which needs to be made to point to a new starspangled200.maryland.gov subdomain because the Windows server running www.maryland.gov requires everything to be under the www.maryland.gov/Pages/<page name>.aspx URL scheme... But project management ran over budget, and the people who needed to be contacted about those changes couldn't be reached, and when the subcontractor's project manager talked to the vendor's project manager who emailed the wrong government IT department, some information was lost. The necessary forms needed to be filed, but to do so the contractor needed a particular vendor ID number and approval for that takes months, how many more projects do you plan to do for the state? And anyways starspangled200.com looks pretty clean, do we really want to do this optional redirect? So they spent some pocket change and registered it for 10 years, and handed off the task of renewing it to some administrator who could spell DNS but knew nothing else about it with a stern warning that things would break if it was not renewed.

Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge of this project.

> Government plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable).

Most government entities are not qualified for .edu.

For a while (pretty long ago, I think early 00s, maybe even late 90s) GSA (who managed .gov. at the time) made some noises about narrowing it further (may have even closed noncompliant registration for a while, while keeping grandfathered ones) to federal government sites only, which led to a lots states using .com or .<state>.us domains for nongrandfathered domains, and even adopting them as preferred sites where they had grandfathered domains.

The policy direction died fairly quickly, but the impacts were more lasting.

There's a common belief that .org domains are much more tightly controlled than they are. They may have thought they were doing the right thing.

They probably registered the .com before .gov was easy to get. FWIW when I click your .gov link I get an SSL warning in safari on iOS.

If somebody steals your number, your bank (or credit card company) will send you a new physical card with a new number. Or at least mine did, ymmv.

Auto payments usually fail when the card is expired.

That's true, it's the expiration and code that change.

While Maryland has been happy to use eminent domain to seize things for far more dubious reasons, like during the Baltimore Colts saga, those things typically have at least been in Maryland

No. Absolutely not.

Yeah it isn't that hard. File it as lost/stolen and get a replacement. When I sold my last car I forgot to turn in my NC amateur radio plate with my callsign. I guess they recycle them. When I went to finally do it the lady at the license plate office just marked it lost/stolen and let me keep it.