Reading about MNLARS – the state’s drivers license, registration and titling system – is making me nostalgic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in 1996-97, I worked for a company that was engaged to do the engineering for a big, extremely well-funded startup in Palo Alto, run by a former salesman from IBM. The company’s business model: pay people to read spam. The theory was, people would set up accounts, and then get a little bit of the ad buy money for clicking on ads, and links in spam emails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Catering to greed, of course, is never a bad business model. But by the time I left the company, we were figuring that someone clicking on six ads a minute, 8 hours a day, might make $6-8. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wound up leaving – and was delighted to read in PC Magazine that the project had made their “Ten Dumbest Ideas of 2007” poll. By this time, I the company had folded, taking $30 million in investor funding with it (along with, I was less delighted to learn, the company that I’d worked for). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Remember when $30 million on a bad idea seemed like a lot of money? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If that’d been a government project…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, wait. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Minnesota taxpayer has spent close to $100 million on the MNLARS system – half up front, leading to a spectacular failure, and half for a “fix” that failed even worse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And now Governor Walz wants to double down<\/a> on the failure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walz released a budget this week that includes $94 million through 2021 to finish the system known as MNLARS, operate it for two years, hire staff, and reimburse deputy registrars who took a financial hit from the botched 2017 rollout. That\u2019s on top of $15.7 million in stopgap funding that Walz was already seeking to get the system through June 30. Fearless prediction; we’ll end up spending $400 million, and end up doing the whole thing in Google Drive spreadsheets. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading about MNLARS – the state’s drivers license, registration and titling system – is making me nostalgic. Back in 1996-97, I worked for a company that was engaged to do the engineering for a big, extremely well-funded startup in Palo Alto, run by a former salesman from IBM. The company’s business model: pay people to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mn-legislature","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70090,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70088\/revisions\/70090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
To pay for some of the costs, Walz has proposed a $2 fee every time a driver makes a vehicle license, tab or title transaction.
<\/p>Via Fox9<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n