If you haven’t heard about them by now, license plate cameras have been going up in SWLA, specifically around Jennings, ostensibly to catch uninsured motorists. If you’re riding dirty and one of the cameras catches your plates, you’ll be sent a quick $200 fine in the mail.

Of course, one brief look at the comments section of any Facebook thread talking about them shows a whole lot of insured motorists claiming they've been fined, who have then had to go through the process of proving their innocence by showing that they do, in fact, have insurance.

Ah, well. Maybe some good will come out of all this. Who knows?

I’m sure we’ll all see our insurance premiums go down any day now because we’ll be getting all those uninsured motorists off the road with this new high tech system, right? I mean, that’s the reason we're told our rates are so high in the first place, isn’t it?

Whether you like the idea of these cameras or not, it’s a safe bet they’ll start popping up elsewhere in Southwest Louisiana and across the state, so get ready for that.

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However, people are glossing over the most amazing part of this whole thing and no one’s talking about it: the technology behind these cameras. It's seriously impressive stuff when you stop to think about it, given the state of Louisiana’s roadways.

Honestly, have you ever tried to focus a camera on something moving at speed while it’s bouncing around and vibrating so hard it looks like its molecules are gonna fly apart any second? All I manage to get is a blurry mess whenever that happens, and when you’re talking about vehicles traveling down some of our lumpy, bumpy, barely-there roads, it���s pretty impressive that these cameras are able to get any usable images at all.

Still, it’d be a lot more scientifically interesting if they’d aim a few of them at some of the potholes we have around here. Half the things are roughly the size of Kansas and are quite likely capable of supporting their own ecosystems. Think about it. There could very well be an entire civilization of mole people lurking just beneath Highway 14, using its potholes for ventilation into their subterranean paradise.

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This might be the sinister hidden truth behind these cameras: the long-term threat they pose to the natural beauty of Louisiana's indigenous potholes.

If the fees generated by all the fines these cameras are bound to start flooding mailboxes with end up being applied to fixing our roads, where would they go? How would they live? What environmental damage would we be doing if we actually put money toward our roadways instead of cameras?

WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE MOLE PEOPLE?!

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