chicken

Every post is a diaper. It will need changing. Often.

If this isn't satire I don't know what to think

So she just doesn't have eyelids I guess

What worries me about it is how it applies very broadly, so it would mean stuff like the reddit piracy megathread could be prohibited, and make it actually more difficult for people to find or discuss places to safely pirate things

Yeah, but it wouldn't be realistic to say "we accept crypto now and also are refusing to comply with credit card content policies" right away anyways, because that would just lose them all their business. The better plan would be to do what they seem to be doing; comply in the short term as best they can, while simultaneously looking to branch out with the payment options they accept, so that at some point in the future credit card companies might have less leverage.

Transportation spending isn't just gas costs, I bet a lot of this is accounted for by how much more you can spend on newer, fancier cars, or even air travel.

Also note that driving is highly subsidized, and if the gas tax isn’t raised to cover those costs then that money still has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is other government programs, which low-income are much more highly dependent on.

Sure, I agree, again, I'm not arguing against a gas tax, I'm in favor of it because it's necessary, just saying that it should be acknowledged that it disproportionately affects the poor and that fact should be addressed in its implementation.

since Mastercard and Visa would absolutely block them if they tried it.

They didn't block Steam back when it accepted Bitcoin, or even complain afaik

Maybe he was talking about the Canadian border, that's the one adjacent to Vermont

Sorry, but unless you are disabled…nobody is obligated to drive.

There are degrees of obligation. The amount poor people would have to sacrifice in order to not drive is more. That's how 'regressiveness' works.

USDOT statistics show wealthy and poor people have very similar cost burden (as percent of household budget) when it comes to gas costs

This is hard to believe because there is a maximum anyone could reasonably drive, a higher end income would dwarf the cost of that, there is a tradeoff between housing costs and commute distance (best way to avoid driving is living in an expensive city), genuinely wealthy people don't have to commute anyway, etc. could you link the source on this?

A gas tax makes sense because it directly pressures consumer behavior towards using less gas and producing less emissions, but it's still technically regressive because poor people are more obligated to drive and gas costs are a larger proportion of their budget. The way to make it not regressive would be to redistribute the revenue.

My point is, hardly anyone goes out of their way to use other payment options, and that's one reason why most businesses don't bother with them, so this is also a choice of the consumer. Of course there's also little incentive for the consumer not to bother, but that's kind of just the deal with catch 22 network effects, someone has to take the leap to using something else.

Some businesses offer more options though, and when they do you can choose to use those options.

Is violence a currency?

No scarcity