Farmacia Similares! That doctor has some killer dance moves. I’ve been meaning to get one of the bobble heads.

I know price influences demand, but it doesn’t address need. Most of California is designed in a way that basically requires a car—it isn’t like the northeast with convenient and affordable trains to take you anywhere you need to go.

Yes, this method will likely convince some people to switch, and it will likely reduce car usage as well, but it will also place a huge financial burden on people who need their vehicle to live and who can’t afford an electric vehicle, which not only costs more to buy, but also costs more to maintain and has a shorter lifespan than gas cars.

California has an immense amount of money compared to other states. If you are asking me to come up with a better solution than making gas prohibitively expensive, my solution would probably be to emulate New York City, but statewide.

Make every city extremely walkable. Create subways in those cities for extended travel, ideally with more of an eye towards accessibility than New York has. Create an extensive high speed rail system that goes between cities and towns that is faster and more convenient than a car. Make the carrot of other transportation options absolutely massive, and then incorporate the stick of higher gas prices.

The downside to that approach is that it would likely be a multi-trillion dollar investment. You could potentially lower the cost a little by excluding some smaller towns from this overhaul, but those people should be given something to make that equitable, like giving them a massive discount on buying electric cars somehow.

I’m no politician or expert, I know I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that I am someone who would be driven to poverty if I had to buy a new car right now or pay $8 for gas, especially factoring in the extremely high cost of living in California.

That seems to be the case. I’m really surprised how many people are downvoting this thread of comments just for having a realistic discussion about the drawbacks to financially penalizing cars. Nobody here is advocating for big oil, but you’d sure think that from the reaction.

HAL, the rogue AI.

Thanks, Obama. /s

Last time I was in California, it was over half way to $8 already.

Edit: not sure why people are downvoting, it’s just a simple fact that was confirmed by another poster too. Numbers are numbers. Here’s a website showing the current prices in Ventura to be over $4:

https://www.gasbuddy.com/gasprices/california/ventura

What alternative transportation is California going to provide then? I agree, cars suck, but you’ve got to give people something realistic and convenient, otherwise you’re just putting a paywall on freedom of movement.

Your lol’s and lmao’s aren’t necessary, I’m trying to engage in a good faith discussion with you here. Laughing me off isn’t the same as making a valid point.

Saying that they can fork out transactions they don’t like is clearly a misunderstanding of how most crypto works. There may be some shitcoin out there that has nefarious design qualities that I don’t know about, but the largest coin out there is undoubtedly bitcoin, and speaking to that system, the entire purpose of it is that it is trustless at its core. It is defined by a set of rules that were set out in the white paper, and it does not deviate from that. Transactions are verifiable by each ledger. Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t sitting there with his finger on a switch to screw you. There may be whales who are able to move the needle with huge transactions, but that is literally the same for any currency.

Maybe we will have different definitions of oppression, so I will just say people in general can protect their assets from seizure with crypto. If you have too much cash in your car and get pulled over at a traffic stop, the cops can just take it on the assumption that having a large amount of money on you is suspicious. This has happened multiple times in America when people have been traveling with large amounts of cash to purchase properties, cars, antiques, or a whole variety of other things. No beat cop is going to be smart enough to start hassling you over your USB keychain when you get stopped for going 5 over the limit.

I agree with the first sentence of your second paragraph—if the creators of a coin have included hidden design elements to screw people, they should be held accountable for that, but that is not going to be the case with every crypto coin out there, and they should be judged individually. Going back to my knife example, a knife that is a murder weapon should be seized, a knife that is a cooking utensil should not.

And lastly, to speak to your point about CP, while I’m not an expert on the subject, nearly every system I’ve heard of that is used for that is something that is also used for totally legal purposes including Lemmy! Should Lemmy be illegal because there are some illegal instances out there? Of course not—those individual instance operators should be held accountable, and the other instance operators have nothing to do with it. When you paint with such a broad brush, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I respectfully disagree. Crypto is a tool. It can be used by oppressed people to protect their money, and it can be used by people like Trump to grift them out of it too. It’s the same energy as a knife—it can perform life saving surgery and it can kill depending on the hands using it. The tool isn’t to blame, the people using it are.

Another interesting phenomenon with crypto is the safety it has brought to the drug trade through online markets. Instead of a dealer being able to sell bunk product to hundreds of unaware customers, now we have anonymous online reviews to assist people in sourcing safer products from an industry that governments have refused to regulate and provide access to.

It’s a double edged sword, but it isn’t crypto’s fault how it gets used, just like it isn’t a dollar bills fault when it buys a child bride. Accountability is for humans, not objects.

Completely agreed. Everything is framed from the perspective of who it helps or who it hurts rather than seeing the incredible and liberating potential of new innovations.

Welcome to the Leftist Club. We’re here for you, comrade!

The same Winston Churchill who was just fine with starving a million Indians to death? Or is it the Winston Churchill who thought Mussolini’s body deserved more dignified treatment? Definitely can’t have people disapproving of that guy…