Exactly, this policy is from a government that taxed tobacco products so much that cigarettes are now cheaper than they have ever been in ~15 years because the black market stepped in and have nearly completely taken over the market.
Same but with 1 kid and different websites (including HN, which is equally bad!). Actively fighting it though. Slowly removing all social media accounts, now just need to figure out how to block stuff permanently on my phone.
On a desktop I did it with changing my hosts file to point everything to 127.0.0.1. Need to figure out how to do this also on mobile without an additional network device that would disrupt things for my wife.
I usually see people preferring to use the self service in McDonalds or supermarkets when given the option of either, so the consumer must find some benefit to it.
I always choose self service because that's where the volume is. I can wait in one of any Costco lines with 4 carts and 1 person checking them through, or I can wait in the line with 4 carts and 6 self service checkouts.
Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.
Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.
I have a mental list of who the fast/slow checkout people are at my store, would be curious to see numbers but I think the fast people are more than 2x as fast as the slower ones.
I really appreciate the ability at Costco to scan with my phone as we pick up items. Check out becomes a breeze. But I absolutely hate self-checkout grocery stores unless I just have a few items. The idea that I'll run a cart full of groceries through self-checkout is insane. Not only do they routinely not have accurate bar codes requiring some sort of lookup from an attendant. I'll have things which require human clerks to "approve" anyway like wine. In addition, my self-checkout lines don't have the full conveyors like the human checkout lines. So everything has to be moved from cart directly to bag and there isn't enough bag space so you have to start putting bags into the cart which still has groceries. The whole thing is a mess and I hate it.
As long as one takes moderate measures to stay anonymous on the network level, an exchange that is P2P or doesn't force KYC can be used to convert. There are many of them out there.
You can do it on Kraken just fine. As long as you're ok paying taxes on it (since Kraken is KYC), you're still shielding the source of the funds, which is the primary utility of Monero.
Or to put it another way, it's good for "money laundering", but not "tax evasion".
In a similar vein, Uzi Nissan won a protracted legal battle against Nissan (the car company) over nissan.com, because he'd been in business fixing import cars way before Nissan decided to drop the Datsun name.
Still wound up getting his life ruined from the legal fees, though
