> But serious question: do you think your employer should pay you to commute?
In a practical sense, most employers should or do. Not for your personal choice of commute, that's on you, but an employer in downtown LA or rural Nebraska does end up having to compensate people for living somewhere so hard to get to.
When I talked to my brother (a civil engineer who's doing his fair share of driving to remote working locations all across Germany and beyond) about the prospect of autonomous cars, he said that he wouldn't want to have one of these as a company car, for the same reason he wouldn't want to go by train: Under German law, when you're driving the car yourself, it counts as work time. When you're being driven by the car (or when you're going by train), it counts as free time. So if the location was 5 hours away, he would lose 10 paid work hours if the car was driving him instead of the other way around.
