It provides a convenient phone number to provide to people who require one but to whom you don't want to talk, e.g. charitable organizations that will pester you to increase your donation. Turn the ringer off, give it an answering machine or similar service, and let people leave messages which you pick up later.

(It may also work better for speakerphone calls than a mobile phone.)

It's pretty straightforward, to my mind. With the exception of all but the most staggering technological advancements, widespread adoption of new technology typically requires:

1. a sound implementation,
2. a robust support infrastructure, and
3. an effective marketing campaign.

Geeks, for a variety of reasons, tend to respect the first, grok the second, and abhor the third. I personally believe it's what drives our perpetual cycle of incredulity on this subject--because we so detest the last part of this equation, we refuse to see its importance in getting all those squishy, distracted, emotional bags of water to adopt cool new stuff.

NFC has never had the effective marketing campaign in the US, and only kinda had the support infrastructure. The iPhone has incredible inertia on the marketing front, and Apple have clearly done the legwork on building a good starting lineup of financial institutions and retailers for Apple Pay. It remains to be seen whether this'll be sufficient to make NFC catch on, but it's easily the closest we've come to covering all three of the bases above.

Yup. And honored by a "mainly Canadian economics blog", no less.

Law always trumps private contracts. Private contracts are enforced by law and dependent upon it. If I signed a contract that would make me a slave you couldn't enforce it (not with the legal system at least).

Driving? Is that something like burning gasoline to physically relocate his body?

Because of my political leanings, I tend to assume the worst about our friends in California but this is fantastic. Hopefully it catches on elsewhere.

LK

And I've had to put up with those damned geographers claiming they've seen triangles with three right angles when it's been mathematically proven that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees! "Empirical evidence" indeed!

what is far from settled, is whether the humanity's impact is anything to speak of

The only way it's "far from settled" is to play willfully ignorant and deny the fact that humanity is not a trivial force on this planet.

Arctic ice should've disappeared this summer — instead, it has grown.

Don't go citing the Daily Fail as if they had credibility.

The profits of fossil fuel corporations are not endangered by the "green" moves at all

I see you don't think long term.

But for the government folks — those, who are sincerely convinced, they know better than their subjects — this is a perfect way to expand their control.

Oh the paranoia! Please, cite some more credibility-free sources, would you?

And, of course, an axiom is just a starting point; if the axioms are inconsistent with each other, or with reality, the conclusions drawn from the axioms could be bogus, no matter how air-tight the reasoning.

though there are still perfectly valid debates in almost any other branch of science (dieting, economics, pedagogy, biology, and even computers — you name it — it is all in flux),

Sure, sure...

the science of climate is "settled" and anybody doubting the line pushed by the governments must also believe, the Earth is flat.

Utter nonsense. What's settled is that the climate is changing at the hands of man, what's open to debate is what the impact on us will be in the short and long term. The "consensus" is the same as the "consensus" that supports the modern understanding of evolution - it is a refinement and agreement across the field on the gross mechanism for something, and all the arguments lie in the details.

Kudos for tossing in the pinch of anti-government paranoia, it has to be that and not the desire for massively profitable fossil fuel corporations to defend said profits.

Because some other type of phone would require you to understand the technicalities of a backup? Sounds like the kind of phone most non-technical consumers wouldn't use.

Or because, with some other type of phone, the technicalities of a backup would be simple enough for non-technical consumers to use?

You say "regressive tax" as though that is somehow morally wrong and shocks the conscience of the Universe. You might choose a cutoff that income tax starts on all income above a basic subsistence rate, but there is no absolute moral authority stating "regressive tax bad, progressive tax good." Besides, many low income people currently pay no income taxes at all. Even if they paid a pittance and had some skin in the game they might start taking a much greater interest in how their tax monies were being spent -- which would be a Good Thing.

A flat tax that somehow benefits the rich? Wow, how did you arrive at that?

Let me see here. Under a flat tax I make X dollars and pay Y tax on them where Y = some% of X.
Another person makes 2X dollars and pays 2Y in taxes.
Uncle Money Bags makes 100X dollars (I hope I'm in his will) and pays 100Y in taxes.

You know, that really sounds very fair to me -- although truly fair would be that everybody pays the same amount of tax each year because everybody benefits the same from roads, schools and other provided services.

Anything else is punitive from envious people who hate that someone else had more than they do.

People are weird that way. Take the social experiment where the researcher offers you $50, which you can take or refuse. But there's a condition: If you take the $50 then I get $100. But if you take nothing then I get nothing either. While you'd think that it's a no-brainer that you now have $50 that you didn't have before, you'd be amazed how many people will refuse to take their money because someone else "unfairly" is getting more in the process. And that attitude carries over into other areas.

How dare you attempt Logic on Slashdot?

Is that before, or after, the $1.2 billion that Nevada is giving Tesla for the Gigifactory?