Another part of the Old Testament that doesn't get talked about much, but intrigues me greatly is the degree to which it seems to be telling the story of (the followers of) a God who is, at first, fighting for supremacy against various other Gods, but who eventually emerges triumphant. Again, I'm not enough of a theological scholar to be able to speak with any real authority about this, but stuff in the Exodus story (the Egyptian priests being able to perform what were clearly supernatural feats, despite the fact that Moses was able to defeat them), through to Kings (Elijah calls down fire from heaven, while the priests of Baal are unable to do anything similar), and various phrasings (like "you shall have no other God before me") all seem to suggest it.

Dan Aris

I think far too many people—not just atheists, but theists of whatever sort who are less familiar with the thinking of Catholics—miss this important point. It's not that God specifically decided to control evolution, and left other stuff alone—it's that He, through whatever means, guides everything, all the time, in accordance with His plan.

Though one thing I've always been somewhat fuzzy on is to what extent free will—both of humans and of Satan—really enters into the equation. Sometimes, it seems like Satan or humans acting badly can mess up God's plan, and other times it seems like everything they try to do just plays back into God's hands. And I'm not aware of any specific blanket pronouncements on the subject within standard doctrine, either clearly stating that humans do have free will or that we don't.

Just part of why I'm much more fond of the theology in the Curse of Chalion series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Not only do humans have explicit free will there, the Gods can't even interfere in the material world in more than tiny, subtle ways without humans deliberately surrendering their free will to one or more of the Gods...

Give me something clearly defined like that any day, over the mishmash that is Christian doctrine and theology. ^_^

Dan Aris

Except that, as I understand it, the Pope doesn't get to just declare which parts of the Bible (which has been accepted doctrine for well over a millennium) are true, which are false, and which are metaphor or allegory as it suits him. He can make pronouncements either about things that aren't directly covered by the Bible, or about rather specific pre- or proscriptions that it makes. If he wants to start chopping up the Bible, though, declaring large chunks to be something other than what has already been decided, I'm pretty sure he has to call some kind of doctrinal convention, like (IIRC) the Council of Carthage in the 4th century.

However, I'm neither a Catholic nor a particular scholar in these matters, so feel free to correct me if you have better information :-)

Dan Aris

Unless I'm misunderstanding what the GP said, I don't think it's the God of the gaps, I think it's more along the lines of the "watchmaker God," who set up all the mechanisms to produce the results he wanted, then set them in motion and sat back and watched.

Can you explain why God creating the mechanism of evolution (as opposed to the development of certain features and/or species) is a riff on the God of the gaps, in which it is posited that the cause for anything we can't yet explain is God's will?

Dan Aris

I think you'll find that even for regular discounts, there are a LOT of people who will simply not be willing to give up their bank account and SSN details to retailers. I certainly won't. Not to mention it would still have the problem of being a horrendously clunky system to use.

And finally, don't forget that CurrentC isn't even ready for full deployment yet (various things have been quoting dates in 2015), while Apple Pay is live now, and over a million people signed up with it in the first 3 days. By the time CurrentC can get started, Apple Pay will have a very strong—and, I bet you, loyal, given how easy it is—installed base of users who are just not going to put up with their crap.

Dan Aris

I would rather pay an extra 3-5% on every transaction at one of these retailers (with the option of simply never shopping there, which, at present, I pretty much don't anyway) than expose myself to the possibility of having my entire checking account drained when just one of them manages to get hacked and lose my account information to thieves.

I don't care if they overhaul and rebrand this piece of crap so it's less pathetically insecure and inconvenient—even if they make it as simple to use as Apple Pay is now. As long as they a) demand my bank account number, b) demand my Social Security number, or c) demand to be able to track vast amounts of information about me, there isn't a way in Hell I'm signing up for CurrentC or any service like it.

As it stands, it's just a total no-brainer. I can't understand why anyone would rather use CurrentC than cash or a credit card, let alone Apple Pay.

Dan Aris

I would go so far as to say that even if Apple Pay falls flat (which seems like a ludicrous proposition at this point), CurrentC isn't going to go anywhere. Far too few people are going to be interested in it.

Dan Aris

So what you're saying is, you strongly support a significant amount describing what not to do?

Nobody said the chapter on politics had to describe what we had in slavish detail. It should, in fact, explain what would be best based on our current understanding, which should, for example, include explanations of some voting systems that are significantly less prone to devolve into a two-party system with strong incumbent advantage than single-preference, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all like we have now.

Dan Aris

Are you sure you've never seen one? They look just like other credit card terminals, but have a protruding bump at the top with some of the various NFC brand logos on them, like PayPass, as well as the more generic NFC logo, which looks kind of like a wi-fi logo turned on its side. At least, that's what the ones I've seen usually look like.

There are some newer ones coming out, too, that also have the hoods around the number pad, so that you have privacy when typing your PIN.

If you really haven't seen one, that could range from astonishing to perfectly reasonable, depending on just where you are. In rural Upstate NY, they're not very common, but when I go buy groceries at Wegman's in Syracuse, or visit a Panera, they've all got them in one form or another.

However, the point here is that regardless of their current ubiquity or lack thereof, the technology behind them is an industry standard: any terminal that accepts Apple Pay also accepts Google Wallet and any of the various tap-to-pay NFC-enabled credit cards (like MasterCards with the aforementioned PayPass). Apple's not doing anything fancy and proprietary to communicate the authorization to the bank and merchant, just using the industry standard procedures for tokenized NFC payment.

It's important to remember that just because something is an industry standard (like, say, USB, or Thunderbolt), it won't necessarily show up everywhere immediately. In the US, Apple's a relatively early mover on this technology, despite how common it is in the rest of the developed world (and despite some geekier and less-well-known solutions like Google Wallet using it earlier), so for now, it seems to be a technology linked to Apple, but over the next few years, you'll start to see it more and more around the US.

Dan Aris

You are misinformed.

Stores do not need to sign up with Apple Pay explicitly, though banks do.

For a store to support Apple Pay, it just needs to have an industry-standard (though slightly less common than a simple swipe-and-sign) NFC payment terminal. In order to disable support for Apple Pay, Rite Aid and CVS have had to disable NFC entirely at their checkouts.

Dan Aris

That...is also pretty well completely true. I'm not sure I completely agree with your conclusion (stated in the first sentence), but the argument you make is one I've made myself on numerous occasions.

But while, in the short run, the loss of China and India as endless sources of dirt-cheap consumer goods will be deeply disruptive to the American economy, and cause quite a lot of pain, in the long run, I believe it will be a very good thing. Once we can no longer hide the true cost of the things we consume, the Walmarts of the world will no longer be able to run everybody else out of business nearly as easily.

Dan Aris

It is feasible with current technology to supply all the energy needs of a modern house in Upstate NY—hardly one of the "sunniest places worldwide"—with solar panels on the roof of the house. I know this, because I personally know people doing it. Granted, they're currently using the grid as a "battery," rather than actually doing local energy storage, but when averaged over a year, they are net producers of energy.

If this can be done in Upstate NY—just a few hours' drive from the Canadian border—then I posit that it can be done in the vast majority of the inhabited world. That's not to say that I think we should rely solely on solar power for the entire world's energy generation needs—wind, hydro, and some other renewables should be in the mix, as well—but it does mean that any suggestion that solar is only feasible in the "sunniest places worldwide" needs to present some kind of very compelling evidence that what I'm seeing here is a fluke.

Dan Aris

The single greatest predictor of this, as I understand it, is education level of the mother. So yes, if we manage to raise the standard of living in the rest of the world to something comparable to what we enjoy in what we term "the developed world" today, there is a very high probability that the average worldwide birthrate will also look very much like the birthrate in the current developed world.

But, in all fairness, that doesn't solve the problem in any immediate sense. It just means that we won't be increasingly overpopulating our planet in the future.

Dan Aris

Right, so that's, what, about 1/2 the world's population you just listed? (Off the top of my head.) And with the largest country in the world and the most populated country in the world either "getting there" or "not so much getting there."

"Every country in the world" includes all of Africa, the war-torn Middle East, India (which is, I would say, also "getting there," but certainly not there yet), South America, Southeast Asia...

Sure, there are parts of all these places that have very good standards of living. But there are also very large number of people living in them whose standard of living is no better than a subsistence farmer from Western Europe in the Dark Ages.

(And on a side note, if I were looking to state that everyone should have a high standard of living, I'd pick Western Europe over America. Health care and leisure time are not, in my book, optional extras or luxuries that only the very rich should be able to afford, and the prevailing mood in America seems to disagree with me on that.)

Dan Aris