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What fosters a sense of camaraderie or hatred for a machine? Or: How users learned to stop worrying and love Clippy
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575453411132636080.html
In response to
How to always have interesting conversations
My advice, if you want to become a good conversationalist, is just to crank up the amount of time you spend having conversations. If you are really serious, you could consciously review conversations after the fact, to try to find patterns and see where you could have improved.
What's the link between visiting fellows and the weather?
That is good advice.
A friend of mine video taped his conversations with people. (By which I mean, there was a video recording of some event, and he left it on following, to capture his social interactions.) In this way, he was able to see not just things he said, but also gauge people's reactions to his body language. He said it was difficult to watch at first, but had a huge benefit to his social skills.
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Economic Weirdtopia: The generalization of Internet blacklists -- think Spamhaus -- to general boycotts and strikes.
Anyone can publish their own blacklist on any basis or none at all. You can subscribe to any blacklist, which will block you from having economic relations with entities on that list. You won't see a blacklisted company's products offered for sale in a store. If you own a store, people on a blacklist you subscribe to won't be able to enter. If you subscribe to a list that just blacklisted your employer, you're now out on strike.
Some blacklists are defined on moral or ethical terms: the Sierra Club publishes one; so does Focus on the Family. Others are defined on reputational terms: Consumerist's is well-followed in certain circles. Again: Anyone can publish a blacklist. If I get ripped off by someone, I put them on my personal blacklist, to which some of my friends and relatives subscribe. Popular blacklists become more and more influential, and people endeavor to avoid being put on them.
Some blacklists block anyone who doesn't subscribe to them. Some blacklists block anyone who subscribes to certain other blacklists. Some blacklists are transitive. The Ku Klux Klan publishes a blacklist of non-white people and businesses that employ them. The Southern Poverty Law Center publishes a blacklist of everyone who uses the Klan's blacklist.
One very popular blacklist lists people who change their blacklist subscriptions too frequently.
Sexual Weirdtopia: Truly comprehensive sexual education.
Before you graduate high school, you've fucked and been fucked; flogged and been flogged; received at least one (purely experimental, rather innocuous) sexually transmitted disease and had it cured; experienced monogamy including (artificially heightened) jealousy; cheated and been cheated on; loved and lost. You haven't really been raped, or impregnated, or killed by autoerotic asphyxiation: but you've taken memory tape from people who have. You've been through Leather Week and Furry Week and BiPolySwitch Week and Transvestite Week and Cybersex Week and Quiet Family Week and Asexual Week.
So has everyone else, just as they've been to biology class and civics class and gym class. You've seen a cross-section of all the fetishes, kinks, perversions of human sexual experience -- their risks, their appeals, and the skills you'd need to learn to really enjoy them and be appreciated by others who enjoy them.
You are now expected to choose a sexual orientation in the same way that you choose a career: based on your talents, your interests, and what's in demand.
Guidance counseling is available.
I really like your idea for comprehensive sexual education. Something I have said for a long time is that everyone should have their heart broken once, as part of being human, because once you know what that feels like, you understand the stakes of romance. I feel that this post takes that sentiment and expands and develops it much more fully.