Spyke

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Autism

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Scientific papers are often titled "What it's actually about: something witty." This one is about object personification and so after the colon they personify the paper itself by giving it an emotion.

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The inner circle is a dot

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Nah, that's great because you can so easily escalate to heavy talk. Disagree with the political opinion. Insist car culture is just pointless fashion fads. Dive into the morality of reality TV.

Either they disengage and you're free, or you get to have an actual meaningful debate instead of echoing hollow platitudes.

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In the style of gritty film noir, what are up to this week?

The air was stifling. The kind of air that sits on you, like a hot blanket made of water. The kind of air that makes you understand that the atmosphere is heavy, in a way your high school science teacher never really conveyed. Big, heavy, hot, wet air.

It engulfed ArcticPrincess, squeezed him from all directions with it's sticky wetness. He curled up tighter in the strange hexagonal hole he'd found in one of the walls of the airport basement. There was work to do, but he wasn't going to do it. At least today, the world could keep spiraling towards its populist, capitalist collapse without him.

The Fiji Airways Lounge at Nadi airport, incomplete and abandoned. Once, someone had a dream of what this place could be. An architect somewhere, a vision of this space filled with wealthy travellers, the sub-elites, the smaller masses who could afford slightly better treatment while the larger masses endured the gate-surrounded food court upstairs.

Something had gone wrong. Maybe it had been corruption. Maybe the fickle will of the shareholders. Maybe it had been a boondoggle all along, a scheme for furthering the career of a junior executive who'd already moved on to their next, higher paying position. Whatever the cause, the architect's dream sat half-built. One half elegant workstations, elegantly curving divisions between contrasting flooring styles, elegant chairs and elegant partitions. One half abandoned construction materials, unassembled couches and unfinished, purposeless rooms.

The place felt like ArcticPrincess's life, like the lives of all the old friends he'd seen on this trip. Grand dreams in the middle of a slow motion collision with reality. In the centre of it all, a weird hexagon cut into the wall in which you could momentarily try to hide. A retreat for writing fiction in style that had also bloomed and died, for a platform whose dream of freeing social media from corporate dominance was also wilting as quickly as it had blossomed.

ArcticPrincess's phone rang. It looked like he was going to have to help the world collapse today after all.

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NYT Panics Over Outrage at Insurance Companies

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In Canada, the only people I've heard say that sort of thing are very wealthy and can pay out of pocket for preferential treatment in America, which their wealth can't buy them in Canada.

That "fact" is one of the problems with US health care system, not an endorsement of it. The US gives better, faster health care to the rich (even foreigners) by neglecting others.

Maybe you want to live in that kind of society. Not me.

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Brain damage linked to increased likelihood of religious fundamentalism, new study finds

I mean, from the abstract it looks like what the study did was localise the specific network of right hemisphere neuronal clusters that, when damaged, predict religious fundamentalism. Since they only studied patients with TBIs, they weren't testing the claim that brain damage increases the likelihood of fundamentalism. The rate of fundamentalism in the general population could, hypothetically, be higher than among TBI patients (i.e., if brain injuries actually reduce fundamentalism) and this study's insights would still hold.

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Okay, how do you assess that harm has occurred?

I claim that your post just harmed me. You should be excluded from the social contact.

You violated the rules my god laid down. Harmful to me and all my fellow believers. You're out.

Your flagrant homosexuality is harming my children. Excluded.

Your campaign to take away my guns is harming me and all my descendants. I was just minding my own business until you came along with your intolerant gun removal policies. Excluded! Burn him.

This only solves the dilemma in a trivial way, if harm is transparent and uncontentious. It doesn't address the real dilemma, which is widespread disagreement about what should and shouldn't be tolerated.

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Phew, lucky that there's no disagreement in this society about what right and wrong is and what should and shouldn't be tolerated. Otherwise we might devolve into two antagonistic political factions mutually condemning each other.