Word: real-world
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...that creative capitalism is already with us. Some corporations have identified brand-new markets among the poor for life-changing technologies like cell phones. Others - sometimes with a nudge from activists - have seen how they can do good and do well at the same time. To take a real-world example, a few years ago I was sitting in a bar with Bono, and frankly, I thought he was a little nuts. It was late, we'd had a few drinks, and Bono was all fired up over a scheme to get companies to help tackle global poverty and disease...
Still, there's no guarantee that simply taking the beer out of beer pong will have the sobering effect that college deans intend. Last year, Dartmouth College banned water pong, the real-world version of Pong Toss, because of the risk of water intoxication - it's no joke, as an H2O overdose can be fatal. "I know that [water pong] seems like a good balance between the Dartmouth drinking culture and just trying to have fun," Kristin Deal, a Dartmouth community director, wrote in an e-mail to students announcing the prohibition. "However, it can be just as dangerous...
...critics who say the third year of law school is often pointless, since by that stage most law students already have jobs lined up and care more about socializing than getting good grades. Some schools have responded by offering more externships, study-abroad programs and legal clinics to give real-world experience during that third year...
...narcissistic culture, where you don't always recognize your impact on other people, and your own little turf is the most important.'' The difficulty most people have with slash-and-burn comedy is separating the conceptual satire (''Look how uptight people are over these words!'') from the real-world impact (''How can he say that about black people?!''). Comedians themselves are much better at keeping the two distinct. After spewing out ethnic insults on the Tonight Show, Don Rickles (who is back on TV this fall in a Fox sitcom) usually let Johnny Carson know what a sweet...
...self-serving as this excuse is, we can learn something from taking it at face value. Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, off-line politeness. The other is a kind of communal game in which whoever is cleverest and pushes the most buttons wins...