First things first.

In this thread (new window) JacksBlack told us to mark his words. Consider them marked:
Oil @ $75/bl in 24 months. Gasoline @ $2.25

Mark my words.

People to whom I owe keyboards:
keepitcherryThread

My profile consists of thoughts and musings of other Farkers. Not because I can't think for myself, but some people have the propensity to word it better.

Top Farker Thought:

El_Camino_SSon giving advice to yourself in your twenties:

Anyone that gives you NEGATIVE advice should be ignored completely. Especially if that negative advice is about how getting ahead will involve treating others poorly.

You should learn to trust in the goodness of your soul.

Great examples of wonderful advice that will be guaranteed to make you into a selfish prick that has no soul, and probably wreck your life:

1. Don't get married.
2. Don't treat women with respect. They're selfish.
3. Worry about your money a lot more.
4. Don't let these chumps get the one over on you.
5. Spend more time in college humping.
6. Don't trust people.

This is the kind of crap advice that you should immediately throw out. It's negative, and useless, and if taken, will make you utterly unsatisfied and unhappy your whole life.

Realize that being an honest person, whether you die a hundred years from now or the next five minutes, is really the only way in the world for a person who isn't a clinical psychopath to sleep well at night without a fifth of bourbon or a fist full of pills in them. There are billions that have lived and died on this planet, here for a little while, and they're ash a lot longer. Even stone pyramids get ground down by the wind. Die on your feet as an honest person, it's what you should do, because in the grand scheme of the universe, you're a tiny ant. Best to be an ant with integrity, than a stealing, lying cockroach. Either way, you're not God, you're a bug. Be a good bug.

People will disappoint you. They will steal, back stab, and cheat on you sexually. Some will be selfish their entire lives, and will not be able to escape it. That's because they're human and full of frailties and failures, just like you. Don't rush to the stupidity of ages, which is tribalism, and then declare others the 'enemy' in your life, because you can see their failures and not your own.

Learn to be a good person, because at the end of the day, lying, cheating, and climbing over your fellow man for an extra little piece of paper with some extra numbers on it, or a sexual act, or a medal, or some land that you can't own past death is a horrible, childish, and pathetic way to define victory in your life.

You're a hairless monkey with some math skills.
Learn to accept that, and live in those parameters.
Don't believe for a second that you're immortal, always fundamentally more moral than the others around you, and deserving to be king of planet earth because you're kinda clever.

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Not a farker, but Bill Simmons on JJ Redick:

1. If his name was "Joe Redick" or "Jimmy Redick," he wouldn't take nearly as much crap from anyone. Nobody wants to like a white kid named "J.J." It's one of those "I'm sorry, I have to hate you just out of principle" white sports names along the lines of "Chipper," "B.J." and "Christian."

2. If he went anywhere else but Duke, he wouldn't take 9/10th's as much crap from anyone. Switch him with Mike Nardi and stick Redick on the bombs-away Villanova team and you know what would happen? Everyone would be raving about how much fun Redick is to watch. Unfortunately for J.J., everyone hates Duke and he's the quintessential Zabka-like kid Coach K always recruits, so we're already biased against him. We want him to blow out an ACL or break something crashing into a scorer's table. This isn't his fault.

3. I don't care whether it's a lousy college hoops season or whether he's playing for a stacked Duke team: He's such a deadly shooter that (A) it's shocking when he misses a wide-open 3, and (B) he's one of those rare guys who can sink open 3s in any situation (even a 1-on-2 fast break), from any angle, anywhere on the court. There aren't five NBA players who have more confidence than Redick from 25 feet. I know it's practically sacrilegious to say, but I think he's immensely entertaining to watch. How often do you see a college kid with Cassell-like balls?

4. Anyone who thinks that Redick -- on the right team, in the right offense, with shot blockers to protect him on defense -- cannot end up being an asset in the NBA is insane. Repeat: Insane. He's a better shooter than Steve Kerr, John Paxson, Jerry Sichting, Trent Tucker or Craig Hodges, all of whom had similar games and played roles for championship teams. I would actually compare his ceiling to Rip Hamilton's ceiling (who is almost as bad defensively, by the way); you could craft a decent offense from running Redick off multiple picks and getting him open shots.

I look at it this way: If you're an A-plus in any category, you're going to crack a 9-man rotation in the NBA, regardless of whether you have any other skills or not. Desagana Diop blocks shots, and that's all he does; Eddie House makes jumpers, and that's all he does; Carlos Delfino plays defense, and that's all he does; and all of those guys are contributing to 60-win teams right now. Redick is going to find the right team (maybe not right away), and he's going to make open 3s, and even if that's all he does, he'll be one of the best eight guys on the team. It's going to happen. The funny thing is, NBA scouts are always more enamored with multi-tool guys like Dunleavy and Darko who end up not being able to do anything that well. So those guys get drafted above guys like Redick, and then everyone is amazed when Redick turns out to be a better pro.

On Technology

jjorsett2007-12-10
Fortunately, we now have MySpace and FaceBook so that your retarded deeds can be memorialized for all eternity, to the amusement of your future employers, potential spouses, and offspring. Yay, technology.

On Exclusive Tastes

Pocket_ninja 4-29-04
"Hey. Look at me. I'm cool because I don't like things that the majority does. Look at me. Please look at me. Look at how exclusive my tastes are compared to yours. Hey. You're not looking at me. Would you just look at me a little? Don't you want to hear about how I'm so much smarter than you? WOULD YOU JUST LOOK AT ME? I NEED YOUR APPROVAL TO FEEL EVEN REMOTELY GOOD ABOUT MYSELF!!"

On Net Neutrality

t3knomanser 3-28-08
Let's go back down this trail.

Packets must go from point A to point B in order to communicate. There are a finite (and small) number of routes between these two points. If you bring up a command prompt and type tracert fark.com (traceroute on Unix type systems), you'll see a list of all of the nodes in your route between you and Fark. Tomorrow, your packets might take an entirely different route, but there's a limited number of (efficient) routes you could take.

The anti-net-neutrality crowd thinks any server on that chain should be able to do anything it wants with your packets. Discard them, re-route them to a less efficient route, or just delay them so that other traffic can go through faster. This is very dangerous.

Why? Well, for starters, you break down the trust of the network. Neither side of the transaction (you or Fark, in this case) has any control over the route your packets take. If any node in that chain decides to de-prioritize Fark's traffic, you can't do anything about it. You can't use a different route, because you can't control that. So, basically, you're giving node-managers infinite and unanswerable power. There is no "free market" in play- the consumers of network services have zero ability to take their traffic elsewhere.

Second, you're opening the door for anti-competitive behavior. Comcast can launch a video service and give it top priority, and they can throttle YouTube and FarkTV (no loss there, right?). A round of anti-trust suits may correct that, but why should we even allow this kind of anti-competitive behavior in the first place?

The big myth is that these networks are private property and they can be run anyway the owners see fit. Unfortunately, these networks benefit from the largesse of the taxpayers. They're subsidized out the ass, they've been granted special right-of-way privileges that let them drive lines through private (and public) property without the owner's permission, and generally benefit from all variety of special consideration in government.

I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. You can't take billions of dollars from the government and still expect to be able to run your networks like your own private fiefdom.

On Religion and Tolerance

Chaotic Limbs 11-18-04
"I completely understand why so many hate Christians specifically. I used to go to church and I can tell you honestly that being a believer doesn't make you a better person. Most Christians are intolerant, self-righteous, and focused on the bodily sins like lust and nakedness rather than the really corrupting influences of malice, jealousy, grudgekeeping, self-righteousness, intolerance, hate and spite."

Jubeebee 3-25-08

My mom took me to church since I was a year old, and I ended up taking an intellectual path away from religion.

I was big into dinosaurs when I was a kid. I knew epochs, families, diets, fossil finds, etc., etc. I was also taught, every Sunday and Wednesday, all those Bible stories we all know. The whole Jesus thing was cool to me; a guy who loves everyone, helped people, all that cool stuff. I liked that part.

Noah, not so much. At 6 years old, I remember asking my mom teacher how Noah fit a pair each of Ultrasaurses, Brachiasaurses, and Diplodocuses on an Ark about 600 feet long.

When I was in middle school, I learned about Mahatma Ghandi. I remember asking my paster, who was a Jesus or Hellfire type, how a loving God could damn someone who helped so many millions of people to better lives just because he was born somewhere that wasn't predominantly Christian.

Throughout high school and into college I read biology and religious texts of all flavors. The more I learned, the narrower Christianity seemed to me. Literal interpretation of the Bible required willful disregard of observations of reality. The stuff I heard in church fit smaller and smaller gaps of knowledge.

Eventually I realized I couldn't keep up the doublethink required to view organized Christianity as Truth. It required putting blinders on toward so much of the world. I can't pursue a life of willful ignorance.

I still think Jesus had some good things to say. I think personal spirituality is a legitimate part of moral philosophy for a lot of good, honest people, myself included. But organized religion as traditionally taught is utterly incompatible with rationality. It fails under every intellectual test I've been able to devise, and thus has no place influencing anything but one's own quest for inner peace.

/end Tolstoy that no one will read

On Society

contrapunctus2008-01-04
"I'm not sure people can truly appreciate what it's like to be in this girl's position.

Let's face it. Fame can destroy a grown adult's sense of character; for a teenager it can result in full blown sociopathology. Too many options, too much money, too many people wanting a 'piece' of you. You end up living in a state of child-like perpetual fantasy with every hedonistic wish fulfilled.

But the degree to which American society worships celebrity for the sake of celebrity really turns my stomach. Yes, I know it's natural primate instinct to focus attention on extraordinary people, but it really seems as if we've taken the concept to an incredibly unhealthy conclusion. Maybe it's individuality run amok, but it seems our only lasting value now seems to be who can finish first in the great narcissistic race to the bottom.

No drive to excel? Who cares. No natural ability for art, science, or mathematics? No problem. Just attention-whore your way to the top and you too can reap the 'benefits' of modern American life:

[Image of MTV's, "My Sweet 16"]

Socially, we're going to pay for all of this ignorance sooner or later."

On Role Models

Tommy Moo 01-08-08

"...A strong black role model in an intellectual position (as opposed to yet another morlock athlete or rapper) might inspire a sudden sweeping change in the paradigm of what it means to be black and masculine. I think President Obama would be great for the country. There is a legitimate chance that we'd see a majority of ten year old black kids dreaming of going to college instead of playing for the Knicks. I literally think this isn't just wishful thinking. Even the most curmudgeonly old white man should root for blacks to succeed. It [could] cut down on crime and go a long way to help race relations."

On Windows Vista

SnarfVader 2-17-08

Why are all of you so down on Vista? If you actually had the horsepower to run the Vista properly, you'd see that it'll crash and reboot so much faster than XP ever did and with all the cool features turned on it'll look better doing it too.

On Outsourcing

Weaver95 3-31-08

Most mobility products are being built in Asia, so having excess capacity in the U.S. doesn't make a lot of sense. It's a smart move," said the analyst who has an "outperform" rating on Dell. "They're going to be talking about cost-cutting initiatives" at the analyst meeting.

Translation - 'US workers are expensive - sure, they're skilled and all but paying them a competitve wage hurts the bottom line. And they expect BENEFITS! ugh. China is better, we can pay those coolies pennies on the dollar for rote memorization assembly line manufacture. plus, we can dump our contaminated waste right into the ground water! No EPA means pure profit! If anyone biatches about it, I'll just call it capitalism and wave the american flag really hard for a while'.

on Nationalized Health Care

EnnuiPoet


We need National Health Care right now, because it is clear this man [Glenn Beck] needs help. Serious, prolonged, intensive, medical help. I will gladly contribute my taxes to get him committed, sedated and placed in very soft, quiet room far, far away from the rest of us.