ARS on Twitter
RSS
This joke never gets old…
Posted by Duncan on January 22nd, 2009
got this in an email from my mom…
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a distinguished looking man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then the Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”
“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. .
Now give me back my dog.
January 25th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Nice technology-hating joke. Average Joe Rednecks and the Taliban certainly have more in common than one would assume.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I guess the humor is lost on you Magnus. Let me explain it for you. The punch-line is two fold. First, it is making the point that possessing alot of technology does not make one intelligent or truly knowledgeable. The second is, that being a Congressman/Senator does not make one intelligent or truly knowledgeable. There. Hopefully that cleared it up for you.
I guess mouth-breathers like you and drooling retards have more in common than one would assume.
January 27th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
You are so right. Cowboys and hilbillies in general have always been famous for their dazzling intelligence.
Seriously though, you should stop using that computer of yours, you just look like such a hypocrite after that joke.
Love
Magnus
January 27th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Magnus Melon,
I stand in awe of your reasoning abilities. You are a cognitive giant. In fact, the methods of deduction you use are incomparable to anything else on this planet, nay, the known universe. Please feel free to come back and add your dazzling brilliance anytime.
Douche.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
No problem Douche! I thank you for your kind comments.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Magnus,
This joke really has nothing to do with technology, per se – that’s just part of the window-dressing. What it’s really about are educated “experts” dispising the wisdom of those who they view as less educated because they don’t have the same credentials (basically another form of tribal prejudice).
In other words, we have “experts” who feel a need to interfere and control the lives of the hoi polloi for “their own good” – which is another term for arrogance. Especially when they can’t admit (or don’t suspect) the limits of their knowledge.
And almost all the time, these top-down governmental interventions end up causing more harm because of limitations of human knowledge and tunnel vision and the law of unintended consequences – and that is when the motivations are benign. When these interventions are cover for malignant motivations, then you get major-league damage.
And as another example, I predict in some twenty or thirty years we’ll see how much harm come from the global
cooling warmingclimate change crowd.More humility from our experts would be in order. And that’s what this story is about.