"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

o yeah thats right it is too.

Yeah, Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, which is a national holiday, and people traditionally have Friday off, too, and then go and ruin a perfectly good day off by going to the mall to do all of their Christmas shopping.

but why "black"?

Because of the 4 am trampling deaths at Wal-Marts.

Okay, not really, but I don't have a serious answer for that question.

Amazon have just introduced Black Friday in UK. On a Monday.

When profit charts are made, going into the "red" means you're losing money and black numbers mean you're showing a profit.

Since the Friday after Thanksgiving is traditionally the most profitable of the day for retailers, it's called Black Friday.

pleasant plains OTM

Wikipedia isn't so sure

Origins of the name

Black Friday as a term has been used in multiple contexts, going back to the seventeenth century, where it was associated with a financial crisis in 1769. The earliest known reference to "Black Friday" in this sense was made by Trevor Mcwanda of the American Dialect Society, in a 1966 publication on the day's significance in Philadelphia.[13]
The term Black Friday began to get wider exposure around 1975, in two newspaper articles from November 29, 1975, both datelined Philadelphia.[14][15]

Accounting practice
Look up in the red or in the black in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
By the early 1980s, an alternative theory began to be circulated: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss for most of the year (January through November) and made their profit during the holiday season, beginning on the day after Thanksgiving. When this would be recorded in the financial records, once-common accounting practices would use red ink to show negative amounts and black ink to show positive amounts. Black Friday, under this theory, is the beginning of the period where retailers would no longer have losses (the red) and instead take in the year's profits (the black).[16]

No explanation of why it's sometimes called Green Friday.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0804D&L=ADS-L&P=R5955&I=-3

*Philadelphia's "Black Friday"*

JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the Philadelphia Police
Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. It is not a
term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens the Christmas
shopping season in center city, and it usually brings massive traffic jams
and over-crowded sidewalks as the downtown stores are mobbed from opening to
closing.

I'm sure there are a thousand other disambiguations of the term that include stock market crashes, bush fires and Donald Fagan, but as far as the answer to "Why do journalists and retailers call the biggest shopping day of the year 'Black Friday'?", it's because of the so-called profits.

I thought it was because Christmas shopping is such a miserable, bleak, dreadful experience but maybe I am projecting my shopping hate. Profits make more sense.

its def a lil ironic play on the connotations of 'black' tho - lol silly we were talking abt profits of course!

yeah, it's really totally racist

I thought it was because it was a black, horrible day for shop staff, haha.

number one shoplifting day too

Zuckerberg and George W. Bush are talking on my Facebook.

W. keeps needling Zuck for not having a college degree.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com

nevermind ^__^

(Horrible Young Woman)
:if i can get ____ _______ and _____ ________ to pay me back the $515 they each owe me it will be a god damn miracle! I am so fed up with people. All I want is my money and i can move on with my life!!!!
38 minutes ago · LikeUnlike · Comment

and sorry to put this on fb guys but when you dont answer my thousands of phone calls and texts i dont know what else to do
39 minutes ago · Like

____ ______: anyone else out there thinking that it's almost 2011 and we still don't have personal jetpacks? I mean c'mon scientists!

This could possibly be the most unoriginal post I've read on Facebook in six years.

The girl who did that is far from poor, too.

is anyone else on the new messaging system? so far, i think its a huge improvement over the other system

i rejoined but only for this new team i'm on and i already got friend requests from old acquaintances who i haven't talked to in 4-5 years.

ive had a lot of people venting about friends not paying back money lent show up in my feed recently too

nagl

solution: don't borrow or lend money from friends
I think some darling old sexpot said this in a pithier way.

Alternative solution: don't put your business out on the street.

But that wd make FB kind of useless to many ppl so Abb's solution is prob better.

I think it would be best to implement both.

Naming the names of people who owe you money, and making their name a linkable @ to their profile = nagl indeed

And the immediate "I'm sorry but when you don't get back to me, well, I just didn't know what else to do" defense is even more classic.

hey everyone ben jones just ran over my dog w/his car ON PURPOSE lol no j/k but he does owe me $15, dick

this cartoon shit is so tedious

But it prevents children from being abused. It has real world results!

At first, like 2 weeks back, it was just "hey change yr avatar to your fave 80s/kids cartoon for the weekend". That seemed like fun.

Then all of a sudden it turned into "CHANGE YR ICON TO AN IMPORTANT CHILDHOOD MEMORY TO RAISE AWARENESS FOR CHILD ABUSE" ... I beg yr pardon wut.

One of my bffs has changed hers to Homer strangling Bart, haw.

I posted some wiseass remark about it having real world results on a friend's comment about changing his pic and he said, "For the moment I changed my picture, I wasn't kicking my kids' asses."

But yeah like when I did it it was just "whats your fave 80s cartoon" and I did Battle of the Planets, I dont wanna be one of those idjits who run armchair activism on FB ("save this dog from this shelter in a nother country 876764654 miles from you!" "sign this petition to help stop this Iranian woman from being executed even tho she probably got pardoned six months ago but hey its on the internet so WE CAN CHANGE THINGS")

ugh one of the (myriad) reasons I baleeted my farcebook account was to get away from all that crap. 99.94% of the people who follow those trends are either zombies or do it because they're worried they'll stand out for the wrong reasons if they don't.

i actually pretty much automatically delete friends who do that shit.

the only thing i've ever campaigned for is the petition to get the NPG/Smithsonian to put up the motherfucking Wojnarowicz piece in that exhibit again. and i've been on facebook for more than five years— that's the first.

Deleting friends. There's another one. You remove someone because (a) they're distantly related and you're not sure why they're on your list in the first place, (b) they're a massive bigot, (c) they're a person you met on ilx or something and you don't need them to be on full-name terms with you and your entire networks of friends/family or (c) you just don't like them, and three weeks later you get a call from a friend/relative saying 'oh hai, so-and-so has got the shits with you because you blocked them in Facebook.' Puh-leeze.

I don't want to derail this thread into a bitching session but I've been off it for probably close to a year and I don't even notice its absence.

I might sign up for a "Deactivate your FB account for a week to send a message that e-mail activism is NOT OK, but actually quite stupid"

I've removed people-I-barely-knew from FB and 12 months later they've re-added me? Like they forgot or something (I dont re-accept). I've had one "omg why did you defriend me!?" complaint from a lass who once in the very distant past I was passing friends with via an IRC channel, but I just dont want anything to do with that lot, so... no.

luckily, most people don't notice. i also have started blocking peoples' feeds, cuz man, some of my old friends are negative negative nancies. like this old friend, who wrote this a few weeks ago:

"I got my wish. We got an hour off early, so I didn't have to drive home in rush hour traffic for 90 minutes like I usually do on Mondays, and I got to take a nap, after a very stressful day of having to do stupid crap like running to the Greek restaurant in a torrential downpour for everyone else's food because my boss wants me to "get to know the area."

it's like, great, your day sucked, LEARN TO FUCKING DEAL YOU WHINER

so yeah, blocked.

That was weird. All those people signing up to 'I WIL DELETE MY FAECBOOK ACOUNT COZ I CARE BAOUT MY PRIVACY' groups that went absolutely nowhere.

"The drunken step-father saw that his co-worker's new profile picture was a Carebear, and then it dawned on him: childhood is a time for laughter and innocence, after all, and that by berating and smacking his wife's son for getting sweet and sour sauce on the new carpet, well, maybe that was an overreaction."

so tempted to do a burt_stanton-style "freakout" status update just listing off all of the stuff we were supposed to "care" about this year

I've removed people-I-barely-knew from FB and 12 months later they've re-added me? Like they forgot or something

I'd been through a lot of weird and scary shit with various people on Facebook but that was the second-last straw.

i've only had one person de-friend then re-friend me, and it was because he'd gone through a massive massive change of life. like, he lost the stick up his ass.

so tempted to do a burt_stanton-style "freakout" status update just listing off all of the stuff we were supposed to "care" about this year

Ok saying you don't care about stuff, or even putting the word care in scare quotes, is the kind of thing that iirc gets at least one Care Bear at your door, imploring you to change your ways. If you are over '80s cartoons, I highly recommend not dissing caring.

unless someone is being a true ass i don't normally knock them off my friends list. got plenty of people on my list whom i don't know too well/haven't seen in years/don't really care for that much, but deleting them seems kind of dickish and message-sending. easy enough just to hide them.

xpost to anyone

(aa here) I had a few people delete their account declaring 'FB is ruining my life' or somesuch and reappear with a friend request two weeks later.

circa1916: If you hide them, they can still see all your stuff, can't they? My main objection was to letting near-strangers see everything about me.