I believe that was sarcasm
I do dislike forums like ArsTechnica where "/s" is prominent, I believe that if you need to write a sarcasm tag to get that across, you likely should not be writing sarcasm at all.
Then again there's people like parent which will miss what I believe to be obvious sarcasm, and I wonder all over again if there's a point to it all.
Sometimes I think we should just not write sarcasm at all on written communications.
That being said I had no problem seeing sarcasm in this example, chiefly because the language was obviously different(how often does one use the word "worthless" to describe people?). I guess it makes for a useful rule of thumb regarding what could be reasonably considered sarcasm.
Hell, people can't decide if The Prince is a satire or not.