Opportunity - the Chinese language has over 7250 words for it, if I recall my high school Spanish class correctly.
The internet has been shown to be irresistable for all types of promotion and marketing - you can buy everything from Vi8gra to Vigara to Vaigira with just a few clicks of your mouse, swipes from your fingertip, or even without any intervention because you have malware in your computer.
It's just something about the spellbinding allure of the raw potential of an untapped market - the wide-open vistas of gilded promise, the waiting tsunami of money which draws in people from all walks of life and every corner of the globe - as well as those posessed of every sort of moral failing.
Now some entrepreneurial types have worked out a devious new way to earn money. Just post people's mug shots online, SEO the crap out of them, and ruin a person's chances of ever getting a good job again.
Then - and this is the cleverest bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of bucks to take the photos away when they come begging you.
You see, in many American states, the actions of law enforcement are published online for public examination and review. This includes mugshots of people who are taken into custody, whether it's for 1st-degree murder, or fiscal fraud resulting in global economic disaster (just joking, obviously), or even because they cuffed the wrong suspect and let him go an hour later.
So rather than wasting this valuable raw material of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of the mouse and some devious manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can ensure that anybody Googling a person's name will find that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. Forever. (just ask Rick Santorum....)
So the next time you walk into a job interview, you'd better have a pretty hilarious story to tell about that time you got booked by the deputies because you look kinda like a mugger when you wear an old grey hoodie...
People like this are why I'm convinced we are doomed.
The internet has been shown to be irresistable for all types of promotion and marketing - you can buy everything from Vi8gra to Vigara to Vaigira with just a few clicks of your mouse, swipes from your fingertip, or even without any intervention because you have malware in your computer.
It's just something about the spellbinding allure of the raw potential of an untapped market - the wide-open vistas of gilded promise, the waiting tsunami of money which draws in people from all walks of life and every corner of the globe - as well as those posessed of every sort of moral failing.
Now some entrepreneurial types have worked out a devious new way to earn money. Just post people's mug shots online, SEO the crap out of them, and ruin a person's chances of ever getting a good job again.
Then - and this is the cleverest bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of bucks to take the photos away when they come begging you.
You see, in many American states, the actions of law enforcement are published online for public examination and review. This includes mugshots of people who are taken into custody, whether it's for 1st-degree murder, or fiscal fraud resulting in global economic disaster (just joking, obviously), or even because they cuffed the wrong suspect and let him go an hour later.
So rather than wasting this valuable raw material of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of the mouse and some devious manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can ensure that anybody Googling a person's name will find that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. Forever. (just ask Rick Santorum....)
So the next time you walk into a job interview, you'd better have a pretty hilarious story to tell about that time you got booked by the deputies because you look kinda like a mugger when you wear an old grey hoodie...
People like this are why I'm convinced we are doomed.
About the Author:
Ben Scott is a blogger whose muse is shadenfreude (a German word meaning "laughing at another's misfortune") - you can read more of his work at Why We're Doomed and if you enjoyed this article, you'll probably love this post!
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