Opportunity - the Chinese have over 8700 words for it, if I remember my high school Spanish class.
The internet has been shown to be a boon for all types of promotion and marketing - you can order 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 a virus in your browser.
It's something about the mesmerizing attraction of the raw potential of an unexplored market - the wide-open vistas of sheer promise, the waiting tsunami of dollars which draws in souls from all walks of life and every corner of the planet - as well as those posessed of every variation of moral failing.
Now a few entrepreneurial types have discovered a devious new way to earn a living. Just upload people's mug shots online, SEO the living daylights out of them, and ruin a person's chances of ever getting a decent job again.
Then - and this is the brilliant bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars to take the photos down when they come pleading with you.
You see, in many U.S. 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 murder, or stock market fraud resulting in global economic disaster (like that could happen?), or even because they cuffed the wrong fellow and let him go an hour later.
Far from neglecting this valuable resource of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of your mouse and some slick manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can guarantee that anybody Googling a person's name will be presented with that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. For years to come. (just ask Rick Santorum....)
So the next time you arrive at a job interview, you'd better have a pretty witty story to tell about that time you got booked by the police because you look a little bit like a mugger when you wear an old grey hoodie...
Misbegotten jerks like this are why I'm convinced we are doomed.
The internet has been shown to be a boon for all types of promotion and marketing - you can order 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 a virus in your browser.
It's something about the mesmerizing attraction of the raw potential of an unexplored market - the wide-open vistas of sheer promise, the waiting tsunami of dollars which draws in souls from all walks of life and every corner of the planet - as well as those posessed of every variation of moral failing.
Now a few entrepreneurial types have discovered a devious new way to earn a living. Just upload people's mug shots online, SEO the living daylights out of them, and ruin a person's chances of ever getting a decent job again.
Then - and this is the brilliant bit - charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars to take the photos down when they come pleading with you.
You see, in many U.S. 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 murder, or stock market fraud resulting in global economic disaster (like that could happen?), or even because they cuffed the wrong fellow and let him go an hour later.
Far from neglecting this valuable resource of public humiliation, with just a few clicks of your mouse and some slick manipulation of search engine ranking cues, you can guarantee that anybody Googling a person's name will be presented with that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. For years to come. (just ask Rick Santorum....)
So the next time you arrive at a job interview, you'd better have a pretty witty story to tell about that time you got booked by the police because you look a little bit like a mugger when you wear an old grey hoodie...
Misbegotten jerks 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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