Opportunity - the Chinese have over 7250 words for it, if I remember my highschool Spanish class.

The internet has been shown to be a boon for all types of promotion and marketing - you can purchase everything from Vi8gra to Vigara to Vaigira with just a few clicks of your mouse, swipes from your finger, or even without your intervention because you have malware in your browser.

It's something indefinable about the spellbinding attraction of the raw potential of an unexplored market - the wide-open vistas of sheer promise, the waiting avalanche of dollars which draws in folks from all walks of life and every corner of the world - as well as those posessed of every sort of moral failing.

Now a few entrepreneurial types have invented a devious new way to earn a payday. Just post people's mug shots online, SEO the living daylights out of them, and destroy a person's chances of ever getting a 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 most U.S. states, the actions of law enforcement are placed online for public review and scrutiny. This includes mugshots of citizens who are arrested, whether it's for 1st-degree murder, or stock market fraud resulting in global economic collapse (hah, I kid), or even because they collared the wrong suspect and he got released 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 ensure that anyone Googling a person's name will be presented with that mugshot plastered front-and-center atop the list of results. Forever. (just ask Rick Santorum....)

So the next time you go to a job interview, you'd better have a pretty convincing tale to tell about that time you got arrested 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.