So strange what we'll do...

...for a little mool.

I was thinking this morning, don't remember why, about what people are willing to do to make money, what kind of crappy (either for them or someone else) jobs they'll do, and what kind of values or futures they'll sell out for short-term gain. I was thinking that it's easier for me to understand the lure now that I'm a parent, quickly watching the dreams I'd held onto as a young adult sift into the realm of unlikeliness if not impossibility anyway, and hoping to still provide a life less ordinary for my otherwise suburban-cursed kids, though I'm still not at the point which I'd take a job I saw as morally amiguous, unsustainable, or even mundane.

Then this afternoon I got my periodic Google search email (Google executes a particular search for me daily and emails the results) and noticed something I've seen a few times since beginning to use this tool: links to websites with descriptions or text with an almost cohesive (in a post-modern poetry sort of way) but still random, machine-generated content. If you were to actually click on them (something I don't recommend) you'd find a site that exists solely to show up in a search result and steer you somewhere else. Below are today's examples:

captured in Pakistan in 2003, told his form a governing coalition. Civil Liberties Union in San Diego, horseradish to recall the Jews possessed enough incriminating private property. together. and statements delivered to the US The left-handed Langerhans hit a Tedstone said. an empty airplane hangar ... legislation that would provide a path - http://back-of-lawler.spaces.live.com/

Seriously, how much of a shitbird do you need to be to be in charge of *.spaces.live.com? What a stupid and pointless thing to do with your life, even if it does in some way help you pay the bills. I just wonder how much money I'd have to make before I felt good at night if developing this kind of thing was my job. It would take at least some brains to figure out how to do this - it probably combs other sites for content and then mashes it together to keep it relevant and 'findable' by top search engines. What could that kind of intellect do if doing something worthwhile?

UPDATE:

In today's email from Google, I have recursively become part of the problem, it would seem, with bad juju's name, author, link, and the title of this post showing up with the content from the top result above stuck in as if it was the content of this site. Strange.

I removed the other two results as they were all running into the sidebar.