Yes, those are “stacks” of “benjamins.”

His Twitter page was hilarious enough as it was without the G-Money MySpace retard-shot he has plastered as a background image. The MySpace theme runs throughout his scam-site too, including badges that lead back to his profile. And this really hits the mark; nothing says gaudy like a sleazy MySpace page…

WARNING: MySpace pages have been known to lower IQ, view at your own risk.

This guy is amazing. At the end of his MySpace youtube video, he gets in his Nissan 350Z and drives off, and yes, the camera keeps running until he drives down the street. He has two separate youtube videos, one for his MySpace and one as a greeter for his site. I’m sure he’d have one for Twitter as well, if he could. But these profile pages are just runners up compared to the grand-daddy of them all, his actual website.

Behold, in all its trashy glory: MiragesMoney.com

After laughing at his ridiculous Twitter background image for a solid five minutes, I clicked the link to his website, where I sat and laughed for another solid five minutes. Then I watched his terribad, self-promotional youtube video that he uses for a site-greeter, and laughed for another five minutes, and then it just got better as I clicked through to see the “Success Guide” portion of his site.

The Success Guide

This is truly hilarious; it’s his step-by-step guide to “become a baller.” Seriously.

From the guide intro:

Alright alright, so you want to pursure this make money from home thing and you want to stack $$$ like Mirage huh? You got some work to do. But hey, if Mirage can stack thousands a day then so can you. So here it is you wanna be ballers, the ultimate guide to making money online. Aka the success guide. I don’t know why Mirage did it, but I guess he just has a sweet spot in his heart for those who are struggling like he was. Now dont even think about jumping ahead in any section! Read each section diligently, join the networks he tells you to and structure everything the way he teaches and start ballin.

It only gets better from there, including a life history, written in nearly seventh-grade reading level, and many, many paragraphs of juicy internet-marketing secrets. This guy lays it all bare for the world to see, so that we can all become ballers just like him. Go ahead, cruise his pages, it’s good for about 20 minutes of uninterrupted laughter. When you’re finished, just be sure to gouge out your eyes, burn your computer, and lament the sad state of humanity to which the world has now bore witness.

Yep. It really happened. An ad appeared on the Google homepage.

When Facebook Lite launched just under two weeks ago, my immediate reaction was a sigh of relief, followed by the question “how long will it take them to trash up this one, too?” When I asked that question, I fully expected to find out by Christmas. I thought wrong.

It took them eleven days.

That’s right, it took them less than two weeks to begin trashing up Facebook Lite just as its unholy predecessor had been before it. I took note that on the day of release, that they had already placed the ominous “Create an Ad” sidebar, and it looked suspiciously devoid of content.

Now that column appears to have been invaded by what has become the bane of Facebook users everywhere — trashy ad placements. So now that one single, misleading, trashy ad has shown up all by its lonesome, how long will it take for Facebook to populate the sidebar with two of them?

I find your lack of thumbs disturbing…

Allowing the trashy ads into Facebook Lite is one thing, but not bringing the larger Facebook’s only countermeasures along with them is another. Without the seemingly worthless thumbs up and thumbs down voting feature attached to these ads, users are left without recourse and entirely at the mercy of the ad-providers. What began as a refuge from the relentless onslaught of Facebook is almost surely doomed to its namesake’s destiny.

You can say that I’m just making hasty generalizations, but we are talking about Facebook here, after all.

This vile competition is on the level of tearing a teddy bear out of a child’s arms and then ripping it apart into a pile of fuzzy remains on the spot.

- Rosa Golijan

To sum it up, what could have originally been a great thing has turned into a sick, twisted marketing ploy. Microsoft set up a competition, complete with public, popular voting, to decide which children’s hospitals would receive (and more importantly, not receive) a Microsoft-funded gameroom. Maybe the PR Guru’s who bought and paid for the ridiculously misleading Laptop Hunters adverts have finally lost their minds. Maybe I’ve been right for the last decade and Microsoft truly is just plain evil. Either way, even the most die-hard loyalist can’t deny how wrong this entire endeavor is.

Again, head over to Gizmodo to read the full story.

Image: Culture Smith Consulting

“Peter” in this case is the Facebook user logged in to his account. The woman in the “Hot Singles” ad is his own wife. According to Facebook, these ads “respect all privacy rules.” Personally, I think it’s just a nice obvious bit of proof that Facebook is truly sleezy under all the pretty blue makeup. Luckily there is a quick and easy opt-out for this nonsense, steps follow.

You’re automatically opted-in by Facebook

That’s right, you have to actually go into your settings to turn this off. Your face may have already been used to advertise any number of things to the people on your friends-list. Here’s how to do it:

• Highlight Settings at the top of the page, click Privacy Settings
• Click News Feed and Wall
• Hit the tab for Facebook Ads
• There should be a drop-down menu here, select “No One”

Firefox Users:Some Firefox users are unable to see a drop-down menu. This is a bug, and you’ll have to use a different browser.

Cheryl Smith was good enough to post this discovery to her blog when she was alerted by her (thankfully) good-humored husband.