She is true evil of the most realistic: cold, unblinking and reptilian. A Karla Homolka clone. Hope she rots and dies alone.
I agree with Crown, she's likely a true sociopath. Who could berate a person for getting out of a car filling up with carbon monoxide other than a cold, distant sociopath.
Sociopath or psychopath? I'd argue she's more on the psychopath end (just armchairing this obviously) because it appears she was unable to truly form a close relationship with him and was using him merely for her personal gains or entertainment. Whereas sociopaths are able to form actual bonds with those close to them such as family and, in this case, a boyfriend potentially.
Possibly Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Also, she was apparently being treated for depression herself. Getting two mentally ill people together makes a nasty toxic cocktail.
Those eyebrows sure aren't pretty. They look like a sod farm for Clementine Ford's armpits. I'm so glade his case had a judge that saw through the Sad Little Frail Snowflake Girl routine. Now a bulldyke gets to use her as a dress-up doll. Win-win.
I Munchausen. She actually said she wanted to be the popular girl with a dead boyfriend. She told him to erase his texts WHILE bullying him into suicide. I think she's a manipulative sociopath. She belongs strapped to a bed and heavily sedated. Forever.
That's just one of the countless texts of her badgering and bullying him. Again and again and again. While saying "I love you". Becoming irate and impatient when he failed or had second thoughts. Going to lengths to talk him out of getting help. You see, I just felt such a deeply sad melancholy overcome me the more I read into how she browbeat this kid and made him end his life just so she could become Little Ms. So-And-So. This kid knew he needed help, he actually wanted it. For fuck's sake, he's just a KID. He doesn't even know what shitty fun becoming an adult is. He wanted it, he wasn't completely weak. There's this ever-oozing epidemic where people are just completely disregarding the quality of life for others. That they'll ruin a life --a person no more different or special than them-- for the most useless or lame of gains. Like popularity and sympathy as you become the trophy wife for the suicide hotline and Michelle Carter plays the grieving, tear stained black-clad widow. It's straight-up Dexter Morgan shit where a sadistic lunatic hides in plain sight. Only this girl sent some kid straight into his grave, and she knows she did. If she did it once or twice, you know, eye-rolling after having a bad day... I get it. We say dumb shit we don't mean. We have ALL done that. But this was a relentless, cult-like brainwashing that didn't stop until he was dead. As touchy as a debate this subject is, I think she deserves punishment and I'm glad She's guilty. Fuck her. Let this be a lesson to evil bastards who are willing to ruin a soul for a temporary thrill. It honestly sounds like it could have been written into the script for the movie "Heathers". It's that fucked up.
Interstate blocked by protestors in MN over Philando Castilo verdict. Live stream: https://livestream.com/unicornriot/yanezverdict
Nah, it's Minnesota. 18 arrested, no injuries or property damage. Now if the Vikings ever win the Superbowl...
I heard an interesting statistic that the number of publicly traded companies has essentially halved since 1992. I also read that GE and Facebook have similar revenue/market valuation, but GE has about 10x the employees as Facebook. That sincerely scares me. The economy is crying for actual taxes to encourage investment (and reverse inequality), and de-monopolizing our industries. But somehow, Facebook is worth more than the guys making nuclear reactors, microwaves and horrible TV.
But Facebook has data, GE doesn't. The Data is where the real marketing power is... just ask Google. Facebook knows EVERYTHING about their "customers", and the business interfaces and tools around targeted marketing to Facebook users is fucking scary. Both Facebook's and Google's ability to mine and then assemble and sell relevant data to companies wanting to sell you shit is mind blowing when you look behind the curtain. There's an old saying... if you're not paying for it, then you are what is being sold. Look at the potential informational reach of Facebook and compare THAT against GE and you'll see that it's almost surprising it's not got a higher relative valuation. https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-One-Don-Peppers/dp/038548755X That was one of the first books I read that really opened my eyes to the paradigm shift that was cheap computing and end user data. Basically, we went through a stage where the marketing world could start to individualize marketing, rather than just carpet bomb everyone with the same message. That represented the stone age, and all the advances of Big Data R&D and cheap computing resources has gotten us light years beyond that.
Nett, I'm completely with you in the value of marketing...but how the hell did marketing outstrip everything in the "real" economy? My point is that with a nuclear reactor, it has value at almost every layer and contributes to the real economy in much the way we're accustomed to. You can re-sell, repair, refurbish their products and there's a tangible value there that approximates objective value: a microwave is "worth" x, and can be repaired for 7, etc. Facebook data is like an airline seat: the window of value shrinks considerably based on time, perspective and the data quality. (Can't sell a seat in Denver to someone in Dubai). It's value is completely subjective, and is somewhat artificial. I guess my thought is GE provides solutions to needs: power, edible foods, etc. and as such they are a stalwart of the tangible, real economy and a victim of the investment economy. Facebook provides a solution to wants: I want to know my customer, I want to see what my friend did on vaca, etc. and is a darling of an investment economy. Ultimately, I think Facebook represents a danger to privacy, certain kinds of liberty and from an economic perspective it's kind of unfair to compare GE with FB. This rapid transition has occurred in a tiny window of time: "cloud" computing really hit it's stride in 2008, and big data not long after that, and we don't know the ramifications of it. I can see that with a handful of elections occurring in that window, it's had a powerful impact on politics. It's starting to have a divisive impact on businesses, and it's scary to think of the marriage between an social/governmental system and the GE-type businesses that is slow to evolve, not to mention what happens when your privacy is completely forsaken by the power of an SQL query.
It's all about the increased efficiency of selling goods. Odds are if you're in the market for a jet engine or a nuclear reactor, you already know all the suppliers in that space, and they know you. They can buy you off, get you some nice strippers and steaks, take you to Hawaii, and then they get the sale. But every other company, regardless of size, needs marketing. The data allows everyone from a one-man instrument maker selling globally to a localized coffee shop selling locally to target market to people that the data shows will be a potential customer. The biggest thing large and cheap computing and big data brings is efficiency at scale. It's not hard to tap into the market you're looking to sell into for a few bucks a month. Twitter, Facebook, Google... they all provide cheap, automated access to that data that everyone can use, and a shit-ton of people and companies DO use. Globally. That's why the ISP's are fighting so hard to be able to sell your data, because it's worth a lot. For any sales people on here... would you rather spend $150k to reach 1 million people and convert 200 of them, or $200 to reach 5,000 and convert 200? But not only that, Facebook also has a delivery channel for that marketing. Why do you think they set up their Facebook Groups stuff? They're creating target rich communities that are focused on specific, highly marketable things, and then turning around and selling access to those ad spaces in that feed to companies wanting to market to that group. Compare that potential reach with the reach of GE, and you might understand why FB is considered to be worth so much. The biggest fear Facebook, Twitter, etc, has, is to piss off their user base and then they all go away. That's what Reddit is facing right now... they have a huge, highly specialized environment just ripe for the marketing pickings, but if they go too commercial, too obviously, too fast, too annoyingly, they're going to piss off their user base and will lose that environment that they've built up in the first place. They built the community around one set of rules and behaviours (limited marketing, free to use, etc), and now they're trying to figure out how to monetize that, and are slowly morphing it into something that will allow that... boiling the frog. That's why just about every VC in tech only gives a shit about number of eyeballs or users... because even if the service is being given away, they're hoping to build it, grow it, and then monetize that audience or customer base in some way. I think a number of such plans are way over-rated and won't work out as well as their founders hope, but that realization is just starting to hit VC's that were quick to jump on large user bases. Look at Instagram, for instance... they made one small change to mirror some of SnapChat's functionality, and now Snap's stock is not doing well. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/snap/interactive-chart?timeframe=1y&charttype=line Investors see that there may be something there, but they're not sure... because everyone thinks "lots of users == lots of data == lots of revenue". I saw it in the educational software space... a number of companies gave the service away for free in order to sell the data they were collecting... text book publishers, school supplies, targeted ads within the app, etc. Then people freaked out and legislation to "save the children, and their data" came about, and the only revenue stream for those companies dried up and so did they. I think the average person really, really underestimates the complexity and insane amount of data that online services collect and collate.
Nett puts it pretty succinctly. I'd just like to emphasize that the marketing channels facebook creates is to sell products from the real tangible world you refer to, mainly B2C industries not so much B2B heavy industry. It's not disconnected from reality as you seem to think. Like Nett pointed out it made the monitary value of marketing campaigns so much easier to track and assign worth to as opposed to the old forms of advertising. It made marketings role in companies much more viable as part of the core business in this regard.