Why Technology Is Awesome: Part 184

I feel like the daily deluge of information from newspapers (always digital (except for the WSJ), sometimes important things, depending on which one I've been reading), internet (omg cute cat pictures and more videos of otters doing adorable things? Yes please.) and magazines (always in paper, wtf is wrong with me?). But every now and then I get really excited about all the interesting things that I'm reading. And every now and then I get really excited because instead of reading about terrible things (gunmen killing innocent people, the unemployed people trying to get by) I find some truly inspirational things in the news that assures me that other, more positive things are still happening. Which reminds me not to be depressed about the way that society is going. So I got that going for me...

• We're trying to help the environment. As a society, we're moving toward meatless meat according to The NY Times, which is interesting (I watched a TedTalk about the upside of moving from meat (cows, chickens, pigs) to insects (that's right) as an alternative form of protein since it takes an inordinate amount of (increasingly) scarce water to produce even a pound of meat. Meatless sales have hit $550M market volume, which is impressive. Additionally, a lot of the new players are not only trying to move away from meat, but to make something that's actually better than meat by taking out saturated fats and lowering total fats. Maybe we won't end up like the fat people wheeling around in Wall-E after all...
• What. The. Hell. People. So Brendan Eich contributed $1,000 to Proposition 8 (anti-gay rights). When this was found out, some two weeks into his new tenure as the CEO of Mozilla Firefox (yup, that Firefox) people went on rampage. OkCupid put up a landing page that asked users to switch browsers if they tried to access using Firefox, developers clamored for him to rescind his donation and bloggers lit it up like New Years Eve. I can see one side of this-- it's actually no one's business who he decides to donate money to in his personal life. It's actually kind of an infringement of his privacy for people to be going through his personal affairs like that. However, on the other hand, you are a public figure Brendan Eich. If you really want to donate, make your donations anonymous. Particularly if it's a hot-button issue. Particularly if you live in California, a traditionally more liberal state. Particularly if you're located in Silicon Valley, where your reaction to Proposition 8 is almost a foregone conclusion. I mean hell, even my mom doesn't support Proposition 8. I'm not saying you can't do whatever you want in your private life, but please, for the love of, take precautions to make sure that you do them privately. If you did, you wouldn't have needed to step down
• Amazon announced the Amazon Fire TV, which will be $99 and will be there move to basically put a cash register in every person's living room. This isn't a surprise. I feel like the TV craze has been going on for awhile now and although Apple entered to small amounts of excitement, all the buzz after the CE show in Vegas that focused on the amounts that could be made through the TV from people at home (my generation's version of the home shopping network, pretty much) pretty clearly shows us what the future holds. Strangely, Bezos wasn't on hand for the announcement (very different from the era of Steve Jobs-esque announcements). However, TV as a cash register won't be successful until access is easy (that means integration from multiple sources, much like what any, say, PS3 does now, except better), content is deep and varied (that means sports-- c'mon Amazon, you know your demographic. At least get your offerings up to the number of sports options that are available on Roku) and it's got to be affordable. So they got that going for them
• Rumors continue to circulate about Apple moving toward mobile payments. Passbook and a given group of established customers that are used to the user interface already through iTunes make a convincing argument

And finally... I forgot that Dita Von Teese existed. I also love that she was married to Marilyn Manson. Don't ask me why, but I was Googling her the other day because I kind of forgot she was a thing, and I stumbled on a bunch of her quotes. They made me laugh. I posted my fave up above. Though I like to imagine her saying, "You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world... and there's still going to be somebody that just fucking hates peaches." (insert shrug)