Green Tech Girl

The green trend has now hit web browsers – you can download the free Flock Browser Eco-Edition here. The browser comes pre-set with links and feeds from various eco-websites, and they give 10% of the search engine proceeds from the browser use to an environmental organization voted on by users.

I downloaded the browser and installed it (it does come in a version for Linux), but I’m not sure if I would use it that much. Some of the eco-trendy sites that come pre-loaded I don’t like particularly much. The one that wins my top “Eco-Irony Award” would be Sprig, which claims to be about the environment while pushing mindless consumerism. (No, you don’t really need to get a new pair of designer expensive “environmentally friendly” shoes when the ones you already have work just fine.) Ecorazzi, which focuses on green celebrities, seconds my list of mindless eco-trendy consumerist crap.

So while I feel that the idea behind Flock’s eco-browser is a good one, I am personally not thrilled about the trend towards corporatey, consumerist websites that play off the green trend but are in reality more of the same consumerism that got us into this environmental mess in the first place.

The big elephant in the living room that many environmentalists don’t want to address is the overpopulation problem. With 6 billion people on the planet and growing, we need to start looking at voluntary humane ways of keeping the population down. If we don’t, mother nature will do it for us in the form of plagues and natural disasters.

I’m a woman so it’s fair for me to blame women for this overpopulation problem. Far too often, we women use children as a means of making our egos feel good. Certainly, some of this is a biological urge, but it can’t be all that, since I’m a woman with regular hormones and a decent sex drive who doesn’t get all jazzed up over babies.

For some women, however, having a “baby” is the difference between happiness and despair. Enter the “reborn doll.” This is like a “real doll” for women, but instead of being an anatomically correct sex doll, the reborn doll is a lifelike baby doll. These things look so realistic that police officers have bashed in car windows to rescue the baby dolls from hot cars in the summer.

Most of these dolls are simply dolls with realistic features and mohair. But some are now getting robotic elements – a beating heart or a chest that rises and falls like the child is breathing. Soon enough, these dolls may end up going to the extreme of realism. I can’t imagine why anyone would want a barfing, pooping baby doll, but you never know. The creepiest thought is whether or not they’ll actually make these things capable of suckling on a woman’s breast. Eeuw.

So the question is, which is more damaging to the environment in the long run – real babies, or an army of robot babies, who require parts and plastic and electronic batteries and components and all that nonsense?

Hmm…

Just a quick note to express my frustration that computers seem to have a clock that kills them just a little bit after the one-year warranty is up. Maybe that means more money for the computer makers, but it’s just soooo much electronic waste. I have an old Pentium II that was custom built 10 years ago and the darn thing still works. It’s been there as a backup of my backup computer, in case nothing works and I need email. I guess they don’t make them like they used to.