It just takes 5 seconds to think about the treatment of white workers in coal mine to debunk this entire article. My grandmother was a middle class family in mid 20th century and still preferred to hand wash the families cloths until arthritis took over.
My great-grandfather died in a coal mine so, I have an intimate understanding of your argument. Intimate enough to tell you that you did not understand the article.
My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).
It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine its fun for more than a load or two!
When I was young I did summer work for a woman who described how difficult it was getting to find a new washer with a wringer, which if you are not familiar is a pair of rubber rollers above the washtub to really squeeze out the water. This was a wealthy woman who just couldn’t change her workflow.
From what I understand, the dryer is a bigger concern. In the UK and in Europe, you are already ahead of the curve by reducing use of the electric dryer.
The heat-pump crowd never miss an opportunity to spread fanciful figures. They just take the power draw, assume they dry as quick as the old dryers, and multiply time by power to get a nonsense figure. [0]
In the real world, to get my clothes dry, my heat pump dryer uses ~1.5 kWh (at at least 2 hours) vs ~2-4 kWh with an older dryer. Yes, I've used watt meter.
I'm sure /yours/ is magic tough :-)
They're good at reducing peak load on the grid, sure, which is useful.
[0] The manufacturers join in the with this nonsense by lying about the clothes being dry, and gating the "actually dry" setting behind some advanced menu. They expect you to do the last 10-15% of drying in your wardrobe or something.
technically fruit would be free in tropical countries all year round, though in somewhere like Europe you would need to preserve it (drying would be cheapest long term preservation)
Technically I could survive on rats and pigeons, but that strategy doesn’t scale as easily as washing machines and electricity. I would also need to figure out an energy efficient way of cooking them if I wanted to beat the washing machine on emissions.
It is much easier to pick up fruit with zero skills and you can eat it it raw compared to rats/pigeons + it scales with no issues, there is enough fruit for everyone.
You make a good point but I do have some excess fat stored that I need to shed lol
And 0.2 kWh? Always cold water and barely any spin? I'm firmly middle aged and can't get my head around people washing bed linen etc at cold temperatures and not worrying about dustmites etc.
But maybe it was a lie all along to get us to use more energy.
Any of these that are electric is where your money is going: heat, water heater, air con (if you have it), clothes dryer, oven. Switch them to Russian natural gas for the savings.
> Second, the semiautomatic washing machines themselves may have taken some of the drudgery out of clothes washing, but they did not really save time. Scott explains that the person washing “had to manually feed each item of clothing through the powered wringers between each part of the cycle.” You could not just close the door and turn the machine on and leave.
Second? Why not first? This could be the entire article. Why would I buy a machine that doesn't actually provide meaningful value? Everything else in this article is ragebait for HN.
It still seems like that would save a ton of unpleasant work, if not time.
I own a pasta machine where I have to hand-feed the pasta sheets, and it's so much easier and more fun to make pasta compared to rolling by hand, even though it doesn't save me any time.
Simply feeding an item into a wringer is easy and a bit meditative; wringing by hand is a lot of work and a lot of wear on your skin.
I still hand-wash a lot of my stuff. I do not find such washing to be tiresome in any way.
There is a method to it that produces good results (definitely better than the machines) with little effort. To start with, I pre-soak the clothes in good washing powder. I also do not let clothes pile up. I wash a bit at a time.
Now do it for a family of six, four of who are children running through muddy streets. There's no robot vacuuming and wet mopping your home. A broom is all that keeps the dirt out.
Today, clothes don't even get dirty by those standards.
I stayed a couple of months at a place that listed laundry facilities that turned out to be a couple of deep sinks with a built in wash board. I didn't find it physically difficult but it was very boring work. Key lesson I learned, don't use more soap than necessary. Excessive soap just increases the time spent rinsing.
only people who are directly impacted by an aspect of automation worry about it, everyone else either doesn't care or is quite happy even as they talk about how bad it is.
There's polyester sports clothing which seems to be more stain resistant (because it doesn't really absorb moisture), but for some reason bacteria seem to stick to it even better, so it gets smelly.
My friend (a highly paid tech-bro) wouldn't pay cash money for a cordless Dyson vacuum when I could clearly see it being much more pleasant to use and saving much a lot of time and hassle. It was a matter of $200.
The issue is that people are really conservative spending money on things that are not the status quo. They don't do a first principles analysis using ROI - that's what nerds do.
Its also the same with agentic commerce or agentic anything. Its obvious that's where things are headed. But you will get the same greybeard response "but you don't need it, just use your brain" etc etc.
Not sure which Dyson you recommended, but I understand where he’s coming from. I’ve considered going back to corded because the Dyson:
1. Doesn’t perform as well
2. Battery dies over time (fixable, but annoying)
I’m not willing to give up the lack of cord, but it’s not a clear cut upgrade and end result is a lesser product for some benefits that I could technically do without.
Lots of parallels to vibe coding, actually. I’m worried things are headed in the agentic direction because wealth is consolidating at the top and the rest of us will be left with whatever AI slops out. We won’t be able to afford quality.
That's only tangentially related. But AI is worse than humans in this aspect - it will always side against any novel take and is heavily biased towards status quo.
The Dyson is convenient yes. It's absolute shit for deep cleaning. The Dyson is good for daily light cleaning. But for a proper clean you still need a corded vacuum.
We have a Miele C3 and a Dyson V8 at home. The Miele cost twice as little as the Dyson and performs twice as much in actual cleaning power, filtration etc. Both machines have great durability and have worked flawlessly for years. If I had to choose only one of them I'd get the C3 over the Dyson without a hesitation.
Clothes were more expensive (relatively to income), while manual labor offer was in excess, and washing machines were big, not particularly good at their job, and needed constant supervision. So, all in all, there's no hard questions here. Meanwhile, authors made an impressive work trying to spice up otherwise bland text with as much "social and racial dynamics" ritual mentions as possible.
I read Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. The first volume talks about conditions in rural Texas. He describes the nonstop, grueling labor for women supporting a farm family. One of the chores was washing clothes. In Caro's view, rural electrification changed womens' lives dramatically, and the electric washing machine was a nontrivial factor.
Now, that happened starting in the late 1930s, so there wouldn't have been any use for electric washing machines before that. And installing a wash machine in a city probably required being able to afford a detached house. Maybe the people who could afford that could also afford to have their wash done for them.
Maybe urban women had easier lives. That wouldn't shock me. My middle class grandparents in Europe had servants. When I lived in a house with no wash machine, while in grad school, I took my wash to the nearby laundromat, and picked it up the next day, folded, ironed, the works. It cost me just a few bucks.
The wheeled suitcase for traveling also feels like such a no-brainer in retrospective, yet seemingly took longer than expected to catch on. One example:
> Sadow spent months attempting to sell his wheeled suitcase to various New York City department stores, but was met with resistance. Most department stores, according to him, refused to sell his invention due to a "macho feeling" that men would consider rolling their luggage "wimpy" and that women who travelled would have their husbands around to carry their suitcases for them.
"INVENTIONS: Wheeled suitcase can be rolled instead of carried. Two small wheels, attached on one end near the bottom when case is standing in ordinary position, touch the floor when suitcase is tilted by means of extensible handle on the top near the other end [Science Service]"
But I'm also thinking about the wheels available at the time - 1950s rollerskates used metal or wooden wheels, as I recall. Rubberized polymer wasn't available for another decade. Metal wheels on luggage seems a poor combination.
I also think porters were much more common, which meant many of those "macho" men could easily pay someone to carry their bags to the room, or airplane.
I mean, I was "there" for a lot of it in the modern-ish era, basically when air travel was like bus travel, buy ticket, get on plane.
FAR less distance and time between "car" and "plane." Closer parking, curbside service, but even if not, you're just physically closer to the gate. No TSA, etc.
One aspect of "macho" is social dominance, in a culturally defined manner.
What is more macho, getting coffee yourself, or telling the (almost certainly female) secretary to do it for you? Getting coffee is a menial job.
What is more macho, changing your baby's diaper, or expecting your wife to do it? Changing a diaper is a woman's job.
What is more macho, polishing your own shoes, or paying the shoeshiner?
What is more macho, carrying your own luggage, or paying a porter?
These are menial jobs, often done respectively by poor children ("shoeshine boy") and Black people. (White train passengers once called each Pullman porter "George", following the slaveholder tradition of referring to a slave by the master's name!)
By using a porter you show social dominance, and imply you are rich enough that their payment is a trifle.
From observation there is definitly a difference in attitude regarding automation between the sexes on average. Men seem much more eager to automate chores than woman.
In the era I grew up (early 70s), stay-at-home moms were not uncommon. I knew several families that either did not have washing machines, or had them but did not use them, because a lot of the women enjoyed the communal aspect of socializing at the town’s laundromat. I’m sure the rise of 2 income households also drove the adoption of in-home washing machines.
The machines were supposed to save us time and make our lives easier which initially they did, but instead that time got filled with other things to do for someone else.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] threadIt was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine its fun for more than a load or two!
In the real world, to get my clothes dry, my heat pump dryer uses ~1.5 kWh (at at least 2 hours) vs ~2-4 kWh with an older dryer. Yes, I've used watt meter.
I'm sure /yours/ is magic tough :-)
They're good at reducing peak load on the grid, sure, which is useful.
[0] The manufacturers join in the with this nonsense by lying about the clothes being dry, and gating the "actually dry" setting behind some advanced menu. They expect you to do the last 10-15% of drying in your wardrobe or something.
And 0.2 kWh? Always cold water and barely any spin? I'm firmly middle aged and can't get my head around people washing bed linen etc at cold temperatures and not worrying about dustmites etc.
But maybe it was a lie all along to get us to use more energy.
I don't know about 0.2kWh, but I see a machine at Argos claiming 0.33kWh for this cycle.
Hm, come to think of it, they've been saying that for quite a few years now.
Any year now, I'm sure
(I'm not pro-russian gas)
Second? Why not first? This could be the entire article. Why would I buy a machine that doesn't actually provide meaningful value? Everything else in this article is ragebait for HN.
I own a pasta machine where I have to hand-feed the pasta sheets, and it's so much easier and more fun to make pasta compared to rolling by hand, even though it doesn't save me any time.
Simply feeding an item into a wringer is easy and a bit meditative; wringing by hand is a lot of work and a lot of wear on your skin.
There is a method to it that produces good results (definitely better than the machines) with little effort. To start with, I pre-soak the clothes in good washing powder. I also do not let clothes pile up. I wash a bit at a time.
Today, clothes don't even get dirty by those standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posser
They are weird devices, if you didn't know what they are for you (someone) might never work it out.
only people who are directly impacted by an aspect of automation worry about it, everyone else either doesn't care or is quite happy even as they talk about how bad it is.
The issue is that people are really conservative spending money on things that are not the status quo. They don't do a first principles analysis using ROI - that's what nerds do.
Its also the same with agentic commerce or agentic anything. Its obvious that's where things are headed. But you will get the same greybeard response "but you don't need it, just use your brain" etc etc.
1. Doesn’t perform as well
2. Battery dies over time (fixable, but annoying)
I’m not willing to give up the lack of cord, but it’s not a clear cut upgrade and end result is a lesser product for some benefits that I could technically do without.
Lots of parallels to vibe coding, actually. I’m worried things are headed in the agentic direction because wealth is consolidating at the top and the rest of us will be left with whatever AI slops out. We won’t be able to afford quality.
Related: Every AI model has the same “controversial” take on humans | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197313
We have a Miele C3 and a Dyson V8 at home. The Miele cost twice as little as the Dyson and performs twice as much in actual cleaning power, filtration etc. Both machines have great durability and have worked flawlessly for years. If I had to choose only one of them I'd get the C3 over the Dyson without a hesitation.
Now, that happened starting in the late 1930s, so there wouldn't have been any use for electric washing machines before that. And installing a wash machine in a city probably required being able to afford a detached house. Maybe the people who could afford that could also afford to have their wash done for them.
Maybe urban women had easier lives. That wouldn't shock me. My middle class grandparents in Europe had servants. When I lived in a house with no wash machine, while in grad school, I took my wash to the nearby laundromat, and picked it up the next day, folded, ironed, the works. It cost me just a few bucks.
> Sadow spent months attempting to sell his wheeled suitcase to various New York City department stores, but was met with resistance. Most department stores, according to him, refused to sell his invention due to a "macho feeling" that men would consider rolling their luggage "wimpy" and that women who travelled would have their husbands around to carry their suitcases for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase#Late_19th_century_to_...
I looked in archive.org and found nothing on that specific topic, but learned that wheeled luggage existed in the 1940s, at https://archive.org/details/sim_quote_april-13-19-1947_13_16... from 1947:
"INVENTIONS: Wheeled suitcase can be rolled instead of carried. Two small wheels, attached on one end near the bottom when case is standing in ordinary position, touch the floor when suitcase is tilted by means of extensible handle on the top near the other end [Science Service]"
But I'm also thinking about the wheels available at the time - 1950s rollerskates used metal or wooden wheels, as I recall. Rubberized polymer wasn't available for another decade. Metal wheels on luggage seems a poor combination.
I also think porters were much more common, which meant many of those "macho" men could easily pay someone to carry their bags to the room, or airplane.
FAR less distance and time between "car" and "plane." Closer parking, curbside service, but even if not, you're just physically closer to the gate. No TSA, etc.
What is more macho, getting coffee yourself, or telling the (almost certainly female) secretary to do it for you? Getting coffee is a menial job.
What is more macho, changing your baby's diaper, or expecting your wife to do it? Changing a diaper is a woman's job.
What is more macho, polishing your own shoes, or paying the shoeshiner?
What is more macho, carrying your own luggage, or paying a porter?
These are menial jobs, often done respectively by poor children ("shoeshine boy") and Black people. (White train passengers once called each Pullman porter "George", following the slaveholder tradition of referring to a slave by the master's name!)
By using a porter you show social dominance, and imply you are rich enough that their payment is a trifle.
(On a tangent, "Qué es más macho, pineapple o knife?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d9YAz3A4pc by the inestimable Laurie Anderson.)