The Tyranny of Convenience
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It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented.
> After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified.
Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will.
The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong.
> To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
I know plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, but have a 4G / LTE 'feature' phone. There's no stigma there - it's down to a combination of cost, functionality, and signal range.
The suggestion implies there's a clear downside - an evil, perhaps - to using a cellphone or any of Google's services (naturally conflating the two is not useful).
I think the introduction of running water, especially hot water, into homes, and washing machines around the same time, made a substantial improvement in terms of availability of ~half the potential working population.
I may be the only one in the thread who has washed clothes by hand (Granny made me acquire the skill), so let me say doing it correctly is a real upper body workout. A family load of laundry would take many hours and an athlete to do it in a day. Each piece must be done individually. Hanging it all up to dry requires a lot of space too.
> these appliances ... free up an entire person to go work
And they help free up the other eight or nine hours that you don't spend working or sleeping during a day as well. They also help to free up many hours on the weekend.
The time savings and improvement to quality of life is immense. And we're just beginning. We're only fully 50-60 years into the appliance revolution.
> Rosling, however, believes washing machines foster education and democracy. He doesn't think the "haves" should tell the "have-nots" how to spend their days either.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hans-rosling-washing-machine-...
I see where you're coming from, though, and realize that's not what you meant. For places where kids can go to school and a parent is not spending tons of time washing clothes instead of spending it with the children, the argument runs differently.
But even not counting for how much time it actually costs. The energy costs are lower for a washing machine. The detergent necessary is tiny. The health risks are minimized. (Let that one sink in. Touching dirty laundry is a great way to get sick. Especially if you are scrubbing it to wash away the soiled parts.)
So no, it is more than just a great theoretical argument. And the idea that folks are being wasteful by having a laundry machine is... well, astonishing to me.
I'm finding it amusing that so many people are focusing on the time portion and somehow managing to downplay it.
Even the energy costs are lower, considering how ridiculously little energy modern washing machines take.
And of course there might be some sort of marginal environmental or other cost between the two as well.
The biggest external cost with machine washing is the hot water, but most detergents now are optimised for cold / room temperature wash.
The biggest actual cost for hand washing is the time consumed - you may call it opportunity cost. Historically the societal benefits of the shift from having someone (typically 'the woman' of the household) spending 10-20 hours a week attending to laundry, to requiring perhaps a half hour of someone's time, have been better studied.
Yes, I'm aware top loaders are still popular in the US, which may change the economics markedly.
It's cheaper in regard to what alternatives are sacrificed for each unit of clothing cleaned.
Netflix?
Speak for yourself. I haven't done that in years. My last bluray was my first. I stream or download everything these days, not to mention that many streaming services offer paid options that do not have advertisements every x minutes.
Nothing wrong at all with the phrase 'streaming television'
My point was that this is not at all new phenomenon -- for people over 40yo, the appeal of 'at will' AV systems has been well understood long before the word streaming was re-appropriated to refer to a sequence of IP packets.
I can't help but think some people just have no experience living without. When I had my dishwasher installed a few years ago, after a decade of living without one, the plumber made a conversational comment about how they were a lot of trouble, he thought that when his broke, he might not replace it. My wife responded "How about you ask your wife about that." I'm sure this guy, nice as he was, simply didn't wash dishes. He really had no idea what doing it by hand meant, nor would he have if his dishwasher broke.
In fact, a much bigger timesaver was prepackaged food/microwave/ etc. For preparing food, there really isn't an alternative, because you have to eat every day - you can't simply eat less, as you can with the washing clothes case.
As a transportation cyclist, some people I know think I must have superhuman willpower. But the reality is that I don't own a car, don't like the bus, and live too far away for walking regularly to be practical. I structured my life so that cycling is the most convenient option. I do this to save money and stay in shape. (It's good for the environment too but that's not as convincing to me. My pollution is a drop in the bucket, cycling or not.)
Here's an example most would consider less extreme: Switching to a "feature phone" or not using a cell phone at all. In that case, calling from a feature or landline phone becomes the most convenient option.
Few would be surprised by the general principle: When possible, structure your life so that doing what you believe is right comes naturally.
What seems more surprising are the specific applications, perhaps because they often are personal and consequently not applicable to others.
Hey, don't sell yourself short! Of course an individual's pollution contributions are a "drop in the bucket". Just like a presidential vote is a drop in the bucket. In aggregate, these drops do a lot of good (or could do a lot of bad). You're walking the walk, so to speak. That inspires people to do the same. Keep it up!
People's lives are hyperoptimized leaving little room for random encounters and chance. They just take the shortest route from point A to point B.
Also, boredom is fought ruthlessly. Boredom wasn't useless. It was used to "entertain" the brain by pondering one's life problems, come up with solutions. Today feeling bored means it's time to check facebook.
For this I made a separate chromium profile who's tabs reopen on boot, homepage is hn, and search engine is hn algolia. It's stopped the ctrl-t n enter habit successfully.
> https://www.metafilter.com/172744/Technologies-of-Mass-Indiv...
I thought it'd be cool to see all the comments and discussion people are having about this: How can the comments on all three sites {MetaFilter, NYT, HN} be collated to into one discussion? Is there a service that exists for this that my morning brain isn't thinking of?
As to "how" to accomplish it, my mind is immediately jumping towards a browser extension that automatically searches the other sites for matching content when you're viewing the discussion page on any of them, and then incorporates the relevant info somehow.
The mapping of convenience to cost is called "transaction costs."
It's certainly prevalent in a lot of economic work!
Convenience is a factor in preference (ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility)
Convenience is simply one variable used in decision making. Some of us value it more than others. In many spaces, I value preference and self-ownership higher than convenience, so many of the examples in the article do not resonate with me. I see the described behavior in others.
As the article points out, technology evolves. Personal hosting will become simpler with time and perhaps at some point, we will hit the tipping point where it is approximately as convenient as third-party "cloud" data and application hosting. Incremental steps along this path that merges self-ownership and convenience (e.g., the work being done by ZeroTier) are visible if you're looking for them.
After I started fishing in my spare time, I've had really good days where the fish are hammering my lures and I'm catching them every 10 minutes. Those days always start out well, but towards the end it's almost boring since I know they'll end up biting and there's no sense of accomplishment.
But the days where the fish aren't biting and I have to switch out lures, tie different rigs, and search for the fish make it much more rewarding when I do catch one.
A washing machine, or running water, or not having to bake one's own bread, are much less of a luxury, closer to basic necessities outside dire poverty. Washing by hand or bringing water from a river may be fulfilling and fun if you choose to do so, and are free to change your choice when you see fit. For basic necessities, it is much less so.
Its exhortation to "resist the stupefying power of convenience" is unlikely to work, because convenience, which I would define as "getting what you need or want with less effort," gives rise to economic incentives: Between any two otherwise equal options, the more convenient one requires a lower investment of time and work from you and is therefore, in the end, cheaper.
Exhortations against economic incentives rarely if ever work.
Aren't those things also filled with convenience? We use convenient tools, places, etc. for them. As the author described earlier "By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us". Since this is most likely, at least to a point, true then couldn't convenience be thought of as something allowing us to advance in areas that are of interest to us instead of wasting time for things that aren't?
> “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.”
Even if that's the case I'm sure it's not if we take into account more than a single generation. Imagine, for example, the convenience of the washer. Before it, washing the clothes was a very tedious and time-consuming task.
True; but I suspect that in the past, people didn't wash as many clothes as frequently as we do now. It seems possible that the total amount of laundry being done in a typical household has grown so that although the process is easier/more efficient, we still spend a similar amount of time on it.
Or perhaps it gives us time to spend on addictions. It might be the other way around: addictive behavior and the time it requires, fuelled by a plethora of available addictive products (drugs, computer games, social media...) causes us to value convenience more than we should.
tldr; Convenient does not beat free. A convenient system with fees and with no propaganda against it whose use carries no risk of ruining one's life/finances/reputation beats a gratis system with widespread propaganda against it whose use, development, and distribution carries a risk to everyone's life/finances/reputation.
* you can get sued into oblivion for even using the free option. This is such a danger that Bram Cohen, original author of Bittorrent, has stated publicly he decided from the outset never to download content over it so that nobody could ever impeded his current or future work with threats of lawsuits over copyright infringement. (And the current debacle with Project Gutenberg shows how big a danger those lawsuits can be.)
* you can get jail time for publishing the locations of the free options
* you can be threatened with lawsuit and/or criminal penalties for developing an application like Popcorn Time that makes the free options discoverable and user-friendly
* you will eventually get your domain name suspended if you ignore all the risks above and serve up an app/site for the free option
* even projects like Gutenberg and IMSLP which serve up content exclusively that is no longer under copyright have to spend considerable resources consulting with lawyers to make sure parties who would rather sell what they offer cannot simply strongarm them or sue them out of existence
Take all those risks into account, plus the fact that RIAA and Hollywood have enormous resources to throw against the free option. It is amazing that the free options have existed at all, much less in the user-friendly and convenient form of something like Popcorn Time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
and The Tyranny of Tyrannosaurus Rexes
I think it was this video [1] when discussing innovation at any cost.
How is this even remotely true? I always wait on spirit crushing lines at Starbucks. I guess you can order ahead, but the "planning factor" does take away some convenience.
Basically, these things that modern technology and optimization have wrought tend to be burdens to those of us who tend to think more deeply about things.
It's good to stay aware of the pitfalls of modern life. However there can be no doubt that overall, the changes that bring about increases in convenience and choice are good for most people. Their effect on society is a little more nuanced.
> When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).
The youth vote has been on decline since the 1980's, long before Ticketmaster ever came along (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_vote_in_the_United_State...).
> We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.
This argument blows my mind how simplified it is. There are plenty of reasons someone would prefer iTunes over Napster, not illegal and more user friendly to name the two biggest. Why not use the example of a record store versus iTunes or even Napster? To show how conveniency can beat in human experiences or make you bend your morals to steal music?
> Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
This argument totally neglects that Amazon was ever a "little guy." Amazon's growth is the embodiment of American's prizing competition. Without competition, Amazon would never have been able to steal customers from Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Kroger, etc. Also, Amazon's framework allows for "little guy" shops to start up with low cost.
> However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us.
If this was a "utopian ideal", then we would not be able to read this article on the internet. There is a reason that only the wealthy elites were scientists in the past. It's because they didn't have to spend their majority of the day doing laborious tasks. Without conveniency, there would be a lot less engineers, scientists, writers, artists, gamers, etc.
This article has no leg to stand on. You can swap out the word conveniency for innovation at many points, which is completely counter-intuitive to human philosophy. I understand that the writer is saying it's nice to take things slow. To not multi-task your brain to death. What he should be arguing for is to practice patience not to wash your clothes by hand.
There's no outsized value in washing your clothes by hand every day, week, month. It's monotonous, very time consuming and physically punishing. There's also similarly no value in cutting your entire lawn by hand. These things are not comparable to climbing a mountain, which you're going to do rarely.
If you have to climb a mountain every day, take a vehicle. Your body will thank you. And so will your loved ones, because climbing a mountain is extremely time consuming, so you'll never see your loved ones again.
Getting tired of publications where Wall of Text hits you for +100 hp...