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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not what anyone was expecting, but we've automated all the cleaning in the house. The clothes get washed, folded, and ironed. The trash gets taken out. All the plants get watered.

How? The oldest form of automation. We pay someone to come and do it. We have a cleaning person come twice a week.

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Nice, we use our kids. Perhaps that's why we had three (parallel processing, FTW).

Not sure on cost comparison, though :)

I'd be curious to know ballpark cost (and in which state just for cost of living).

My biggest concern with letting a stranger into the home is theft/trust issues. While I'm sure most people have a good experience and I'm sure you can find a company that background checks, it is more personal paranoia (and it isn't cleaners in particular, I don't like leaving any strangers alone around the house).

I just have someone come every few weeks; she's been cleaning for my neighbor forever (in MA). $100 for a few hours work. It doesn't really handle day-to-day housework but it ensures things get dusted and vacuumed before they get too bad. She isn't nearby but a lot of people get someone local for $30/hr. for cleaning, dog-walking, etc. Not for everyone, but it's not rare.

I have a separate service do my lawn for about $60 every 2 weeks or so.

Asking your neighbors is usually the best, at least around here you can usually find someone who is known to multiple people who can vouch for her.

If that doesn't work, and if you're ethically ok with it, you could put some cameras around the house (turned on only during the day when the cleaner comes). Dashcams are reasonably cheap nowadays.

I was paying a cleaner to come by and do my floors about once a week, but eventually realized that for 2.5 months worth of cleaning I could replace her with a "Braava" floor cleaning robot.

(I do feel a little sad about it, she's sweet and I see her all the time when she cleans other units in the building…)

When I lived in India, it was cheaper to hire someone to wash clothes and dishes by hand than to buy a washing machine or dish washer (and the place we lived wouldn't have had anywhere to put them anyway). [Though half the time we did these things (by hand) ourselves.]

I mean, of course. It is cheaper to do that anywhere in the world. The trick is to use the washing machine more than once.

I laughed, but my impression is that due to overpopulation it's incredibly cheap to rent a human for such tasks there. It'd probably take years to spend what the machines cost, and they take space (a premium, see: overpopulation) and require maintenance.

That's one of the defining characteristics of the third world:

TCO(human labor) << TCO(automated labor)

"When I lived in India, it was cheaper to hire someone to wash clothes and dishes by hand [assuming that context makes it clear that the costs are being calculated over an extended period of time rather than a single instance] than to buy a washing machine or dish washer".

Just like if I were to say "when in city X, it was cheaper to travel by taxi than to buy a car", I wouldn't mean a single taxi ride.

That's a strange use of the word.

Would you say that e.g. warfare and agriculture has been 100% automated because it's manual labor performed by people who aren't you?

Where and how do you afford this?

I can only do this because I live abroad in Latin America. Sadly, wages are very low for this kind of work.

Though I did have a cleaning person come twice a month, when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I could never afford all this much help living in the US.

I used to live in Central America and most foreigners from the US had their own maids. Some maids even had their own room in the house and lived with the family (great for babysitting, cleaning, cooking, etc)

Cleaners really are not that expensive. I live in the UK where the cost of living is really high and can still afford to have a cleaner in for a couple of hours a week. I still do the dishes (well, load / empty the dishwasher), clothes and take out the rubbish but at least I don't need to vacuum / dust the house etc.

In most places in Western Europe that I've lived, it's perfectly normal for a 2-earner household to have someone that comes in say 4-7 hours to clean once a week, and maybe do some laundry/ironing (depending on time available). It's an expense yes, but around that (when calculated back to monthly cost) of say owning (another) small car.

In Belgium, the govt set up a system where "freelance" cleaners get paid 15€ / hr and also get health care, pension etc. This is all done electronically / online and works really well.

Normal people don't use cleaning companies but loads of people had a cleaner nevertheless who was paid "in black" prior to this system.

Now everyone's insured, pays taxes, gets long term benefits etc.

You just described people working for you as robots.

I understand it was meant to be a harmless joke but it's still not so nice to say.

Part of me wants to be offended by that but part of me knows every one of us is just a cog in a machine, some bigger than others but really... not that much bigger.

Robots don't get paid?

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