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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of paper towels, or disposable nappies, is removing the labour cost of cleaning them.

My ex-wife was a stay at home Mom for her religious reasons, and was determined to be the "best" Mom, only healthy food, no TV or devices, cloth nappies etc.

Once we hit kid #3, the time needed to launder cloth nappies wasn't viable with two other kids on the go. I encouraged her to give disposables a go, and she was hooked, but very guilty about it.

But yeah, disposables saved us (well mainly her) many hours of scraping shit, stirring a giant bucket of nappies with Napisan, washing them, hanging them out in the sun to let the UV sort the stains etc.

So while paper towels are technically non-essential, I'm reminded of the old sarcastic comment that "Linux is free, if your time has no value".

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Seems to me like people just aren't sharing the wisdom enough about how to do these things both responsibly and efficiently.

We used just use cloth diapers, put them in a diaper-only load in our washing machine, dry them in the dryer, and it worked fine.

Scraping? We just used a sprayer attached to the toilet, held in a little clip thing that keeps the spray contained. Stuff went in the toilet, mostly-clean diaper goes in the pail.

We also did "elmination communication" part-time. Just literally set the kid over the potty around the right amount of time after eating, and each time we take diaper off, and if it looks like they're about to go. It wasn't lots of extra work, and around 6-months, we had maybe half the times just going in the potty without needing to deal with a dirty diaper at all.

The entire problem is that our society is set up for the disposable approach and you rarely even know anyone in person who can guide you through managing it better, so we all figure it out for ourselves using the internet. But like, the one other family we told about what we were doing it just followed our lead and had total success too. And kids end up fully potty trained before 2yo.

It takes more than just good intentions, it takes sharing the wisdom more. Companies that profit off of a disposable economy work to get attention instead of the better wisdom we could be sharing with one another.

Yea, I found this odd that kids in US used diapers well above 2 years. I found a lot of kids potty trained in India around one. My kid's day care prohibited diapers for kids above 18 months!

Or, different people have different circumstances.

Like, say, a low pressure water supply, limited to 900L a day.

There's a reason we went with scraping the solids off, then soaking the nappies. It wasn't a lack of wisdom.

Wisdom is why we used a washing line instead of a dryer, as the UV in my country is amazing at removing the left over stains.

It's also great at giving people with a Northern European heritage skin cancer, so you know, upsides and downsides.

Super off-topic but national differences in washing lines vs dryer use are fascinating. In an early attempt to replicate the Japanese line-drying time forecast[0], I looked around for English-language articles about clothes drying, and the predominant advice was to always use a clothes dryer, because line-drying takes too long, encourages mould and mould is deadly and to be feared. Which seemed weird as I’d never owned a dryer.

Props on sticking to your guns for so long with cloth nappies, I know some couples who couldn’t make it work and felt they’d let themselves down.

[0] https://tenki.jp/lite/indexes/cloth_dried/

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I could have better emphasized though that I know there would have been no way for us to have managed as well as we did without having learned some wisdom that came from other people.

Yes, circumstances vary. But I stick to my basic point that wisdom is not shared anywhere near enough, and a lot of the blame for that goes on the businesses who profit from people remaining unwise. This factor is at the heart of a huge portion of the world's problems.

If you just get a bum shower as used in many East-Asian countries, you can get away with very little paper towel use and don’t have to clean towels as well.

And these bum showers can be bought on Amazon quite cheaply and shouldn’t be too difficult to install on any toilet.

You’d also be much cleaner I think.

This is just one example of such a shower found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B086W1YZSH/ref=sspa_mw_detail...

I’ve got japanese one and drying function just doesn’t cut it. In the end i use more toilet paper but experience is better. Could use cloth ones but toddler would destroy those.

> I’ve got japanese one and drying function just doesn’t cut it. In the end i use more toilet paper but experience is better. Could use cloth ones but toddler would destroy those.

Might depend how dry you want your bottom to be. I live in Thailand, so we got bum guns everywhere of similar style as the linked Amazon product (no drying function). I usually just use 2-4 sheets to "dry" my behind. If it's still a little bit wet, I don't mind, as my behind will get dry after a few minutes with pants on anyways (perhaps because I live in a hot country). At least I am 100% sure my behind is clean.

After talking extensively about the benefits of bum guns with my friends when we were in Asia, the hot vs cold country is a big differentiator. We loved them when we were out there, feels so much cleaner. Its also quite refreshing.

Back in the UK though you during the winter the water will be extremely cold and you really don't want to be damp down there.

I wonder if you could get one with warm water. And why not use a towel to dry off afterwards? Many people keep one in the bathroom for showering anyway.

I'm picturing the towel people use to dry there hands suddenly used ALSO to dry butts.

The problem is mainly with 99% of towels being ultra symmetric (up/down, left/right, front/reverse). When your towel is asymmetric, you can split it into zones for various things :)

Japanese washlets use heated water

The one I have I run a hot and cold line into it for warm water; then I just sit for a minute or two to air dry. I don't live in a particularly hot or dry region, either.

I have owned both the cheap cold water amazon ones and TOTOs. Highly recommend either. If you don’t mind cold water the cheap amazon ones work really well.

But then we're back to people needing to purchase new items to accommodate sudden changes in lifestyle where it just didn't make any sense since the last major advance in technology / the last pandemic. Sure, we know we need to avoid disposable items right now, but as disposable items go paper products are pretty dang recyclable or compostable. Whereas at other times and places conserving water is far more critical.

Sweet, so I'd just need to pay a plumber to install that - if my water pressure was sufficient to run it (it isn't), as I'm not seeing a pump.

I get your point, but yeah, differing circumstances.

Oh, for sure (that was what I was angling at with my comment about roommates). I suspect we would absolutely rebalance our strategy if faced with that sort of circumvention of our ... er... usual waste disposal mechanisms.

On the other hand, I've known grown, solo adults who went through a few full rolls of luxe-brand paper towels a week (who needs a plate when you can stack 10 sheets of paper towels?).

> But yeah, disposables saved us (well mainly her) many hours of scraping shit, stirring a giant bucket of nappies with Napisan, washing them, hanging them out in the sun to let the UV sort the stains etc.

We are using (modern) cloth nappies (after having used disposables early on). Our washing machine handles it all with standard detergent. No stirring or Napisan necessary. The drying via hanging up is exactly the same as for any other laundry.

I do see your general point, of course. We mostly went with the cloth nappies in the first place, because of fitting issues.

> I'm reminded of the old sarcastic comment that "Linux is free, if your time has no value".

Wow, a thread about supply chains and you manage to take a cheap jab at Linux. In response, try running Windows on a computer you only use once a month. You can watch it update every time instead of getting work done. Linux you can update while working.

Once a month? No. I hardly even reboot my Windows machine once a month...

Only the major releases of Windows 10 need a stop the world reboot. Those happen once every six months. And it's usually only a few minutes.

That's for a home machine. I've seen some enterprise machines take forever. I have no idea how they managed to fuck that up, but it's on the IT organisation of those enterprises, not on Windows.

I said once a month, because if you use your computer once a month there is no point having it powered on 24/7, not economical. What happens is you power it on when you need to use it, Windows starts downloading updates in the background, the next time you power on, installation starts on boot.

Those updates don't get installed at boot time. Modern Windows installs most updates in the background. The only ones that require a reboot are the big ones, every 6 months.

You lost me there. Which version of Windows will install the monthly cumulative update without a reboot?

Server 2016 (and older versions of W10) are horrendous for updates. You can have servers stuck on "configuring updates" during shutdown or startup for over 30 mins. Server 2019 is much better though.

To be fair any newish computer OS is going to act the same way in that condition, linux included. I know if I put any of my linux computers in that mode of use they would. My PS4 I use maybe every 2-3 months. Large update every time usually on the order of an hour to do so. I am pretty sure I have not 'paid' for a copy of any OS in 15 years (and that was because I built a computer). Yet I spend a good amount of time 'fixing' things. I pay in spades in time, no matter what little amount I may have forked out when I bought the computer.

Not only:

"Linux is free, if your time has no value."

But also:

"Free software: more expensive than money."

Those old sarcastic comments remind me of Cygnus Solution's more up-beat slogan (they ported and supported free software like GCC, and were bought by RedHat):

"We Make Free Software Affordable"

Instead of just whining about cheap shots, Cygnus Solutions deftly channeled the doubts and problems raised by the first two slogans (which they didn't originate, but were going around at the time), into a successful service under the last slogan (which they did originate, in response).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641664

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GCC-We-make-free-softw...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23884395

https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021225.html

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