In defense of the washing machine
vox.com
vox.com
Whenever I am travelling my hands end up completely battered (covered in peeling skin and sores) from all the handwashing I have to do and I can only sit in amazement at the fact a person who is clearly pro Tweet is anti washing machine.
What a weird time to be alive.
I grew up in Brazil and I remember the news stories about soap pollution in the Tiete river in São Paulo city. The people who lived next to that river were some of the poorest people in the country (the river often flooded the surrounding areas), the amount of laundry soap they were dropping in the river directly without treatment was causing huge environmental problems.
(note a lot of them did have washing machines, they didn't have proper sewage treatment)
That said, this is a genuinely quite surprising statistic to me:
> The UN estimates that only two billion people have washing machines; for the other six billion, a life of washing clothes by hand is not a relic of the distant past but an exhausting chore that consumes a significant fraction of women’s time and energy worldwide.
I suppose that "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" == "The past is still here, it's just not evenly distributed"
From the UN site https://unhabitat.org/washing-machines-indicator-for-measuri...
2 billion - 5 billion
Not 2bil-6bil
The article seems to be from 2015 or we are talking about 10 years ago
The article says 2-6 but the article says 2-5.
The author wanted to say "we are 8 bil people on the planet" but when the article was written there were 7.
Was one of those moments when you really realise just how insanely lucky I am to be born into the life I live - when billions of others could only dream of the luxury.
I grew up until I was about 7-8 without a washing machine at home, my mom would do the laundry with my grandma, me and siblings would help however kids could and it took many hours to wash a week of laundry.
Fuck that noise, a coddled Dutch PhD student who's never had to do this week in, week out, trying to bring back some romanticised view of "communal manual washing". It's absurd to the point of enraging who actually had to live with these conditions at some point.
This is, sadly, the case for a lot of political movements.
I wanted to draw on my personal experience as to why, but i realize its not important and everybody here will agree with the statement when they think about it. And it's fine to have a lifestyle fantasy, you ought to strive to live how you want to.
What isn't right is to fetishize other people lifestyle (fantasy or not), ether positively or negatively. I think a part of anti-queer discourse wasn't really about about the queerness itself, but about the imagined/fetishized lifestyle.
(PS: quick handwashing is cheap and fine for cotton and linen clothes as long as you still use a washing machine from time to time to deep clean them. If you're a struggling student, do that!)
Someone should design a cheap and efficient (and modular, repairable, hackable) volksmachine and arrange to have it made and distributed for free or very cheaply, thus releasing a few billion extra hours a day for people to do something more meaningful.
The worst one I can find is rated at 78kWh vs the best at 47kWh.
I'm pretty sure making the machine and disposing of it when it breaks instead being repaired obliterates that savings immediatiely.
Easy to repair designs is the only sensible way forward to reduce energy consumption during the whole life cycle of the devices.
It was social and those women enjoyed the company. Once washing machines became common, no one chose to go back to do the laundry by hand. They decided to walk together and just chat.
I find unbelievable that a Dutch PhD candidate is so ignorant about the world around him and especially about the tough work that many women had to endure to wash the laundry.
What is next? Asking farmers to stop using tractors and go back to horses and mules, while reducing our farming productivity 1:100 and as a consecuence a multiplication of the price of food?
These modern socialist ideas of degrowth are very dangerous, specially for poor people. And that really exposes how far away are these intellectuals from the real world and from the same poor people they claim to support.
That doesn't sound credible.
Not literally "a few" in the sense of like three or four bucks, but a very small price compared to the dozens of hours of labor you're saving each year.
That's based on an energy cost of $0.12/kWh for electricity and $1.09 per therm for natural gas, and 6 loads of laundry per week.
The estimated annual electricity use is 100 kWh.
It's an interesting washer technically. It has LG's "smart diagnostics" but it does not have WiFi. Instead it sends the diagnostic data to the LG app acoustically. You tell the app to get the diagnostics, then press and hold the TEMP button on the washer. The washer then sends the data using what sounds like the modems we used to use in the dial-up days.
Note: some review sites, such as Consumer Reports, say that it does have WiFi. My guess is that they assumed that because of the smart diagnostics which do use WiFi on models that have it.
Also, https://www.lg.com/us/washers-dryers/lg-wm3400cw-front-load-... says it costs $700. Optimistically assuming the machine will last 20 years without needing major repairs, that's $35/year.
I wouldn't call $22 a few dollars.
And it's missing the detergents.
That said, this one has one of those detergents dispensers. And my detergent now seemingly lasts forever, indicating that I've always used too much.
> The legislation would prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing energy efficiency standards for clothes washers that are not technologically feasible and economically justified, that are likely to result in additional net costs to consumers, or that are not likely to result in a significant conservation of energy.
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress...
I think both proposals are silly. But you do you.
Only now, with my new washer that lets me do 2–3 "extra" rinse cycles, do I not have to age my clothes twice as fast with duplicated washing.
If the laws/regulations prohibit making washing machines that properly clean and rinse clothes, then the laws/regulations should be repealed.
Putting regulations on new products doesn't influence the existing ones.
If someone can't afford a new washing machine without regulation, regulations won't change a thing. They'll still have to buy second hand.
The regulations won't send the FBI to retrieve the existing washing machines not meeting the new regulations. People are still going to use them/sell them as long as they work.
Meanwhile efficiency regulations will reduce the cost of use. I bought a new washing machine at the beginning of the year to replace the one I had for more than 15 years. The new one uses a third of water and about a third of electricity compared to the older one. Given how much the cost of electricity is rising those last years, the savings are huge.
Also, new washing machines have never been cheaper. Sure, their lifespan is probably going to be shorter, but planned-obsolescence is another matter. But I suspect that you could provide the same arguments against regulations intended to fight planned-obsolescence.
How could a technically-oriented person use "green" (with the quotation marks) to talk about efficiency regulations is quite surprising to me.
They are the most accepted tech in the Amish communities - https://x.com/lefineder/status/1837083291960365102 (Tweet source - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Use_of_technology_by_d... )
I don't think there is any point engaging with the part of the population who are anti-washing machines.
Saying you are pro-washing machines is like saying you are anti-child abuse, there is no "In defense" needed. It's a manufactured in your head conversation with Arkham residents who are unfixable.
I could plant this story for about $150 on Fiverr but I've personally better things to do with my time.
- The article is called "In defense of the washing machine". It is not anti-washing machine.
- I haven't read a single comment that opposes washing machines. The closest comment I've seen is one that says that maybe we wash our clothes more than they need to be washed.
- All the top rated comments at the time I'm writing this comment are asserting the value of washing machines or ridiculing the twitter user who argued for replacing washing machines with communal hand washing.
How are you taking in this information and coming to the conclusion that HN is anti-washing machine?
As the article says, around 2 billion people have washing machines. That leaves around 6 billion having to wash their clothes by hand. What would the solution be? Would giving a washing machine to every household in the world solve the problem?
It's hard to imagine that it would, since there is still a ton of infrastructure needed to run the washing machine. How many of those 6 billion people live in places with functional water and electricity networks?
In my opinion what many AI companies are doing is basically that, trying to provide everyone (in the Western world at least), with a metaphorical washing machine. But the infrastructure, resources and knowledge to effectively use generative AI aren't available to most of the population or small and medium enterprises.
This will further the gap between rich and poor, and the gap between countries that use AI and countries that refuse or can't afford to use it.
AI (and computer technology) is more like electricity in this case. A raw technology that per se does not solve any specific problem, but only if/when applied within a specific infrastructure around it.