A washing machine for human beings, from 1970
core77.com
core77.com
It's apparently also a tanning booth.
15 minutes means it takes about 3 times longer than a shower, and it doesn't seem to do your hair.
With every 5L of water I can
- Cook 4 servings (~400 grams) of pasta.
- Brew 5L of tea/coffee
- Water all the plants at home two times.
- Possibly wash most of my handwash-only dishes in one go.
- etc.
You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".
As opposed to eg 'wasting petrol', where the petrol really is gone afterwards. At least it has been chemically transformed.
Nature couldn't care less. Nature works on much larger timescales than humans. It's the humans that are impacted.
Just like climate change, plastic, and all other environmental issues -- humans are paying (or will pay) the price, not nature.
If your waste water isn't treated, and is discharged to water ways as-is, the more water you use, the more dilute your pollution.
If you've got a septic system, I dunno? Probably doesn't help, but if your system is well sized, no big deal? Some of your outflow probably recharges aquifers, so it's kind of circular (although a lot of the outflow evaporates, so less directly circular there)
It's easier to process per litre, but it is easier to process in absolute numbers?
When they dilute at the treatment plant, they can use somewhat dirtier clean water.
So, the prices might not be rising that quickly for now, but sinkholes are giving us the warning.
Prices don't always point correctly, esp. when there are other economic and socioeconomic factors at play.
I wouldn’t worry about wasting it. We’ll die from something else long before water becomes an issue.
Similarly, that spring water has no use if you can't extract it and get out from the hands of capitalistic companies (cough Nestlé & CocaCola cough) which monopolize said spring and suck it dry without giving it to you.
Don't forget, Nestlé's CEO told that "water is something they package and sell, and that water is not a human right". So don't expect it to get that abundant resource and use it the way you wish.
So, water is precious. You need to be mindful about it.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-...
This mentality is what brought us to today.
In most places I've been to, you just pay your water bill, and then you can leave your taps running.
It's about as productive as buying bread just to toss it in the trash, of course.
IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?
[0]: https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country (This is decade old, we're worse now)
[1]: https://riskfilter.org/water/explore/map
If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.
The Great Lakes have 1/5th of the world's freshwater. Absolutely enormous volumes of that water run out the St. Lawrence into the sea, continually, all the time.
I don't have any reason to leave my taps open all the time, and my water is metered so I would pay for such profligacy in money I could put to some useful purpose.
But I can certainly do it without creating any meaningful environmental stress. This would just briefly divert it from its destiny in the Atlantic.
I traveled through Mongolia for a week. Every camp we stayed had a water tank, and water use was extremely constrained. Same for electricity and heat.
Your position is akin to getting power from the first distribution point near a nuclear power plant and saying that electricity is indeed infinite for everyone on the planet.
Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury. I have shared a couple of maps down there. Maybe you should give them a look about our planet's state.
How does diverting an infinitesimal fraction of the water flowing from the Great Lakes affect the water supply at a camp in Mongolia?
If my local water supplier would offer the option to pre-pay, I might take it. I don't think it would change anything about how I use my water, if the price stayed the same.
(I am pre-paying for my mobile broadband, and I don't notice me using it any different than people who post-pay.)
You are right that me consuming almonds in Singapore can indirectly cause trouble in California, where they grow the almonds. But the well-known solution to that is proper water rights trading, like they do in Australia in water challenged areas.
I've had short hair and right now I have long hair. Long hair is a bitch between washing and drying.
Many do though.
I have a family member, also male with short hair, who used to take 20-30 minute showers every day, driving others in the house insane - but that was the "I'm a first-year medical student, I just learned how many bugs there are on everything, and how ugly diseases they cause; also, have you heard of SARS?" effect. Other symptoms include going though copious amounts of hand disinfectant. Fortunately that went away over time, as they improved their feeling for actual risks.
I think the greater point is that hair maintenance varies greatly from person to person, and it is absurd to assume every male only needs 2 minutes or every female needs > 15 minutes. A great example of the stupidity of stereotype and how it leads us away from useful thought.
(The dirty little rugrats don't give a damn, but they know).
Whether this is something you should do is another question...
(Also, it might be possible to extend it with hair washing if you mount one of those barber sinks at the top and then somehow automate it. Exercise left for the reader.)
Gonna steer clear of those directions. All things in moderation, etc.
You can buy two small dishwashers, keep clean stuff in one, dirty in the other, then run the dirty one and swap.
Or you can also just have one plate and wash it by hand after every meal.
It worked until the drill instructor noticed that the clothes in the wall locker weren't aging.
But the article's final photo is of completely different model - far more accessible, far safer, and for "the health care sector".
A normal model would just sit on the floor.
Hence it's a gimmick.
Though I bet it would get old really fast.
I guess this is where Star Trek got the idea of "sonic showers" from?
Thinking the future will be worse with all the available evidence is of a huge ego. How main character you have to be to think that it's just as you're alive that a trend of millenia will inverse.
In fact people will get upset if you don't agree with them that the world is going to shit (and prove they are smart by predicting it).
I think that social democratic movement in 20th century, and also Chinese communist government, made many people's lives better, by improving their material conditions. It often involved technology, true, but the technology is not much if it's not applied en masse. (Communist government of my home country, Czechoslovakia, had famously huge success in eradicating polio.)
And I am not convinced that free market dispersal of technology is more efficient in providing it en masse than government-directed dispersal. For a striking example, watch the ending of "scientific horror story" from Angela Collier: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?si=rrBJPb6bHASNrPEY&t=2991
David Graeber has written eloquently about this
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/of-flying-cars-and-the-dec...
You need to not hurt thoses who are brainwashed by cars and keep taking it despite having one of the best public transit in the world.
I'm in favor of more public transportation, but if you think people use car willingly in and around Paris, I don't think you've tried it; it's so bad that only people with no viable choice will use a car. Or maybe you could explain (for example) how my sister in law was supposed to carry her two baby kids to the daycare using an overcrowded metro (and bonus, through stations without working elevators) or how my brother was supposed to carry the equipment he was using to constructions sites he was working. And then you've got all the places where taking a car is a 30 min trip vs 2 hours by bus or public transportation (thankfully the Grand Paris initiatives are helping a lot there).
For now, removing cars in Paris just push them around the city, because the public transportation network isn't ready.
The rest of your comment try to justify car usage by taking less than 5% of the transit in the city, when there is already exception or infrastructures made for the scenario you described (except elevators and accessibility, thats a big issur in paris intra-muros). Yes, there are a lot of people that use the car when they can not use it, thats still most of the car traffic.
so, do you have any data to back up that assertion? (I won't claim that I have any favorable to my argument, just the observation that driving in and Paris around Paris is pretty bad)
> For a lot of destination you can take 2-3 differentes routes.
most alternative routes usually take longer and end up congested whenever the main route is having issues.
https://www.paris.fr/pages/le-bilan-des-deplacements-a-paris...
Indicate 13% of the traffic is for utilitary vehicule. This number include people taking their utilitary vehicule for personal reason. 50% is for personal vehicules.
Also, why were you driving around Paris ?
> most alternative routes usually take longer
It depends.
Also, according to one of the linked pdf, cars in Paris are barely for Paris-Paris movement, but more for Paris-suburbs, which is still the biggest weakness of the public transportation network.
Otherwise, there is no such thing as "transit employees not feeling like working" - thanks to the magic of economy holding a metaphorical gun to the heads of most people. You work whether you feel like it or not.
There is also buses, bus since the rail is faster, I never take it.
In case of strike the network is never fully down, people that can remote work do it, so there is a lot less of people transiting. On the biggest strike you can loose an hour or two while commuting, for small strike, it will get more crowded.
Flying is less energy efficient. You need to find cheaper and clean energy source.
You need to find a tech that allow to fly quietly.
Forcing to make people walk more is better for the society as a whole.
It's like you think the only victims of drunk drivers are the drunks themselves.
tl;dr: it all leads to this conclusion: replace "capitalism [with a system that] is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power:.
"Bullshit Jobs" should have also remained a blog post.
We would also call this a "minimum viable product" and promise that in some future update, the less-than-important people involved will be replaced by AI (and become even less important).
As for automatic washers: The idea isn’t totally gone - enclosed automated pet washers are around. (Despite being clearly terrifying for some pets.)
But they sure don't have a funky 70s style design, perhaps that's the part that's missing for most people ?
Here hoping that China gives us another run since the US of A has decided the take the back seat, financialize everything and put MBA/Bureaucrats in every corner of the process.
Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)
Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.
There was a New Yorker short story I read years ago about an elderly woman in a nursing home, and this wasn't the point of the story at all, but the main thing I remember is how the woman wanted to live with her daughter until her daughter pointed out that assisted/accessible bathing would be impossible in the daughter's tiny apartment shower.
If I would have to guess Soviet Russia?
modern washing machine UI is terrible.
The main annoyance I can find is that it's overly cautious about when it lets you open the door. I guess they take mild annoyance and waiting for the user, over Miele being responsible for major water spills.
Even better, been complemented by a family member recently that they have never seen a wool blanket be washed this well... lol
マッサージボール massage balls
回転いす kaiten isu rotating seat
排水 haisui drainage/wastewater
石けんすい sekkensui soapy water
超音波 chōonpa ultrasound/ultrasonic waves
温風 onpū hot air
湯 yu hot water
I have acquired blurry kanji reading superpowers.
I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:
> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.
These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?
I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.
At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)
It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?
I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.
It was part of a world expo, and from the text we can see it was set as a futuristic vision targeted at anyone that could use the apparatus. The official description also has no focus on the models or who it should be used for in any specific detail.
I get your point on the models all being women, but as that has more to do to the period than the machine itself, it isn't remarkable in itself. It would be like commenting on the show guides being sexy women when discussing Mercedes' prototype at 90s cars. Pointing at the sexism and gender gap doesn't help the subject.
You're right that this part of this history isn't necessarily that important to the machine being discussed in the article, but I think the other poster has a good point that this was absolutely part of the culture of the time, for good or bad, and I don't think this part of history should be ignored personally. Part of reading about something like this is to bring the reader back in time to what it was like being at this show in 1970 and seeing devices like this. Part of the experience was absolutely seeing pretty women modeling things or otherwise being part of the exhibit, because that's something that's completely different these days.
I think it might also be interesting to point out that while having "booth babes" is now out of vogue in the US, it's still the norm here in Japan. Go to an industrial trade show here and it'll be full of men walking around seeing the demos and talking to (generally male) company representatives, while there's a bunch of attractive well-dressed women standing in front handing out brochures and swag and scanning your QR code to put your email address on a mailing list, but who don't actually know anything about the company or products.
I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.
It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.
I don't know if all the models were women, perhaps they had some guys as well? (Or the author just doesn't want to commit, because they don't know?)
We see some pictures of models, but we don't know if those are all the models they had.
But you don’t want to sanitise your skin, just get the dirt off, so I don’t see any real issues.
Have you ever taken a bath?
It seems like you can answer these questions for yourself rather than asking a stranger on the internet.
Let us know what you find.
I would have quoted that if it were easy to find, or quantify. It's not. I encourage you to do so, put the work in, and let us know what you find.
Its not that I don't agree with you, it's that I want you to do the work for yourself.
We are talking about a device from 50 years ago where concerns were wildly different than the ones today. Water was cheap and plentiful.
Imagine a starbucks restroom that cleans it's self every few hours or so.
You aren't making money on customers or employees using the toilet so there's no incentive for investment beyond the bare minimum. Businesses wouldn't have bathrooms at all if it were legal.
I've had this vision where we create a niche in a building for restroom placement by fork lift. For the low end ones the interior can be 3d printed melted down and recycled. They can be pressure washed with high pressure steam.
For the high end ones you can have the marble finish with gold trimmings then when it tickles your fancy have it replaced with a different color marble, different light and different ornaments.
You can do various lease formulas where you get to enjoy the fancy designs until you [need to] downgrade to the economy version.
That formula could also allow exotic designs that wouldn't sell as permanent installations. You could have a different marvel character theme every week/month while you wait for the steam punk and Victorian units to become available. Star wars, startrek etc. I mean, you wouldn't want a ycombinator themed restroom permanently but for a week or~so it would be hilarious.
Edit: the Wikipedia page above says "the ultrasonic action is relatively benign to living tissue but can cause discomfort and skin irritation.". So maybe it was just a gimmick. Ultrasound cleaning was fairly new at the time, so maybe it sounded modern.
Was that just bullshit?
Which probably aren't documented for the ultrasonic cleaners.
Plus "if you don't know, play it safe".