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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

> After five minutes of that, the machine would then fill the chamber with hot water for a three-minute ultrasonic bath. This was followed by a two-minute hot rinse cycle. Next, the chamber would drain and the user was blasted with warm air to dry off. They were additionally exposed to both infrared and ultraviolet light to kill germs. All in all, it was a 15-minute cycle.

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.

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I suppose, one advantage would be that you can use it while almost asleep, while you need a minimum of mental presence for a shower. So if you wanted, you could: wake up; slump into the bathroom and into this thing; press the button; snooze another 15 minutes while part of your morning routine is being done for (or to) you.

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.)

Your vision lacks the ultimate destination: This will replace the bed.

That sounds like that one guy a few years ago who wanted to replace all kitchen cupboards with dishwashers.

Gonna steer clear of those directions. All things in moderation, etc.

I think this works.

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.

Flashback to boot camp, we did this with our clothes. One set (well, actually several) of perfectly folded never-used clothes in the wall locker (ready to be inspected by the drill instructor, of course), one set of clothes on your body, and one set in the laundry bag. They did laundry often enough that you could get by with just wearing every set of clothes for two days. Gross, but we collectively decided to hold our nose and say nothing about the aroma of our teammates in return for not having to tweeze t-shirts.

It worked until the drill instructor noticed that the clothes in the wall locker weren't aging.

Need to triple buffer or there’s a condition where you have used a plate from the clean pile, but the dirty wash is still running. You’d just have to stand there in the kitchen like some kind of Sims character.

There is still the sink.

I replaced all my wardrobes with washing machines.

If you replace some of them with clothes dryers then you can not only have clean clothes, but also dry and not-musty clothes. Highly recommend.

Yngwie Malmsteen's kitchen cupboards are probably all Marshall speakers.

You are right that for able bodied people it's at best a gimmick. But it might be useful for people with limited mobility, who don't want to depend on other people washing them.

Safely getting into and out of it looks very challenging for people with limited mobility.

But the article's final photo is of completely different model - far more accessible, far safer, and for "the health care sector".

It's probably only that tall so onlookers can gawk at the pretty women's bodies inside through the transparent sides. If it were sitting on the ground, you wouldn't get such a great view.

A normal model would just sit on the floor.

Yes, the original prototype is obviously just there to show off the models. I was thinking about more practical and less sexy versions that might actually see production.

Yeah, for a production model you'd likely see the chamber dropped down to a reasonable height, and whatever is in the pedestal can be hidden behind an adjacent wall or under the floor or something. There's no real reason it needs to be up on that pedestal apart from just being visually impressive

Gimmick? Maybe, I’d love to try something like this.It may not save time, but i bet it feels glorious.

> It may not save time, but i bet it feels glorious.

Hence it's a gimmick.

Though I bet it would get old really fast.

For a man sure, you can do your hair in 2 minutes. But if you’re a woman it is going to be a multiple of 15 minutes.

I'm a man but washing and using conditioner will take a lot longer than 2 minutes. I have very long hair though.

It's really more of a long-hair vs short-hair thing than a gender thing.

I've had short hair and right now I have long hair. Long hair is a bitch between washing and drying.

Depends on how much hair the man still have... some will definitely not do it in 2 minutes. And most women I know don't need 15 minutes to wash their hair.

Let's see: shampoo, rinse, mask, wait 30-60mins, rinse, conditioner, rinse.

Do you think every woman does this regularly without pay? My entire shower takes 8 minutes as a woman.

You're faster than me, a man with short hair :). Rinse, gel, shampoo, rinse, shampoo, rinse - but the warm water also cleans the mind and soothes the soul, so I'm not in that big of a hurry to end one of the best ways to relax and unwind I have. It usually adds up to 10 minutes.

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 have extremely thick hair, but only use shampoo once every few weeks because too much absolutely ruins my hair texture. Nonetheless, just rinsing my hair thoroughly with warm water and then cold water takes at least 5-6 minutes per shower.

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.

But kindergarten kids know there are tons of bugs on everything.

(The dirty little rugrats don't give a damn, but they know).

Short hair man here who regularly takes hour-long baths... ;')

Of course there are other factors, including biological ones, but yes I agree not every woman does this regularly.

Many do though.

This thing doesn't wash your hair though.

Ouch, the germicidal UVC is even more hazardous than the UVA and UVB tanning rays!

And uses orders of magnitude more water

Is that a problem though? The other day I got a whole lecture on HN, complete with math, proving that keeping the water running entire time while showering isn't meaningfully wasteful... I still can't believe it on an emotional level, but the math checks out...

A nominal water aerator limits water around 5L-6L/min levels. For every minute I don't use the water, I spend approximately two full kettles of water.

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.

So it's not not meaningfully wasteful. However, I can't turn off the water in the winter, because I feel very cold otherwise. However, this doesn't mean I don't waste any water or happy about what I'm doing. My only (half) relief is this water is somehow processed and reused by city for other needs, at least one more time.

Water is by far the most abundant resource on the planet (70+% of earth is water), and we have methods to remove salt and contaminants from almost all of it. We can even turn urine into drinking water.

I wouldn’t worry about wasting it. We’ll die from something else long before water becomes an issue.

Water already is an issue in many places. It's expensive and in limited supply because we can't drink salt water and storage, treatment and delivery cost money.

For the US in particular, water issues come down overwhelmingly to unfettered agricultural use, often with crops like alfalfa that are both mostly water by weight and are shipped out of the country to other places. Domestic use is only a fraction of the total.

I am pretty sure that this is true in all developed countries. When you see farming without irrigation, you will see more poverty. It is very important for human development. That said, it could sometimes be done more efficiently, but more costly.

And in some other places it's so abundant that water companies don't even bother metering it, you just pay one flat fee a month and you can use as much as you like.

70% of the surface of the Earth is covered by water. That turns out to mean little. Have you seen this?

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-...

The issue in cities where most people live is only sometimes about the actual quantity of water available, but the cost and capacity of infrastructure to collect, treat, and distribute the water.

Currently, my waste water goes right back into the Mississippi. Fresh water galore. That's not the case on the west coast. Residential (lawns aside) isn't a drop in the bucket compared to agriculture though.

The amount, abundance and share of water among everything on this planet doesn't mean anything if none of it is in that dam nearby your city and you can't utilize it.

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.

The water is cheap and plentiful, what's wasteful is heating the water and throwing that away.

If you live in Minnesota, sure. Not as true in Australia.

The maps, surveys and projections say otherwise, but of course you're free to believe what you believe.

That's the thing, dollars are usually a better indicator, unless something somewhere is burning money to prevent prices from reflecting real scarcity.

We're drinking one of the cheapest drinking water in the world, but this doesn't change the reality of sinkholes appearing where we deplete the water in our country.

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.

Well, even if the city doesn't re-use the water, it doesn't just disappear.

Yeah, but getting rid of chemicals and returning it to a non-poisonous state for the nature is a big plus.

You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".

Assuming you use the same amount of soap and what nots, and get the same amount of dirt and debris off your body, the more water you use during a shower, the easier it is to process the water at your sewage treatment plant, if your waste water is treated.

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)

> [...] the easier it is to process the water at your sewage treatment plant, if your waste water is treated.

It's easier to process per litre, but it is easier to process in absolute numbers?

Part of processing is often adding clean water; to the extent that you've already done it upstream, the treatment plant can add less.

Maybe. Though when you add clean water upstream that usually means water clean enough to be fit for drinking (because that what comes out of your tap.)

When they dilute at the treatment plant, they can use somewhat dirtier clean water.

Yes, I mean when you are 'wasting water' you are mostly wasting the effort it takes to clean the water. Not the water itself.

As opposed to eg 'wasting petrol', where the petrol really is gone afterwards. At least it has been chemically transformed.

> You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".

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.

It depends on what you mean by 'nature'. On a large enough scale, 'nature' doesn't care whether earth is hit by a moon sized asteroid, either.

I think we’re in agreement :)

What's meaningfully wasteful depends entirely where and when you are, and how plentiful water is locally at the moment.

I think most people take showers but most people don't irrigate their fields.

Most people consume produce from irrigated fields. So it depends on how you want to allocate the consumption: to farmers or consumers? (It's just an accounting question.)

I'm convinced there's a pareto distribution of crop water usage. We're depleting our aquifers to grow sileage crops and almonds (which aren't even that good).

Different things happen in different parts of the globe, and water is a fairly local issue.

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 don't think so. Just because you're not in a water-stressed place doesn't make you eligible to keep taps open 24/7.

This mentality is what brought us to today.

Of course it does.

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.

Just because you live near a lucky point on earth, thinking that everyone has the same luxury is a bit absurd.

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.

They didn't say anything about thinking that everyone has the same luxury.

How does diverting an infinitesimal fraction of the water flowing from the Great Lakes affect the water supply at a camp in Mongolia?

> Just because you don't prepay (but pay as you go) for fresh water doesn't mean that everyone has that luxury.

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.)

Who is 'us' and what do you mean by 'today'? And what do you mean by 'eligible'?

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.

us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.

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.

How would conserving water in, say, Germany help with water stress in Australia?

Was that about water, or about energy spent on heating the water? My gut feeling is that keeping the water running would roughly double the amount of water, so double the energy.

Yes, unless you take cold showers.

Link?

It doesn’t use any water. It just makes the water dirtier.

And it doesn’t use any electricity either. It just moves electrons around.

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