4 ms·
> Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. It'd require some impressive mental gymnastic
by Jedd 9y ago
> Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper.
It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented.
> After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified.
Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will.
The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong.
> To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
I know plenty of people that don't have a smartphone, but have a 4G / LTE 'feature' phone. There's no stigma there - it's down to a combination of cost, functionality, and signal range.
The suggestion implies there's a clear downside - an evil, perhaps - to using a cellphone or any of Google's services (naturally conflating the two is not useful).
- edanm 9y agoTangentially, I've heard it talked about that while the washing machine gets a lot of credit, it didn't have the effect most people think. When it was much harder to clean clothes, people just cleaned them less, and wore dirty clothes more often. In fact, a much bigger timesaver was prepackaged food/microwave/ etc. For preparing food, there really isn't an alternative, because you have to eat every day - you can't simply eat less, as you can with the washing clothes case.
- naeemtee 9y agoWait, why is a washing machine cheaper than hand-washing?
- colordrops 9y agoopportunity cost - most people can make more money using a washing machine than they'd save hand washing.
- onion2k 9y agoThat's a great theoretical argument, but the reality is nonsense. Most people aren't in a position to improve their income by doing an extra few hours work (working fixed hours, or working a salaried job where hours worked don't affect pay, or they're not working, etc), so they'd be better off financially spending that time washing their clothes by hand instead of owning a washing machine.
- Jedd 9y agoSometimes significant societal change exceeds the limitations of our own personal experiences. I think the introduction of running water, especially hot water, into homes, and washing machines around the same time, made a substantial improvement in terms of availability of ~half the potential working population.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoI feel like that’s a mistake with the opportunity cost argument for and against. You don’t have to be in a position to make more money or improve yourself. Maybe the opportunity you find value in is not wasting time washing your cloths by hand.
- karthikb 9y agoTake away the fridge, dishwasher, and the washing machine and now you need someone in the household to get perishable groceries daily, cook daily (no leftovers), wash dishes, and wash clothes. Add up these and gains from other appliance and services and you basically have a full day every day. The argument isn’t that you’d earn for an extra two hours a day with a washing machine at home. It’s that these appliances - in sum - free up an entire person to go work.
- apotheothesomai 9y agoOne would also perform better at work, if one's free time weren't filled with time-consuming and often exhausting chores. To be available and energized enough to perform well professionally requires that one be able to take care of the life stuff and still sleep. I may be the only one in the thread who has washed clothes by hand (Granny made me acquire the skill), so let me say doing it correctly is a real upper body workout. A family load of laundry would take many hours and an athlete to do it in a day. Each piece must be done individually. Hanging it all up to dry requires a lot of space too.
- adzm 9y agoLess water, less detergent, less time.
- taeric 9y agoI'd be surprised if there is a facet that is cheaper for hand washed. Only way I can imagine right now, is if you don't have but one or two things to wash. I'm finding it amusing that so many people are focusing on the time portion and somehow managing to downplay it. Even the energy costs are lower, considering how ridiculously little energy modern washing machines take.
- wavefunction 9y agoIt's probably cheaper if you factor in time spent washing clothes by hand. I could see people washing clothes more often and taking worse care with them given the convenience though. And of course there might be some sort of marginal environmental or other cost between the two as well.
- Jedd 9y agoThat's a good question -- I'm struggling to find a well researched summary of the situation. The biggest external cost with machine washing is the hot water, but most detergents now are optimised for cold / room temperature wash. The biggest actual cost for hand washing is the time consumed - you may call it opportunity cost. Historically the societal benefits of the shift from having someone (typically 'the woman' of the household) spending 10-20 hours a week attending to laundry, to requiring perhaps a half hour of someone's time, have been better studied.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Wait, why is a washing machine cheaper than hand-washing? It's cheaper in regard to what alternatives are sacrificed for each unit of clothing cleaned.
- rajup 9y ago> Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes - leaving aside the frequent censorship, lower quality audio or video, the inability to pause or rewind at will. The phrase 'streaming television' just seems wrong. Netflix?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoBlockbuster.
- optimuspaul 9y ago> Renting vhs/beta/laserdisc/bluray/hd etc has long been preferable to watching something littered with advertisements every 12-15 minutes Speak for yourself. I haven't done that in years. My last bluray was my first. I stream or download everything these days, not to mention that many streaming services offer paid options that do not have advertisements every x minutes. Nothing wrong at all with the phrase 'streaming television'
- Jedd 9y agoWe may be of different ages. My point was that this is not at all new phenomenon -- for people over 40yo, the appeal of 'at will' AV systems has been well understood long before the word streaming was re-appropriated to refer to a sequence of IP packets.
- mc32 9y agoPlus Hotels had in-house ripped Netflix-like AV systems for quite a long time.
- stinkytaco 9y ago> It'd require some impressive mental gymnastics to consider hand-washing cheaper than a washing machine. The societal changes (improvements) that washing machines brought are immense, and fairly well documented. I can't help but think some people just have no experience living without. When I had my dishwasher installed a few years ago, after a decade of living without one, the plumber made a conversational comment about how they were a lot of trouble, he thought that when his broke, he might not replace it. My wife responded "How about you ask your wife about that." I'm sure this guy, nice as he was, simply didn't wash dishes. He really had no idea what doing it by hand meant, nor would he have if his dishwasher broke.
- ghthor 9y agoI'd much rather do my dishes by hand. Dishwashers leave a strange film on the dishes.