5 ms·

I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can c

I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles. A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly. Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 2019 don't have the temperament to just sit on ass and enjoy all the machine-assisted, low-maintenance living? Throw the clothes in the washing machine, and push the start button. Push the start button on the carpet-cleaning robot. Push the start button on the floor-mopping robot. Move clothes from washer to dryer and push start button. Put ingredients in bread machine and press start. Put entire meal in microwave and push start button. Put dishes in dishwasher and push start button. Hop on motorized treadmill and push start. Flop in massage chair and push start. Have problem; push button; no problem. People have more time now, and they invent new things to do to fill it. If you only want to do 10 hours a week in housework, all you need do is lower your standards to whatever the machines do for you without supervision. Toss out some ant/roach bait and buy some spray-can air freshener. Avoid filth-producing pets or babies in your home. Substitute chemical engineering or electrical engineering for elbow grease. If you do almost any revenue-producing activity in lieu of housework, you will be able to pay for a pill-swallow, spray-on, or button-press solution to any routine housework problem.

bhandziuk 7y ago
Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes, dislodge the carpet cleaning robot when stuck, fill the mopping robot with water and soaps, cook a decent meal that's not a microwave meal, put the dishes away in the cabinets and wash all the dishes which cannot go in the dishwasher (pots/pans, knives) There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing the minimum.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  > Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes... Hanging a garment on a hanger is easier than folding it. Small clothes can be thrown into a "CLEAN"-labeled basket or bag. The laundry-person need not be responsible for restocking everyone else's wardrobes. You are inventing requirements for the task that are non-essential. Essential laziness is rearranging your life such that the most labor-intensive parts of a task are unnecessary. The only thing that prevents the 3-pile method of wardrobe management (clean, dirty, and worn-but-smells-okay) is social pressure. And if you stop caring so much about what other people think of your lifestyle, but still care a little bit, you can replace the dresser with some postal-style plastic tote bins on a wire shelf: socks, underwear, jersey shorts, tee shirts. All your going-out clothes can go on hangers. No more folding. A decent meal need not be haute cuisine. If you break your kids (or yourself, for that matter) of the "different foods can't touch" thing, you can make a lot of good stuff in a programmable pressure cooker/slow cooker. That's a single pot that doesn't exactly wash itself, but it is halfway to an autoclave already. Put plain water in it, select high pressure cook, and hit the start button. Pot sterilized. Add ingredients; beep beep boop, start. Dinner is done. And maybe your dishwasher needs an upgrade. We put pots, pans, and knives in it all the time. The cast iron doesn't go in there, but that is all seasoned such that it just gets rinsed out and re-oiled, and is then clean. Stop valuing things for the extra effort put into them, and start seeing human-required labor as an evil that should be destroyed. If you're doing 60 hours/week of housework, you aren't spending 1 hour/week thinking about whether all that "work" actually needs doing, or not.
  - bhandziuk 7y ago
    Knives don't go in the dishwasher because they dull faster and I'd rather spend time washing them than time sharpening them. Post and pans in the dishwasher is just a waste of space. By putting one pot in there I can not put 6 plates. The pot is easy to clean, the plates are annoying. I have to put things away because there's no room for the pile method. I share 4 ft of closet and a 4 drawer dresser with my wife. The rest of our bedroom is mostly bed area. I cook meals because I'm lazy. Cooking cost less money. Microwavable meals mean I need to work more to pay for those meals which is something I don't want to do. Cooking saves me time in life by costing me less money. My life is arranged around laziness but it is different laziness than yours.
    - logfromblammo 7y ago
      You can optimize for time, or you can optimize for money. It's very rare to be able to do both. Can you explain to me how a dishwasher makes knives dull, because I had not heard of this before now.
      - bhandziuk 7y ago
        https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4873/do-knives-get-dull-in-dishwashers https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4873/do-knives-... Also, if you have wood handles it'll ruin the wood.
        logfromblammo 7y ago
        It looks like no one in that thread could dig up any experimental evidence for it. Manufacturer recommendations are not to be trusted. This looks like a job for some identical knives, some knife-use simulator robots, several dishwashers with a standardized typical load, hand-washing sinks, a pile of dishwasher detergent, a pile of hand-wash detergent, and an objective measurement device for knife sharpness. My essential laziness (and lack of research grant money) prevents me from conducting the experiment myself, however. I'll just take my chances with the dishwasher.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bhandziuk 7y ago

Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes, dislodge the carpet cleaning robot when stuck, fill the mopping robot with water and soaps, cook a decent meal that's not a microwave meal, put the dishes away in the cabinets and wash all the dishes which cannot go in the dishwasher (pots/pans, knives) There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing the minimum.

logfromblammo 7y ago
> Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes... Hanging a garment on a hanger is easier than folding it. Small clothes can be thrown into a "CLEAN"-labeled basket or bag. The laundry-person need not be responsible for restocking everyone else's wardrobes. You are inventing requirements for the task that are non-essential. Essential laziness is rearranging your life such that the most labor-intensive parts of a task are unnecessary. The only thing that prevents the 3-pile method of wardrobe management (clean, dirty, and worn-but-smells-okay) is social pressure. And if you stop caring so much about what other people think of your lifestyle, but still care a little bit, you can replace the dresser with some postal-style plastic tote bins on a wire shelf: socks, underwear, jersey shorts, tee shirts. All your going-out clothes can go on hangers. No more folding. A decent meal need not be haute cuisine. If you break your kids (or yourself, for that matter) of the "different foods can't touch" thing, you can make a lot of good stuff in a programmable pressure cooker/slow cooker. That's a single pot that doesn't exactly wash itself, but it is halfway to an autoclave already. Put plain water in it, select high pressure cook, and hit the start button. Pot sterilized. Add ingredients; beep beep boop, start. Dinner is done. And maybe your dishwasher needs an upgrade. We put pots, pans, and knives in it all the time. The cast iron doesn't go in there, but that is all seasoned such that it just gets rinsed out and re-oiled, and is then clean. Stop valuing things for the extra effort put into them, and start seeing human-required labor as an evil that should be destroyed. If you're doing 60 hours/week of housework, you aren't spending 1 hour/week thinking about whether all that "work" actually needs doing, or not.
- bhandziuk 7y ago
  Knives don't go in the dishwasher because they dull faster and I'd rather spend time washing them than time sharpening them. Post and pans in the dishwasher is just a waste of space. By putting one pot in there I can not put 6 plates. The pot is easy to clean, the plates are annoying. I have to put things away because there's no room for the pile method. I share 4 ft of closet and a 4 drawer dresser with my wife. The rest of our bedroom is mostly bed area. I cook meals because I'm lazy. Cooking cost less money. Microwavable meals mean I need to work more to pay for those meals which is something I don't want to do. Cooking saves me time in life by costing me less money. My life is arranged around laziness but it is different laziness than yours.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    You can optimize for time, or you can optimize for money. It's very rare to be able to do both. Can you explain to me how a dishwasher makes knives dull, because I had not heard of this before now.
    - bhandziuk 7y ago
      https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4873/do-knives-get-dull-in-dishwashers https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4873/do-knives-... Also, if you have wood handles it'll ruin the wood.
      - logfromblammo 7y ago
        It looks like no one in that thread could dig up any experimental evidence for it. Manufacturer recommendations are not to be trusted. This looks like a job for some identical knives, some knife-use simulator robots, several dishwashers with a standardized typical load, hand-washing sinks, a pile of dishwasher detergent, a pile of hand-wash detergent, and an objective measurement device for knife sharpness. My essential laziness (and lack of research grant money) prevents me from conducting the experiment myself, however. I'll just take my chances with the dishwasher.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]