> Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washe

> Washing dishes is so incredibly dumb. What should have been done long ago is standardising plates, cups and cutlery and creating integrated dish cabinet/washer that can wash those standardised items and store them. The fact that in 2014 we still rely on manual work to wash the dishes is a disgrace perpetrated by oversupply of cheap human work. And what, exactly, do you propose that we do about this "oversupply of cheap human work"? If we simply ignore it, there'll be hell to pay. The old saying, idle hands are the devil's workshop, is based on millennia of human experience. Suppose that all the dishwashers in the U.S. were suddenly to find themselves both (1) out of a job, and (2) as a result, unable to earn enough money to feed themselves and their families. Now consider that for some of these people, retraining them to seek out and hold other jobs might not be much of an option. There are some people who, for whatever reason, simply can't learn the necessary skills / behaviors / motivations. (If you're inclined to scorn that notion, or such people, consider how little we really know about human learning abilities and motivation; such people are more common than you perhaps imagine.) Are our unemployed dishwashers going to sit around passively and accept their fate, watching their families do without while they see others around them prospering? Not bloody likely --- they're going to try to do something about it. And some percentage of them are going to make trouble, e.g., by robbing or cheating others, dealing drugs, rioting, etc. From a purely-pragmatic perspective, if we want to keep our vaunted social order intact, then we're going to have to figure out how to keep people (A) occupied in reasonable contentment, and (B) reasonably-well fed, -clothed, -housed, etc. This is a brute fact, which we can like or not, but which we disregard at our peril.