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Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Love the initiative. I'll get one once this starts mature.

Seeing things like this makes me think how badly companies like GE, Maytag, etc. all dropped the ball. Rather than innovating on making peoples lives easier - liberation from domestic toil - they just focused on squeezing out every penny by making Chinese crap with a brand name sticker glued, selling worse versions of products invented in the 1950s.

Somebody, please, just make a robot which folds my damn laundry!

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Fun fact, the washing machine is credited with saving the most human work hours.

Now for the folding!

It occurred to me recently that, at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers, and to this day consider them to be a luxury.

The same cannot be said for washing machines. Everybody uses a washing machine. If you don't have one, you use a laundromat. Even the poorest do not wash their clothes by hand with a tub and washboard like the olden days.

This comment has no real "point." I just wanted to share what I think is an interesting observation on this topic.

We have a dishwasher but rarely use it (only for parties, etc). Loading / unloading is surpringly time-consuming, imho washing by hand is quicker.

Something I'd consider doing if I was single would be to have two smaller dishwashers, and alternate them, and leave the clean ones in the dishwasher...

I've looked into this and they do actually make these. Same size as a normal dishwasher, but has two separate compartments of half the size. I wanna just skip the whole process and have my cabinets clean them though.

kinda of the same thing isn't it? this just changes the definition of the cabinet to those two compartments.

It probably depends on the size of the household as well as the food prep habits. In a dense urban landscape without much kitchen, a dishwasher makes less sense, given the amount of eating out, takeaway, and so on, probably decreasing the amount of dishes you have total as well.

I lived until last month without a dishwasher (as a NYC resident). It never seemed like that big of a deal. When moving, our only hard requirement for the new place was in-unit laundry.

Before having a dishwasher: "Oh you don't need a dishwasher, in fact I find washing dishes by hand meditative!"

After: "You will remove my dishwasher from my dead cold hands"

My parents had a dishwasher but always said it "didn't get the dishes clean" and used it as a drying rack instead.

I bought a house where the dishwasher was incorrectly installed causing odors to come through the sink. That led me down a rabbit hole of proper dishwasher installation, maintenance, loading and using rinse aid.

MY GOD! My parents were wasting their lives! My dishwasher cleans and dries two sinks worth with three minutes of effort!

> at least in the US, the poorest households do not have dishwashers

Not just the poorest. About half of the places I've lived in the US didn't have a dishwasher, and only about 1/4 of those places were affordable for a low-income person.

In my experience, it largely depends on how recently the place was built/remodeled.

And various economists (and others) have suggested that the invention of the washing machine was the most important step towards allowing women to enter the workforce.

Which society needed so we can we have twice as many people working and pay them half.

I think in an alternate timeline in which the washing machine is not invented, we would still send women to work.

The washing machine labour could have been solved with centralising washing as a society, in the same way we centralised childcaring.

The economic forces and the political propaganda were too strong.

Spare us the conspiracy theories. Washing machines were invented because they're convenient, not because of "political propaganda". And we've already "centralized" clothes washing, it's called a laundromat.

>The washing machine labour could have been solved with centralising washing as a society, in the same way we centralised childcaring.

Are you genuinely unaware of the laundry sweatshops in the early 1900s? Have you never even seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

We've done centralized laundry. It was sweatshop work and was pretty terrible for everyone involved. Today we have laundry pickup services, but it's too expensive for most people. Are you willing to pay $40 for a load of laundry? Because that's what you get without sweatshop labor.

Seriously, read up on early 1900s labor practices. The labor laws we have today are written in blood. A lot of women and children suffered gruesome deaths and disfigurement, lifelong illnesses and disabilities.

Robot Speed Folding: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UTMT2WAUlRw

Never let a mention of the hard problem of manipulating nonrigid objects go pass without mentioning how antiscience senator Tom Colburn openly mocked the idea of a robot that could fold laundry.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/oklahoma-sen-tom-coburn-repo...

So the invention of clothing in the first place was the biggest waste of human work hours.

Thanks for the words of encouragement! If I may ask, what is the level of "maturity" you expect before adopting a home robot? Clearly, a robot that can wash and fold laundry is already there, but what are the other necessary/sufficient qualities?

I've never seen a robot that can wash and fold laundry! At least not one that I can have in my home.

I guess I need it to be actually useful without supervision - put socks away, or pick up dirty clothes and put them in hamper, or put dirty dishes from the living room next to the sink, tidy the place up a bit. I'm a hacker so I love the open nature of this project, but unless it's actually useful for something, I will have a hard time convincing the other member of this household to have a robot/vase-destroyer/fire-hazard prattling around the home.

Maybe it could have a vacuum cleaner on the base..?

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