I was skeptical the washing machine needed defending; I'm not convinced this article, or the offending tweet really need highlighting.

That said, this is a genuinely quite surprising statistic to me:

> The UN estimates that only two billion people have washing machines; for the other six billion, a life of washing clothes by hand is not a relic of the distant past but an exhausting chore that consumes a significant fraction of women’s time and energy worldwide.

I suppose that "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" == "The past is still here, it's just not evenly distributed"