What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?

InternetIsScary :verified:@mstdn.social to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 107 points –

What is something you can’t live without, technology wise that saves you time?

I have to say it’s my virtual assistant I’ve made. It saves me a lot of time with making reminders and such alarms for meetings or interviews, music etc.

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I'm pretty sure my washing machine is the thing that saves me most time. Washing by hand is fucking hard work and very time consuming. I would neither have the time nor the physical endurance to keep all my clothes and household items in a state acceptable to society.

Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it's expectations. It's also kind of wasteful to wash clothes too often.

Then again, if washing machines did not exist, society would have to adjust it’s expectations.

Wouldn't it simple revert to the class based system of cleanliness we had before?

  • the rich would still have clean clothes with intricate designs and patterns that would be laborious to clean, but they have staff that clean their clothes
  • the middle class would still have mostly clean cloths but would have much more simple to wash designs which are more durable, and a significant portion of household time would be spent on cleaning cloths
  • the poor wouldn't have clean cloths

Wouldn’t it simple revert to the class wealth based system of cleanliness we had before?

The problems you mention here comes from wealth inequality. We still have those problems when wealth inequality exists - people just find other things to differentiate themselves from the poor. I.e. instead of cleanliness, it is wearing the right (read: expensive) brand of clothing. Or owning an expensive car, or an expensive phone or an expensive anything.

Cleanliness used to be an expensive thing so the wealthy used that to show off their wealth. Nowadays, it is other things.

The solution to this problem is not to make things cheaper (again, there will just be other ways to show off status/wealth), but to reduce wealth inequality.

Basically the only point that needs to be made at the moment.

I think that counts as a kind of societal expectation adjustment

Makes me a bit glum to think about how this concept applies to other areas

Yeah, every time a new timesaving invention becomes mainstream the “meta” of society adjusts and everything gets faster. And more chaotic and insane and crazy. Modern life is weird

Yeah, 'living within your means' works in both directions.

My dryer was down for a bit so I had to hang clothes to dry. Slight inconvenience that really made me appreciate having a washing machine that still worked.

Massive respect to people (most often women) around the world who have washed clothes by hand. The cleaning of the clothes is bad enough but there's also the fetching of (or travelling to) a lot of water.

mechanized laundry is second only to modern medicine, imo

followed closely by indoor plumbing and dishwashers

Indoor plumbing wins all of them for me, for one my washing machine wouldn't be worth it without, and for another it'd be hard to access clean water to rinse wounds and drink medicine.

Having just returned from a long carry-on trip, I concur.

I spent half April washing my socks and underwear in the shower. Even without washing my outer layers, it got really irksome. Thankfully, we had an apartment (with a washer) for the second half. That first load of laundry was magical.