Posted on 11/12/2025 4:43:21 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
If Good News had a patron saint, it would be the Swedish professor of global health Hans Rosling.
Rosling, who died in 2017, was a wizard at using data and storytelling to challenge misconceptions around global development and progress. With statistics in hand, Rosling could convince the most determined pessimist that the world was, on balance, getting better. And there’s no better example of the Rosling touch than a TED talk he gave in 2010 called “The Magic Washing Machine.”
“Laundry day” used to actually mean an entire day of soaking clothes, heating water, hauling, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing, and hanging. But standing on the stage next to the most basic washing machine you can imagine, Rosling described the day his family first used one. His awed grandmother watched the tumbling drum like a movie as his mother sat down and did something unheard of on laundry day: She read a book.
That’s the point. For people of Rosling’s mother’s generation, a washing machine wasn’t just a washing machine, it was a time machine. It created time — time to learn, earn, rest, and parent. And the past century of advances in what we might call household technology have given people — and especially women — the freedom to fill their hours as they wished.
In the US, the household appliance revolution of washing machines, dishwashers, and microwaves — plus the electrification that made them run — cut the burden of housework from something like 60 hours a week at the start of the 20th century to around 28 hours by 1970 and under 20 by 2005. Food work alone went from around 65 minutes a day in 1965 to around 37 minutes...
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
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I hate these hoax headlines.
I came all the way back to November 12, 2025 to read it.
Not bad.
This has been happening for the last 300 years at least.
Constantly accelerating technological change.
The latest is the digital revolution, AI, robotics, and cheap access to space, all interelated by digital computing.
All possible of revolutionary increases in productivity.
All already being implemented in the early stages.
All require ever increasing supplies of energy to run.
Now they have new ways to use all that extra time, like posting on and looking at social media.
“Food work” 37 minutes? That guy is doing it all wrong:
Bowl of cereal breakfast - 1 minute
Vending machine lunch - 1 minute
DoorDash dinner on paper plates- 1 minute
The dryer is, too. The furure is filled with mismatched socks.
My dryer is a spaceship.
My toaster is...
I tried.
Daniel 12:4:
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
Stupidity shall also be increased...
“The furure is filled with mismatched socks.”
Not a problem for me. All my socks are same type and color and get thrown in the sock drawer.
Knowledge is certainly increasing rapidly, even logrythmically.
However, the depth of our ignorance is also increasing.
The more we know, the more we know how little we know.
Nobody starves anymore unless a government is involved.
Our laundry guy in Basic Training was a hayseed type you’d never suspect of any chicanery. Every now and then, someone would complain about a missing sock. The least of our worries, but still. A couple of days before graduation, he went through the bays with about 50 socks he’d pilfered, giving them away. Good for a laugh.
I did a load the other day and came out with 4 of my wife’s mismatched black/navy socks, no two alike. LOL!
This is why I buy a Costco pack of black socks every few years!
You and me, brother. See my previous.
Slouching toward Elio...
not to mix metaphors or anything..
No flux capacitor, no time machine.
A washing machine doesn’t have a flux capacitor.
Mom was very happy when Dad bought her a washing machine, It had rollers on top to wring water out of the clothing, that used to be done by hand. Wasn’t until a couple decades later that she got a clothes dryer.
My hot tub is a time machine. There’s a crockumntary on it on TV from time to time.
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