A Few Remarks on the Hypothetical Stigma of Somewhat More Than Cleaning (SMTC)

There is cleaning. You know what cleaning is. It involves applying some kind of textile or textile-like object (rag, mop, feathers) to a surface, possibly with the assistance of a fluid (water, water with soap in it, other chemicals). If you are _really_ literal minded, you may inform me (hopefully gently) that sometimes you clean with scrapers (nylon scrapers to get things out of dishes, knives to get things out of crevices, fingernails, etc.). Fair enough. You know what cleaning is. (ETA: I own a Roomba, a Eufy, a canister and an upright. Yes, Dear Reader, I do know what a vacuum is. And yes, a vacuum is used to clean. You do _indeed_ know what cleaning is. Congratulations!)

There is Putting Things Away, sometimes called Tidying Up or Straightening up or similar things, in which a variety of items are returned to their default positions. Chairs go back to where they circled the table or lined up next to a counter. Paper related items back into drawers or onto shelves. Dishes back in the cupboard. Dirty laundry to the laundry. Clean laundry to the dresser and closets. Coats and shoes to their hooks and shelves by the door. Etc.

And then there is Somewhat More Than Cleaning. And by this, I don’t mean Spring Cleaning, in which one finally moves the couch to vacuum under it and put it back, or moves the bookcase to get the bunnies in the corner, or getting the bunnies from under the bed. The Somewhat More Than Cleaning is when you decide you actually no longer want something in your space. And I don’t mean putting used tissue in the wastebasket, or scraping food off the dirty dishes or taking the empty beer cans and bottles out to the recycling. I don’t mean disposing of consumables. I mean, you decide that you are Done With That Chair. You never liked it. You are not going to have it reupholstered (or you already have and you still hate it). You are never going to read those books again. Those clothes haven’t fit since before you had your last child. Etc.

SMTC has gone by a number of names in my lifetime: home organizing, decluttering, “tidying” (in the MarieKondo sense, not in the tidying up sense above), and now, Swedish Death Cleaning. Each phase has gone through an era of Guru Does Talk Show Circuit and Writes More Than One Book, Everyone Is Doing It, Then No One Is Doing It Any More, they are doing the next phase (<— hyperbole alert).

It is not at all clear that there are significant differences in the activities of SMTC under its many labels. And Julie Morgenstern, the Millenial Minimalists, Marie Kondo and now Margareta Magnusson are all alive at the same time, all active. Their books and blogs and magazine articles are all present, to some degree, in the same time and space. But the activity level has clearly evolved. (I don’t know where to put Peter Walsh. I welcome suggestions).

Why?

Generally speaking, we evolve labels for something which has not itself changed in any significant way, because the old labels have acquired a burden of stigma, or because the new label is desirable in some important way. I could give examples. I’ll use one that I’m allowed to use. “Lady” became “woman”. A “lady” didn’t work, and therefore a “lady” could be blocked from having career aspirations or education required for a career. A woman worked: she could get the education and pursue her career vigorously.

A lot of the other examples that spring to my mind are painful to discuss and/or are not really In My Wheelhouse. But for an example, you could peruse the definitions and time frames for “idiot”, “moron”, “retarded”, “developmentally delayed”, “learning disability” and “intellectual disability”. Some of these are still tossed about as insults with distressingly few social consequences (in much the same way we toss around works like “dumb” or “lame”, without thinking of what we are saying when we use these as generically negative words — hey, I meant the we part. I am part of the problem. I’m trying to change.). Some have been aggressively retired from the language (cf. use of the R-word in the 2008 presidential campaign).

I am very, very carefully not talking about people of color. They have enough trouble without getting dragged into this essay.

SMTC does not _seem_ like the kind of thing which would need to evolve its label in order to escape its stigma or acquire the right to exist or do something important. But I’m betting it does, or this wouldn’t be happening. Here are some possible explanations:

We _really_ don’t like SMTC. So we sort of have to be “tricked” into engaging in it, and we have to be lied to to really do it well. “If you do this once, it’ll stay this way forever (with a minimal amount of maintenance which we will pretend is normal cleaning but isn’t really because you’d get discouraged and give up immediately)”.

Perhaps we believe that SMTC is something we never need to do. By renaming it, we can treat it as a new task needing a new assignment. People who successfully resisted “home organizing” might sign up for “decluttering”. People who declined to “declutter” might be sucked in by asking whether their things “Spark Joy”. People who mocked Marie Kondo might find motivation in their own mortality a la Swedish Death cleaning.

Perhaps the stigma is what we did with the things we removed from our lives (remember: the central activity of SMTC is Not Having Something In Our Space Any More) in the previous rounds. Perhaps this is an effort to distract sustainability and/or environmentally sensitive types from the fact that we are de-accessioning things.

Perhaps this is all sleight of hand to distract the hoarders we all wind up sharing space and stuff with from the fact that Something Isn’t Around Any More.

Perhaps this is a way of consoling ourselves with the Less that we now have, due to reduced circumstances.

Downsizing and Voluntary Simplicity movement fit in here somewhere, as do:
“More with Less”
Hoarding
How does environmental / sustainable fit in here?
Frugality
Make it do or do without

People Who Don’t (Think About) Clean(ing)

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for months. Possibly over a year. I still don’t know really what I want to say, so I’ll just sort of write around it and hope that the shaded background will make what I really want to get out sort of pop out by its absence. A silhouette, if you will, if my actual topic.

I have a food processor. I used to have a very small food processor, then I had a small and a large one, and I got rid of the small one. I almost never use the large one. I used to use the small one. The small one was not big enough to do the thing I really wanted a food processor to do (make pie crust, which a stand mixer is bad at for a variety of reasons. I can do it by hand, but it turns out the current optimal solution is to ask R. to do it instead. He doesn’t seem to mind and he enjoys eating the results so it seems only fair). But the small one was easy and quick to clean. The big food processor is able to do what I want to do, but I don’t use it because except when I’m cooking for a really large group of people (larger than I ever cook for these days), it is more trouble to clean it than I gain by using it.

Almost no one ever cleans out the greats trap in the vent hood above the stove (I get that people who have never had a vent hood above the stove will be confused by this. But you know, a lot of other people will be, too).

While most people — once they’ve discovered the failure mode of not doing it — empty the lint tray in the dryer, almost never one pulls the dryer forward, disconnects the hose, and vacuums it out. Which really does need to be done periodically. If you go outside a house or apartment building and find where the dryer vents to the outdoors, you almost always find some lint hanging about in the bushes out there.

I know a couple people who have or had those built-into-the-house vacuum systems (the ducting for one is installed in this house, but we never hooked it up and don’t intend to). One of them still uses hers. The other one tells this hysterical (well, it is funny NOW, at least the way she tells the story) story about vacuuming up something that was on fire. The vacuum did not magically put the fire out. Instead, it moved it to a very inaccessible location in the house. It turned out okay, but was very scary for a while.

OK, one more. I was cleaning the shower earlier this year, and got really annoyed when I realized the caulking needed to be redone in the acrylic surround (three pieces, I think, maybe more, so this was where the pan connected to the walls). I wound up hiring someone to rip the whole thing out and install a tile shower. Part of my goal was to get a new shower head with a telephone head. Of course, I could have just swapped out the shower head and R. could have redone the caulk. But there’s this point where, I didn’t love the shower and R. actually disliked it. And don’t get me started on the silicone bead on the glass shower door. Yuck.

I really wanted a shower head because I was sick of filling a bucket to clean the walls of the shower. Yes. Yes I was.

Here’s the thing. There are a ton of places around where you live and/or work where there is persistent yuck. Grunge. Sticky accumulation of let’s not think too hard about what that might be. Dusting is easy. Toilets are really not that hard to clean. But shower stalls? Shower stalls are the worst. And I just don’t understand why. My current theory is that places that are hard to clean occur because the people who make things are not the same people who clean them. If the designers were the cleaners, they’d do things a lot differently. Because they would be like, this sucks, let’s put in a telephone shower head so we can hose it down. Let’s put an attachment on the sink that we can screw a hose onto and attach a spray head to. Etc.

For thousands of years, we were pretty good at ignoring the persistent yuck, because glass hadn’t really happened yet, so there weren’t a lot of windows and thus not a lot of natural light to show us where the yuck was in the corners. But we got glass, we got lots of windows, and worse, we got electric lighting. For a really long time, the people with power in society just basically got to insist on the people without power in society (pick a pair: and you can use slave, serf, etc. literally or metaphorically, and you can find a time and a place where it was all true) doing the grunge work. Anyone lucky enough to be in a position to do creative design work sure wasn’t someone who was on their hands and knees in the corner with a knife trying to dig whatever the fuck that was out of the corner.

And don’t tell me about Dutch women, or Swedish women, or any other group of Northern women who clean everything, and who have roughly equal positions in their societies and who always had the right to their own money, and who owned property but still cleaned things and blah blah blah. First of all, it isn’t anywhere near that straightforward. And second of all, anyone who has been trapped indoors for 4-6 months out of the year and then gets hit by a ton of sunlight does a lot of crazy shit. Manic, angry, scare everyone out of the house cleaning is the least of it.

I’m not sure what to do about this. But I do think that some version of Eat Your Own Dogfood is probably called for. If you are unfamiliar with this term, here, I have found it in wikipedia for you:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

We’re running out of continents full of desperate people who want to move to the United States and clean houses and pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses and wipe noses and butts so their kids can attend school here and grow up prosperous and, hopefully, safe from gangs and civil war and the like. Sure, we can build robots like Roomba. But robots like Roomba have severe limitations. Just like dishwashers. If we are going to have meaningful home automation, erasing gendered division of labor is going to be an important part of getting there. Not so everyone has to do their own chores to build character and garbage explanations of that sort.

So the designers of the future will build stuff that isn’t such a pain to clean that we ultimately refuse to keep using it.

ETA:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3020214/lay-back-and-clean-your-house-with-swarming-micro-robot-cleaners

I know this is pie-in-the-sky brainstorm stuff. But bear with me. Did anyone ask what was involved in cleaning out the bees? I mean, they go out, they pee on things and then they drink up the pee + grunge. It’s gotta come out of the bees at some point, right? Or do you just _throw the robot bees away_?

I know, I know. You’re like, why do you even care? Well, here’s why I care. There are people out there who _reuse paper towel_ and advocate that other people should, too. There are lifecycle studies of the tradeoff between all kinds of disposable vs. reusable and how many times you need to reuse it things. You are going to be expected to clean the damn bees. How hard is it going to, er, be?

A Few Remarks about Instant Pot

I wrote this over a week ago and have been meaning to post it (I've been trying to catch up on Posts I've Been Meaning to Make today).


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/17/business/instant-pot.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

This year, I bought a lot of my friends and family an Instant Pot. It seemed to me like the Cabbage Patch doll for adults for 2017 and I wanted in on that sweet, sweet fad present. It did not hurt that I had bought one for myself and then promptly gotten rid of the very small zojirushi rice cooker (because the IP did just as good a job cooking really tiny am ounts of rice), the stovetop pressure cooker which only Roland every felt safe about using, and two crock pots that I got out at most once or twice a year. (I bought people who didn’t want or who already had an IP an air fryer. I feel like the air fryer is a lot closer to 1992’s reboot of Baby Alive than it is to Cabbage Patch of yesteryear, but I don’t really know.)

Even if I never used my Instant Pot again, it has paid for its space on my counter by making it so easy for me to get rid of so many other appliances.

The NYT article above is about the inventor of IP, Robert Wang, and how he came to create the IP, and how it became a bestseller. Basically, Amazon, for that latter part, but also, influencers. So, yeah, you have just proven you understand how brand development works in the mid teens. Clever you. I am excited to learn from this article that Wang intends to take his appliance development cred elsewhere in the kitchen, by adding sensors and what have you to other appliances. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

Robert, if you are reading, here is my short list of things I want:

burners that notice there is nothing on top of them and automatically turn off. If they are not great at detecting there is nothing on top of them, they could ask.

Oven that notices there is nothing in them after preheating has completed, and 30 more minutes has passed. If they are not great at detecting that there is nothing in them, they could ask before automatically shutting down.

App and Alexa and so forth integration for all appliances.

A fridge / freezer that notices that the door didn’t close all the way and just fucking closes it for you.

Everything that has a filter that needs to be replaced periodically should have a really good, flexible way of telling you that. It could text me or send me email, or it could have integrated reordering of the appropriate filter on amazon.

Something that ensures that a dishwasher with dirty dishes in it that is unattended for multiple days does something OTHER than just letting everything mold (vacation mode, settable from a distance)

These are all basically safety features. There are more: integrated I’m Leaking sensors for anything connected to water. Basically, if it makes it into the troubleshooting table, it should be better.

As for the NYT author: what do you MEAN RIP George Foreman? Those grills are alive and well. I have friends who still love the one they own from Back In the Day. And you can still buy lots of versions of them. On Amazon.

I Tried Reading a Book About Automation

It isn't a good book. Here are my live-notes from the first fraction of the book. It is not likely I will return to the book, altho you never know. Sometimes I hate read. I don't like it when I hate read, but I do sometimes do it.

Notes for Humans Need Not Apply

Car approaching narrow bridge. “Suddenly” bus full of school kids. Both won’t fit. [Author thinks this is a conundrum for an autonomous car. Should it leap off the bridge to save the kids?]

1. Didn’t you notice the bridge was narrow?
2. Why wasn’t there signage telling you the bridge was narrow?
3. Why are you and the school bus driver both approaching a bridge two narrow to accommodate to vehicles side by side at too high of a speed to stop in time to reverse, back up to a place where passing is safe?

This kind of narrow, single lane situation arises all the time in reality. The reality is usually a driveway, private road, forest access road, etc. There are usually turnouts along the way, and generally people drive slowly enough so that if someone becomes visible, there is time to backup or proceed to a pullout before a crash occurs. As soon as someone becomes visible, everyone slows down.

You can park in a location for 2 hours but that’s it. What if an autonomous vehicle surfs these locations?

1. People already do this. Meters deter it somewhat, however, people just move their cars. As an autonomous car would.
2. Some metering systems are now area based — they don’t care if you move, as long as you’ve paid for the time.
3. If time is the constraint, there are two existing systems for monitoring. One is tire marks, which humans already get around by going down and rubbing the tire mark off their vehicle. Usually there is a fine if you get caught doing this. The other involves writing down license plates. All of these could be readily automated. Booting and towing are the two major strategies for dealing with people who either don’t pay by surfing free spots or who don’t move their vehicle when they are supposed to. Both involve substantial fines. An escalating charge / fine system would solve the supposedly “ethical” dilemma he describes, and it would be far easier to implement than autonomous cars. It would also catch humans who do all this stuff, which means we probably will see this kind of system soon if it doesn’t already exist.

One per customer is commonly got round by having employees go out and buy the max, if the idea is to scalp / resell at a markup. See concert tickets; robots in the online sense to auto-buy tickets and resell already exist, and we already have various True Fan systems designed to give humans an edge.

“Should it [my personal electronic assistant] be required to report me if I direct it to serve my twenty-year-old daughter wine at Thanksgiving dinner?”

I don’t know what state the author lives in. Two of the three states I have lived (WA and MA, but not NH) permit parents to give their children alcohol at home as long as they are present.

https://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=002591

These are all presented as open-and-shut, people do it one way, the law covers it, robots open up a new field. In NONE of these cases is it open and shut (or is open and shut in an opposite direction, with the wine at T-dinner, depending on state of residence).

“How would you feel about a dog-walking robot that fails to save your child from being mauled because it is obeying a “Keep off the grass” sign?

I’m having a little trouble imagining the details, but whatever. Here’s how I would feel about it. Someone owns the dog. That person sent it out with the robot. When I sue (or arrange to have someone punished because I wasn’t satisfied with the actions taken by the police or the outcome of my lawsuit), I will sue the owner of the dog AND the creator(s) of the dog walking robot, because that’s just good legal strategy. Ultimately, if the dog mauled my child, I’m going to make absolutely certain the dog dies (but this won’t require action on my part — the police will make sure that happens). Depending on what I find when I research the owner of the dog, I may also make sure they die. Signs on the grass and other details are largely irrelevant to me, other than that I might take measures to further punish the creator(s) of the robot, if they don’t modify their robot appropriately.

“An autonomous car that refuses to speed you to the hospital to save you from a heart attack”

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/05/highspeed_care.html

Ambulances are not magic. They do not have SF shielding. People die in ambulance as a result of traffic accident who were highly unlikely to die otherwise of whatever they were being transported for. I would need to know a lot more details — and then I would wonder why I wasn’t in an ambulance if I was having a heart attack.

Again, presented as “against the wider interests of society in a whole new way”. None of this seems particularly new.

The balance of the argument is, yeah, but workers will need new jobs. This is true! And yet that is not considered a valid argument against using a machine to grind peanuts vs. grinding the peanuts by hand. But it is not different.

“We’re all workers, even managers, doctors, and college professors.”

Well, I’m not a worker. At least, I’m not paid for the work I do. I really am a capitalist. A highly skilled and highly paid worker is still a worker, if they are paid for their work. Duh. Marx did NOT characterize conflict as between workers and _paid_ managers. He characterized conflict as between workers (including paid managerial, clerical, etc. help) and _owners_. “The real problem is that the wealthy will need few, if any, people to work for them at all.” Yeah, this is probably not true on any level. I mean, we’ve been through a lot of automation, and it isn’t true yet. Most automation “deskills”. It doesn’t completely reduce the need for labor at all. Similarly, butt wiping. Nose wiping. Etc. He thinks that somehow, even the owning 1% will become non working, left behind, etc. Which makes no sense at all. Note: this is what happens when you conflate “high salary” with “high income”, and then further conflate “high income” with “high wealth”. Then you think that the 1% are people who have high salaries. this is not true. The 1% do not make their money from salaries. Hasn’t ever been true and is not now. (OK, it is actually the .1 or .01% that this is true of, but I’m fairly certain that’s what he is talking about.)

“The obvious simple solution, to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the poor, is a nonstarter in our current political environment.” And yet “I will present a framework that applies free-market solutions to address the underlying structural problems we are creating.”

“Our current sequential system of education of work — first you go to school, then you get a job — was fine when you could expect to do more or less the same thing for a living throughout your working life.” I _assume_ he means that we need to iterate on this? Which of course most people _do_, through certificate programs, professional masters, etc.

He proposes a “job mortgage”. Yay, debt servitude! Yikes.

He also misunderstands home mortgages. “The way your home mortgage is secured exclusively by your property.” Um, no, in a lot of states, you still owe on the part not recovered by selling the property.

“Non binding letters of intent to hire you if you acquire specified skills”

If it isn’t binding, what good does it do? “Certain payroll tax breaks if they ultimately follow through.” But the idea would be to better direct training programs. Not sure we need this letters of intent, thing. This is just a distributed feedback system, and I’m unconvinced it is useful.

He seems to think that Social Security owns stocks.

“Average Joe and Jane ... own more than you might expected, in the form of pension funds and Social Security — they just don’t know it because an opaque system of fiduciaries manage their wealth instead of them. We need to give people more visibility and control over their nest eggs”

Oh that is a BAD idea. That way even more people will sell at the bottom and buy (near or) at the top, making inequality even worse.

“The temptation to riot and loot the local department store is greatly diminished if you know you are a stockholder.”

OK, so the local department store is basically toast in most places, so maybe not the best analogy. Also, if you have good visibility into your nest egg and you see it dramatically lose value, wouldn’t that INCREASE the incentive to vandalize? “You screwed me, I’ll screw you!”

Unspecified corporate tax breaks for stocks that are widely owned. Seems pointless: startups — where growth occurs — are not widely held but also make zero profits to tax. By the time a company makes money that can be taxed and therefore breaks might apply, they are big, they are not growing much any more (very occasional exceptions). So, wide ownership would be associated with slow / no growth. Also, you would wind up not collecting like any taxes at all. To the extent that this isn’t true, you’d wind up giving disproportionate tax breaks to people who are the big winners anyway (fang stocks are big, widely owned, have significant revenue and in some cases profits)

I wonder what he thinks _should_ have been done differently during the Industrial Revolution(s) of yore?

Oh, those were the days! “Amazon dominates book retailing.” Well, yes. But. “Little attention is paid to the resulting destruction of livelihoods and assets because there’s no incentive to do so.” OK, so, what _should_ be the tradeoff when contemplating the destruction of horse breeding vs. the creation of the automobile? How do we count TB deaths? How do we count authors who can now self pub and write instead of working a day job vs. people in NYC based publishers who get laid off? How do we count popular authors who self pub and write vs not popular authors who were once subsidized by NYC based publishers, who now have to get a day job?

“You can buy a robot that can vacuum your floors”

You just have to groom the house so it doesn’t destroy it.

“Already in commercial development are robots that can weed a garden”

Packed wide passages between beds only, not in a lawn, not on gravel, not in a too tightly packed garden. Tertill

“Load and unload randomly shaped boxes from delivery trucks”

Wynwright RTU. No news since 2016. Not sure if this thing works or not?

“Follow you around carrying your bags”

https://www.thememo.com/2017/07/13/5-robot-bags-battling-to-carry-your-luggage/

Some were supposed to ship this year; follow up later

“And pick crops”

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604303/apple-picking-robot-prepares-to-compete-for-farm-jobs/

This we desperately need; it will not create any unemployment at all.

“Soon, just about every physical task you can imagine”

Butt and nose wiping not mentioned. Bummer.

Folding laundry is. Ha! Not happening soon at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/business/entrepreneurship-laundroid-self-folding-laundry-machine.html

ETA: Unrelated, mostly. School bus fatality analysis. As I expected, most school bus crash fatalities involve people not in the bus. So that makes the above should my autonomous car leap to my death to avoid killing the kids in the school bus extra special stupid. Because if the autonomous car hits the school bus, the kids will get jostled, and the person in the autonomous car might well die.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0386111214000375

Autonomous Luggage

I have no idea how I missed this back when I was researching kooky luggage months ago, but there are now at least two bags out there that come with some kind of wrist band and they basically follow you around like a well trained puppy and / or the luggage in that SF series I used to read (Kris Longknife -- took me a while to come up with that). The two brands I have found so far are Travelmate (supposedly if you order now, you'll get it in 90 days) and Cowarobot.

I have some questions, the most significant of which is: batteries and regulation thereof. We spent the last year with a big debate and imminent but never materializing regulations on anything bigger than a cell phone (OK, the regs DID materialize for flights originating in some middle eastern airports and traveling to certain other destinations). This led to debate about whether it was a good idea to insist that people check things that had batteries in them (fire hazard in cargo, basically). And in turn, this exposed the open question of Just How Big a Battery Can You Bring On a Flight With You, which is important to me because I bought a slightly enormous one for my G-Ro but have chickened out from actually bringing it on a flight yet (planning on bringing it with me in 2018, because otherwise, why did I even buy it).

Anyway. I'm not skeptical that the luggage works, and I think it is really cool that people doing this because OMG my wrists and arms have taken some damage in airports over the years and old age is not looking happy for me, and maybe this would help some. But I do sort of wonder about the batteries.

ETA: Batteries must be removable.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/05/technology/smart-bag-limits/index.html