Comment by nlawalker
5 hours ago
Re: kitchen appliance analogies, I stand by my "AI is a dishwasher" analogy.
It's annoying that the dishes still have some pooled water in them when the cycle finishes; it doesn't always get everything perfectly clean; I have to know not to put the knives or the wooden stuff or anything fancy in it. But in spite of all of that, I use it every day, it's a huge productivity boost, and I'd hate to be without it.
And other people choose to wash dishes by hand and they're fine with it and not significantly less productive. The use of a dishwasher wasn't forced on everyone.
It is significantly less productive to hand wash dishes. But that’s fine to do manually if you wish for something that takes up maybe half an hour of your own time every several days. It’s not fine if washing dishes is your job. No company is going to hire an artisanal dish hand washer that refuses to use a dishwasher.
My parents (and many boomers in general) manually wash dishes and then still put them in the dishwasher.
It is significantly less productive to do both, and yet…
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I've worked in dish pit.
I can tell you that I didn't observe a single hand-wash-only holdout.
Perhaps such holdouts existed at a point, but a restaurant can only flatter the ego of their performatively-unproductive seniors for so long. Competition exists.
It's actually less productive for dishwasher-safe dishes, there's simply no question about that.
Hand-washing dishes also, from what I understand, uses more energy and water than the dishwasher does.
> Hand-washing dishes also, from what I understand, uses more energy and water than the dishwasher does.
Correct, more energy, detergent, and water. Dishwashers are more efficient than what you can do by hand because they effectively manage their water usage.
A modern dishwasher will use 3 to 4 gallons on a run. By comparison, my kitchen sink holds about 10 gallons of water on each side. When I wash by hand, I'll fill one side with soapy water and rinse each dish individually. Easily more than 10 gallons of water get used in the whole process.
Dishwashers are so efficient because they rinse everything off the dishes with about ~1 gallons of water, they drain the water, then use detergent in the second run which gets off the tougher food stains, another 1 gallons of water. Then they rinse with another gallon of water.
Dishwashers maximize getting food particulates into dirty water in a way that you can't really sanely do by hand.
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This is in fact true (in the US at least), but part of why it is true is that people don't wash dishes the way they used to (with multiple bins of soapy + rinse water) and instead just run a bunch of hot water.
Modern high-efficiency dishwashers probably beat the most efficient humans now, but that's relatively recent and not a huge margin (and may not get the same results).
It depends.
I use the time I spend to hand-wash my dishes as a time to pause and to let my mind wander. Having the hands in water is soothing.
And its a pleasant feeling, where cleaning is part of the food workflow : I cook, I eat, I clean (the kitchen, the dishes, my teeth).
I hate home dishwashers: you have to play Tetris after each meal to fill them, trying not to get your hands/arms dirty, then you have to let it do the work, and now you have to spend a few minutes to get the dishes out and store them where they should be, even though most of them are not linked to a meal you just had. Maybe worse, you could unload the dishwasher at a time completely unrelated to food, so that breaks the link.
On the other hand, having worked in restaurants, industrial dishwashers are awesome.
It's less productive and it's less water efficient.
i wonder what people in restaurants use and why
From my experience, restaurants hand-wash some stuff (anything that needs scrubbing such as cookware) and use dishwashers for light-soil service items (plates, glasses, cutlery). But these aren't dishwashers like you have at home. They run very hot water and complete a wash/rinse in just minutes.
I get where you're coming from but dishwasher is definitely a "could live just fine without."
Fridge OTOH, not so much.