Lavadero Primero

While all routine and mundane tasks will eventually be relegated to software and robots, some tasks are sufficiently far off that a little short-term compromise might be necessary. One of these tasks falls in the realm of laundry. While the atomic operations of cleaning and drying have been automated for so long that the legacy manual operation is no longer even attempted by most, chaining these operations into a single compound automated system seems sufficiently out of reach. While some systems are starting to bridge cleaning and drying, the operation that seems hopeless to automate is the dreaded folding step.

Clothing is a unique substance in that each item is made up of fibers which are solids with one key property; extreme flexibility in a single dimension. The processes of looming and stitching exploits this property and makes a three-dimensional object which has a general shape but still remains quite flexible in all dimensions. The flexible properties of clothing are what make them appealing as garments as they allow for a wide range of body sizes, shapes and motions. The flexible property is even exploited in the automated cleaning and drying steps of laundry as clothing is fluidized and agitated to encourage the respective dirt and water separations. The flexible nature of clothing is requisite for these reasons but has enabled a dark side of clothing manufacture that is diametrically opposed to and essentially prevents any efforts to automate the folding process.

Fashion dates back to the 12th century as tailoring guilds began forming in Europe. At this point in history there was no concept of automated washing so no naturally clothes were designed with no consideration for the practice. The automated washing machine would not begin to appear for six centuries meanwhile fashion continued spiraling out of control generating garments of immense complexity. Today garments produced by high fashion defy categorization and look like nothing when not being worn.

I guess she couldn't stop chewing her leg?

How is this a bathing suit?

While most people won't wear the clown suits that model's wear on runways, the products of high fashion act as a north star for fashion design whereby the Old Navy's and Gap's of the world attempt to walk a fine line between practical and fashionable. Very little consideration is paid to how well these garments lend themselves to automated laundry. In fact the "north star" products mentioned above normally can't even be subjected to conventional laundry processes and instead have to be dry cleaned which is still a semi-industrial process which is not meant for the home. The bottom line is clothing is thought of a personal statement rather than the utility it is which is a detriment to its longevity and efforts to automate it's maintenance. 

It is because of this that clothing manufacturers focus on how the clothing looks on a mannequin/model and then settle on what an acceptable number washes is before it disintegrates. Where does this leave automated folding? The sad state is that due to the insanity that is the fashion industry, clothing varies so much that even the best computer vision and robotics we have today (and likely will have for many years) will be confounded when that one hot skirt/body wrap/cabbage/small dog that is all the rage is picked out of the pile. The robot arms that could perform a quadruple bypass surgery on a muskrat will end up ripping a frock/sweater/ski mask/basket of muffins to pieces, the owner of the confounding garment will blame the machine and we'll have wasted everyone's time. 

The proposal on the table is (temporarily) abandoning aspirations of high fashion and embrace the AI we have today. If the variety in clothing is limited to a degree, then a robotic folding system of today could have a success rate of  >99% and the ultimate laundry machine would be possible. A single machine that would accept laundry from the hamper and produce neatly folded piles of clean laundry could be in every home in 2 - 5 years. 

I stress this is only a temporary solution. AI will accelerate itself and soon computers will be able create and maintain garments that we never thought possible. The point i'm stressing is we don't have to wait until then. For many the time and sanity that is saved by automated laundry is worth the sacrifice in fashion.

Engineering a Merry Christmas

Everyone knows that services and facilities can experience deviations from the normal quality and availability of service during holiday times. This results from anomalous stresses being applied to affected services and facilities. These stresses come in two main forms; increased demand for services and products, and decreased labor supply due to vacations. All services and facilities experience the labor shortage while parcel services, food preparation, and retail experience also experience a sharp demand increase. These services are squeezed so hard that to meet the demand they have to engineer out the labor supply shortage with seasonal labor and conditional employment clauses. 

When a service or facility is stressed logistically, this stress is translated to physical and emotional stress on the labor force which supplies the service or operates the facility and the consumers who rely on the service or facility. Since most of the population fall into one or both of these demographics, everyone shoulders a piece of this stress. The origin of the stress is the lack of sufficient turndown in all affected services and facilities. Examples:

• Retail stores are not built to accommodate a daily traffic equivalent to Black Friday or else they would look more like amusement parks or convention centers. 
• Medical offices don't keep 1.5X the needed doctors on staff so their appointment traffic is unaffected by multiple concurrent vacations. 
• Restaurants don't maintain extra dining rooms, kitchen space, and cook staff to ensure their wait times on New Years Eve are similar to any normal time.

These examples come off as absurdities, however they are what would be required to diffuse the above-mentioned stresses given the current model of concurrent holiday celebration. The historic benefit of the concurrent celebration model is it maximizes the probability that one will get to visit with all their family and friends in one occasion. This has always been the "reward" for shouldering the above-mentioned stresses. 

The concurrent celebration model developed from superstition that specific dates had legitimate significance but remained because it solved the logistics problem of coordination. In the past where communication with distant friends or relatives was difficult or impossible, the concurrent celebration model was the crutch that ensured people would see each other if they returned to a habitual place on the right dates. It suffices to say that these coordination problems, for which the concurrent celebration solved, have been solved with current technologies. Meetings can be arranged and even rescheduled to accommodate attendees' needs quite easily. Yet we still shoulder the stress of the concurrent celebration model.

It is with these considerations that a new model is being proposed. The dispersed celebration model removes the service and facility stress of the concurrent celebration model while relying on modern communication tools for self-organization of celebrations. In this model, the same number of holiday leave is given to workers under the concurrent celebration model however they will be given as floating holidays. In this model floating holiday overlap is minimized to prevent the labor supply impact. This will naturally force people to organize within their family/friend groups to move holidays around to accommodate the overlap clause. In this model Christmas will be celebrated all year by someone but never at once by everyone. The trickle down effect of this will be the services and facilities that experience an increased demand during holidays in the concurrent celebration model will see this demand redistributed across the calendar and turndown will no longer be an issue. 

Redistribution in the time domain is the only logical solution to the problems the concurrent celebration model presents. It is a no-cost solution which will benefit society as a whole by removing the stresses presented by the concurrent celebration model. The first step will need to be revoking state acknowledged holidays. Second will be getting the largest employers to agree to redistribution of holidays and eliminate service level impacting floating holiday concurrency. Holiday pay can still exist if employers offer comparable compensation for those who abstain from floating holidays. These two steps cost nothing to anyone and will put society on the fast track to eliminating holiday stress.