Just read about Jack Ma’s pun at Ali Day. Apparently he holds a wedding for all his employees married in the past year. This made news apparently because he punned a Chinese work schedule know as the 996 (9am-9pm on 6 days of each week) he turned it into 669, which he, being one of very few masters of marketing on earth, then explains are frequency (6 days a week) and intensity (once a day(6/6=1and for a long time! 9 is a Chinese homonym with 久, stipulating the per incident duration is to be long.)

I’m very glad to see the Chinese people innovating on their work schedule ;-). I had considered this issue since 2012, proposing the 6-2-10 schedule(aka 6-12-22), some analysis and the p6 systems, and analysis. The work-life balance is very important for human beings. As I learned more about it, by working more and having kids in my life, I discover that the bi-directional nature of some resources is quite prevalent.

For example, at a recent employers super-super-decked-out office space, we have daily bathroom overload. People all use bathroom just before standing in long lines for lunch, and then there is another thundering herd rushing to the bathroom between 3 and 5. No stalls. No toilet paper when you get a stall. Between 5-7 you are also likely to encounter the maintenance crew trying to put toilet paper back–and they have to shut the whole site down to do it. The congestion is partially caused by humans have similar digestion periods–the time it takes for the body to make waste of the food we eat. While the company “followed rules” set by the city building code for the number of bathroom, it had obviously decided to hack the workspace in that way.

And I shan’t mention the later ploy to label the rooms as self-identified gender specific rooms. I mean I guess the idea is that the produce of eating could squeeze organs in ways that would change your self identification, in a crunch.

Similar to the traffic problem we encounter daily driving into San Francisco in the morning and out of San Francisco in the evening, staggering the need for resource by shifting work schedule can drastically alter the utilization profiles of the resources. Instead of one side of the highway being congested and the other side half empty. You could have equal proportion of people coming and going from the office and the highways would experience mild increase in utilization in both directions during commute hours. The cafeteria and the bathroom as well. Reduced lines in both if we staggered our eating schedule as well.

One wonders if these newfangled ideas are outdated before they are even out to practice. One thing that has begun to happen is that they have begun to make large casual-working space. There is a new academic building coming up next to my home where the entirety of the first floor is a cafeteria with tables to eat on. But there’re also power supplies so you can eat and work all in the same space. The open space where you can see everyone else in the gigantic room with 1kp capacity (kilo-persons) is exactly the same as San Franciscan open office space.

In b2 of this world, perhaps, The automated robots will bring food to you so you don’t have to self-organize with a hundred other persons just to get the food. They will take the trash away so you don’t have to stand in line to return trays. You’d still have to visit the bathrooms. But we can coordinate that too! The computer can, based on ingredients of your food, and biometric data from your wearables figure out your personalized digestion period for each individual meals brought to you. It can optimize total communal comfort of bathroom occupancy by giving you recommendations for foods on the menu as well as subtly adjusting delivery times. It can even alter your exercise schedule to enhance the prediction accuracy of your digestion period.

Wow! AI researchers and developers have their work cut out for them to make all that just right.

I guess this is almost a dystopian world view… a world more anal for control and optimization and more caring for the common person than communism.

We can only wait to find out. The Commies are reproducing like rabbits, how about you? Is your entire country pro- or anti-reproduction when you have 32 year lowest birth rates as measured by CDC.