
The hidden cost of Gangnam Style - ra00l
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/06/daily-chart-1?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_hidden_cost_of_gangnam_style
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throwaway_yy2Di
_" Alternatively they could have built more than four Great Pyramids of
Giza..."_

Why waste your life in front of a TV screen, when you could be pushing rocks
into a big pile?

~~~
vixin
Or presumably, building Chartres Cathedral?

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osmala
The article perpetrates The myth of any working hour is equal. Actually its
energy which limits the amount of work person does, and if we add more hours
the same amount of work gets done spread on more hours, of course there are
exceptions to this rule like where you just sit and wait and do some standard
routine when someone comes like selling tickets when number of customers is
low enough that your working speed doesn't matter.

The reason we have 40 hour workweek is that industrialists realized it
maximizes the productivity of physical labor, and its studied quite through
out. In mental labor the studies say that maximizing long term productivity is
even lower than that. You get more done for a week if you add additional hours
for a week, however within week or two your productivity dips so that you
produce LESS than when you were working 40 hour week. If we add commute to 40
hour workweek, and count the stuff people must do to keep their self in
working condition and not too smelly, there is less than 40 hours of leisure
time. I just did Excel out of what I want to do in a week and what I MUST do
(like eat, sleep...) Then end result was 187 hours a week, unfortunately for
me there is only 168 hours in a week.

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paul
If only we could each contribute 4 minutes of our time towards building the
Great Pyramids of Giza.

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QuantumChaos
Surely the Economist writers, of all people, can imagine that being
entertained is worth something, and might possibly be worth the opportunity
cost of the time people spend on entertainment. After all, by watching the
video people have revealed their preference for spending their time this way.

~~~
vixin
How insightful you are!

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adamnemecek
This is the dumbest article I've read in a long time.

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x0xMaximus
Reminds me of a Chrome extension I wrote a couple months back to figure out if
the total viewing duration was more than 1 human life and show that instead of
the play count: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/you-
consumed/lpnkd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/you-
consumed/lpnkdajdhkpmildjadohhgcgiolpbjeg?hl=en)

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jack-r-abbit
What a stupid article. If a project is going to take 1 person 40 hours to
complete, that doesn't mean it would take 40 people 1 hour to complete. And...
I often listen to music via YouTube while I work. I'm sure several of those
views were from me while I was working.

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klez
This assumes people would have been doing these things instead of watching the
video.

This article gives an interesting perspective of how many man-hours were lost,
but that doesn't mean those man-hours would have been put into something
constructive instead.

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fla
This assumes people watched the video again and again. In reality most people
watched it a few times, then only listened to the music, doing something else
meanwhile.

How much of a Giza pyramid could have been built instead of writing this
article ?

Edit: typo

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sschueller
If work would only scale like that my web app would be done in under 4
minutes.

