All Work And No Play ...

Clifton Forlines writes: "Jupiter Media Metrix released a report on Monday about PC gaming - here's one of the more interesting tidbits: 'Similar to past years, Microsoft Windows-bundled games dominated the top rankings in October 2001: Solitaire was number one, with 21.3 million users.' A little math tells us that americans spent about 24 million man-hours in October on Solitarie (estimating that each user spent a little more than an hour over the whole month) That corresponds to about 1 million man-days, or around 2740 man-years! For comparison, I looked up these numbers... Empire State Building: 7 million man-hours (a mere 9 days of Solitaire), Panama Canal: 20 million man-hours (a mere 26 days of Solitaire), Apollo project: 15.5 billion man-hours (or a mere 52 years of Solitaire) Think about it!"

Comments

Regarding the man-hour comparisons...

[dstone]

Ask yourself this: do you really want the type of person who finds fulfillment playing Solitaire and Minesweeper to divert his/her attention to building the next skyscraper or hydroelectric project? Please, no!

Re:Regarding the man-hour comparisons...

[renehollan]

A socialist friend of mine used that argument to justify a 90-90% unemployment rate: if we could just feed, clothe, and house people who messed up the work we did, we'd be more than 20 times more efficient with the same effort, and could easily afford the astronomical taxes to support the welfare state that would result.

Being a libertarian, I said a few disparaging words upon hearing this suggestion, but I have to admit, he had a point.

Of course the proper counter is, having increased my efficiency 2000% or more, why shouldn't I reap the benefits? Because you didn't stop me? Is that a threat? There are other ways of getting threatening freeloaders out of the way...

Funny numbers

[snake_dad]

But not that amazing. It just means that if 23 million people each spend one hour digging, the Panama canal could have been finished in less then a month. There would be some elbowing ofcourse, and maybe Panama would have sunk by itself with al those people standing in spot...

The point is, if you choose the statistics that you compare to carefully, you can make anything seem amazing. Compare hours spent playing solitaire to hours spent while brushing teeth, and suddenly he numbers don't seem so amazing anymore.