Slashdot Mirror
Attack of the Clones to Cost Economy $300m
Audent writes: "Attack of the Clones may make you sick but according to this story, it will cost the US economy $300 million in lost productivity what with all the nerds calling in with a bad case of midiclorianitis. ...
Nerds and geeks and propellorheads are singled out as being most at risk. Take your medication now! dammit." A nameless reader also points to a review (looks like two, but only one is up at the time of this writing) up at http://www.pstwo.net/.
I wonder how much Slashdot costs to the economy?
--Metrollica
Osama Bin Laden could only wish. There are lies, damn lies, and marketing generated statistics. If there was such a thing as an "employment expert", I think they would have, by now, figured out the whole unemployment problem and solved it. Three hundred million bucks in lost productivity? The 9/11 atrocity is estimated at 1.2 billion dollars in economic damage to US worker productivity, not counting lost jobs, from what I have read. To say that Star Wars is going to do 1/4 of the economic damage as September 11th might send Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's color coded domestic terrorism scale to RED causing him to ban all showings before 6pm local time.
Write this one off to cheap and easy journalism recycling a press release. If this is true, however, I expect to see George Lucas at Gitmo in the next month.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Well, from cmdr taco's own comment we can figure slashdot get 1 million unique visitors a day. Ok then. Say, 50 % are actually at work and at the correct time, 500,000 unique visitors. Assume they only visit slashdot ONCE during their daily job for 15 minutes. You get 500,000 x 15 = 7,500,000 minutes of lost productivity per day.
Hmm, figure average wage of U.S. worker to be 35,000$/year (roughly) that is, 20$/hour. OK then, so 7,500,000 minutes = 125,000 hours x 20$/hour = 2.5 million dollars/per day.
Extrapolating for a work year (roughly 270 work days in a year) = 675 million dollars in a year due to slashdot and lost productivity.
Hmmm. I'm probably wrong, for one thing not everybody spends 15 minutes a day on slashdot, not everyone looks every day, not everybody does it works, not everybody makes 20$/hour so that number is prolly too high.
But even if you figure it is DOUBLE or TRIPLE what the real number is.. wow.. even if it is QUADRUPLE that means that the real number would be 168,750,000 million. Not quite Star Wars but close..
Does anyone have a link so I can find a list of theaters with digital projection? I ask, of course, because I want to see Ep2 in a digitally equipped theater.
I don't know a whole lot about how this works yet, but it seems to me that in awarding sick days, companies would have already planned for this. Don't they expect people might take days off? This just happens to be everybody leaving on the same day.
I understand that other factors might be involved, such as not having enough employees available to run a piece of equipment, but that's not what they're talking about. Raw wage calculations should have been taken care of already.
Yes?
In Japan, they require by law that events this popular (Dragon Quest games) get moved to Sunday. Should we do the same?
These are the kinds of figures people like to tout when talking about how much damage the latest Outlook Virus/Worm has caused. It infected 100,000 computers, requiring 30 minutes/computer = 50,000 hours lost, bla bla bla. At this rate, "the economy" must be churning out trillions of dollars a year, which makes $300m a good sound bite, but a drop in the bucket as the economy goes. I mean, an afternoon off? How much do you think that can really hurt the economy? If that's the case, maybe we should cancel July 4th, because that's a whole day off!
Why is it that there are always studies like this of the "geeks", but there's nothing representative of the other masses?
:-)
OK then...
I know most of the Americans here don't know the first thing about the World Cup, but over here in the UK it's estimated that a third of the entire workforce is going to take the day off to watch the England v Argentina game.
Because of the time zones, the game kicks off at 12:30pm our time. Personally speaking, there is no way I'm going to miss this game! There's a seriously huge rivalry between our countries, mostly down to those pesky Argies employing some decidedly unfair tactics in previous matches.
There's a BBC News story about it too.
--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)
Basically, The thing run like this, The scene opened in an empty office will all these phones started ringing of employees leaving messages on answering machines giving crazy excuses for not going to work. ie I can't come to work today because my taxi cab was kidnapped by aliens etc etc.
Now, this is all fair enough untill the tag line, "WOMEN can not be expected to work will such and such sale is on". Until I saw that ad I thought feminists, were just a bunch of militant lesbians as much as the next guy. But somthing about that was JUST PLAIN WROUNG. No one should market anything by drawing a generalisation about a group of people. To say somthing like "such and such" is a bad worker becasue they are "such and such" is as bad as saying all black people are gang members or jews are all mean with money.
In our society it is the person that counts not who they are. It is the invidual who decides if they should take the day off, and not some marketing crap thay says your a nerd and thus your life is about Star Wars. Thus you will skip work to see this movie because it is your life.
This article is really just a piece of marketing, but insidiously it's saying people who know a thing or two about computers (who doesn't these days) are all over weight nerds who live with in their mothers basement, have no life apart from everquest, and are basically lesser to us jocks and should be mocked between classes at high school.
That this was mirrored on slashdot, demonstrates how deep this "sterotype" has become.
Pianist : Some jerk whos taught themselves how to type in rhythm