Are you 99.999999% sure that picking up that penny won’t kill you?
This argument does not seem to be a valid reply to the post you link to. Picking up pennies does not seem very risky—in particular it seems no more risky than many other jobs we would be willing to perform for $36/h. This is the beauty of quantifying it in terms of hourly wage—we won’t have to perform insanely complicated calculations about the risk and reward, we can just compare the risk and the reward to other routine things we do for a living.
That said, I’m a bit doubtful about his assertion that picking it up takes less than a second. 5 seconds seems like an equally reasonable estimate to me, and that would put the problem in a quite different light.
And on a personal note I throw a huge pile of pennies in the trash every other year, so having one more carries a negative utility for me. :)
This argument does not seem to be a valid reply to the post you link to. Picking up pennies does not seem very risky—in particular it seems no more risky than many other jobs we would be willing to perform for $36/h. This is the beauty of quantifying it in terms of hourly wage—we won’t have to perform insanely complicated calculations about the risk and reward, we can just compare the risk and the reward to other routine things we do for a living.
That said, I’m a bit doubtful about his assertion that picking it up takes less than a second. 5 seconds seems like an equally reasonable estimate to me, and that would put the problem in a quite different light.
And on a personal note I throw a huge pile of pennies in the trash every other year, so having one more carries a negative utility for me. :)