alt Hacker News> The worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently. On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour, perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people 1hr / 16 / 365 = 4.3y).*
I am not convinced by these kinds of calculations, and I think they generally do rationalists & their like a big disfavor.
A year of someone's life is approximately 9,000 hours.
If you spend an hour commuting to work and back for 30+ years, that's approximately the same amount of time.
But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.)
I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.
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> But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.)
If my commute was in a car then yes.
This is so obviously a beneficial trade that I feel like I must be missing something.
EDIT: even if you added the stipulation that I must continue to live where I currently do, and can't take advantage of this teleportation to live in a more-favourable area that is further from my work.
I'd accept then move to a bigger better cheaper house in the middle of nowhere...
And what of the similar delay incurred when someone's arm does get ripped off? It's not like the train is just going to keep going on with it's regularly scheduled day. Paramedics will be called, the train will be stopped.
Besides that, this happened 11 years ago. Probably everyone involved has collectively wasted that 4.3 years just by not optimizing their time to within 1 second per day (11 years = 4015 days = 1.11 hr for each second wasted)
But you completely changed the scenario in an absurd way?
The original setup was spending time in line vs having usable, productive time.
You changed it to spending time in line vs the time just vanishes.
Shit, I would. Trading a year of the lowest quality life I'll ever experience, for a couple of years worth of saved time at a higher quality of life, PLUS the rest of my time can be better quality, too, since I'd be better rested? Sign me up.
Yes I would take that deal
I spent two years driving from Maryland to Quantico every day 3-4 hours round trip because I was assigned to DC but my duty station was in Quantico.
Those two years probably took a year off my life
> I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.
I think that this is closer than you think and would be debatable. If somebody told me that a 1.5-2 hour commute five days a week would go to zero for the rest of my life, and I just had to give up the last year of it, I'd probably take that deal.
edit: I have to agree that the commute is negative time for me, then. It's worse than nothing. Yes, I've gotten a lot of reading done, but people get a lot of reading done in prison, too.
I think I would actually. The tradeoff between commute time and housing location is one of the largest time/money/lifestyle decisions you constantly make over your professional life. If I expected my commute would be 30m+ every day by car, I believe I would take that trade in a heartbeat. I could completely decouple where I live from where I work.