Daylight Saving Time
I have been pondering DST for some time now, and I came to a realization this morning. When I buy a certificate of deposit from a bank, I am giving it the opportunity to spend my money as it pleases. In return, when the certificate of deposit matures, I withdraw my money and a little extra is included by the bank for my troubles.
The United States Congress borrowed an hour from us on March 9, 2008, and will return it on November 2nd, 2008. We are not in possession of this hour for roughly 65.2% of the year 2008. Since they are borrowing this hour from us, taking away our right to use it, I suggest that we charge Congress interest on this hour. I think that a fair price would be the current US prime rate, 6.00%. This means that we should receive an extra 0.06 interest times 0.65 of the year times 1 hour = 2 minutes, 20.46 seconds* upon our withdrawal on 11/2/08 of the hour we saved this past Sunday morning. I suspect most Americans will use this time to sleep just a bit longer, but I found a better thing to do.
Say you have a room-temperature can (12 fl oz) of soda but you wanted to get it cold, fast. Then, you can do the following, courtesy of Adam Savage of Mythbusters:
That would be about 20-25 minutes in a freezer. If you put it in a bucket of ice, that would halve that time. If you put water in that ice, it'd be cold (about 5°C) enough to drink in about 4-6 minutes, if you put salt in that water, you'd reduce the chill time to just over 2 minutes.
Sounds like an effective use of time to me. (:
Unfortunately, I am not sure the United States Congress can afford to pay out this interest. When I checked the PopClock while writing this, the U.S. population stood at 303,604,956 (16:51 EST Mar 10, 2008). Giving each American their due of 2 minutes and 20.46* seconds would mean incurring a cost of 42,644,053,491.93441 seconds, which amounts to 1,351.33737 years. The U.S. Congress doesn't have that kind of time! They've only existed for about a sixth of that!
However, Economics professor Ian Walker showed that time can be converted to money with the following formula:
V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person's hourly wage, t is the tax rate and C is the local cost of living.
W = $16.75, according to here
t = 32.69 according to this
I believe C should equal 1, since we are calculating this across the country, but I may be wrong here.
We must multiply our result for V by 42,644,053,491.93441 ÷ 3600 = 11,845,570.41442622, since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, and this formula is on a per-hour basis.
Thus, we have V = (16.75 * (100-32.69)÷100) ÷ 1 = 11.274425 dollars per hour.
and 11.274425 dollars per hour * 11,845,570.41442622 hours = $133,551,995.2196673.
$133.5 million? Oh. Maybe Congress could afford it. That's how much we've spent in Iraq in the last, oh, eight hours.
* - using the exact amount of the year, 238/366, about 0.6502732240437
The United States Congress borrowed an hour from us on March 9, 2008, and will return it on November 2nd, 2008. We are not in possession of this hour for roughly 65.2% of the year 2008. Since they are borrowing this hour from us, taking away our right to use it, I suggest that we charge Congress interest on this hour. I think that a fair price would be the current US prime rate, 6.00%. This means that we should receive an extra 0.06 interest times 0.65 of the year times 1 hour = 2 minutes, 20.46 seconds* upon our withdrawal on 11/2/08 of the hour we saved this past Sunday morning. I suspect most Americans will use this time to sleep just a bit longer, but I found a better thing to do.
Say you have a room-temperature can (12 fl oz) of soda but you wanted to get it cold, fast. Then, you can do the following, courtesy of Adam Savage of Mythbusters:
That would be about 20-25 minutes in a freezer. If you put it in a bucket of ice, that would halve that time. If you put water in that ice, it'd be cold (about 5°C) enough to drink in about 4-6 minutes, if you put salt in that water, you'd reduce the chill time to just over 2 minutes.
Sounds like an effective use of time to me. (:
Unfortunately, I am not sure the United States Congress can afford to pay out this interest. When I checked the PopClock while writing this, the U.S. population stood at 303,604,956 (16:51 EST Mar 10, 2008). Giving each American their due of 2 minutes and 20.46* seconds would mean incurring a cost of 42,644,053,491.93441 seconds, which amounts to 1,351.33737 years. The U.S. Congress doesn't have that kind of time! They've only existed for about a sixth of that!
However, Economics professor Ian Walker showed that time can be converted to money with the following formula:
V=(W((100-t)/100))/C, where V is the value of an hour, W is a person's hourly wage, t is the tax rate and C is the local cost of living.
W = $16.75, according to here
t = 32.69 according to this
I believe C should equal 1, since we are calculating this across the country, but I may be wrong here.
We must multiply our result for V by 42,644,053,491.93441 ÷ 3600 = 11,845,570.41442622, since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, and this formula is on a per-hour basis.
Thus, we have V = (16.75 * (100-32.69)÷100) ÷ 1 = 11.274425 dollars per hour.
and 11.274425 dollars per hour * 11,845,570.41442622 hours = $133,551,995.2196673.
$133.5 million? Oh. Maybe Congress could afford it. That's how much we've spent in Iraq in the last, oh, eight hours.
* - using the exact amount of the year, 238/366, about 0.6502732240437