Do You Need All That Water to Boil Pasta?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For me, the marginal income from an extra 6 minutes of time is zero.
Said differently, if I'd offer you six bucks at dinner time to give up cooking and work for me and you'd say no, then your time must be worth at least six dollars, or $1/min, otherwise you'd have done it.
Since it's a nice, clean, hypothetical we get to ignore things like the silliness of working for only 6 minutes, or the time it takes to leave your kitchen.
How you actually get paid is irrelevant, the question is 'How much would you have to pay me right now to stop doing this and work.' That's the value of your time, because in an open economy, you could go work instead (subject to the caveats above). =)
Usually the question is asked in terms of what work you'd get paid most doing (which is often work you enjoy). Even If I get paid $10MM/yr in one lump sum from a trust fund, the value of my time per minute is still however much money I'd take in lieu of my time, or, in economic parlance, the 'second best alternative'.
Just because you can't practically bill for a fraction of your time doesn't make it value-less. That's a common fallacy, and (imho) a wasteful way to look at life.
In this case, I'd argue that in light of what you said above that I would have to pay you a LOT to get you to quit cooking and go do work, so the value of that chunk of time is actually quite high.
"No, the marginal income (in dollars) is the smallest amount of dollars that you'd take to work for someone else for those 6 minutes."
Theoretically, yes. But try to find someone who will employ you for just 6 minutes. There's not that much liquidity in the job market (yet?).
I just wanted to make that point because I believe many people (although perhaps not many hacker news types) are likely to waste their time because (from a cold, unfeeling economics nerd perspective) we tend to undervalue it.
Blowing 4 hours on the tube on for a CSI marathon becomes a lot less likely when you think of it as spending two-hundred bucks to be slightly entertained.
It's an unhealthy way to make every decision, but still a bit underused in my opinion.
Environmental costs are very clearly not computed very efficiently in our current market. Instead, they're external costs that get passed on to the public as a whole while the individual incurring them benefits. Maybe it's not worth cooking pasta in this way, but the dollar value you assigned misses all the externalities involved.
1) Fill pan with hot water (your water heater already expended a ton of energy heating the water, why waste that? Or if you have an energy efficient water heater that only heats water when you turn the tap on, well that's still tons more efficient than a gas or electric stove top).
2) Put pan on the stove and add copious amounts of water.
3) Insert pasta and wait ~10 minutes, or to your personal texture preference.
4) Drain pasta and place on plate.
5) Eat pasta; a good pasta is usually tasty just on its own.
PS: There are lots of ways you can make it cheaper or faster such as covering the pot while you wait for the water to boil. In the end it's not a big deal, but if it's saving you time and money why not?
If _you_ don't know why you use the amount of water you do, try it with less until you see a difference. (This advice goes for pretty much everything)
Perhaps they have stopped requesting sign-ups from international users.
Working extremely hard to compress a lifetime's earnings into a few years, e.g. from a startup.
Obsessing over a small number of hobbies, e.g. coding, to get unusually good at them.
The idea that people can improve themselves and their lot, and that results are linked with effort.
Everything in moderation - unless you want to be particularly good at it, perhaps.
[Edit: Damn, I've done it again. Voting you down because I disagree with you, even though raised a point I wanted to reply seriously to. Sorry].
I wonder how fast you could cook pasta in a pressure-cooker?
Italian grandmothers who make the best pasta would hate this article.