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Comment by kyleblarson | Hacker News Reader

"After 10 hours on the phone with customer service, two trips to the local Comcast office and a chat with a rogue technician, the myth has been busted"

So the author spent maybe 12 hours figuring this out? Is his or her time worth more than 20 or so bucks per hour?

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It doesn't work that way. If you can take any given hour and trade it for a certain amount of money, then you're lucky. I don't know anybody who can take 12 hours and trade them for $240, or say $600 (as you are hinting that this time is worth significantly more than $20/h).

I could get a second job, but that would pay less per hour, would start at a higher (fixed) number of hours, and bring a lot of responsibilities. Plus, it would cut into my precious free time.

Only for hyper-demanded successful freelancers time is completely fungable and arbitrarily tradeable into dollars. The rest of us can't monetarize their free time so easily. And I think a $250 saving for a day's work is pretty good for regular people. Besides, I think there was a bit of hyperbole in the "10 hours"...

Thanks for explaining this so well.

I constantly see people misinterpret "opportunity cost" in a situation like this, and you cleared it up nicely.

If it helps other people save money, then the time spent is more valuable. Creating and curating accurate information is a public service.

Ethics is the point, not ROI.

And this is the lesson that Capitalism teaches: if you do not like the ethics of another company, you are free to create a competing business model and hurt their ROI (if their current customers agree with you).

Or lobby your local municipality to revoke their franchisee agreement and fund/rollout municipal fiber, provided at a reasonable cost.

You need a free(r) market for that. Comcast gets franchise agreements with each municipality, and there is no competition for cable TV or internet.

It's not all about the money, maybe he enjoyed exposing Comcast's lies - most of the time anything interesting/exciting beats money, or people wouldn't be writing posts on Tumblr, drawing digital art, fixing old stuff and commenting on Hacker News...

You have to add the benefit of saving ~$250 to the benefit of getting the top post on HN. Then you divide.

Good point. Makes me think of people who go on mileage runs to accrue airline miles for status. They tend to compare value in cents per mile, and if the run yields a low enough cost per mile, it's worth their time to take a flight just to turn around and come back. It would be interesting to see a similar calculation taking into consideration time, likelihood of getting on the HN front page (or being the top post), and value of getting on the HN front page.

Where do I go to cash in my internet points?

That is so two bubbles ago.

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