And what percentage of total work produced do those 4.82 million hours represent?
You can't evaluate if it is a "tragic" cost or not without knowing the other half.
From their writeup, sounds like average time spent on Google for that day went from 33.6 million hours to 38.4 million hours - an increase of 14% more time spent per person on google.com for a single day. This doesn't sound tragic to me. If the average RescueTime user spends 4 and a half minutes on Google each day, an extra 36 seconds isn't going to destroy the economy.
This seems fairly common on HN: sarcasm and subtle humour just goes over (many) peoples' heads, and people keep discussing it as if it were serious.
That stumped me for a while because people here are smart in general. I won't go into why I think that happens. My conclusion is that it's better not to post anything humourous -- unless it's obviously humourous.
Thank you! :-) Yeah, more time is "wasted" getting coffee every day. We thought it was a lot more interesting how LITTLE actual time was spent on Google search and how the Pac-Man logo resulted in a 15% bump on average time logged.
You can't evaluate if it is a "tragic" cost or not without knowing the other half.
From their writeup, sounds like average time spent on Google for that day went from 33.6 million hours to 38.4 million hours - an increase of 14% more time spent per person on google.com for a single day. This doesn't sound tragic to me. If the average RescueTime user spends 4 and a half minutes on Google each day, an extra 36 seconds isn't going to destroy the economy.