I completely agree with the point being made by the story about the microwave, but I don’t find that specific story very convincing. If my microwave were twice as fast or twice as slow, it would not make me have substantially more or less free time, or at least it wouldn’t do so by a direct conversion between time taken microwaving things and free time.
Almost all the time when I am microwaving things for more than 20 seconds, I am doing something else concurrently. Sometimes that’s because the food preparation process involves multiple parallelizable things; in this case the harm done by a much slower microwave would be that I’d have to think harder about scheduling. Less commonly, the food preparation tasks don’t parallelize but there’s something else I need to do (say, emptying the dishwasher) and I can overlap microwaving with that. And when even that isn’t so, I can generally find something reasonably pleasant to do for a few minutes—read a book, get massacred at chess by my telephone, etc. -- while I wait for the microwave to run, so the appropriate cost-of-time isn’t for meaningless waiting versus whatever I’d have been doing instead, it’s for the best waiting-compatible thing I can do versus whatever I’d have been doing instead.
The story in the OP shows some awareness of this when it doesn’t just have the slower microwave being slower, but says that using involves “repeated breaks to check and stir”. It’s harder to parallelize something that needs repeated attention. Maybe I have a particularly effective microwave (I don’t think so, and think the opposite is more likely[1]), but my experience is that nothing ever needs that much repeated attention. Things that need longer in the microwave can tolerate longer intervals between checking/stirring.
[1] My microwave doubles as a conventional oven. It doesn’t have a turntable, and it doesn’t look to me as if it does any magic tricks to vary where the nodes and antinodes of the field are inside the oven (is that a thing? I don’t think I’ve heard of it being, but it seems like it might be possible somehow), and I think it’s of the type that achieves lower-power settings by turning on and off at intervals of several seconds.
My case may be atypical. For instance, I don’t generally cook meals in the microwave, and maybe those are particularly bad. (Examples of things I do do: cooking frozen peas or sweetcorn; softening butter; melting chocolate. All of these are things that with my microwave do require multiple rounds of checking and stirring, but none of them would save me that much time if I had a magical microwave that did away with that need.
… And, speaking of time and tradeoffs, this is all far more time than it actually makes much sense to spend analysing the costs of a microwave oven :-). But there’s a broader point, which is that many of the tradeoffs this article is about involve your time, and there are important subtleties that make a big difference to how you value that, so that two things that “take 15 minutes of your time” may have very different actual costs, depending not only on how much you like doing them but also on when you have to do them, what else you can be doing at the same time, what else you could be doing instead at that time, etc.
I completely agree with the point being made by the story about the microwave, but I don’t find that specific story very convincing. If my microwave were twice as fast or twice as slow, it would not make me have substantially more or less free time, or at least it wouldn’t do so by a direct conversion between time taken microwaving things and free time.
Almost all the time when I am microwaving things for more than 20 seconds, I am doing something else concurrently. Sometimes that’s because the food preparation process involves multiple parallelizable things; in this case the harm done by a much slower microwave would be that I’d have to think harder about scheduling. Less commonly, the food preparation tasks don’t parallelize but there’s something else I need to do (say, emptying the dishwasher) and I can overlap microwaving with that. And when even that isn’t so, I can generally find something reasonably pleasant to do for a few minutes—read a book, get massacred at chess by my telephone, etc. -- while I wait for the microwave to run, so the appropriate cost-of-time isn’t for meaningless waiting versus whatever I’d have been doing instead, it’s for the best waiting-compatible thing I can do versus whatever I’d have been doing instead.
The story in the OP shows some awareness of this when it doesn’t just have the slower microwave being slower, but says that using involves “repeated breaks to check and stir”. It’s harder to parallelize something that needs repeated attention. Maybe I have a particularly effective microwave (I don’t think so, and think the opposite is more likely[1]), but my experience is that nothing ever needs that much repeated attention. Things that need longer in the microwave can tolerate longer intervals between checking/stirring.
[1] My microwave doubles as a conventional oven. It doesn’t have a turntable, and it doesn’t look to me as if it does any magic tricks to vary where the nodes and antinodes of the field are inside the oven (is that a thing? I don’t think I’ve heard of it being, but it seems like it might be possible somehow), and I think it’s of the type that achieves lower-power settings by turning on and off at intervals of several seconds.
My case may be atypical. For instance, I don’t generally cook meals in the microwave, and maybe those are particularly bad. (Examples of things I do do: cooking frozen peas or sweetcorn; softening butter; melting chocolate. All of these are things that with my microwave do require multiple rounds of checking and stirring, but none of them would save me that much time if I had a magical microwave that did away with that need.
… And, speaking of time and tradeoffs, this is all far more time than it actually makes much sense to spend analysing the costs of a microwave oven :-). But there’s a broader point, which is that many of the tradeoffs this article is about involve your time, and there are important subtleties that make a big difference to how you value that, so that two things that “take 15 minutes of your time” may have very different actual costs, depending not only on how much you like doing them but also on when you have to do them, what else you can be doing at the same time, what else you could be doing instead at that time, etc.