I rarely buy things in cash, and when I do, my retail experience tells me to avoid annoying the cashier and just hand over a bill rather than fiddling for quite a bit longer with exact change I might not even have. Since vending machines and parking meters won’t take pennies, the way they eventually exit my purse is consistently this: somebody is holding a charity collection for something like mosquito nets or whatnot and I pull out a handful of change and they get all the pennies and nickels I have. It is not too unlikely that, through this mechanism, my picking up a penny has saved a life.
But this is all beside the point: time isn’t fungible. None of the time I have spent picking up pennies had an available superior use all by its one-second-long lonesome. I find pennies to pick up when I’m walking somewhere and in little enough of a hurry to be taking in my surroundings; I find them when I have already decided to dedicate a morning to cleaning the house; I once found a twenty-pound-note on the ground in London while I was waiting for my aunt to rejoin me; I don’t find them when I am hard at work accomplishing maximally valuable tasks, or even when I am in a state and location suitable to performing such work!
I pick up pennies.
I rarely buy things in cash, and when I do, my retail experience tells me to avoid annoying the cashier and just hand over a bill rather than fiddling for quite a bit longer with exact change I might not even have. Since vending machines and parking meters won’t take pennies, the way they eventually exit my purse is consistently this: somebody is holding a charity collection for something like mosquito nets or whatnot and I pull out a handful of change and they get all the pennies and nickels I have. It is not too unlikely that, through this mechanism, my picking up a penny has saved a life.
But this is all beside the point: time isn’t fungible. None of the time I have spent picking up pennies had an available superior use all by its one-second-long lonesome. I find pennies to pick up when I’m walking somewhere and in little enough of a hurry to be taking in my surroundings; I find them when I have already decided to dedicate a morning to cleaning the house; I once found a twenty-pound-note on the ground in London while I was waiting for my aunt to rejoin me; I don’t find them when I am hard at work accomplishing maximally valuable tasks, or even when I am in a state and location suitable to performing such work!
I believe your calculation is off by at least an order of magnitude.
Just how unlikely is “too unlikely”? Maybe she just cares about lives an order of magnitude more than you expect her to.
Where did I perform anything best described as a “calculation”?