While hilarious, and I upvoted it, I doubt economists would agree with the stated cost of the catpenny game, nor with its comparability to other forms of entertainment.
ETA: and catpenny seems likely to be subject to drastically diminishing returns.
Huh; I know someone who made this same suggestions, only he was talking about throwing the pennies at people… I suppose it’s worth noting that in this case, the pennies are not as recoverable.
On utility:
--bash.org
also from bash.org (made as a reply since I’m already at my 5-quote limit):
The analysis fails to take into account the cost of buying and raising of cats.
Or at least of maintaining friendships with people who have cats.
While hilarious, and I upvoted it, I doubt economists would agree with the stated cost of the catpenny game, nor with its comparability to other forms of entertainment.
ETA: and catpenny seems likely to be subject to drastically diminishing returns.
I seriously can’t decide if catpennies have diminishing marginal utility or not!
We should test this! Anyone got a cat? I’ve got 9 pennies I don’t want.
Don’t forget to consider the negative utility of an angry cat attacking the catpenny player, which will surely happen after x catpennies.
Anyone going to go looking for x? It would of course have to be statistical distribution, varying with cat age, breed, and so on.
Also, how hard you’ve managed to hit it with the pennies. I think you have to try to maximise the damage:irateness ration.
Doesn’t catpenny cost less than a penny (in terms of dollars spent)? You can recover most, if not all, of the pennies.
also, don’t forget to consider that the cat is conscious and might not like getting hit by pennies :)
Given yesterday’s xkcd, I note that Google has no hits for “strip catpennies.”
Huh; I know someone who made this same suggestions, only he was talking about throwing the pennies at people… I suppose it’s worth noting that in this case, the pennies are not as recoverable.