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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Based on Google numbers:

There’s 16M flights per year, so saving 5 minutes each is 80M minutes, which corresponds to 160 years.

A plane crash will kill about 160 people; so if one happens every twenty years, then we’ll have saved lives if the average age is over 50 (within 20 years of natural death) and lost lives otherwise.

Personally, seems a bad gamble.

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To get from minutes of time to minutes of human time, you have to multiply the 5 minutes by the number of passengers on the flight

I don't have an opinion one way or the other on the "optimization", just pointing out the missing step in the math

What you’re suggesting is any crash can be attributed to the US method of scheduling takeoff and landing (since that’s the risk issue you’re responding to). That’s not true. If a plane’s engine explodes in midair, it has nothing to do with how the ATC schedules takeoff and landing.

I couldn’t find any crashes listed on Wikipedia in the past 20 years that could be attributed to two planes being directed occupy a runway at the same time.

I remember when my grandfather and I were arguing about whether or not SNES or Sega Genesis was better(he worked for Motorola who made the Sega Genesis processor). Eventually we agreed that whichever one had more buttons on its controller was the superior product, so I won that discussion. Actually I think he was just ready to end the argument but I thought my logic was sound.

I'm not sure a one to one comparison here is appropriate, either. The fundamental argument that 1 minute of wasted time is equivalent to 1 minute of life seems tricky. To prove this is easy, simply ask yourself if you'd rather take a day off your life or spend a day waiting in line at the DMV. I think you'll find that most people would rather still be alive and at the DMV. Loss of life is not equivalent to loss of time.

It is the same thing. Life is finite. You will live every minute, but you better not waste most of them. Last thing you want is to run out of time and not done the things you wanted.

Say I offer to stand in line for you at the DMV and do all your paperwork that otherwise would have taken a day of your life, but in exchange at some point in the future, 1 day from your otherwise natural death, I will find you and shoot you in the head. say I have the resources to absolutely do this and there's no way to avoid it.

Do you take that deal? Why or why not?

Yes. Chances are high my natural death will occur at old age. One day today is worth more than one day as an old man.

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