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This is probably great for him, I rarely watch TV anymore, but I still watch a lot of series on DVD and such. However, in the space of 60 minutes, I can (for example) watch 3 episodes of The Simpsons or Futurama, not the 2 I'd get on TV.

I probably still watch the equivalent of about 3 hours of TV a day, just it's compacted into 2 hours. The other hour I can read a book, and a lot of the time I leave shows running on my media server just for some background noise.

I hate radio DJ's, so quite young I picked up the habit of using TV not radio as a tool for background noise. It's probably a bad habit, but I find in residential areas (I grew up in the quiet of the country) I get highly distracted by noises outside.

It is a compelling argument that if you dropped the 3+ hours of TV a day, you could make an extra $10K on minimum wage (here in Canada it would be about $16K on minimum wage). However, this advice might work great for one person, however if everyone in the country suddenly decided to cover 30+ hours a week of extra work, it would probably further collapse the economy. There's not enough jobs to go around the people we have already, if people suddenly double their hours then lots of people would likely loose their job.




>There's not enough jobs to go around the people we have already, if people suddenly double their hours then lots of people would likely loose their job.

There is not a fixed amount of work to do. If the author of this article just watched TV instead of creating the blog network that he did, he wouldn't have put anyone out of a job.


In the immediate, yes there's a very finite number of jobs. If there was an unlimited supply of jobs, not a single person in the world would be unemployed.

Jobs are tied to the economy, until the economy grows there can't be more jobs. The system might handle a flux of 10% new workers (either from a bizarre immigration mistake or a ton of people working over time or double full-time jobs) however, resources are finite. All 300 million people in the USA can't overnight get a second job.

In certain sectors there's probably great ease in getting a second job. However, there's not 300 million minimum wage jobs going.


I agree with that point, and perhaps I was a little callous in my original (grandparent) comment. The demand for workers is often very inelastic because it requires someone to figure out new ways to add value that requires workers.




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