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From: tr@wind.bellcore.com (tom reingold)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.admin
Subject: Re: Some interesting news stats
Message-ID: <11250@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 25 Oct 88 12:44:03 GMT
Article-I.D.: bellcore.11250
References: <5200@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com
Reply-To: tr@wind.UUCP (tom reingold)
Organization: Bellcore, Morristown, Noo Joizy
Lines: 26

On the subject of "Some interesting news stats", spaf@arthur.cs.purdue.edu
(Gene Spafford) gives some very interesting statistics indeed!

$ [...]
$ Further assume that, on the average, each of the 303,000 (est.)
$ Usenet readers spends 20 minutes per day reading/posting news, at an
$ average hourly wage of $15 per hour per person (if they were working).
$ Then, the total cost of Usenet at its current size is $593,125,000 per
$ year!  Even if those numbers are off by a factor of 10 (doubtful),
$ those numbers are staggering!
$ [...]

This one, however, does not worry me.  Let the employers worry
about lost productivity on an individual basis.  (Not that I think
Gene is asking us to worry.)  You could make the same argument
about coffee breaks and how they are a threat to our GNP, etc.,
etc.  If all of us newsaholics weren't "wasting" our time and our
bosses' time reading news, we would probably be wasting it in other
ways, so it's questionable as to whether or not there is some kind
of real loss.

Tom Reingold
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