$20 trillion for telly
Count Kostov has decided to dive head first into the meadow mayonnaise with the intention of coming out smelling of roses. Roses grow best in dung anyway.
Most of the vermin who produce the bullshit "cost of..." estimates are pathetic professionals. They should remember that professionals built the Titanic (and the Dome, 1960's tower blocks and the Morris Marina): an amateur built the Ark. So the Count will now prove that gentlemen (aristocrats and true blooded amateurs alike) can always beat the so-called professionals at their own game.
The professionals thought they had hit the jackpot by estimating global warming could cost £10 trillion in the years to come. I will now prove, by using the professionals own methods, that Television costs $20 trillion. Every year. It will cost a billion trillion over the next fifty years. If this much money was placed in pound coins in a tower above London, the planet would implode.
Step one is to find out how much telly the peasants watch. I asked my butler, Digdog, this question. He claimed not to know any peasants. I told him to ask his parents. He also complained that I made him work so hard that he never had tiem to watch telly. But so I got the dog to dig. When asked to dig for something he is like a dog with a bone: he will not give up.
Digdog eventually found that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Scientific American had estimated that on average the peasants in the industrialised world spend 3 hours a day going goggle eyed. That is nine years of a mis-spent lifetime. Incidentally, you are entitled to award yourself another medal if you pronounced Mihaly's family name without going goggle-eyed or boggle throated.
Now take the three hours a day. Multiply by $8 an hour (far too much pay given the price of potatos and gruel, but it can't be helped). Multiply that by 1.5 billion people. Multiply that by 365 days. Suddenly you have $20 trillion a year which could be productively spent by young children climbing chimneys to sweep them and by grannies doing something useful like sweeping out the factory, cooking for the troops and knitting underwear instead of complaining that the Count is an idle layabout.
$20 trillion is about the size of the US and European economies combined. Without TV we could be twice as well off.
It may be $20 or $2 or $200 trillion. The Count ran out of fingers and believes that calculators are the invention of the devil, designed to make idle brains idler. So you go figure. Not that the maths count for the Count, because however good the maths may be, the assumptions are a load of bollocks.
This, of course, is precisely the point. All the "cost of..." calculations are complete bollocks. Someone with an axe to grind dreams up an imaginary figure to prove an imaginary problem and then demands huge amount of real money to solve the imaginary problem.
However, in this case there is clearly a real problem: $20 trillion a year. The problem needs to be understood more and to be resolved: the benefits to society of solving the TV challenge will be huge. So the first step is to invest a modest billion or two in the STOP Society. (Stop Television Overwhelming Peasants). You may rest assured that as STOP is owned and run by the Count, any billions it receives will be very well spent: on himself.
Most of the vermin who produce the bullshit "cost of..." estimates are pathetic professionals. They should remember that professionals built the Titanic (and the Dome, 1960's tower blocks and the Morris Marina): an amateur built the Ark. So the Count will now prove that gentlemen (aristocrats and true blooded amateurs alike) can always beat the so-called professionals at their own game.
The professionals thought they had hit the jackpot by estimating global warming could cost £10 trillion in the years to come. I will now prove, by using the professionals own methods, that Television costs $20 trillion. Every year. It will cost a billion trillion over the next fifty years. If this much money was placed in pound coins in a tower above London, the planet would implode.
Step one is to find out how much telly the peasants watch. I asked my butler, Digdog, this question. He claimed not to know any peasants. I told him to ask his parents. He also complained that I made him work so hard that he never had tiem to watch telly. But so I got the dog to dig. When asked to dig for something he is like a dog with a bone: he will not give up.
Digdog eventually found that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Scientific American had estimated that on average the peasants in the industrialised world spend 3 hours a day going goggle eyed. That is nine years of a mis-spent lifetime. Incidentally, you are entitled to award yourself another medal if you pronounced Mihaly's family name without going goggle-eyed or boggle throated.
Now take the three hours a day. Multiply by $8 an hour (far too much pay given the price of potatos and gruel, but it can't be helped). Multiply that by 1.5 billion people. Multiply that by 365 days. Suddenly you have $20 trillion a year which could be productively spent by young children climbing chimneys to sweep them and by grannies doing something useful like sweeping out the factory, cooking for the troops and knitting underwear instead of complaining that the Count is an idle layabout.
$20 trillion is about the size of the US and European economies combined. Without TV we could be twice as well off.
It may be $20 or $2 or $200 trillion. The Count ran out of fingers and believes that calculators are the invention of the devil, designed to make idle brains idler. So you go figure. Not that the maths count for the Count, because however good the maths may be, the assumptions are a load of bollocks.
This, of course, is precisely the point. All the "cost of..." calculations are complete bollocks. Someone with an axe to grind dreams up an imaginary figure to prove an imaginary problem and then demands huge amount of real money to solve the imaginary problem.
However, in this case there is clearly a real problem: $20 trillion a year. The problem needs to be understood more and to be resolved: the benefits to society of solving the TV challenge will be huge. So the first step is to invest a modest billion or two in the STOP Society. (Stop Television Overwhelming Peasants). You may rest assured that as STOP is owned and run by the Count, any billions it receives will be very well spent: on himself.
posted by Count Kostov at
9:04 am
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