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Fact:
"Nationwide an estimated annual savings of 9300 man-hours and $130,000 worth of ink could be gained if dates were written without extraneous 0's (2/27/6, for example, instead of 2/27/06)." - Posted by Fred
As another use for the forum, maybe we can do quick follow-ups to the most recent day's facts.
I just got off the phone with our web fact checker. He and I did some quick figuring and it turns out that storing a single displayed zero on a web server for an entire year costs 10^ -7 dollars. Multiply that out by all the zeroes in cyberspace and the savings of simplyfying dates on-line would only amount to $8.33.
This figure, of course, is global rather than national. Unfortunatley, isolating the dates hosted on US servers was too daunting a task. A rough estimate using the end figure and the proportion of web data stored on US servers yields $6.27 as the answer.
Well, now wait a minute.
There seems to be some confusion about the statement of this fact, which concerns _hand_written_ 0's.
Assuming each 0 takes 1/10th of second to write, and that the average citizen of this great land has an occasion to write just one extra zero per day, that comes to a whopping, uh, oh, >>3 million<< man hours per year. At minimum wage, we're talking about $15 million in lost wages and productivity.
Dang calculator. Anyway, the figure is off, but way in the other direction. Oh dear. Better contact Legal. Barnes threw a fit last time we had to worry about a retraction.
no worries Fred, NHawkins was just talking about it from a pure physical capacity. That is to say, how much space on a hard drive it takes to store those extra zeros. This savings gets added on to yours, for a total savings of $15,000,006.27 per year.
The statistic was offered as a comparison between print costs and online costs - the reproduced and readable zeroes of the world. Obviously, I didn't go deep enough into your fact file for the day to see that you were referring to hand-written zeroes. I only fault myself for not following company policy.
However, if you were to fully calculate man-hours, you would also have to factor in transition costs. The full move to a new date system would actually cost money in the short-run. Additionally, the zero serves as a vital placeholder - just as important in marking the year as one through nine will be in the coming decades. That loss, of course, can not be quantified in mere dollars.
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