As part of wrestling out the cost of hobby software projects, I’m trying to figure this out. How does resting and human recreation factor in as an economic value? The whole idea with hobby projects is that you might subtract from recreation, or maybe even sleep, to add to the value of a hobby project. But if you can’t know the value of those, how do you determine the value of a hobby project?
Okay, here is the way to properly understand this. Humans need to sleep. As if it couldn’t be said more bluntly. The trick is to define it as a basic human need, like the need to eat. Therefore, if it is compromised and under-nourished, it will have a calculable negative impact on the economic value of anything else that is more directly produced as a function of labor over working hours of time directly on a project. Likewise, you can argue the same for recreation: Personal recreation is required for human health. But, here’s the key. The need has to be understood on an individual basis, there is no one-size-fits-all for the need for sleep and recreation.
The trick here is to properly understand those as prime variables to satsify for optimum human health, and therefore working performance, of an individual person. The trouble, at first sight, is that these are very expensive activities to fulfill in terms of time consumption, and ultimately, they cost food energy. But, once those are satisfied, the time that remains for working is available at 100%. And, what is the definition of that 100%? At the outset, without respect to time… it is the smartest worker you can get for an undefined amount of time.
So… now I’m really getting detailed. What if you don’t need 100% of the worker’s available intelligence? Purportedly, you could therefore make compromises on their available recreation and sleep time and they would still do just as well on the labor activities. With that assumption in place, it simply means that mundane labor can be worked more cheaply by a smarter worker who has had their recreation and sleep “stolen away” from them, because… that means that their food energy cost, in terms of that required to maintain their basal metabolic rate, is reduced per unit of labor time.
But, circling back to the first question. What is the economic value of sleep and recreation? Well, now we have a precise measurement stick to grade against. It is the difference between the economic value of a large quantity of mundane labor versus a small quantity of highly intellectual labor. Ultimately, in this case, I still have a productivity scalar factor that is specific to each individual worker. And, given the rigid definition that I had provided, you also have to account that the base living expenses for different people differ, for example, fundamentally because bigger people have a higher basal metabolic rate, and therefore cost more energy for any job. Unless, of course, their larger body size has a specific advantage to a job, for example in the case of distinctively physical labor.
Humans are, in all senses, quite different from server computer hardware. Server computers run 24x7, working tirelessly to serve. Alas, they are utterly dependent on humans to keep paying to keep their necessary operating expense resources of energy and network connectivity coming. We must not forget about the machines among us that work tirelessly to serve, lest we stop paying to support them.