Rain Man
07-09-2007, 07:34 PM
Hypothetical situation:
You're hard at work at your frozen scorpion stand, giving out samples to the kiddies and enjoying the nice, fresh flavor of scorpion. You're the only employee, so you have no coworkers. It's just you, the scorpions, and a lot of raspberry sauce and ice cream. You make $50,000 per year, in a city where that will buy you a nice upper middle class home and NFL Sunday Ticket.
While you're wiping down the counter, your boss arrives. He's the big cheese, the big kahuna, the guy who makes all of the trips down to Mexico to personally hand-pick and taste each month's batch of scorpions.
He has big news. He's going to open up a string of new scorpion stands at ten-mile intervals along the highway out east of town, which has a strictly enforced speed limit of 60 mph. He thinks that no one will be able to resist a raspberry-covered frozen scorpion if they have to drive by it every ten miles, and you agree.
He wants to transfer you to one of the new scorpion stands. However, your commute now is only 200 feet, which is quite easy, and obviously any new commute is going to be longer. However, you can't pass up this opportunity since you think frozen scorpions are the next Starbucks.
Two-part question:
1. What is the longest commute you would make from your current home before you moved to be closer to your job? Assume that the highway is surrounded by suburbs that are all more or less identical. Assume that you own your home and like your neighbors and you have a kid who is entering sixth grade and has spent all of her years so far at Larry Howard Elementary. Your spouse doesn't work due to a freak accident that left him/her unable to make change or write the letter "e".
2. If your boss wanted to open a scorpion stand out west of town, where there is no housing and it's a 60-minute commute each way from your home, how much more money would you need to make to accept that job and feel like you're breaking even?
You're hard at work at your frozen scorpion stand, giving out samples to the kiddies and enjoying the nice, fresh flavor of scorpion. You're the only employee, so you have no coworkers. It's just you, the scorpions, and a lot of raspberry sauce and ice cream. You make $50,000 per year, in a city where that will buy you a nice upper middle class home and NFL Sunday Ticket.
While you're wiping down the counter, your boss arrives. He's the big cheese, the big kahuna, the guy who makes all of the trips down to Mexico to personally hand-pick and taste each month's batch of scorpions.
He has big news. He's going to open up a string of new scorpion stands at ten-mile intervals along the highway out east of town, which has a strictly enforced speed limit of 60 mph. He thinks that no one will be able to resist a raspberry-covered frozen scorpion if they have to drive by it every ten miles, and you agree.
He wants to transfer you to one of the new scorpion stands. However, your commute now is only 200 feet, which is quite easy, and obviously any new commute is going to be longer. However, you can't pass up this opportunity since you think frozen scorpions are the next Starbucks.
Two-part question:
1. What is the longest commute you would make from your current home before you moved to be closer to your job? Assume that the highway is surrounded by suburbs that are all more or less identical. Assume that you own your home and like your neighbors and you have a kid who is entering sixth grade and has spent all of her years so far at Larry Howard Elementary. Your spouse doesn't work due to a freak accident that left him/her unable to make change or write the letter "e".
2. If your boss wanted to open a scorpion stand out west of town, where there is no housing and it's a 60-minute commute each way from your home, how much more money would you need to make to accept that job and feel like you're breaking even?