I got Panda for dinner, and my fortune cookie said, “If given a penny for every kind act, you’d be a millionaire.” That just sounded wrong, so I did the math, and here’s what I got:
I’d need to do 100,000,000 kind acts to get $1 million. Let’s assume I can do 10 kind acts per hour, I’m awake 16 hours a day, and there are 365.25 days in a year. At that rate I’m doing 58,440 kind acts per year, which means it’d take over 1,700 years to get enough kind acts to make a million dollars. Even if I were to kick it up 100 kind acts per hour (more than 1 per minute) it’s still going to take close to 200 years. That’s still almost an order of magnitude off of something realistic, so whoever wrote the fortune in the cookie didn’t even bother with a back of the envelope calculation.
The only way I could see this working is if I were to get credited for kind acts per person, and was able to do wide, sweeping acts of kindness to large portions of the population. For example, if I bought a Playstation for an orphanage, I’d get a couple hundred pennies, one for each child who played it. Or if I accidentally ran over O.J. Simpson, I’d get ~300 million pennies for doing all of America a favor, and I’d hit $3 million all at once.
Anyway, here’s a link that talks about the origins of fortune cookies. Apparently they’re from Japan.
9 Comments »
