> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant".
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
It doesn't matter whether useful economic work can be accomplished with savings of one second per person. Directly inflicting frustration one second at a time is still a bad thing.
And obviously, those seconds can add up to meaningful time wasted even on an individual basis.
> The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero
First of all, I said one million people, not 38 million people.
But second (no pun intended), this waste of human life doesn't just aggregate across people, but also for multiple offenders one any one particular victim.
A second on this website, a second on that site, a 10 second "loading" animation screen on a blog. It adds up. It adds up to all individual users actually wasting their life and productivity.
Your implication that it's fine to willfully waste a second from a million people is either not understanding what "a million people" means, or a borderline psychopathic disregard for other people.
You can also throw your trash on the ground, because really, is the city measurably worse off just because of you throwing just two candy wrappers in the park once a day? If someone accidentally drops trash, or makes a slow website because they don't have skill or time to make it faster, then that's a completely different matter.
This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.