Are you 99.999999% sure that picking up that penny won't kill you?

This argument does not seem to be a valid reply to the post you link to. Picking up pennies does not seem very risky -- in particular it seems no more risky than many other jobs we would be willing to perform for $36/h. This is the beauty of quantifying it in terms of hourly wage -- we won't have to perform insanely complicated calculations about the risk and reward, we can just compare the risk and the reward to other routine things we do for a living.

That said, I'm a bit doubtful about his assertion that picking it up takes less than a second. 5 seconds seems like an equally reasonable estimate to me, and that would put the problem in a quite different light.

And on a personal note I throw a huge pile of pennies in the trash every other year, so having one more carries a negative utility for me. :)