Monopoly Economics: When One Person Has All The Money, Game Over

Billionaire venture capitalist Nick Hanauer has made the news recently with his views about how inequality is bad for the economy. Here's a quote that got my attention.

"The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that’s quite charming, but in a real economy it’s much more problematic".

You can read the entire interview here.

Is Time Travel Possible?

Evidently, time travel is possible if you eat enough Doritos. This commercial was shot by amateur film maker Raj Suri for $200 and took eight hours to complete (read more here). It won Dorito's "Crash the SuperBowl" contest and is very funny (I love the yellow lab with his face in the Doritos bag).

Time travel is a complex concept (see the issues here) and requires violations of causality to accept. My favorite "impossibility theorem" is called Presentism which argues that neither the future nor the past exists and therefore there are no "non-present" objects you might return to or go to in the future.

Hey, Apple! Fix the iPhone Upgrade Process!

There's a new upgrade for the iPhone operating system (iOS 7.1.2). I've been through a lot of these upgrades. Everyone is the same: brain dead. 

Here's the problem. My iPhone is full of music. Each upgrade requires more free space. Changing my "...media sync options to make more storage available" doesn't really do that so I have to delete songs manually. This is like asking me to perform my own root canal. Every song I pull off manually is painful, like pulling another tooth.

Here are some options. I'm going to write the options out in pseudo code. Any one of my students could program this for you, Apple. If you're interested in hiring them, I'll send you a list.

The first option: automatically delete songs that aren't played very much until you have enough free space (I know you keep information on how often a song has been played).

Sort songs by the number of times each song has been played;

Do Until (There is enough free space);

     Delete songs starting with least played.

Here's another option: automatically put deleted songs out into the cloud.

Sort songs by the number of times each song has been played;

Do Until (There is enough free space);

     Put the least played song out in the cloud;

     Keep the song in the playlist but mark it as out in the cloud;

     Delete the song on the iPhone.

Here's another option: store all the music in the cloud unless I ask to play it. I have many, many more songs that I have purchased from you on iTunes than I can possible put on my iPhone.

Download to the iPhone the list of all songs purchased from iTunes;

When I select a song to be played, download it to my iPhone;

If ((my iPhone is out of space) or (you need more space for an upgrade)) Do Until (There is enough free space);

     Delete songs starting with least played.

Well, I could go on. 

"Why are you putting this on your blog," you ask, "rather than sending it to Apple as a suggestion?"

Obviously, you have never tried to make suggestions to a large computer manufacturer or a software developer. Try notifying Google Maps (or worse yet, Apple Maps) that something is wrong: "We'll let you know when we've upgraded the map to reflect your correction." Right! That was three years ago.

Is it just me or does it seem that Apple System Programming is a bit uninspired these days?