Studio711.com – Ben Martens

All of our photos, including the ones we take on the phone, end up getting stored on our computer. This week, Tyla was looking back at photos from 2013 and she noticed that all the photos from her phone between January 1 and June 6 were gone. Uh oh.

I said I’d take a look but obviously they were nowhere to be found on the computer. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem. I fired up CrashPlan, told it to show me all the files including ones that were later deleted from the computer and voila, there they were. A couple clicks and I had all the photos back on my machine again.

We’ve been happily using CrashPlan for five years now and this is the first time I’ve used it for a major recovery operation. But even if we never used it, I’d still pay for it. It’s only $60 and that’s cheap insurance.

For the last couple months, I’ve been playing the Monopoly game at our local grocery store. When you buy items, you get game pieces and if you collect all the pieces in a specific set then you get the associated prize. I know it’s ridiculous to play but it was something to do during the times that I was watching Elijah but he was content to play by himself.

The most I ever won was a free DVD rental from Red Box (not even a BluRay) and a free jar of pickles. Yay. Totally worth my time.

I’d love to know exactly how much they actually pay out. They say they are giving away a hundred of million dollars, but there are so many sneaky ways that they don’t actually end up paying.

• Many of the game pieces include $0.25 coupons for specific products. I imagine that most people, like me, immediately toss those.
• It’s a lot of work to keep track of everything. You have to stay on top of it to have any hope of winning so that weeds out a huge number of people. I bet a lot of gamepieces get lost or just thrown away when they are taken home.
• If you do keep up with it, you pretty quickly figure out that there are some game pieces that are common and one from every set that is impossible to get.
• If you assume that a decent percentage of people who get the tickets don’t actually end up following through with analyzing them all, then it follows that the rare pieces that you need to win are ending up in the trash somewhere.
• The game is spread across the country and across many grocery chains.

I knew all this going in, but I still played.

When it finally ended, I looked up the odds. I should have done it from the beginning. Here are some of the interesting stats:

• Each set does indeed have a rare piece, but there is also a semi-rare piece. The odds of getting the semi-rare piece are 1 in 5000. So if you get to the point where you only need one more, you’re doing pretty good.
• Free Redbox rentals are the easiest to get. The odds of finding the rare piece for that prize are 1 in 1620.
• If you take out the little instant winner prizes (like Redbox) and the prizes that just gives you two more game tickets, then your odds of finding ANY rare game pieces are 1 in 4157.
• Lots of the game tickets include a code that you can enter online for another chance to win. All I ever won there was more of the free ticket coupons. If you take out those, the odds of winning anything online are 1 in 80,598.

It’s relatively easy to collect all the non-rare pieces. The whole game really boils down to just finding those rare pieces. I’m guessing that I probably acquired around 400-500 game pieces over the course of the game. So even with all that work, my odds of winning anything were tiny. Put all those numbers together and I had about a 10% chance of winning anything worth more than $10. Bump it up to a prize worth more than $100 and my odds fell to less than a percent. That’s not a very good return on my time investment.

Over 325,000 people lined up to put $1000 down on the new Tesla 3. It’s an incredible accomplishment for Tesla considering that many people lined up without even knowing what the car looked like. Tesla could be the next Apple in terms of producing stuff that people blindly want. They’ve built an incredibly good reputation.

The concern is whether or not Tesla can deliver. It seems like Elon Musk’s plan from the beginning was to learn about electric cars with the early expensive models. Now we’re seeing the full gamble play out. This is make or break time for the company. Tesla can currently make about 50,000 cars per year so at that rate, it will take them six years to fill the orders and they aren’t even going to start shipping them until late 2017. With that many orders lined up, Tesla can go to investors and request a lot of money to build out even more factories so they should be able to ramp up production.

That’s a huge number of electric vehicles. Estimates put the total number of electric cars in the US around 410,000. Tesla sold about 63,000 of those. It’s pretty easy for people to back out of their orders and get their $1000 back, but if even half of the people buy the car, it’s a very sizeable percentage of the total market.

They’ll have to really bring down their production costs too. Car companies generally include research and development costs in the cost of their car. That’s how the companies can stay afloat. Tesla does NOT include R&D in the cost of their cars and even then they aren’t making much money on each one sold. It may be a viable business strategy in the beginning but at some point they have to turn the corner and really be a profitable company.

I hope they succeed and given all of the amazing things Elon Musk has accomplished, it’s hard to bet against them. That being said, this is a huge undertaking. It will be fun to watch!