> Let’s say your city releases a list of all trees planted on its public property. It would be a godsend—at least in theory. You could filter the data into a list of all the fruit and nut trees in the city, transfer it into an online database, and create a smartphone app that helps anyone find free food.

So assuming that an individual fruit tree produces 20,000 calories of edible fruit annually, and there are a couple dozen fruit trees in a typical American city, we will have spent a hundred man hours in app development and testing to turn half a million potential calories into a few thousand, as we inflict the tragedy of the commons on these public resources and encourage people to pick the immature fruit before someone else with the app does.

That idea is so stupid, by next week I expect to see 8 startups with a combined valuation of 80 million dollars all attempting to monetize the 24 fruit trees on public property in Mountain View by selling ads targeting "urban nomads" (aka homeless), or by paying homeless to gather unripe fruit for each other in whatever litecoin or ripple clone is in vogue that week.