Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic attempted to calculate how much Angry Birds, a popular smartphone game, cost the US economy every year. Based on some generous assumptions and light research (a technique we’re quite fond of ourselves), Madrigal estimated that the common pastime costs the US economy over 1.5 billion dollars a year. He came up with this number by estimating or finding that:

200 million minutes is spent by people playing Angry Birds each day

5% of that time is spent while employees are meant to be working

The average salary of a smartphone owner is $35

Madrigal notes that some of these assumptions are pretty ambitious, but concludes that his final figure is probably accurate in its order of magnitude. To read more about how he came to his numbers, as well as how this value compares to the estimated market value of Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, click here.