Skeeter's kofi currently has a high marginal utility · 5:06pm Feb 26th, 2022
Skeeter
Skeeter the Lurker is having trouble. If you go to his kofi, it says he's reached "879% of $200 goal". That's misleading. He set that kofi up 2 years ago, to raise $200 to help pay the mechanic after an accident. This time it's a bigger problem, so that "879%" doesn't mean "879% of what Skeeter needs now". I delayed signal-boosting to ask him what it does mean, and whether he still needs money or not. 3 hours ago (Saturday morning) he wrote, "I... don't know. I think I should be good, actually."
I interpret that as meaning "The amount of money I have now should be just enough to last until my next paycheck." So on one hand, you could say his situation isn't urgent.
But on the other hand, you could say that this is the best time to give him some money, because he is right at the break-even point between "gets through this month without a hitch" and "becomes homeless or takes out a loan from a street gang". That means that a small gift has the highest marginal utility right now, because it has a high probability of making a difference. (Like being a voter in a swing state, as opposed to in California. Ask MyLittleEconomy if you need more explanation. Maybe we can prod another story out of him.)
Tangentially, the existence of non-swing states is an affront to democracy.
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Yes; I'd have thought that Democrats and Republicans could agree the current system is stupid. But apparently not. When I talk to people about it, the answer we usually arrive at is that the system can't be abolished because then the Senate would no longer exist, and states with small populations would have very little say. But this is stupid: we could keep the system we have now, but distribute fractional electoral college votes, with each candidate getting the same fraction of electoral votes as they received of the popular vote. It's a trivially easy fix; yet people seem irrationally attached to integers. I think most people are literally afraid of, or offended by, rational numbers.
The simple "one vote + winner-take-all" system is also stupid, as is our failure to adopt an algorithm to draw electoral district boundaries. We have much better alternatives.
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Even when i talk to nerds who love arguing about RCV STV etc there's some mental block about reforming the winner take all per state of the EC. I'm surprised some court hasn't ruled in a suit saying "giving all 3000 of california's EC votes Blue violates the rights of the 30% who voted red." I know it would end up a mixed bag like gerrymandering cases but it holds water.
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The problem, I think, is at least in part (and maybe mostly) that conservatives have been propagandizing - and I'm not using that word frivolously or merely disparagingly, it really is usually propaganda - that the Electoral College has to be kept in exactly its current condition because if it was changed, "big cities would decide elections" (they wouldn't, by almost any reasonable definition of 'big city' all of them combined wouldn't have the numbers to let cities form some sort of arrogant cabal that unilaterally decides the Presidential election) and "smaller states would lose their voice" (which they wouldn't, because 'representing smaller states' isn't even what the President's job is supposed to be as the head of the executive branch on a federal level, and we have a Senate and a House of Representatives specifically for the purpose of representing individual states) and "we need faithless electors as a last line of defense against tyrannical or incompetent candidates who've somehow fooled the general population into voting for them anyway" (haha, yeah, THAT safety net definitely worked in 2016, right????).
All this is to say, what keeps the Electoral College around is really just that Republicans know they're a minority by significant margins and they'll likely never win another Presidential election again in the foreseeable near(ish) future if it was actually a popular vote, or anything representing a popular vote in a way that was fair to all voters. This has been true for at least two decades - both Republican Presidents that have held office since the 2000 election lost the popular vote, while neither Democrat President failed to win it - and the Electoral College is pretty clearly an underdog party's desperate cheat code to disproportionate power.
...Aaaaaanyway, that's a long digression. The point here is, go help Skeeter! That's something we don't need to be political about.
Thanks for boosting the signal! And for the clarification of what that's a percent of -- though, fortunately, it appears to have already gotten significantly higher, by the time I reached this post in my blog post backlog.