Government by Donation

Last week, someone apparently decided to set up a GoFundMe page for people to donate money towards paying for President Trump's proposed border wall. As of this writing, it's at about $16.5 million out of a $1 billion goal.

I do want to start by pointing out that there are several complaints about this donation project that I don't agree with. As nice as it is to play games with math showing how long it will take to reach their goal or predict that the rate of donations will drop, it's probably not that easy to make guesses about the rate of donations. And while it's tempting to point out how much else we could get other than political stunts with this money, the average donation is right around $50, and all of us are probably guilty at one point or another of using sums like that in a less than ideal fashion.

What I do want to ask is: do we really want our government to work this way? 

The one detail I will use from the math problem I discounted above is that even if the donation rate doubles, it would take months to reach the goal - and years to get the actual amount we'd need for the wall. Even if we decide that's okay for this project, there are a number of things our government needs a bit more urgently than that. We did, after all, learn all the way back before we even had a Constitution that a federal government that can only ask for money can't even pay its debts, much less do anything else.

And making a habit of this also means tying our government's ability to pay for things to the wealth level of the portion of society that favors a particular project or the strength of the viral marketing campaign they can come up with. Both of those possibilities seem like they could make our country very undemocratic if they end badly.

Even if we decide we'll only do it for some limited projects, that still offers an option for people to do end runs around the democratic process by offering conditional donations. There are ways to avoid that, but we'd need to be careful about how we set it up. Otherwise, we'd see the government forced to choose between accepting money for projects that the people don't want or turning down money that it generally needs more of. 

Book Journal: Throne of Glass

One of the nice things about NaNoWriMo is that spending lots of time around plenty of other people who like books is very helpful in getting new book recommendations... I learned about this fantasy series at one of the writing events last month and have just gotten around to actually reading it. (Which means I've finished the first four books in the series and am working on more. I think there are seven books in all.)

It's quite good. A lot of these novels have problems creating any kind of serious internal conflicts for the heroines and heroes; given that I occasionally thought this one was going a bit overboard on the self-doubt and regret, it definitely doesn't have that problem.

Without getting too much into spoilers (read as: you may want to stop here if you haven't read it yet, but don't have to), I also liked the way it brought the main characters into the central conflict of the story. There's a great evil that's hunting for magical artifacts it can use in its nefarious plan... and it's already mostly done with that stage, forcing the main characters to scramble a bit if they want to cause any disruption to the plan at all, and putting them at a serious disadvantage for almost all of what I've read so far.

However, the antagonists still make mistakes too, and the protagonists do a great job of using those to their advantage. It ends up making both sides seem very realistically flawed while still allowing everyone to have their chance to do some very clever scheming and plotting.

Also (major spoiler alert) there's plenty of magical fireworks once one gets far enough into the series, so if what you really want is to read about an entire castle getting melted by a magical blast of fire, you can have that too.

Meritocracy's Weakness

Earlier this month, right after the former President Bush's death, two editorials showed up in the New York Times which drew a fair bit of criticism for their views of what makes the ruling class in the US (such as it is) worthy of their positions in society.

I happen to agree with a lot of the criticism of the first one - I think it ignores a lot of the flaws of the old guard and doesn't acknowledge that sometimes people appear more trustworthy because they look more like us - but it still brings up a useful point, and the second one develops that point further. Specifically, they point out that an elite class ostensibly based on merit alone can still share many of the flaws of an aristocracy based on inheritance and privilege.

It's a useful reminder that designing a system with a specific goal in mind (in this case, to ensure that those at the top of our society are there because they deserve it) is often more difficult than it looks and vulnerable to any number of shortfalls and unintended consequences. In our case, we've hidden or willfully ignored many of the ways in which unearned advantages affect people's results even as we tried to focus on merit alone. And we're not willing to fix it, because the steps we'd need to take to even find the problem look like steps backward to any number of people.

I think the conclusion the second article ends on - that our elites should be aware of how they got there, rather than suffering from any illusions about their place in society - is a good one, even if I think it still paints an overly bright picture of the past. It certainly is a useful detail to remember as we keep trying to find a new way forward.

Strawman Arguments

There have been a lot of interesting stories lately about little things like how the left hates "Baby It's Cold Outside".

To me, one of the interesting things is that I first heard about these things from the conservative people I know calling people stupid for complaining about them, rather than from the liberal people I know actually complaining about them. Particularly given that I have far more liberal friends than conservative ones, it's hard to believe that anything which is a common complaint on the left wouldn't come from the former group first. It almost makes me question how much the average liberal actually believes such things.

Sarcasm aside, it's worth taking a closer look at how and why we complain about small numbers of people complaining about random things. Sometimes it is appropriate to call attention to such things and make a point about poor arguments and extreme views. (If you're hoping I'm about to clarify whether or not I think the liberal complaints in question actually are that sort of extreme view, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you, though.) However, there's a dangerously fine line between doing it in a way that limits the scope to just the extremists in question and doing it in a way that tries to make everyone on the other side look like the extremists in question. I get quite tired of people complaining about how nasty the other side's discourse is and then doing things like the latter that simply add more fuel to the fire.

It's also worth looking at what we want done about the problems we complain about. Personally, I don't care if someone decides not to listen to a song or the like, whether their reasons are good or bad. That goes double if it's only a small number of people. Even if they start encouraging other people to do the same, it doesn't affect me much unless I care about their opinions of me. If they asked me point blank for my opinion, I suppose I might tell them, depending on how much I wanted to deal with an argument. But I wouldn't bother a whole lot more than that; their views simply aren't going to affect me much. It irritates me that many of the people I know that claim to be about personal freedom aren't willing to extend the same courtesy to their opponents.

Democrats and Populism

Usually it's the conservative columnists at the NYT that have me shaking my head inside the first paragraph or two... but there are rare occasions where it happens with the liberal ones as well. And this piece about what the Democrats should focus on to win in 2020 is one of them.

The short version is that I don't like populists, and I don't want the Democrats to focus as much on populism as this editorial calls for.

To be fair, there's a version of populism that I can support, and the graphs in that article about who earns more support as the defender of the working class illustrate why. A lot of these policies are popular because they legitimately do support the working class and are things we should be doing. To that extent, I definitely do want the Democrats to focus on their support for such things and make them a central part of the message.

However, I also think there's a version of populism that focuses too much on economic anxiety and ignores social issues - this was the major problem I had with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. I can understand that not everyone cares about the latter, but given that the Democrats are going to get blasted by the other side for their social views regardless of how extreme they are, I don't think it's worth compromising on those views in order to avoid distractions.

That isn't the worst of it, though, because there's also the sort of populism that amounts to telling people what they want to hear regardless of its practicality. In particular, there probably are some moderate swing voters out there that want both lower taxes and more government benefits; we've seen that phenomenon before in the Republican, rural sections of the country voting for candidates that promise to cut taxes even as they're voting for Medicare expansions and other liberal policies. The problem is that any sort of promise we make telling them they can have both is almost certainly false - in the Democrats' case, it'd be because we'd feel that we had to raise taxes to support programs (as opposed to the Republicans cutting programs to support their tax cuts whether or not they said they were going to keep the programs), but that would still be the sort of lie that is all too common in politics.

Election Forecasting Accuracy

FiveThirtyEight isn't the only news source I know of that tries to check themselves for errors and talk about why they got things wrong (or why they got them right), but they do tend to be more comprehensive about it than most places are. The specific example which I'm writing about is this very detailed article from last week about their midterm forecasts.

One of the most counter-intuitive things I got from that article is that their probabilistic forecasts mean that they actually don't want to be right all of the time. For example, out of all the races they say are fifty-fifty splits, they'd want to get half of them right - if they were capable of picking the winner more often than that, it would imply that the odds weren't actually even to begin with. So they're actually worried if they're calling too many of the winners accurately, which is a rather amusing problem to have.

They also offered a number of concerns they might want to take a harder look at as they go on to forecast the 2020 election. One of them was underestimating the effects that stronger partisanship was going to have, which is rather depressing but certainly not surprising. The other big one was them discounting polls conducted by partisan groups a bit too much in some cases. It will be interesting to see how they change their forecasts going forward... although we might not figure out how useful any changes are until it's time for the 2020 postmortem.

And then I probably have to admit that one of my favorite parts was the closing portion, which I will just quote rather than trying to paraphrase:

We actually do think there’s enough of a track record now to show that our method basically “works.”... We probably won’t be as accurate-slash-lucky in 2020 as we were in 2018, especially in the primaries, which are always kind of a mess. But our way of covering elections is a good way to cover them, and it’s here to stay.

I'm looking forward to plenty more great reporting from them.

Game review: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

So one of the reasons I didn't restart the blog last week was because I was taking a bit of a break from writing every day... and then the other reason is that I was busy playing Epic Battle Fantasy 5 (which came out on December 1st) every chance I got.

Just to be honest about how much I was playing it - that came out to about 40 hours of play time, or about 5 hours per day from the 1st to the 8th.

I've played previous games in the Epic Battle Fantasy series and enjoyed them quite a bit (my review for 4 is here), so this doesn't come as much of a surprise to me. It's a fairly traditional RPG along the lines of games like Final Fantasy - your party of characters has to go on an adventure to save the world, with plenty of monsters to kill, treasure to find, and cool weapons and armors to use. And these games have always rewarded scouring every inch for hidden secrets and talking to everyone to get clues about other secret areas and quests, so there's quite a bit to do. Or you can just read all the jokes, memes, and RPG parodies that the story comes up with, which as far as I can tell is "all of them"; it's utterly hilarious.

EBF 5 also allows for a number of different play styles - if you want to just breeze through the game to read all of the story and humor, then you can set the difficulty to zero and do that. Or you can play on Epic difficulty and work on mastering the battle system in order to get every single achievement, if you're more interested in a challenge. And you can change between the two easily, since the difficulty can be changed at any time.

I should mention that I do have one or two complaints, though. One is that right around the 15 or 20 hour mark, simply playing through the game starts to feel a bit like a grind. You don't usually need to grind for gold or EXP in the EBF games, even on the higher difficulties, and this one is no exception. But you do still have to deal with the monsters that are blocking your path through each of the areas, and those battles, plus the extra ones you have to go through in order to get all the treasure, start to get a little old after a while.

The other complaint is less of a complaint and more of an acknowledgement that not everyone is going to find every part of this funny. Personally, I find the mockery the author directs at feminism and political correctness (of which there is very little, to be fair) to be more grating than funny, for example. There are actually options now to tone down some of the mature humor and impractical armor designs for the female characters, but not everything is affected by that.

Overall, I greatly enjoy this game's humor, and I enjoy the challenge of trying to get every achievement I can. I highly recommend it.

NaNoWriMo aftermath

Another flawless victory!

... Well, kind of. I made it to 50,000 words, although I probably could have done it sooner if I hadn't gotten distracted at the very end of the month. I'm fine with it, though; this is part of the reason why I try and build up a little bit extra during the month.

As expected, while I did try to keep the blog going, that basically stopped by the middle of the month. Normal posts will resume tomorrow - one every weekday, same as I was doing before November. (The explanation for why this post is being made now instead of me doing this sometime last week will also be coming tomorrow.)