Yostivanich

I was think­ing about this lit­tle thing we have com­ing up in the US, that well is dom­i­nat­ing every­thing. The Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and at first I was going to urge that you should edu­cate your­self and then go and vote on Nov. 4, and also point you to a place to go in case you have prob­lems vot­ing or think that your bal­lot wasn’t casted cor­rectly.

How­ever I can’t say that, because it’s un-economical to vote and frankly I can’t sup­port some­thing that’s illogical/un-economical.

I believe very firmly in the idea that humans, myself included should be more ratio­nal and make deci­sions based on logic, espe­cially logic based in the eco­nom­ics of a deci­sion. Essen­tially cost-benefit analy­sis every­thing, includ­ing cost-benefiting the cost-benefit analy­sis of some­thing. Is the cost, be that time, money, energy, food, friend­ship, etc worth the ben­e­fit gained, money, food, energy, friend­ship, etc. Pretty sim­ple to explain, only really hard to imple­ment. How­ever I try to make deci­sions based on this prin­ci­ple, only do some­thing that gen­er­ates at least an equal or greater return com­pared to what I put in.

The whole urg­ing peo­ple not to vote sounds very weird com­ing from me for a vari­ety of reasons:

1. I’m a pretty polit­i­cal person.
2. I’ve urged peo­ple to vote in the paste, even up to sev­eral weeks ago.
3. Who in their right mind tells peo­ple not to vote around this time?

That all being said I can’t tell peo­ple that they have to vote, instead I will stick by my prin­ci­ples and actu­ally not urge peo­ple to vote this elec­tion, it’s a waste of your time and except in very lim­ited cases and very few states will it even mat­ter.

That all being said, I must admit to being a hyp­ocrite and I did vote this elec­tion (absen­tee bal­lot) and will prob­a­bly con­tinue to do so for the fore­see­able future. The rea­son being is that I made a call in which my per­sonal feel­ings towards vot­ing and democ­racy out­weigh the time spent edu­cat­ing myself on the issues and actu­ally vot­ing. I already care about pol­i­tics so the time spent edu­cat­ing myself about the issues is wrapped into my nor­mal rou­tine. Also an absen­tee bal­lot, means no lines, no prob­lems, just sign up (5ish min­utes), get the bal­lot, fill it out (5 — 10 min­utes) and I was done. So the time dif­fer­ence is pretty good. For most peo­ple to just drive back and forth from the polling place is 20 minutes.

So today I offer some weird advice with the real­iza­tion, that I myself don’t fol­low this advice. Don’t vote peo­ple, it’s illogical.