Where State Capitals Should Be

The United States is a bit odd in when it puts its state capitals. Ask a random person what the capital of a random state is and they’ll probably tell you the name of the largest city in that state – but in the US that’s rarely the correct answer.

Only 17 of the 50 states have their most populous city as their capital: Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Oklahoma, Iowa, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Utah, Colorado, Massachusetts, Arizona, Rhode Island, Ohio and South Carolina.

The other 33 states have a small, generally obscure, city as their capital. For example, take a look at this map of California:

It’s as though the state capital was chosen for maximum annoyance of the citizens of California. Sacramento isn’t the largest city (L.A.) but the 6th. Now, perhaps there are reasons you don’t want to use the largest city as your capital. The next most logical choice would be to use the center of population – the point that would take the least distance for everyone in the state to travel too. But again, this is rarely the choice.

The map below shows all of the capitals (cyan), largest cities if not the capital (red) and the center of population for each of the fifty states:

I’ve also put together a table showing how far away the center of population is from the state capital building.

Capital City	State	Distance from Center of Population(mi)
Juneau	Alaska	544.32
Sacramento	California	246.15
Carson City	Nevada	243.42
Tallahassee	Florida	241.24
Cheyenne	Wyoming	156.10
Springfield	Illinois	122.43
Albany	New York	91.07
Bismarck	North Dakota	78.33
Santa Fe	New Mexico	76.23
Pierre	South Dakota	70.93
Boise	Idaho	65.63
Olympia	Washington	63.71
Raleigh	North Carolina	59.52
Topeka	Kansas	58.41
Charleston	West Virginia	57.22
Montgomery	Alabama	51.02
Austin	Texas	48.96
Madison	Wisconsin	48.37
Lincoln	Nebraska	40.90
Jackson	Mississippi	40.36
Atlanta	Georgia	38.86
Oklahoma City	Oklahoma	38.20
Des Moines	Iowa	38.16
Helena	Montana	36.96
Columbus	Ohio	36.14
Little Rock	Arkansas	34.34
Nashville	Tennessee	34.30
Frankfort	Kentucky	32.25
Saint Paul	Minnesota	28.64
Richmond	Virginia	27.91
Honolulu	Hawaii	27.45
Indianapolis	Indiana	26.80
Baton Rouge	Louisiana	26.51
Salt Lake City	Utah	26.06
Salem	Oregon	25.65
Trenton	New Jersey	23.02
Hartford	Connecticut	20.85
Lansing	Michigan	20.29
Annapolis	Maryland	19.91
Denver	Colorado	19.61
Montpelier	Vermont	16.44
Boston	Massachusetts	16.42
Harrisburg	Pennsylvania	14.87
Phoenix	Arizona	14.52
Dover	Delaware	14.08
Jefferson City	Missouri	10.82
Providence	Rhode Island	5.65
Concord	New Hampshire	5.25
Augusta	Maine	2.29
Columbia	South Carolina	2.13

You can see the full Google Doc here, which I’ve used for several other of my blog posts such as passport ownership in the United States and the rate of growth of the United States and median income.

The True Cost of the Royal Family Explained

Blog

I decided to put this together after hearing one person too many moan about getting a public holiday for the Royal Wedding.

Script

Look. At. That.

What a waste. That queen, living it off the government in her castles with her corgis. (and gin) Just how much does this cost to maintain?

The answer: 40 million pounds.

That’s about 65 pence per person per year of tax money going to the royal family.

Sure, It’s still twenty-three pence short of a complete shield, but it might be more than you want to pay.

Any after all, those are your coins. Why does the queen get to steal them?

Well, it’s a little complicated.

The story starts with this guy: King George the third, most well known as the monarch who lost the United States for the Empire.

Less well known – but far more interesting – is he likely suffered from a mental illness called Porphyria which has the unusual side effect of transforming your poop from it’s normal boring brown to a delightful shade of purple.

But I digress – back to the the reason the Royals get tax money.

King George was having trouble paying his bills and had racked up debt.

While he did own huge tracts of land, the profit from their rental was too small to cover his expenses.

He offered a deal to parliament: for the rest of his life he would surrender the profits from the rents on his land in exchange for getting a fixed annual salary and having his debts removed.

Parliament took him up on the deal, guessing that the profits from the rents would pay off long-term.

Just how well did parliament do? Back to the present, let’s compare their profits and losses by using a tenner to represent 10 million pounds.

The cost to maintain the royal family today is 40 million pounds per year.

But the revenue paid to the UK from the royal lands is 200 million.

200 million in revenue subtract 40 million in salary costs equals 160 million pounds in profit.

That’s right: The United Kingdom earns 160 million pounds in profit, every year from the Royal Family.

So stop all your moaning about the Royal family and how much they cost and how worthless they are. The Royal Family is Great for Great Britain.

Doing the individual’s math again:

160 million pounds divided by 62 million people is about 2 pounds and 60 pence.

Because of the Royal Family, your taxes are actually 2 pounds and 60 pence cheaper each year than they would otherwise be.

But perhaps that’s not enough for you because you’re a real greedy geezer. Why not kick they royals out and keep 100% of the revenue.

Because it’s still their land. King George the crazy wasn’t crazy enough to give up everything, just the profits.

But it wasn’t only him: every Monarch since King George the third has voluntarily turned over the profits from their land to the United Kingdom. Again: Voluntarily.

If the government stopped paying the Royal Family’s living and state expenses the Royals would be forced to take back the profits from their land. And your taxes, dear Monarchy-haters, would go UP not DOWN.

Plus 160 million is just the easily measurable money the United Kingdom makes from the royal family.

Don’t forget their huge indirect golden goose: tourists.

Annoying though they might be to the locals by blocking the tube and refusing to stand on the right, they dump buckets of money on the UK to see the sights, travel ludicrously short distances by public transport, and generally act silly a long way from home.

Sure not everything they come to see is royal, but the most expensive stuff is.

And who are the biggest spenders? The Yanks.

After they’ve finished buying maple syrup and cheap, pharmaceuticals, Tijuanaian professional services and illegal pharmaceuticals, where do they go next?

The United Kingdom.

Americans fly across an ocean to see a land filled with Castles that aren’t plastic.

And why do the Americans think Frances castles are so boring and stinky and the UK’s castles so awesome? Because real monarchs still use them.

The tower of London is so stunning to visitors because the Royal Crest on the Yeomen Warders Uniform is real. It’s not a lame historical re-enactment or modern LARPing.

It’s the embodiment of the living, breathing queen.

Everywhere you look she’s sprinkled fairy dust on banal objects to make them magically attractive to tourists.

12 million of whom visit every year spending 7,000 million pounds.

Which suddenly makes those direct profits look like rather small change.

But perhaps you don’t care than the monarchs are a perpetual GOLD MINE for the UK. You’re a Republican and you dislike like the royal family because of their political power. After all, the government gets all its right to rule through the crown, not the people.

And yes, I’ll grant you that back in the head-choppy days of yore, this was a legitimate concern, but the modern queen isn’t a dangerous political lion but a declawed kitten.

Her powers are limited to a kabuki theater act of approving what parliament wants to do anyway.

Remove the royal family from government and fundamentally nothing would be different except now you wouldn’t live in the magical United Kingdom but the rather dull United Republic of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A.K.A URESWNI for short. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

But, maybe I’m wrong – perhaps the queen is a political ticking time bomb, just waiting for her chance to declare random wars and devolve parliaments for the lulz.

But until that day comes.

God save the queen.

Notes & Corrections

Irritatingly I mixed up St Michael’s Mount and Mont Saint Michel. I had literally hundreds of image files I was collecting and just mixed them up. I’m doubly annoyed because want I actually wanted was an awesome image of a French castle (with sticky lines) and a boring image of an English castle (with starburst).

Some notes for people who are interested: the queen pays taxes. American’s top tourist destinations. United Kingdom tourist statistics. The Crown Estate estimates portfolio.

Credits

Images by: anko.gaku_ula, Kyle May, koishikawagirl, PhillipC, Davide Scalzo, David Hughes, crosathorian, L-plate big cheese, Rev Stan, Diliff, Todd Baker, pikous, Yogma, Pink Sherbert Photography, Vee Dub, EDD07, DrJimiGlide, Be.Futureproof, Tomas Castelazo Photography, jmt–29, LucaLu, wolfsavard, laszlo-photo, fauxto_digital, mornathedark, jpctalbot, ell brown, Brimack, Ryuugakusei, caseydavid and me {2} {3}.

Music: “Thatched Villagers” by Kevin MacLeod.

The Alternative Vote Explained

This video is a part of the 'Politics in the Animal Kingdom' series.

For the purposes of making the video simpler, I pretended that everyone who voted for Owl, Turtle, etc had the same first, second and third choices for their candidates. In a real election it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the votes would be cast this perfectly.

Under the Alternative Vote in the first round when Turtle is illuminated, if half Turtle's voters like Owl and half like Gorilla then Owl would get half the votes and Gorilla would get half.

Full script:

Queen Lion of the Animal Kingdom is displeased. She recently introduced elections for the office of king using the first post the post voting system.

While her Realm started out as a healthy democracy with many parties running candidates for king, it quickly devolved into two party rule, with the citizens not liking either one but trapped within the system because of a problem called the spoiler effect.

However, one of Queen Lion's subjects from a distant land, Wallaby, has a solution: The Alternative Vote.

What's the difference?

To find out, lets follow one voter on election day, Red Squirrel, under both systems.

There are five candidates running for king, two members of the big parties Gorilla and Leopard and three other candidates, Turtle, Owl and Tiger.

Under first-past-the-post Red Squirrel gets a ballot where he picks just one candidate.

Red Squirrel Really likes Turtle and even campaigned for him. However he knows that his new neighbor, Grey Squirrel, is voting Gorilla.

And what, starts to wonder Red Squirrel, about all the other animals? Who are they going to vote for?

The debates on Animal News Network only had the big parties, so Red Squirrel thinks it's going to be a close race between Gorilla and Leopard.

While he's indifferent toward Gorilla he is deathly afraid of Leopard.

Because he can only pick a single candidate, he gives his one vote to Gorilla in hopes of preventing Leopard from becoming king.

This is strategic voting, and it's a necessity under First Past the Post.

But now it's time to look at the Alternative Vote, which wallaby explains to Red Squirrel.

Instead of picking one and only one candidate, he can rank them in order of his most favorite to his least.

He goes into the voting both and gets the same ballot as before, but now puts Turtle as his first choice, Owl as his second and Gorilla, third.

He dislikes Leopard and Tiger equally so he stops filling in his ballot and drops it in the box.

At this point, Red Squirrel doesn't care exactly what happens, he has other things on his mind and heads off. But you, dear citizen, want to know how the votes are counted so here goes:

Turtle, beloved though he is with some of the citizenry, comes in last place with only 5% and he is eliminated from the race.

Because the voters ranked their candidates in order, we can know what would have happened if Turtle didn't run.

Without Turtle, voters like Red Squirrel, would have picked Owl instead, so their votes are transferred to her as though Turtle was never in the race at all.

This is why Alternative Vote is sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting. It's able to simulate a bunch of elections where the least popular candidate is eliminated after each round without all the time and expense it would take to run a bunch of campaigns, one after another.

The Alternative Vote method keeps eliminated the least popular candidate until someone either wins a majority or is the only one left.

As no one has a majority yet, the next lowest candidate, Tiger, is eliminated. Tiger voters listed leopard as their second choice, so she gets Tiger's votes.

In the last round, Gorilla is eliminated. Gorilla voters listed Owl as their second choice, so Owl gets those votes, wins a majority, so is crowed king.

The alternative vote is a better system because it produces winners that a larger number of voters agree on.

While the Alternative Vote does have flaws it's important to note that any problem AV has, first past the post shares.

They're both susceptible to gerrymandering, they aren't proportional systems, they can't guarantee a Condorcet winner (which math geeks hate but there isn't time to explain here), and over time they both trend toward two main parties.

That being said, Alternative Vote has a huge advantage that first past the post lacks and makes it a mathematically superior method: no spoiler effect!

Imagine this election: the two big candidates are running, Gorilla and Leopard, and Leopard looks set to win 55% to 45%. But then a third party candidate, Tiger, enters.

Tiger manages to convince 15% of the Leopard voters to back him. Now the results are:

Under first past the post, gorilla now wins even though a majority of the voters didn't want him.

Under the Alternative Vote, because all Tiger voters put Leopard as second choice, Leopard still wins because a majority of the citizens of the animal kingdom would rather have her in charge than gorilla.

With AV citizens can help support and grow smaller parties that they agree without worrying they'll put someone they don't like into office.

After examining the differences, Queen Lion decrees that the Alternative Vote is to be the rule of the land for electing the king and everyone is happier. …well almost everyone. The two big parties can't be complacent and need to campaign harder for their votes.

This has been The Alternative Vote Explained by me C. G. P. Grey.

Thank you very much for watching.

Images by: David C Walker 1967, Billy Lindblom, xlibber, Todd Ryburn, shirobane, Dawn Huczek, TheBusyBrain, Stig Nygaard, Michael Baird, Ana_Cotta, digitalART2, be_khe, Hamed Saber, Conor Lawless, travellingtamas, Pixel Addict, Shawn Allen & audreyjm529

Music: "Artifact" by Kevin MacLeod

Spanish captions by Alberto van Oldenbareneveld.

As always, special thanks to Wikipedia.