By the way, since we're on the topic of legit campaigning versus fun vacationing on the contributors' dime: let's calculate this campaign's efficiency so far!
The Rules: Anything spent on fun stuff (tech toys, travel, and publicly LARPing as a candidate) counts as "benefits". Any other expenditure count as "costs".
From the first cycle, John bought about $3200 of tech toys. I consider all his travel in this period to be "un-fun" - traveling to New York and Washington DC, and mainly eating alone at fast-food joints. So, the other $6100 I consider sunk costs. During this period he mainly schlepped around trying to schmooze with power-adjacent people, it seems.
From the second cycle (our current), about $3500 was spent on tech toys, $2300 on the California trip, and $950 on the Massachusetts candidate training. The California trip is classified as "fun" for obvious reasons, and the candidate training is as well, because it mainly involved the fun parts of LARPing as a strong woman candidate while live-tweeting the whole thing. Pure John-bait there.
Another $5000 was spent on un-fun stuff - I include the video ad here because it wasn't something you'd ever pay for with your own money. The Godzilla ad, if it comes out, will go under "fun".
The Grand Total (figures approximate):
Money Sunk: $11100
Fun Extracted: $9950
Or in other words, John's combusting his campaign donations into fun with a little under 50% efficiency. We can assume the rest of the campaign's cash on hand will be spent at a similar rate, with perhaps one final burn-down of fun when it's time to pack the whole thing in.
And of course, if John were actually spending his own money, it would be more efficient just to buy his toys outright rather than going through this rigmarole.
