• Horsey@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    This is my fist time seeing photos of the ballroom location… and I’m absolutely blown away how unbelievably tacky it looks. They could’ve put it anywhere, and they ruined the symmetry of the White House plot and couldn’t even be bothered to build in the same style?

  • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    The funniest poison pill the Dems could include in every bill would be to mandate that the Army Corps of Engineers go in and demolish it through any means necessary, then include it in every bill while focusing on actually good policies that are either popular or otherwise mundane but generally considered good. Doubt that’ll happen, best we’ll probably get is it getting leveled and the bunker gutted and rebuilt after Trump’s gone but still.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I want every putative 2028 candidate to pledge that on January 20, 2029 he or she will sign an executive order to tear down this monstrosity

    And get rid of dept of war and secretary of war titles, and revert back to lake Ontario and Gulf of Mexico, and just erase any evidence that he ever existed, honestly.

    • Kirp123@lemmy.world
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      60 minutes ago

      The Department of War doesn’t really exist though. Only Congress can rename it and Trump didn’t pass it through Congress. They keep calling it the Department of War but it is still the Department of Defense.

    • Steve@startrek.website
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      6 hours ago

      Nonsense, thats wasteful. Offer it to every queer group in the nation as a free event center. Weddings, furry cons, drag shows every day.

    • RunningInRVA@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      What’s crazy is he was able to secure all the corporate donations for this thing, yet the poor Kennedy Center needs to be demolished because he cannot secure donations to keep it alive.

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        As far as I know, the Kennedy Center’s donation problems didn’t really start until after a judge told him they couldn’t put Donald Trump’s name on the building.

        • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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          5 hours ago

          Not quite, the Kennedy Center’s problems started when he first put his name on it and replaced the board with sycophants.

          The large amount of existing donors stopped providing funds, and the team responsible for getting donors was replaced by idiots trying to use Trump’s disastrous name.

          • YragNitram1956@feddit.uk
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            22 minutes ago

            Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

            Oliver Kornetzke

      • BillyClark@piefed.social
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        9 hours ago

        For people who don’t know, the Kennedy Center had a large team of people whose job it was to get enough donations to keep it running… IIRC something around 100 people, and under Trump’s direction, that team was more or less completely dismantled.

        The previous director of the Kennedy Center was a very rich man, I think a billionaire, who had personally donated millions to the Kennedy Center, and Trump got rid of him.

        Trump did everything he could to sabotage all existing sources of funding for the Kennedy Center.

        It’s hard to describe in words what a pathetic loser Trump is. He can’t stand to have somebody whose name is in any way elevated above his own. He’ll destroy any cultural institution and anybody else’s happiness just to get the tiniest bit of honor for himself.

        • likebudda@reddthat.com
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          9 hours ago

          It’s hard to describe in words what a pathetic loser Trump is.

          It must be done by performance art that includes horrendous odors and the kind of flashing lights that cause seizures.

          • X@piefed.world
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            8 hours ago

            And every audience member must wear a cilice belt locked on to each thigh during the performance and for two additional days after.

      • crandall@lemmy.today
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        9 hours ago

        Well he didn’t, congress decided we should all help pay for it to the tune of a $billion IIRC. If you’re from the US you’re paying for it.

  • nerdo@lemmy.zip
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    9 hours ago

    Any corporation that donated to this administration should be nationalized or shuttered

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      6 hours ago

      Let’s be real, they should all be broken the fuck up. Nationalizing corporations is not a still our country knows how to do well… They always pay off the owners and inevitably it ends up back in private hands. We should nationalize the rail network and Amazon, then run them at cost with fair access to power our economy. And starlink… infrastructure in general is really advantageous for so many reasons

      But the rest just need to be broken up. It’s by far the best option

      Any company that has the money lying around to make a meaningful white house bribe is too damn big. China had a really good idea with their regulatory policy… You just can’t let companies grow to the point their power is on the same scale as the government. They become cancerous

      Shutting them down widely would be disastrous for workers and sometimes our general quality of life, nationalizing them would be messy, expensive, and they’d end up sold off for pennies as soon as kleptocrats get back any amount of power… But if we get in the habit of trust busting, we’ll instead be able to course correct whenever someone good is in power

      Bonus points if we make the split businesses worker owned and controlled, but I don’t have that much hopium on hand at the moment

      • PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works
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        3 hours ago

        Any company that has the money lying around to make a meaningful white house bribe is too damn big.

        Okay, take a look at Intel: they’re in the semiconductor fab business. Building a new-generation fab (including the next-gen machinery inside) costs approximately a trillion dollars.

        Providing the US president a $1B bribe would be nothing compared to a 1-year delay on the project. This is normal. Some industries are just stupidly capital-intensive.

        Now, let’s be realistic here: a $50M bribe is more than enough to buy Trump’s help on minor things. $50M is chump change for heavy industry. $50M is less than half a jumbo jet. You can’t make industry too small to bribe Trump without destroying them entirely.

        And even if we did succeed, a $5M bribe goes a fair way.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          19 minutes ago

          Right, the fab… It’s meant to be one of four across the world that will provide all of the most advanced chips. It’s being built after the one Taiwanese fab as a strategic asset, with huge amounts of government funding and incentives

          Like TSMC, it should be able to produce all kinds of advanced chips, not just Intel designs. And it’s really not going well… We’ve been trying to stand it up for like a decade, and for the longest time the money just kept going “poof”. It’s only recently, when some kind of deal was made for TSMC to help the process for fabs in China, the US, and the EU that real progress started being made

          That’s not Intel’s success, that’s a big multinational deal that is being handed to Intel

          That sounds like infrastructure to me.

          What’s more, chips aren’t designed by 100k people, individual humans innovate and collaborate in teams. Corporations are terrible at it, the more people you have working towards something the more resistant it becomes to current.

          We already have very small teams that come up with really cool and interesting chip designs, but they have little access to fabs because a few big companies monopolize the fab time in part to deny it to their competition. It’s an impossible barrier to entry, there’s so much horizontal integration and incestuous investment that we’re blocking real innovation

          Having infrastructure that allows for small players to win limited runs on the fab would drive the entire space forward

          And speaking of jumbo jets, airlines just can’t seem to keep themselves in business. It’s a heavily subsidized industry kept afloat because air travel is a necessary piece of our economy… That’s undeniably infrastructure

          $5 million is indeed not much for a business, but a business that benefits more from influencing politicians than actually making/doing things is the problem. They should be too busy reinvesting in their business to start buying barriers to entry, it’s a sign they have too much control over their space already.

          They lack competition, and by going for regulatory capture means they need to be broken up to make that competition. I’m not saying every company who has $50 million in a bank account needs to be broken up, but once they turn their eyes to regulatory capture it means they have too much influence

          And there are certain companies that need to be huge to function… Like Boeing. You do need hundreds of thousands of people to produce a line of jumbo jets and healthy competition isn’t practical - but that makes them a strategic resource.

          I’m not saying in all cases they have to be nationalized, but they can’t be left to their own devices either… Look at Boeing. They’ve managed to lobby the FAA to allow their own employees to serve as federal inspectors. It’s why they keep having these crazy problems with their aircraft.

          But public private partnerships don’t seem to produce good results, so maybe they should just be completely nationalized? For all that Reagan convinced us that the government sucks at doing things, NASA did incredible work before the funding was cut

          Maybe they should be set up like the post office, something set up by Congress but primarily self funded and autonomous with more protections against micromanagement. Maybe we nationalize companies as a criminal consequence, and let public options compete against each other with restrictions around that competition

          There’s probably better models, but what I do know is that late stage capitalism is not working out well for us. Computing has stagnated, airplanes seemingly crash all the time now, and we’re still actively destroying the Holocene era with no solutions in sight.

          We need to realign incentives and create hard boundaries around the excesses of capitalism, and I think “having enough power to subvert democracy” needs to be a boundary no corporation can survive crossing

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    10 hours ago

    It’s a monument to Trump. A horrendous scar on America. And that’s sort of why I hope it sticks around, to serve as a lesson to America. This is what happens when you squander your democracy.

    • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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      5 hours ago

      My idea for the Ballsroom: “Twoface”. Put up a curtain dividing the building in half, and each is in a different style: Trumpian, and pre-Trump. People who tour the building criss-cross the curtain, seeing the shitacular sensibilities of Trump, pitted against good taste.

    • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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      9 hours ago

      Could put the Russian embassy in there to make it just that little bit more of a reminder

    • obvs@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      I mean, if this was a Greek tragedy, I bet people could think of some ironic circumstances for balls to be held in that building…

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Or they could do a French-themed party. Trump could re-enact the Bal des Ardents with his inner circle, cronies, and all their closest friends, and entertainment provided by dancers dressed as trees, lit only by torchlight for ambience. It would be the hottest event ever held in the White House. An unforgettable extravaganza.

    • obvs@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Actually, I think the idea of turning it into a homeless shelter is a great idea.

      “The Donald Trump Memorial Shelter For Transgender Latina Homeless Women”.

  • Corvidae@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    I noted in another article, that the new ballroom construction includes a state-of-the-art hospital. Meanwhile, Medicaid is getting cut back. Cuts for thee…