Comment by munificent
11 hours ago
This has nothing to do with funding.
The US is spending $892.6 billion on the military, $11.3B on ICE, and planning to spend $400 million building a fucking ballroom.
It's about authoritarianism.
11 hours ago
This has nothing to do with funding.
The US is spending $892.6 billion on the military, $11.3B on ICE, and planning to spend $400 million building a fucking ballroom.
It's about authoritarianism.
I want you to go to your favorite frontier LLM and ask how much it would cost the US to implement Vienna-style public housing. Figure in paying off current homeowners to get their support. Restrict it to major cities where housing is the worst, just to make it easier. I bet you it's well over $10T long-term. Iraq was $2-3T long term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
You know what? I'll bite. I just went to Gemini and asked this and the answer was between 2.5 and 5 trillion. So less than 2 Iraq wars. Deff a tractable problem if so.
A word of warning: the US government will read this and figure out the solution is another Iraq war.
I hope so.
Hold on. That ballroom is ostensibly funded by private investors including Apple, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Nvidia, Palantir, Booz Allen Lockheed Martin, Zoom, Coinbase, Ripple ...
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2026/01/trump-ballroom-dono...
Therefore the customers of these companies are contributing some of their hard earned money to help these companies grovel to a would-be dictator, and build his precious ballroom.
I'm not a big fan of the general strike idea whereby people forego income to send a message. Why not stop spending money with these companies for some period of time? I think telling these companies to go fuck themselves will put more money in everyday people's pockets than not showing up for work.
Apple consumers would be on more ethical grounds paying a tariff than what Tim Cook has committed them to. He showed up at the White House on Saturday well after the reporting that the government had murdered a law abiding citizen, while that government protected the assailants, and smeared the victims.
It's disgusting. I find him disgusting. I find all of these companies disgusting.