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Comment by mangoTangoBango | Hacker News Reader

> We should start over, get rid of those parasites, move the capital to the center of the USA like Lebanon, KS out of the swamp.

The physical location of the capitol has been irrelevant since airplanes, cell phones, and the internet. The swamp is a metaphor, not a physical place.

That's not true. Significant amounts of lobbying and palm greasing happen in person, explicitly off of cell phones. It's not a coincidence that all of the companies that receive massive amounts of federal government money have headquarters around DC.

Yes, and if you move the capitol all of that moves with it. You literally admitted that those headquarters are located for the purpose of in-person meetings, not a love of DC. So unless the location you intend to move the capitol to is top secret, it's irrelevant.

Moveable capitol

I disagree. Move the capitol to the center of the country, put a lifetime ban on former elected officials lobbying, and that would get rid of a lot of corruption.

> The swamp is a metaphor, not a physical place.

It's an old myth that Washington DC was built on a swamp.

Of course it wasn't a swamp! That's a Republican talking point, feed it into a search engine all day, the search engine will tell you how dumb you are, it was never a swamp.

Nope, it was a wetland! https://doee.dc.gov/service/history-wetlands-district

That sounds at odds with "hurr durr you can only build a tech hub where all the talent is" which is the prevailing wisdom around here.

US aid is huge and vastly exceeds other countries. As a percentage of GDP or when divided by head of population, its rather less impressive than what other places achieve. I don’t think the budget will be balanced by further disadvantaging the disadvantaged. However reducing arms exports as a form of aid could help, but that gets complex fast. Does Israel need billions of dollars of arms? Ukraine? Couldn’t it all depend on some basic human rights being met?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_coun...

Doesn’t matter. We should care more about people who are dying on the street (I have seen this firsthand), have seen this myself in Seattle and SF, and giving everyone healthcare before giving Ukraine or any other country aid.

This is something that both Democrats and Republicans seem to ignore because they want to pursue their own self-interested agendas.

run for office, you seem to know what to do

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