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Comment by stfu | Hacker News Reader

I thought the pandering to the underbelly ideology would only be celebrated among the reddit crowd. Sad to see that hn has been increasingly infected with these ideas as well.

Sure, I am all for supporting the homeless and needy, but come on, re-purposing the presidential residence as a homeless shelter? That is the epitome of a populist gesture!

If he is the president, he should act like a president, dress like a president and live like a president. I, at least, would want my country be represented among equals.

Inviting over other heads of states to your two bedroom apartment in the suburbs might be cute if you are pandering to certain segments of the voting population. But unless he wants to become the Mother Teresa of international politics this is just a joke.

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I don't understand your indignation. Just because this guy is in a minority compared to most presidents does not mean he is wrong.

"Infected with these ideas", really? Is it not you who has a fossilized thinking in regard to what other people should do? "he should act like a president, dress like a president and live like a president". Why, because you say so? I believe that if he is the president then he should act respectfully to his citizens, of which a lot still live in poverty. Dressing up in the most expensive clothes, living in luxury houses and eating only the finest food is a slap in the face of every person in that country who was not lucky enough to be born in a position that would grant them a good life.

Wow I can't believe there actually is people like you around here, did you ever been in South America or in any "third-world country"? over here almost every president lives on big palaces, and owns extremely expensive cloths and cars, while the rest of us lives in very very poor conditions... they are not representing the common life style of their country, they are just enjoying the benefits of power.

Yeah sure: if you are the president of Austria you may waste the money if your people living like a king of the middle ages, but that's not the case of Uruguay.

That's one of most terrible comments I've seen here.

"Let's keep the status quo because...ummm...it's the status quo?"

The trappings of imperial grandeur still seem alien and disconcerting to the american. We don't have a history of it. For the first ~80 years of the american republic the politicians were mostly retired old guys working part time. The scope of the central government only first reached a european scale in the 1930s. Even then, FDR drove himself and his family around in the family car. Elanor Roosevelt frequently did the cooking in the white house.

With the talk of the pope's scaled down lifestyle, it's funny to read about how weirded out American catholic representatives were at the first vatican council way back in 1869. The pomp was strange, and a lot of the ideas about social hierarchy were strange.

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