Invite ye felawes and frendes desirous in gold to enter the gates of Shrewd'm, for they will thanke ye later.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
No. of Recommendations: 3
Paramount Skydance (PSKY) offered an all-cash bid for Warner Bros. (WBD), countering WBD's recently announced deal with Netflix (NFLX). Paramount's offer comes after US President Trump told reporters that the Netflix deal could be a "problem" given the streaming giant's market share dominance.
Does Trump have an original opinion on the merger... or is it a crony(s) whispering in his ear.
Does Trump have delusions of grandeur that Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (DJT) will become the greatest media company the world has ever seen..... or perhaps one of his super-billionaire supporters (Bezos? AAPL, GOOG ) sees the merger as an impediment to continued unbridled growth?
Is it possible Trump is actually concerned with media monopolization as it impacts freedom of speech or.....?
No. of Recommendations: 1
Does Trump have delusions of grandeur
Didn't the jury come back and report on that a long time ago?
Ellison wants Warner, and would rather get it cheap. I fully expect his nibs to block the Netflix deal, so his buddy can get Warner cheap, and appoint another "Zionist fanatic" as it's minder.
Steve
No. of Recommendations: 12
Is it possible Trump is actually concerned with media monopolization as it impacts freedom of speech or.....?
No, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. It’s mere Godfather positioning to say “Nice merger you got there. Shame if something happened to it.”
Then there will be some sort of payoff, I don’t know whether it will be another airplane or a golden dome over the new dance floor or a Reese’s Piece Prize, but it will be something , and then suddenly all objections will vanish, to quote Warden Norton in Shawshank Redemption, “like a fart in the wind.”
No. of Recommendations: 3
or a golden dome over the new dance floor
Caught a piece by Pakman yesterday. Apparently, the architect his nibs hired for the ball room said what Trump wants is structurally impossible. So the architect was fired, and another one hired.
Steve
No. of Recommendations: 2
I wonder if the fired architect consulted with a structural engineer though.
No. of Recommendations: 6
I wonder if the fired architect consulted with a structural engineer though.
Sure. An architect with enough reputation to get hired for a nationally prominent project would forget to get a structural engineer’s assessment before telling The President Of The United States “it would not be structurally sound.”
Makes as much sense as anything else that goes on there.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Sure. An architect with enough reputation to get hired for a nationally prominent project would forget to get a structural engineer’s assessment before telling The President Of The United States “it would not be structurally sound.”I rewatched the piece again. The argument is an architectural one of scale of the ballroom, vs the main house.
Be aware, watching Pakman will probably land you on a DOJ list of subversives.
Trump White House construction IMPLODES after tearing it downhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNsD8yq0w4gSteve
No. of Recommendations: 2
Here is a piece about the ballroom flap, from a more mainstream source.
Trump replaces architect overseeing $300m gilded ballroom project
The president and McCrery disagreed at times, particularly over Trump’s interest in expanding the 90,000-sq-ft ballroom’s size, the Washington Post reported. However, it was ultimately the firm’s limited staff and missed deadlines that prompted the change, one person said.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/04/tr...Trump wants it even bigger than 90,000sqft? I knew the US should have kept all the decorations from Saddam's palace.
Steve
No. of Recommendations: 4
An architect with enough reputation to get hired for a nationally prominent project would forget to get a structural engineer’s assessment before telling The President Of The United States “it would not be structurally sound.”
While not a nationally prominent project, the well-regarded contractor I hired to remodel our present home failed/forgot/neglected to get permits for his (in-house) structural engineer's plans PRIOR to creating the bid I signed.
Only after beginning did we find out there shoulda been a property survey AND a geological survey FIRST to make sure permits would be issued....and that the cost would be substantially higher as a result of the additional foundation work the geological report called for.
but then.... I'm not a spray-tanned, combed-over stable genius; one of the greatest developers known to man.
No. of Recommendations: 2
Yah no goofy.
Almost anything can be accomplished with astute engineering.
Most likely the change order couldn't be effectuated without a significant increase in budget.
Double or triple that $300 million (or whatever budget), you betcha they could probably design it and build it.
Problem is the architect probably didn't want to putz around with whatever extensive engineering redesign might be needed for whatever it was Trump wanted (even Trump probably wasn't sure himself) without millions and millions more in additional design costs alone. And who knows what other changes that would require?
Architect probably felt he had worked hard enough and long enough on this project and had a notoriously impossible to satisfy "client" who would probably stiff in big time in the end and turn around and sue him to boot.
So architect just said "bye felicia"
No. of Recommendations: 2
Problem is the architect probably didn't want to putz around with whatever extensive engineering redesign might be needed for whatever it was Trump wanted (even Trump probably wasn't sure himself) without millions and millions more in additional design costs alone. And who knows what other changes that would require?
The word is that Trump kept upscaling the project, and the architect's small firm found it difficult to keep up with the changes and thought Trump's vision would dwarf the White House it was supposed to compliment. The chief architect was trying to reign in trump's grandiosity. So clashing on size and not keeping up with Trump's constant changes.
No. of Recommendations: 13
An architect with enough reputation to get hired for a nationally prominent project …
Let me fix that.
An architect desperate enough to accept a project for the notorously late paying and litigious Donald Trump …
—Peter
