Betsy DeVos's summer monstrosity is pure McMansion Hell

It’s a bit eclectic, and certainly over the top ostentatious, but nowhere near as ugly as most of the houses on the site. Although she doesn’t mention my pet peeve in mcmansions, the awful stonework. Even when you you use real stones, just glueing them to a wall like that does not look much like real masonry.

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The links are literally (literally literally) in the post.

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I’m literally being figurative here.

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That first link goes to a separate boingboing article. Most of the links in this post do. Only the final link goes to the actual article on Vox. Also, Cory lifted four of the five original images in the Vox article and included them in his BB post, as well as 1/4 of the text. I think it’s not on a good spectrum.

Here’s the actual McMansion Hell website, for folks who’d like to experience Kate Wagner’s work on her terms (instead of Cory/BoingBoing’s): http://mcmansionhell.com/

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Liberally literally being figurative on literary literalism

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I must say that I do like the bridge between the main and guest house. Put the kids over there and raise the drawbridge!

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It’s missing the cannons too

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You’re right about the first link. I misread the url when I moused over it. My error.

Given that it’s clearly presented as a quote, I don’t see a problem with that. The same could be said of the majority of posts that refer to another article.

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That hulking monstrosity only has three bedrooms? Is it the rich person equivalent of a party house? Like the entire first floor is ballrooms/catering services/bathrooms and the people live in what is basically an apartment above a town hall?

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Ms DeVos sure must go to the toilet a lot!

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Well she is full of shit so…

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btw her BROTHER is Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, you know the one connected with the Russia election tampering and the shady meeting in Seychelles (and lied to congress and getting away with it)

so hard to believe how corrupt this presidency administration actually is

Scott Pruitt was a good start but getting her out would be also cathartic (the problem is they are replaced by far more subtle people who disappear into the woodwork while still implementing the same destructive policies)

just like the epa, trump expressly wanted to destroy the department of education so this is the one he purposely picked to make that happen by apathy - so the way she lives her life pretty much matches the apathy and pettiness she administrates

  • Asked if she had seen the worst-performing schools in her state, DeVos said no . “I have not, I have not, I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming … Maybe I should, yes.”

  • DeVos, who rescinded Obama-era guidance on so-called Title IX protections against sexual assault on college campuses, said she doesn’t know if the number of false rape accusations are as high as the number of actual rapes.

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[SIGH]… I… I literally surrender.

The lexicographers are both correct and right.

What is funny to me is how to house on the right side of the image seems to me to be fairly normative in its size and scope. Which by comparison makes the Devos monstrosity even more monstrous and ridiculous looking.

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I need a parody poster replacing the haunted mansion with Betsy’s shit mansion

*Fun movie btw /offtopic

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A higher marginal tax rate would also be perfectly reasonable, IMO. Thomas Piketty, who has written extensively on inequality, believes that high national tax rates by themselves are not effective, because the very wealthy distribute their wealth globally and engage in extensive tax avoidance (if not money laundering/tax evasion). However, tax rates have some discernible effect, and Piketty believes the efficient top rate (slows wealth accumulation but doesn’t completely disincentivize working) is in the range of 80% or so. Taxing capital gains as income would also be helpful. The DeVoses might have to cut back to fewer yachts but I think they could manage.

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Pedantic moment: “McMansion” has a loose definition at best, but the key elements it usually tries to communicate a 1) a stock or cookie-cutter design, 2) an (often tasteless) ostentatiousness exceeding its neighbors, 3) usually achieved by buying up smaller lots so that you can fit a huge house into once-cheaper neighborhood.

This does none of those. It is a heavily-customized tasteless mansion built amongst other tasteless mansions. It’s particularly tasteless, but not a McMansion.

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IMHO the term “McMansion” is most apt for those neighborhoods created when some developer decides to build an upscale neighborhood and dumps a bunch of nearly identical oversized houses on former farmland to sell to people who really can’t afford them.

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I always heard the term in the context of quaint, old neighborhoods that were being razed in pieces so that 4 lots could be combined to make a ridiculously large, out-of-place house. But the internet disagrees and insists that a McMansion is basically just a cookie-cutter large house (which means most of the development on the fringe of town qualifies as “McMansion”, even though it’s not displacing anything except fields.

But one thing I can’t get consensus on is that it means “an ugly mansion”, which is what this thing is.

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