Apple! Do you speak it?



  • Growing from a Switch store in downtown Brussels, the fourth* linguistic group in Belgium recently advanced its own candidate Prime Minister. His appealing and easy to understand but somewhat expensive programme is unfortunately incompatible with the proposals made by the traditional parties which are widely regarded as bad and laughable but have a majority of voters behind them.

    It goes without saying Apple immediately updated its website:

    * 40K German speakers. Don't mention the war.



  • "This indicator clearly shows that Belgium has come into contact with liquids since my election, so my election pledges are void."



  • As far as I know, and as far as politician's promises are concerned, they are always void after the election.



  • @TheRider said:

    As far as I know, and as far as politician's promises are concerned, they are always void after the election.

    Particularly true in my state - one of the key promises from the party now in government was that they would build a train spur line out to where I live. That promise lasted until the evening of the election when it became clear that they would need the support of a rural-based party to get enough seats to form a government (the rural party obviously not having public transport in the city as one of its top priorities). The next day they pushed it back to 12 years down the track; a year or two later they published a study which said it wasn't going to be worth doing for about 30 years.

    This is the same party that, federally, got a bit of stick several years ago from the media by deciding - some time after winning the election, of course - that the promises they'd decided not to do anything about were "non-core" promises. Oddly there hadn't been any mention of this status at the time the promises were made... lots of fun for the media in the next election, though, asking them if each of their promises was a core promise or a non-core promise. :)



  • @Scarlet Manuka said:

    ...promises from the party...

    I've come to the conclusion that politicians make promises the same way that some project managers manage projects. "The timing plan says we'll be ready on this date. What do you mean you need resources X and Y to even make that a possibility, let alone a likely outcome?"

    Perhaps someday we'll have replicators and such, but in the meantime we live in a universe where it takes some minimum amount of time to procure and manipulate physical materials to achieve some material result. That's not even taking into account if the people that have the resources or skills actually want to use them for said purpose.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Scarlet Manuka said:

    lots of fun for the media in the next election, though, asking them if each of their promises was a core promise or a non-core promise. :)
     

    It is a core promise, but our promise to keep the promise is non-core.


  • BINNED

    Reminds me of the, iirc, 2005 election. Party A promised not to raise the VAT, Party B said they'd be raising VAT from 16% to 18%.
    Neither of them got enough votes to form a coalition with a minor party, so they built a coalition together. And they had to compromise on that issue.

    So what was the compromise between keeping 16% and raising to 18%? That's right, raising to 19% !!



  • Here in Wisconsin in the old US of A, Scott Walker (our Governor) ran on a platform of cutting down union pensions and balancing the budget while keeping services intact.

    He got elected, cut down union pensions, and balanced the budget keeping the vast majority of services completely unchanged.

    He's up for recall now.



  • @TheRider said:

    As far as I know, and as far as politician's promises are concerned, they are always void after the election.

    But just to keep you on your toes, once in a lifetime (or there abouts) one of them will mess with you by doing what they said.

    We had a state governor who campaigned on the promise of building a downtown stadium and improving the highway to the beach.

    Not a terribly ambitious platform - but he actually did those two things - and not a lot else.



  • @ijij said:

    @TheRider said:

    As far as I know, and as far as politician's promises are concerned, they are always void after the election.

    But just to keep you on your toes, once in a lifetime (or there abouts) one of them will mess with you by doing what they said.

    We had a state governor who campaigned on the promise of building a downtown stadium and improving the highway to the beach.

    Not a terribly ambitious platform - but he actually did those two things - and not a lot else.

    He succeeded in doing that because it bought him votes. Building circuses always works for politicians.



  • @Master Chief said:

    Here in Wisconsin in the old US of A, Scott Walker (our Governor) ran on a platform of cutting down union pensions and balancing the budget while keeping services intact.

    He got elected, cut down union pensions, and balanced the budget keeping the vast majority of services completely unchanged.

    He's up for recall now.

    He'll lose, of course. The unions will vastly outspend the opposition and the comatose electorate will vote him out.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @SilentRunner said:

    Building circuses always works for politicians.
    And the bread. Don't forget the bread.



  • @Master Chief said:

    Here in Wisconsin in the old US of A, Scott Walker (our Governor) ran on a platform of cutting down union pensions and balancing the budget while keeping services intact.

    He got elected, cut down union pensions, and balanced the budget keeping the vast majority of services completely unchanged.

    He's up for recall now.

     

    He didn't just cut pensions, he cut collective bargaining rights.  You know, the reason unions exist?  That pissed a lot of people off.

    Also his 2012 proposed budget features massive education cuts... big changes to the most important service

    Just sayin' the picture's not quite that simple.



  • @aliquot said:

    @Master Chief said:

    Here in Wisconsin in the old US of A, Scott Walker (our Governor) ran on a platform of cutting down union pensions and balancing the budget while keeping services intact.

    He got elected, cut down union pensions, and balanced the budget keeping the vast majority of services completely unchanged.

    He's up for recall now.

     

    He didn't just cut pensions, he cut collective bargaining rights.  You know, the reason unions exist?  That pissed a lot of people off.

    Also his 2012 proposed budget features massive education cuts... big changes to the most important service

    Just sayin' the picture's not quite that simple.

     

    This is hardly a new concept.  With identifying marks removed, it comes down to "Candidate X says Candidate Y will do Horrible Thing Z if elected.  So vote for Candidate X to keep Horrible Thing Z from happening.  And then Candidate X gets in and does Horrible Thing Z himself far worse than Candidate Y ever could have done."

    I reckon most of the people who post on this forum are too young to remember the Daisy Ad.

     



  • @aliquot said:

    He didn't just cut pensions, he cut collective bargaining rights. You know, the reason unions exist? That pissed a lot of people off.

    Some people believe that PUBLIC Unions-- you know the ones that are paid from taxpayer coffers?-- shouldn't have collective bargaining rights in the first place. Unions sure as hell didn't originally exist to make people rich at the expense of the taxpayer.



  • @da Doctah said:

    I reckon most of the people who post on this forum are too young to remember the
    Daisy Ad.
    Even if I wasn't too young, I doubt they'd have shown it in Australia or New Zealand.



  • @SilentRunner said:

    @ijij said:

    @TheRider said:

    As far as I know, and as far as politician's promises are concerned, they are always void after the election.

    But just to keep you on your toes, once in a lifetime (or there abouts) one of them will mess with you by doing what they said.

    We had a state governor who campaigned on the promise of building a downtown stadium and improving the highway to the beach.

    Not a terribly ambitious platform - but he actually did those two things - and not a lot else.

    He succeeded in doing that because it bought him votes. Building circuses always works for politicians.

    I hear whaty're sayin', but as the candidate for the Default Party in our state, he had the votes.   He apparently thought letting the ball-team go to the suburbs and sitting in beach traffic in July were bad things. And he could fix them. Definitely NOT the normal way politics work.

    I'm not naive - I would suspect he used the promises as leverage to force those two things to happen, stick a knife into a third area of the state (not helped by the stadium or highway) which was run by people he disliked but always votes for the Default Party, and essentially ignore the fourth part of the state which tends to vote Other Party.

     

     



  • Yay*, political derail!

    As for my opinion on political promises, I suggest that political campaigns be officially classified as advertising so that politician's constituents can sue for fraud if they break them. Heck, I'm not even 100% sure how advertising law works in the US, it might be enforced by the FTC even.

    Unless false advertising isn't a crime anymore.**


    * Not genuine enthusiasm.
    ** Like perjury.



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    Unless false advertising isn't a crime anymore.**

    ** Like perjury.

     

    The MPAA (or at least Warner Bros) is too big to fail, therefore we should ignore the part of the DMCA that says filing false DMCA takedown statements is perjury, sentencable to up to 5 years in prison!!!!!!111

    (and yes, that is in the DMCA)

    Actually, how does one go about throwing a corporation in prison?  Throwing everyone who works for them in prison?  The CEO?  Board of Directors?

     



  • @powerlord said:

    Actually, how does one go about throwing a corporation in prison?
     

    You don't, generally it is a fine instead (and in a size that amounts to the lightest of a brush against the wrist).



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @aliquot said:
    He didn't just cut pensions, he cut collective bargaining rights. You know, the reason unions exist? That pissed a lot of people off.

    Some people believe that PUBLIC Unions-- you know the ones that are paid from taxpayer coffers?-- shouldn't have collective bargaining rights in the first place. Unions sure as hell didn't originally exist to make people rich at the expense of the taxpayer.


    Yeah, like F.D.R., who amounts to basically the person who created unions. “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”


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