[FT] Show me the money

Day 1,136, 23:10 • Published in Canada Canada • by AugustusV



Day 1,136 | December 31st, 2010
[FT] Issue #5 | Show me the money








Almost a month as passed since the new eCanadian Prime Minister, TemujinBC, stepping into power, and after much publicized campaign promises, FT has decided to take a look at how our politicians are dutifully keeping their promises.

The great barren wastela- wonderful nation of the North, eCanada, faced a new and "exciting" change back on December the 5th, 2010, when a Crimson took power as chief executive. All jokes aside, TemujinBC promised to be a wave of change, and having spent all his "apolitical career" in eCanada's largest "apolitical group", TemujinBC was set to show the government baddies what him and his e-biker comrades were capable of. My apologizes for not putting all jokes aside as promised, but I wanted to pull a TemujinBC.

26 days later and although eCanada is not teeming with virus-infected dioists, the situation is not better than before, in fact one could arguably (a politically-correct term for "basically") say that we're actually worse off than in November. Facts of course will be used most generously to declare any counter-argument invalid.

The Promises

Let us start simple, and go where all politicians make their debut: the platform. In a quick analysis, we've narrowed down the things TemujinBC had planned to do by January 5th alone:

1. Spend RL money to buy newspaper, tv, radio, etc ads for eRepublik. On one IRC convo the President-to-be said he would easily go up to 2000$ or more if needed.
2. Through promise #1 manage to raise the population to at least (the most conservative estimate possible) 8000 citizens by Jan 5th.
3. Create many charitable (or not) lottery draws and articles and somehow get these through unspecified means (most likely through sheer awesomeness alone no doubt) into the top 5 for all new players to be able to see.
4. Absolutely no changes to the value of the CAF unless his obviously-successful citizen growth plan works out.
5. Save up lots of gold.
6. End war with the eUK
7. Prevent Indonesia from taking over Australia
8. Invade Paraguay and take the Chaco region.
9. Resign from TCO

The Analysis

Early on you can quickly see that the proposed citizen population growth is at the focal point of the platform, if not the only part of the platform, with the rest being sloppily-put together plans to give the illusion of an actual platform and prevent the obvious realization that the player who is so fabled for spending tons of RL money to buy gold to fight in wars, will be spending tons of RL money again to do what no candidate possible can. Basically, the rest of the platform was totally unneeded as he was already unmatched even before he even wrote his 3rd proposal.

But in all fairness, let us look at what exactly has been accomplished, because it's a much shorter list than what hasn't been accomplished.

Social Platform

Frankly, it failed. Miserably. Let these charts explain better:


If you cannot see images well enough, either zoom in on your browser by holding CTRL and pressing the plus (+) button OR click on the images.

Figure 1: Population of eCanada during November 5th - December 4th (Fox Blutch's Term)

Notes: As you can see Fox experienced a nice boom in population near the end of his term, only to be unpleasantly knocked down back to where he started by the end. All in all, he never made grand promises about population if any, and the population was no better off before or after his term. In all fairness, eCanada lost some regions to eFrance and eUK near the end of his term even though Quebec had not yet fallen and all the provinces taken had in between 10-90 citizens.

Figure 2: Population of eCanada during December 5th - 31st (TemujinBC's Term)

Notes: We'll start off easy and state that eCanada was in turmoil when TemujinBC came to power, and population drastically fell when eCanada was being held hostage by Pheonix. However eCanada today has all her regions back, at even at their worst, eFrance only held Quebec for a little while, which means that all other provinces were utterly useless in terms of population. eCanada today has less citizens than Dec 5th, and is arguably is one of the lowest levels of population in almost two years.

Figure 3: Population of eCanada starting with Fox Blutch's term on November 5th, and ending on December 31st, near the end of TemujinBC's term.

Notes: I put a divider on December 5th, when TemujinBC became president to show the difference between the two months.


Where oh where are the "at LEAST 8000 citizens" by January 5th? Are they all coming on the 4th? Not only has TemujinBC failed miserably to reach his minimal target, but has managed to embarrass eCanada with one of the lowest populations in our history in times of peace. Lowest probably since we first passed that milestone way back in our early days as an e-nation.

The newspaper, tv, Radio, etc Ads

Frankly, they never happened. Miserable failure again.

TemujinBC never made any sort of "ad" for eCanada. The man who has spent hundreds and hundreds of REAL Canadian dollars buying eRepublik gold to fund for his personal glories in battle has utterly flopped on provide even 1$ of support for his proposed ad campaign, the one that none of the other candidates could match of course.

In a last ditch effort, Coda (not TemujinBC) has helped by making fliers. Fliers which WE are supposed to print out and paste everywhere we can to get people interested in eRepublik. Isn't that a dirty trick you'd say?

Also to fill in the last bit, there was not even one charitable (or not) lottery draw of any sort on the part of the administration, let alone "constant ones" even though I'd say this one was an easy win for the President. However Kronos Q did manage to create an excellent new player guide which of course TemujinBC has no part in making but a large part in boasting about it as his own creation.

To finish, this administration could rival that of Karsten Skeries who took over for a week or two as President after the infamous Rolo Tahmasee was impeached. It could rival it in being eCanada's most uncommunicative administration ever. Even Alias Vision and definitely Fox Blutch beat TemujinBC and that IS saying something.

The Economic Platform

What economic platform? Saving money?

Well if that can be considered a "plan", TemujinBC decided to blindly fulfill at least one of his "plans" so he savagely cut the Canadian Armed Forces budget (you know, the money to pay for weapons for our soldiers) exactly during the time we started getting invaded by eUK and eFrance.

Of course it didn't take long for us to start losing the war and for high members of the Canadian Armed Forces to threaten to go public in letting everyone know that they cannot fulfill their duty with limited funds. Thus TemujinBC had to go right back to spending every penny we had in the war. I'm not necessarily saying it wasn't money well spent, I'm just musing about another failure of his proposed plan for eCanada.

The Military Platform

We'll keep this one short too. We successfully ended the war with the eUK and TemujinBC successfully managed to quit the Crimson Canucks. Congratulations to the president for making 4th graders everywhere proud and completing two insignificant promises.

However, we did not obnoxiously invade Paraguay which would have been not only impossible to take over, but also maintain, and there was probably a joke with this proposal that I didn't understand. Also, Australia got wiped out by Indonesia.

To Conclude

I will not insult the reader's intelligence with any more obvious conclusions to TemujinBC's term as President. With that being said, I found it rather amusing that our President has also managed to be the most childish and unprofessional President we've ever had. Of course, all this arrogant and obnoxious acting was because TemujinBC was sure we'd all make him our idol after lifting our nation to glory. All we got though was the douchness. I want my money back.

In real life Brazil, a former clown ran for Congress this year to mock politicians and managed to get landslide support. TemujinBC may have gotten landslide support for his Presidential bid in virtual Canada, but it seems the joke's on us. Again.



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Octavian_F is the CEO of the Investment Bank CIBC, eCanadian congressman, and Chief Editor of the Financial Times.