There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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Bad English in Jakarta

Jakartass really lets rip in his latest post, slagging off local airline Adam Air for coming up with a really amateurish piece of advertising that is riddled with grammatical errors.

He even concludes that travelers might do well to avoid the airline.

“After all”, he says, “if they couldn't give a sh*t about a simple thing like that, then what are the odds that they cut corners on aircraft maintenance?”

Good point.

But Adam Air isn’t alone when it comes to producing badly written English.

The fact is many companies in Indonesia can’t be bothered to get their stuff checked first. And to be honest, I don’t think they really care.

Sometimes it can even be fun trying to spot examples of “English gone wrong” in the local media as well as in public places.

Like this banner outside a shop in the plush residential area of Menteng for example.


What would Human Rights Watch Asia make of this?

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