Those of you who are ancient may remember a Shell gasoline commercial in which they lauded their secret ingredient, Platformate(tm). Unclear what that is, but it sounds good.

Here are some more modern, imho deliberate, obfuscations. Made to sound good, though.

Not to pick on Mazda especially, but what exactly is Skyactiv Technology? And not to pick on Ford, but what exactly is EcoBoost?

Many bank ads are, imho, similarly misleading. For example, a youth wishes to take his father on a trip. In the ScotiaBank TV commercial, the smiling young woman says something like this: “I moved some things around and saved you fifteen hundred dollars.” This is supposed to prove that ScotiaBank was, just before this, equally concerned about not making extra money from him.

There is a laundry detergent which claims that, because it is more efficient, it takes less time to do the wash. I don’t know about your washer, but ours is quite new and Caplans really pushed it as being ‘very good.’ It does not measure clothes clean-ness: it runs on a timer. So ‘no soap’ to the wash time change, eh?

Long ago People’s Credit Jewellers had a fifty percent off sale, in which they claimed something like, “This proves we’ve always been the low cost, high value store.”

It is to laugh.

If you don’t live in Toronto, you won’t care much about these next examples of the assumption that we can not think.

Smart Track. Which nobody understands in detail. Scarborough Subway, which nobody can justify. Union-Pearson Express (UPX) which has one-third the ridership needed to pay off at the current outrageously high price. So they cut the price to less than half. Those of you who remember simple fractions will calculate that we now need six or seven times as many riders.

Finally, John Tory is asking Kathleen Wynne for permission to bring back photo radar. This is not a cash grab, no no. The claim is this: “Photo radar will reduce policing costs.” Wake up, John and Kathleen: nothing reduces policing costs in Toronto. If you don’t need officers to run the radar vans, you’ll still employ those officers. You’ve never reduced policing costs nor staffing levels, despite dropping crime rates.

There always has to be at least one Dumb Question if I use that as a category. So here are a few:

Say what? Will we believe anything?

Say what? Will we interpret any weird word as magic or superior technology? (Or in the case of laundry detergent, any weirdly coloured packaging? Like jujubes?)

Say what? Are we too dumb to be told what ridership projections are, so bad ideas can be booed into embarrassment?

Say what? Do we believe our mayor any more?

Should we?

That’s the most important dumb question.