We beg to differ.
Everywhere you look — physically or conceptually — in the Philippines and you find systems and solutions that cannot scale. The most famous of these is the jeepney. The jeepney “system” (if you can even call it a system) is a public transport solution that requires more labour input with every unit of capacity expansion….
A couple of weeks ago, Filipino youngsters are back to school as face-to-face classes have officially begun. With the recent report by the World Bank, which says that around 90% of Filipino school children at the age of 10 have no reading ability, educators in the Philippines have welcomed these face-to-face classes as a way…
Read More “Philippine transportation is a microcosm of the country’s socio-economic disarray” »
As the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte comes to an end, one of its unfulfilled campaign promises coming to light is the improvement in the delivery of government services to the citizenry. At the onset, the support base of Duterte rallied behind him because of this promise translated into action during the first months of…
Read More “Digitization of Ph’s nightmarish bureaucracy should be made a major election issue” »
It is the 21st Century. Yet the most iconic symbol of the Philippines remains the jeepney. Once hailed a triumph of “Filipino ingenuity”, it now persists as a stark reminder of a failure to develop engineering excellence at a time when engineering excellence is an even more important foundation upon which global competitiveness could be…
Language is one of the most basic elements that define a culture or nation. For many countries, it is the unifying factor of their people and the key distinctive that sets them apart from other societies around them. Much has been discussed and even debated on the Philippine’s pursuit and cultivation of a national language….
Read More “Word Power (Not People Power) is the Cure to Filipino Dysfunction” »
How did the Philippines get to where it is now? It is a wretched society, unable to defend itself from foreign and natural threats, paralysed by its own enormous population, and staring at a future hobbled by a lack of the infrastructure to get it down the right road. Yet the country, over much of…
Read More “Filipinos need to get off the loser path and onto the road to real progress” »
Everything is such a huge drama in the Philippines. The coming Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) is no exception. It promises to effect immense disruption across a vast swath of Philippine society — which makes the very hosting of this forum by the Philippine government quite ironic. Economies rise and fall on the back of…
Read More “Mass national disruption as APEC Manila 2015 circus comes to town!” »
It’s timely that Benign0 had come out with an article that discusses the twisting of the concept of sacrifice by Filipino culture. Indeed, it is twisted when one says they have made a “sacrifice,” when it is actually anything but that. I remember a commenter named Palebluedot once said: “I still blame the Catholic Church…