We beg to differ.
Let me tell you a conversation I once had with my Singaporean friends. After all, we all like to believe that the Philippines can one day become as prosperous as Singapore. Both Ilda and Benign0 have already said their pieces about Singapore, so this is mine, or rather, what my Singaporean friends have to say….
Read More “Superficiality vs. Substance: From The Eyes Of Singaporeans” »
So, it has come to this. Sadly, while I am pleased to know that more and more people are waking up intellectually because of the Aquino administration’s repetitive mishaps, a lot more remain delusional regarding the true state of the country. To this day, I still meet a lot of people who are in vehement…
[The following is an article by Star columnist Don Pedero published in The Philippine Star 29 October 2000 and also featured in Get Real Philippines on the same year.] * * * Last July 23, I wrote about Nasty (short for Anastacio), a balikbayan from Los Angeles, who, while vacationing in Manila, had nothing to…
Read More “The #Philippines is a nation of starstruck ignoramuses” »
Is it supposed to be surprising that apart from a few reports on both GMA, ABS-CBN, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer, there isn’t much discussion going around about the newly signed Republic Act (RA) 10535? RA 10535 is described as, “an act to set the Philippine Standard Time (PST) in all official sources throughout the…
Read More “Is Philippine Standard Time truly the solution to Filipino Time?” »
” Love Exciting and New/ Come Aboard / We’re Expecting you and Love’ Life’s Sweetest Reward, we’re a friendly smile on a friendly shore.” Theme from the Love Boat sung by Jack Jones. No, I am not doing a Kate Natividad style story. The title is in reference to a 70s hit…
Lots of people seem to have, at best, a rather shallow understanding of what I mean when I keep harping about the lack of a concept of “efficiency” in the Tagalog dialect. My simple explanation is that the lack of a concept of efficiency native to (or long embedded in) Tagalog reflects the inherent intellectual…
The grand-daddy of our culture-as-root-cause thesis, the late great Teddy Benigno, in his classic 2002 Star article Why investors avoid us: The trust factor highlighted what, at the time, was a very conservative forecast regarding China’s fortunes made in a Nomura Research Institute (NRI) study that foresaw a China that could “burgeon into the world’s…
Read More “Without operational excellence, capital is squandered” »
A car is usually the single biggest money pit in the average Filipino’s portfolio of assets. The value of a brand-new car depreciates by at least 20 percent as soon as they are driven out of the show room. It then proceeds to spend the rest of its useful life draining your bank account of…
Read More “Is it worth it? The Filipino’s guide to car ownership” »