Category: social sciences

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Unskilled OFW Remittance

from GMA news:

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according to the NSO although the remittance from unskilled workers are only a third of skilled workers the sheer number of unskilled Filipino OFW’s make up for this and makes them the larger group in terms of total remittance amounting to around 17.6 billion peros (roughly 400 million dollars or 259 million euros thanks google).
The sad thing is anecdotally people are not really changing their lives long term. This is probably because the families here or back home rarely have enough schooling or are financially astute enough to handle the remittances that they get.
Add this to the fact that people from my country somewhat believe that work abroad is easier than back home. I remember my friends telling me how people coming back home have neighbors who wait in line to get gifts.
I think some things can be done to improve this, hope I can get something started.

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MOA

I think I need to follow local news more closely.
here is a nice intro to the MOA between the MILF Rebels and The Government Representatives.
I think the MOA is unconstitutional and may be there for two reasons.
The current government is trying to railroad a Charter Change, I pray they don’t succeed.
Why Can’t We Have A Better Class Of Politicians?

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Riz Khan Interview About Liberian Women Combatants

I especially like the question on what one of the women whose family was killed and was raped by a soldier would do if she faced that very same man. She said that life must go on and that doing anything would not bring her family back. The kicker is that she said she sees the man day and night because that man is involved with an NGO. Wow!

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Fighting Poverty

from here:
Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

I think that most people in developing nations such as my country this applies. I talk to a lot of people and what hits me is that extreme or even mild but prolonged poverty causes a great change in all but the best people.  Before we can even try to help someone we must first try to convince that person that he can be helped, that he can be “saved”.
There are a lot of foundations who like to help in our country but a key ingredient a lot of these foundations seem to be missing is that people who suffer from poverty are broken in a way. They are not normal or ordinary and a more mindful and involved program is needed. I’ve seen a few organizations that seem to know this. Hope they all do.

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rePost: Addiction and Living

I don’t know, he was saying this about how he survived a drug addiction, but I think that this is great advice for life in general.
The article was a great read, please read it if you haven’t yet. Its about a drug addict who was able to overcome his addiction.
read the article here:

I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing romantic about being a crackhead and a drunk — low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost.

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Oppressed Mentality

thanks to brad delong from his excerpt here:

Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…though we are getting ahead of ourselves. For first we must send Richard Nixon to law school, where he was a monk….

I see this with a lot of my countrymen and women. its like so many people feel that they are so special as to believe that everyone is trying to oppress them. Damn. We are all special that’s why Nobody is special.
What I’d be honest enough to admit is what I continuously see. People are so caught up (except those people whom I know to have so much as to be ble to give so much of themselves, I wouldn’t name names so the few people who read this end up thinking I am referring to them) in the little drama of their own lives that most of the time your boss doesn’t hate you. The jeepney driver who gave you the wrong change didn’t actually try to cheat you. The lady who slightly nudged you while getting off the MRT(like the BART) didn’t really intend to shove you. Get Over Your Cult Of ME!

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My Bohemia the Net

The feeling of alienation that one feels with the world at large leads one to a nuanced depression.
A sense of limbo and utter dejection with the present reality that engulf ones own existence.
To me the internet was my bohemia, a place for misfits, rejects, dreamers and people somewhat unhappy/unsatisfied with the world as it is.
from Vanity Fair here:
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.

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Living In A Bubble

I feel strongly about this. I either try to walk as much as I can. The thing that irritates me a lot is the high levels of pollution you are exposed to. Coming from a 3rd world country You bet our elites probably don’t know how hard it is to breath in most any part of metro manila. Its sad because they are mostly living in a bubble. They live in posh villages with well manicured lawns and beautiful trees. They ride in air conditioned limos and hardly ever really experience the air pollution. I have a feeling they’d be more concerned with the environment if they only joined me for a walk!
from the NYT:
I wouldn’t think that sidewalks are a top priority in developing countries. The last priority. Because the priority is to make highways and roads. We are designing cities for cars, cars, cars, cars, cars. Not for people. Cars are a very recent invention. The 20th century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building much more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness.Even in countries where most people can’t afford to own cars? The upper-income people in developing countries never walk. They see the city as a threatening space, and they can go for months without walking one block.

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Sad

The 2nd richest society my @ss:
Thanks to Marginal Revolution. Post here:

The culture that is Japanese

from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing.
Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

Even better is how he caught her:

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months.

Hat tip goes to Instapundit.

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Sustainable Development

It took me a long time to learn this. You can’t automate the connection, mostly emotional, probably nostalgic in essence because these are the things that keep us caring, keep us active in everything.
from here:
For example: if a school installs light sensors in a classroom so that the lights go off when students leave, they should think hard about what exactly that action is teaching.  If the students don’t have to turn off the lights themselves, it may be further disconnecting them from ecology and natural resources.  Education for sustainability looks to integrate children with the natural world not disintegrate their relationship with it.
HT: j