Piso isang sampal
Napanood ko sa TV ang mga kababayan natin na galit na galit kay GMA. Kahit na magbayad ng piso, masampal lamang ang effigy ni GMA mailabas lamang ang sama ng loob sa corrupt na gobiyerno natin.
Sabi pa ng isang ale, “mas masarap sana kung sa mukha ni GMA babagsak ang sampal ko”.
Disgusted na ang mga kababayan natin sa corruption ng gobiyerno. Poverty is really hurting the people.
Brave new world: sustainability, alliances and infrastructure
Susanne Cooper, SKM / W2W Alliance
Dr Robert Humphries, WA Water Corporation
Alliance Contracting is increasingly being used to deliver the effective design and construction of major infrastructure across
Over the next decade, major infrastructure projects across the globe will be delivered through alliances, which will bring new and diverse levels of skills, expertise and innovation.
Introducing sustainability
Embedding sustainability from the beginning of projects can create enduring value.
In managing sustainability in large, complex projects, there is a need to go beyond concepts or principles and to apply them pragmatically.
It is essential to apply a structured, systematic process, particularly for programs that involve multiple projects and project teams – as is the case with alliances.
Just as it is critical to encourage thinking within a sustainability framework and engender this as part of design development.
Not so much why, but how…
Sustainability principles are now broadly accepted by project teams as a useful compass to guide planning and design decisions.
The real challenge is in the ‘how’ – and in applying sustainability principles into practice across multiple projects at various stages of design.
The following case study shows how carefully thought out sustainability management can positively impact on a large, multidisciplinary project.
Sustainability was key – starting with the tender documents and selection workshops. Driven by the Water Corporation’s Sustainability Strategy (2004), and adopting 18 business or ‘sustainability’ principles (2006), sustainability principles and business principles became synonymous: ‘its’ the way we do business’.
By rigorously applying these (sustainability / business) principles to all decisions, it improves the sustainability of those decisions and reduces the ecological footprint of infrastructure construction and operation, both financially and socially acceptably.
For the Water Corporation, these principles now form the basis for water planning and infrastructure decisions, and in assessing multiple infrastructure options against detailed sustainability guidelines. Sustainability is integrated into every activity the business undertakes. Read more
SHOCK AND AWE IN MANILA
Remembering ‘Occupation Day’, August 13, 1898
By Carmen Guerrero Nakpil
Special to the BusinessMirror
The handful of surviving Filipinos, who, like me, spent their early years as subjects of the only American colony, remember with mixed feelings and queasy confusion the 13th of August, which was celebrated every year with great pomp and ceremony as “Occupation Day.” It was a school holiday and a national fiesta with triumphalist speeches on the Luneta. We were taught that it was the day the Americans took possession of Manila in 1898, obviously a cause for rejoicing, since it meant the end of the nefarious centuries we had spent in Spanish convents and the beginning of our dalliance with English and Hollywood .
Nobody was ever told the exact circumstances of that event, for American policy was (and still is) steadfast denial of historical truths. But I had a dissident grandfather who spent the day in a cold fury, bursting out every so often with denunciations, rendered with clenched teeth and blazing eyes, about how Filipinos, that fateful August, had already surrounded Intramuros and reduced the Spaniards to starvation and despair but were prevented from taking over the city by the Americans, who had pretended they were allies only until they were able to land enough troops to take Manila themselves.
This is the documented account of the American Occupation of Manila, on August 13, 1898. That day, three combatants were locked in an epic confrontation. The Filipinos, about 80,000 troops of the Revolutionary Army, commanded by Gens. Emilio Aguinaldo, Antonio Luna, Mariano Noriel and other officers, had laid siege to Spanish Manila since mid-June and now held the walled city with a stranglehold of concrete blockhouses and trenches from Caloocan to Pasay . Behind them was the whole of liberated Luzon . But they lacked weapons and ammunition and knew they were exposed to the guns of the American warships anchored in Manila Bay . Read more