Confronting the ugly face of disasters
While most of the Philippine business community were, during the first Thursday of this month (May 3) at seminars and conferences of the 45^th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Development Bank at the Philippine International Convention Center, in the City of Manila, a few others were on the other side of town, at the Rockwell Campus of the Ateneo de Manila University in the City of Makati at the Roundtable on Business Continuity Planning conducted under the auspices of the school and Manila Observatory.
The space that separated the two venues as well as the time that had to be spent if one had tried to negotiate the distance in order to attend both events belied the close affinity between the subjects taken up in the two gatherings.  Both groups were concerned about wealth: those in Manila discussed how make more of it and how to share it, up and down as well as all around, with society’s many levels; those in Makati were talking about how to quickly resume the process of making it and return their enterprises to normalcy in the event of a disruptive natural or man-made calamity.  Enough (too much, in the estimation of some) has been said about the Manila event; not enough coverage, I submit, was given to the Makati conference.  Hence, this piece.   Click for Complete Article
 

The Call of Adrian
It was not the ritual I grew up with. For us, the hoi polloi Tondo, it was outwardly marked by no more than a mere return, particularly by the women, to the wearing of clothes of everyday colours, and by the men, to the resumption of louder laughter and more frequent expletives at which nobody takes offense. The church goers exhale a prayer or two, commending in whispers to the Almighty the departed loved one. And those who stay outside during Mass, wear a public a smile that nevertheless fails to hide the anxiety over an unknown future, henceforth to be lived without the one who had unexpectedly gone.    Click for Complete Article
 

One rule for us, another for the big boys
When we lowly folks, not knowing that they are fake, use counterfeit bills to pay our taxes, the Bureau of Internal Revenue through its authorized agent banks, spotting the forgery, correctly rejects our payment.  Our taxes remain unpaid; and we are left to our own devices to settle our problem with those who passed the Mickey Mouse money to us.  Not so with the big boys, like Petron Corporation.     Click for Complete Article
 

The 9^th Phil Non-Life Insurance Summit
Somebody up there likes him.  Exactly two weeks before Reynaldo A. De Dios is to hold his 9^th yearly summit for the region’s insurance industry on April 25, 2012 at the InterContinental Hotel in Makati City, an undersea earthquake, described by CNN as “the largest earthquake of its type ever recorded” occurs in Sumatra.  Recorded at 8.6 on the Richter scale, the quake known as a “strike-slip”, i.e. “where two sides of a fault horizontally slip past each other” excited the scientific community.  Says Director Kerry Seih of the Earth Observatory of Singapore: “Before that we thought at 8.1 was as big as they get, but this 8.6 quake was phenomenal. It has been jaw-dropping and has caused a lot of foment among seismologists.” 
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