Opinion
The most expensive thing in your car is time
A car can tell you many things. It can tell you that a door is open, a tire needs air, a passenger has forgotten to buckle up, or that you are getting dangerously close to the vehicle in front of you. What it cannot tell you is why you have been sitting in the same spot for 23 minutes. This is the peculiar economics of driving in the Philippines. We fork over a great deal of money buying cars that can go very fast, and then spend a considerable portion of our lives making sure they do not.
VP Duterte’s business interests raise constitutional knot
Senator-judge Raffy Tulfo asked a deceptively simple question during Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial: Why did no one in her legal orbit tell her to divest from her businesses before she took her oath?
We have basketball at home
Filipinos have never really needed an invitation to love basketball. Give us a hoop, a ball, and approximately four square meters of concrete and we will figure out the rest. There is no requirement for proper flooring, air-conditioning, seating, parking, or even a complete understanding of the rules. Someone will keep score. Someone will call a phantom foul. Someone will bend the rules to ridiculous proportions in plain sight. So when the National Basketball Association brought basketball to the Philippines once again, nobody complained. After all, Filipinos have been quite willing to make room for basketball for decades. We simply cleared a little more space.
Fed moves in Washington, Filipino wallets feel the pinch
When the US Federal Reserve, the world’s most influential central bank, moves interest rates, Manila can feel the ripple, even 8,500 miles away. The effects do not arrive all at once, and they do not affect everyone in the same way. But eventually, they can show up in the mortgage, car loan, credit card bill, and even the grocery budget.
The great Philippine parking expedition
There are two kinds of Filipino motorists: those looking for a parking space and those who have already found one and are determined not to tell you where it is. Parking has become one of the more demanding sports in modern Philippine life. It requires patience, spatial awareness, quick reflexes, and, occasionally, the ability to stare at another motorist for several seconds without saying anything that could get you into trouble.
