Category: Business

Rappler and Maria Ressa: “JOURNALISTS FOR RENT”

The mystery persists. Why would anyone believe a government initiative presumptuously billed a conference on “media freedom” that is conducted by the Omidyar Group? Omidyar are deeply-invested in many media companies most of which are so-called reporters of “news”.

This is the confronting question posed by Ezra Levant to the various organisations that participated in this chi chi event. Levant observes, however…

No-one here cares. They all want some of that sweet, sweet cash. When @mariaressa said a $4.5 million grant from Omidyar no big deal, you could see everyone here salivate like Pavlov’s Dog. That’s what this conference is about: Omidyar wants to rent hundreds of “journalists”.

Right there is the reason why Big Corporate Media are no longer credible channels for unbiased news reporting. Anyone who receives money from “investors” they have direct relationships with are, in principle, no longer objective.

Unless Big Corporate Media find a new model for funding their “news” operations, they will never regain their lost credibility in that field. For now, they should be content just delivering entertainment. Entertaining an audience, after all, does not require objectivity. Besides, entertainment is more profitable, something Maria Ressa’s Rappler should put a bit more focus on — becoming a profitable enterprise for the sake of its shareholders.

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COSMOPOLITANISM better describes the notion of “liberalism” at the centre of snowflakes’ virtue signalling

Nesrine Malik nailed it in his Guardian article “Feel smug about western democracy? The G20 summit should make us reconsider” when he wrote how “the everyday sort of liberalism” we see being bandied around by “activists” is “probably better described as cosmopolitanism”.

The kind that makes you look around your diverse locality, the quiet tolerance of the majority and think that all is well. Not the kind of liberalism that is borne out by polls showing that there is increased acceptance of immigration or LGBT people. Or the liberalism of technical democracy, where we still elect leaders in free and fair(ish) elections. This is corporate campaign liberalism, new Arsenal kit launch, urban fist-bumping liberalism.

An even more spot-on term right there: “corporate campaign liberalism”. Reminds us of that ill-thought-out Gillette ad circus that was nothing short of an epic embarassment to the industry.

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China detains former Foreign Affairs Sec Albert Del Rosario’s ass in Hong Kong!

Pity former Foreign Affairs Sec Albert Del Rosario. He is a former Philippine official who gets detained in Hong Kong like a common undesirable alien. That’s what you get when you file a case against a global superpower before a Mickey Mouse court such as that of the “International Criminal Court”.

Yellowtards still don’t get it. The world is not fair and it certainly won’t be fair to anyone just because they feel they are entitled to fairness.

Del Rosario was to attend board and shareholders meetings of First Pacific and was travelling alone. He said two members of the Philippine consulate are with him in the airport staff lounge where he was being questioned.

Well now, tough shit, right? Perhaps Del Rosario should file another case with the ICC this time for “unfair detention”. We’ll wish him all the best of luck with that case.

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An influx of Chinese workers inducing rise in property values is not a bad thing

Some “analysts” are making it look like rising property prices which they attribute to an influx of Chinese and other foreign workers are a bad thing. On the contrary this is an opportunity that could result in the creation of more jobs.

Rising prices are a sign of pressure on supply due to increasing demand. A rise in the value of real estate will likely stimulate more investment in property development which, in turn, will create demand for construction work. The upstream impact of this will be more demand for the input into this activity — construction supplies and, yes, construction workers. This is not counting demand for other related goods and services this will create.

The economy and business opportunity is not a zero-sum game. Profit and income harvested by one party does not necessarily deprive another of the same. On the contrary, one party realising profit in one business or employment activity likely results in a net positive opportunity for others.

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Instagrammer @LanceDeOcampo #cancelledt after dipping into Siargao “influencer” row!

“Influencer” is so last year’s hipster lingo and “curated” is so ten years ago old school. Yet social media “content creator” Lance de Ocampo seemingly manages to make a living bandying around those terms.

De Ocampo is seemingly one such Internet parasite of late slighted by statements from business owners who’ve had enough of such millennial vermin pitching “collaboration” projects to market their products and services in exchange for personal freebies.

White Banana Beach Club (WBBC) in Siargao had, for one, issued a statement on its Facebook page essentially slamming the door on these bozos…

We are receiving many messages regarding collaborations with influencers, Instagram influencers. We kindly would like to announce that White Banana is not interested to collaborate with self-proclaimed influencers

WBBC, in a subsequent post, went further to clarify what they believe a REAL influencer is…

Good day everyone.
Our post went viral.
But we want to clarify that we are not against INFLUENCERS.
Just against freeloaders.

A REAL influencer is called as such by the rest, he does not address him/herself as an influencer. They are bloggers. We have actually collaborated with a few of them, in different terms and conditions, and we support them.

There are real influencers, that in case we will contact them and pay or offer something. But look, they’ve never contacted us, as they don’t need us. We need them.

In a statement that he later posted on Twitter, De Ocampo asserted that he “felt strongly offended about their statement” and cautioned the beach resort management against making such a “hasty generalization”.

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How money fits into the scheme of things for GRP and Filipinos as a people

Yup, there used to be a donation button on Getrealphilippines.com and it was there until as recently as mid-2018. The button linked to a legacy mid-2000s era static HTML page that some bozo is now raising a stink about in a recent tweet where he exhibits one among several screenshots of the now defunct page.

It doesn’t really take a genius to dig up information about defunct pages because EVERYTHING on the Web is archived and that page is no exception as it can be found here.

The fact is, letting go of the old GRP legacy site where that page resided was a tough choice. But it had to be done back in August 2018 when we had to migrate the site to a new premium hosting service due to the demands of increasing traffic. Current generation premium WordPress specialist hosting sites do not provide the option to host sites made up of static HTML pages (which the original GRP legacy site was) nor domicile the WordPress installation on a folder other than the root directory as was the structure back when Get Real Post existed side-by-side with the old GRP legacy site. Believe me, I researched extensively and I couldn’t find any that could do it without extensive customised coding.

For that matter, there were two donation pages on the GRP legacy site; that one and another one for the download site for Get Real Philippines Book 1 which was made available for download in 2006 (also archived here).

The key thing to note here is that both these donation pages reach out to random readers and visitors of the site in a manner that requires no personal relationships to be maintained. They were there to consider or ignore. There was a pitch to beckon said consideration but what product for that matter does not engage in any sort of beckoning in the spirit of competition?

To be fair, the pitch on the donation page was written in the sort of dry snarky tongue-in-cheek style that few Filipino minds are able to grasp. So my bad there. But then the target audience of GRP overall are not the average garden-variety communities of shrill folk who do and patronise amateurish research work that make use of “resibo” screenshots without any supporting hyperlinks.

And that’s the whole story. We stand by EVERYTHING we write. Indeed;

Great nations were not built on good intentions. They were built on business sense. Real change in Pinoy society will never be achieved through the “sacrifice” of altruistic “heroes”. True change will be driven by people who find no shame in expecting a buck for their trouble.

If there was any single foundation for a case against the Yellowtards and their dishonest rhetoric, that paragraph would be it.

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Maria Ressa needs to take a break from #DefendPressFreedom — because she is the CEO of Rappler!

If I were a shareholder of “social news network” Rappler, I’d be really pissed. You hire and pay a CEO big bucks and what does she do? She gets my company into a heap of tax trouble and exposes it to a big libel case. Worst of all, she gets arrested and spends most of her time in rallies and schmoozing with “activists” who espouse nebulous causes.

Most CEOs worth their salt are measured on the basis of shareholder added value. It seems Ressa has not only exempted herself from compliance to Philippine law, she’s also unilaterally exempted herself from measures that make most CEOs tremble on their leather seats.

If there is anything that exhibits just what an awful business executive Maria Ressa is, look no further than the business she was supposed to be leading. Rappler was once a star “new media” entity. Now it is so short of cash that it resorts to soliciting donations to fund its quaint legal battles.

Ressa is covering up her failure as a CEO with the dishonest “activism” around “press freedom” we are subject to today. That’s a really dishonest initiative that is sucking precious attention span away from more important national issues that truly matter to ordinary Filipinos. It’s time to put a stop to this nonsense and call out the failed CEO that Maria Ressa really is.

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To all those bagging Henry Sy on the day of his death, show a bit of RESPECT!

Activists and their commie lapdogs are grabbing the low-hanging fruit of wit today making crack about the now-late Retail King Henry Sy. Sy passed away today. And he leaves a retail empire that employs hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and keeps entire downstream and upstream industries around it humming.

Still, the “contractualisation” thing. Commies can’t seem to see behind that moronic notion of trying to outwit the Law of Supply and Demand using obsolete rhetoric as this bozo demonstrates…

patay na si henry sy sr. pero ang iniwan niyang sistema ng kontraktwalisasyon at hindi pagbibigay ng tamang benepisyo sa mga manggagawa (na ginaya na rin ng ibang kompanya) ay mananatili pa rin #NoToContractualization #StandWithWorkers

Employment terms are not the problem. What “activists” call the “problem” of “contractualisation” is just an outcome of the Law of Supply and Demand.

Nobody twisted anyone’s arm to work for SM. SM advertises job openings and there are takers. Free market at work there. Not a perfect system but it’s the best by far. It’s simple, really.

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#GilletteAd exploits misguided #MeToo “activist” anger over “unfair” gender differences

These “activists” want to see being a man made into a complicated enterprise — probably because being a woman is inherently complicated and, being so, women suffer from a bad case of simplicity envy.

Back in the old days, men went out to hunt and so the skills we evolved were mainly around zeroing in focus of attention on prey and working with other men in the hunting team to stalk and kill it. Women, on the other hand, evolved to deal with the politics surrounding working with other women to hold the fort, tend to kids running around, prepare food, and, overall, maintaining a social structure/dynamic that facilitated all that harmoniously.

This is why women tend to be more insecure about their social status and tend to gossip a lot — because they need to keep their radars up to mitigate any threats to their position within these vital structures and dynamics. There’s nothing inherently bad about that. It just is what it is thanks to the selection pressures that shaped the evolution of human society. It only became “bad” when these “activists” told us so.

Women were also the primary “gatherers” in hunter-gatherer societies — which is why they are more avid window shoppers, because their brains are wired to evaluate many options, canvass the best value, and test what they bring home to ensure that what they gathered does not poison the entire tribe.

Brain wiring vastly differs between the genders not because of any conspiracy on the part of either side to bully or dominate the other but because nature shaped those roles to ensure survival of the collective. The thing with these snowflake activists is that they want “equality” but have an ill-conceived working definition of that notion which they then apply to their confused “advocacy”.

[Based on a comment posted on the Get Real Post article “Gillette should decide whether ‘toxic masculinity’ is a bigger issue than TOXIC WASTE”.]
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Activists’ ironic fall for Gillette “toxic male” ad spells mega-$$s for Procter and Gamble!

What the production team for the Gillette ad failed to understand:

* Real men don’t like being told what to do.
* You do not piss off your No. 1 customer.
* Make your Ad about your product, not your personal advocacies.

The fact is, consumers of Gillette’s disposable razors have long fallen for the old — but highly-effective — marketing trick of selling “lifestyles” around a product that had been reduced to a mere commodity in a mature market.

This brouhaha around that anti- “toxic male” strawman is just that. In fact, like “millennial” and all the Gen X, Y, and other category labels, “toxic male” has become just another marketing notion used in the clever ads of dishonest corporations.

It is ironic that snowflake activists have fallen for what has turned out to be nothing more than a successful publicity stunt by Procter and Gamble CORPORATION.

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