Best Posts in Forum: News and Weather

• The Global Typhoon Forecast Models (GTFM) are predicting this system to become a Tropical Cyclone within the next 24 to 48 hours and shall track generally westward towards Western Micronesia. The forecast confidence is currently at HIGH.
• The Day 03 Forecast shows LPA 93W as a Tropical Storm (TS) entering the southeastern border of the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) on Sunday morning, Feb 11, with a medium forecast confidence.
• The Day 04 Forecast shows the system making landfall as a TS or Severe Tropical Storm (STS) along Caraga Region on Monday Evening (Feb 12) or Early Tuesday Morning (Feb 13). The confidence of this 4-day forecast is currently low.
• LPA 93W is still too far to directly affect any part of the Philippines.
• This 24-hour StormWatch Update will be replaced with a 12-hrly Tropical Cyclone Updates once the LPA develops into a Tropical Cyclone with a serious threat to the Philippine Islands.

 

Merry Christmas. Power came back at 4:20pm yesterday, after Noreco fixed the down lines. Overall, Noreco performed great in this disaster.

 

I can understand how people became irrational. Just look at the massive fear porn we were subjected on regular media and social media including Facebook. The videos on TV and youtube showing dead bodies in Italy falling off the trucks onto the street. In the US in Staten Island, New York with the ambulance sirens as they passed by every 2 or 3 minutes and people huddling inside their homes, TV doctors claiming that millions will soon die, videos of Wuhan residents being dragged out of apartments and crammed into into trucks bring driven to quarantine camps and videos of people in Wuhan simply dropping dead on the street.

Now it has been a while and we recognize that although the disease is horrible, much worse than flu strains we are familiar with, the death rate is 1.5% and not of the whole population but only of those testing positive. It has been going down according to the IATF graphs. I the early days I heard figures of total deaths approaching 10% of entire country populations if we didn’t lockdown. Our data on countries that did not lock down is sparse but it seems to show that lockdowns have some life saving benefit but mass casualties do not occur when they are lifted.

But when it comes to matters of life and death it is psychologically difficult to roll back and take a less emotional and more rational perspective. You have been scared out your wits. The fright does not leave the mind so quickly when those shocking images and words have sunk in so deeply.

It seems to stay with people for a long time, reading the majority of comments to covid news on FB. Those who want to relax lockdowns are akin to psychopaths who do not care if people die. So many are probably afraid to comment. Peer approval is much more important here than in the west.

Past “quarantine” actions always meant “quarantining” individuals known or suspected to have been in contact with sick people and then “isolating” the sick people themselves. However, China started a new procedure we could call the “Wuhan” process; what they did, and the rest of the world copied, was to quarantine the entire population, not just the sick or potentially sick as before.

This was the first time in history that happened in a large scale, at least as far as I can see. The 100% quarantines started in Wuhan China and we thought they likely knew the best way to handle it, after all, they were the experts, so everybody followed and they quarantined entire cities and regions just as Wuhan and surrounding provinces did.

Initially this may have been justified because of the high presumed contagiousness. It is truly quite high with an R of 1.3 or more. But at the beginning, scientists were saying it was 6, definitely an added reason to keep everybody inside. To my knowledge, nobody is re-evaluating the need for 100% mass quarantine now that R is known to be much lower.

R = 1.3 is highly contagious; it means that every sick person infects 1.3 more people, so, the disease rampages through the cities if no restrictions are made (like quarantine in its “normal” definition).

Remember the 14 days to “flatten the curve”, to stem the increase in RATE of infections? That occurred here months ago. And for those who think “death rate” is more important, that rate has been in the negative direction even with the statistical increase in new cases (but not increase in rate of infection aka flattening the curve).

“Flattening the curve” is a passé term nowadays for those who remember it. But at the beginning it was the most urgent effort to be undertaken by all nations on the planet. There is not much advertising revenue when reporting news that said we made significant progress on the disease, at least not then.

I tend to be in eskirvin’s corner on this. We really need to do a deep dive and readjust our containment measures if more recent data supports it (loosening restrictions).

I did not say we should stop trying to contain the virus. Or to not selectively protect the most endangered. But we need to give it another look and we may find many relaxations that would make perfect sense.


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I passed the article on to my brother in law, a geophysicist. He thinks the professor at Siliman is correct.
Apparently magma moves around all the time.
These earthquakes could become very interesting or maybe not.

 

Tourists spend their money on hotels and restaurants, which are places the rich park their money for diversification (but low returns in a commodity services market). Regular Joe's don't have the savvy to offer premium services to tourists, so they get the same crap rates which is expected from this economy and provides a poverty lifestyle. There's little trickle-down here.

The Philippines just needs to open this place up to foreign ownership to invite as much investment as the country can entice. It's an international competition and the Philippines doesn't even have the door open. If nothing else, this would at least create some chaos into the system which could provide an opening to outsiders (locals which aren't in the ruling dynasties).

Emerging economies are already facing a world of hurt because the agricultural -> manufacturing -> services paths to prosperity (the same path the US took) are going to be closing off as automation increasingly eats jobs.

Though right now the economy is growing at a decent rate and we can see this with the transformation of Dumaguete and increased traffic. Still, there is a long way to go and I don't know how much of this is reaching the bottom. The increased number of SUV's on the road looks impressive, but it doesn't take many of those things to create a traffic problem. Maybe they aren't as many as there appears to be.

Duterte is trying to fight corruption, maybe another way to do this is to make the dynasties face foreign competition. There's nothing like huge business losses from competitive @ss kicking to drain the coffers of the elites.

 

I went out and had a look at the bridge and think the fault lies with the cement supplier.
Attached are a couple of pictures. They show that the concrete literally turned into small pieces and "dust".
There was a lot of re-bar. The top cord seemed to have a lot. The bottom cord was not visible so who knows.
The bridge is arched slightly about 8-12" over a 60' span which looks about right IMO. The concrete would be in bulk modulus (compression mode) and should no have failed.

I met an Aussie that makes concrete paving stones for driveways and sidewalks. He got a batch of bad cement and his paving stones literally crumbled in his hands. The cement was manufactured on Cebu island. The factory actually replaced his 250 bags of bad cement and gave him another 250 bags to make up for his troubles. The cement factory said they only had 500 bags of the bad batch. Maybe there was more defective product and some of it may have ended up here.

At least the bridge failed before it was completed and people were using it.

 

If you had bothered to read the links DavyL posted you would know that " his biased opinion" came directly from the article.
I find it amusing that you as a junior member on this form feel it's your position to moderate one of the forms moderators.
Carry on ♥️♥️

 

Follow the money. Who got his pension, cash, belongings, life insurance. Where is his widow going to be consoled?

You suggest varying our routine and I suggest it does not matter. We cannot hide from a hit team in this country as we stand out like a white thumb on a black hand. All we can do is use our brains to avoid giving anyone a motive for murder.

 

If you own or are planning on building your home a well is something to look into; if not your primary water source at least as a back up. Where we are the city water pressure was bad so when we built I did not even bring in city water; a well, pump and elevated tank provides enough water pressure. With a float switch controlling the electric pump you really don't have to think about much other than changing the filter every couple of months.

Shawn