Hi!

Welcome to my blog.

Duterte backs more players in telecom, energy industries

PRESIDENT Rodrigo R. Duterte is considering opening up the Philippines to new players particularly in the telecommunications and power industries, saying that such measures will encourage competition and improve the lives of the poor.

President Duterte said in a statement on Wednesday, Nov. 23, upon his return from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit in Perum, that “The only way to make this country faster to benefit the poor is really to open up communications, the airwaves, and the entire energy sector,”.

He explained that an action like that would minimize “corruption in the government,” adding that limited competition in these industries puts the country “at the mercy of the corrupt people in this planet.”

“The only way for deliverance of this country is to remove it from the clutches of the few people who hold the power and money,” he said.

In October, Mr. Duterte threatened the country’s telecoms duopoly -- PLDT, Inc. and Globe Telecom, Inc. -- with competition from China if their services do not improve. He made the statement in connection with a plan to create a complaint line to report corrupt government workers.

In May, these two firms together agreed to buy conglomerate San Miguel Corp. out of the sector for $1.5 billion, pledging to invest heavily to boost Internet service. The acquisition was the country’s biggest corporate transaction in nearly three years.

Meanwhile, the Philippine power and electricity sector is a mix of competition and monopolies. Power generation is generally competitive with many generation companies (gencos) in the field.

ower transmission is a national monopoly via the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP). And electricity distribution is reserved for geographical monopolies, mainly the 120 electric cooperatives (ECs) nationwide, the biggest of which, Manila Electric Co. (Meralco), accounts for about 75% of total electricity sales in Luzon and about 55% nationwide.

In the same statement on Wednesday, the chief executive clarified that he is not “destroying” the incumbents by inviting other players because they “have the advantage.”

“You are here already. Be content with that... But let us open everything to end the suffering of the Filipinos.”

He added that he does not want to have any conflict with the owners of the two telecom groups once he opens the Philippine market for competitors.

“I do not want to have a quarrel with the Ayalas and Pangilinan,” he said.

Manuel V. Pangilinan is the CEO of PLDT while the Ayalas are major shareholders in Globe.

Meralco’s controlling stakeholder, Beacon Electric Asset Holdings, Inc., is partly owned by PLDT, Inc. Hastings Holdings, Inc., a unit of PLDT Beneficial Trust Fund subsidiary MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., has an interest in BusinessWorld through the Philippine Star Group, which it controls.

Reference: 

http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Economy&title=duterte-backs-more-players-in-telecom-energy-industries&id=136896

Softwares

Softwares

George Gamow 

George Gamow was born on 4 March 1904 in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine). He is half Russian and Ukrainian since his parents were Russian-Ukrainian. His mother worked as a teacher and taught history and geography at an all-girls school in Odessa while his father taught literature and the Russian language in a local high school. George Gamow was a developer of Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory.

According to Wikipedia George Gamow led the development of the hot "big bang" theory of the expanding universe. He was the earliest to employ Alexander Friedmann's and Georges Lemaître's non-static solutions of Einstein's gravitational equations describing a universe of uniform matter density and constant spatial curvature. Gamow's crucial advance would provide a physical reification of Lemaitre's idea of a unique primordial quantum. Gamow did this by assuming that the early universe was dominated by radiation rather than by matter.Most of the later work in cosmology is founded in Gamow's theory. He applied his model to the question of the creation of the chemical elements and to the subsequent condensation of matter into galaxies,whose mass and diameter he was able to calculate in terms of the fundamental physical parameters, such as the speed of light c, Newton's gravitational constant G, Sommerfeld's fine-structure constant α, and Planck's constant h.
Gamow's interest in cosmology arose from his earlier interest in energy generation and element production and transformation in stars. This work, in turn, evolved from his fundamental discovery of quantum tunneling as the mechanism of nuclear alpha decay, and his application of this theory to the inverse process to calculate rates of thermonuclear reaction.
In George Gamow's middle and late career, he focused more on teaching and wrote popular books on science, including One Two Three, Infinity and the Mr. Tompkins... series of book in 1939 to 1967. Some of his books are still in print, more than a half-century after their original publication.