It’s hard not to laugh like crazy when our honorable politicians try and outdo each other in coming up with the catchiest blurbs and quotable quotes whenever some significant issues would arise. Sex video scandals, kidnappings, and fluctuations in petroleum prices, you name it, members of our ruling class and their ilk would have something to say about it, usually something they alone would think as funny or witty.

One of the latest issues that these gentlemen and ladies from the honorable world of politics fought over, in manners that would shame piranhas on feeding frenzy, was the issue of the vanishing cellphone loads or credits.

As the six people outside my family who regularly read this column would attest (if they had nothing better to do), as early as two years ago, I was calling for longer validity periods for our prepaid mobile phone credits. Obviously, those half dozen readers of mine did not know anybody of significance from any of our mobile operators and the government agencies supposedly regulating them. For the past couple of years, nobody was doing anything nor seeming to care about consumers’ complaints against prepaid credits turning sour too early.

It took some of our senators complaining about their missing mobile phone loads for our consumer-friendly mobile operators to lengthen the time it would take before they would grab our prepaid loads as part of their profits. As if our dear senators were using prepaid phone credits, come on, who they think they are fooling?

But like the dogs and cats beneath their master’s dinner table, waiting for the chance that those scraps and fishbone may perhaps fall upon them, us consumers cannot be choosy. Maybe we should be glad and forever grateful that now, our 10-peso load would go beyond the 24 hours that used to be its lifetime.

Tracking Our Trash

A couple of exhibits – one in New York City, the other in Seattle, Washington – would include displays showing the movements of garbage disposed of by the great cities’ residents. The exhibits, set to start in September 2009, were made possible by the Trash Track project of a team of researchers from the MIT.

Using wireless locators, the project aims to educate city residents on what happen to their trash after they throw them away. Some of the trash disposed of by program participants will be electronically tagged in order to determine the final journey made by consumers’ daily wastes, such as plastic bottles, disposable diapers, and even electronic gadgets.

The researchers hope to illustrate the “hidden” costs of waste disposal, including garbage’s impact on the environment. One result of the study, this corner hopes, would be people becoming aware of the ways their daily lives contribute to the worsening pollution and the poisoning of the planet.

Meanwhile, I also would like to beg the researchers to conduct a similar study in the Philippines. But instead of tracking trash, they might consider putting electronic tags on the people’s money. This way, I hope, taxpayers will have a picture, an idea, of how our taxes are spent by the government, or stolen, for that matter.

Another way IT could help us protect our taxes from thieves, or moderate some people’s greed, don’t you think?

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.