quality of life, HDIs and kids going to school on their own.

When i'm ask to rate the quality of life in Iloilo City, I won't have my ratings influenced by how bad i think manila is. Iloilo is not Manila and if people do think we should be the next manila or we should follow manila's step to being a megacity, then use Manila's "quality of life" as baseline, the guage, to measuring Iloilo's.

Why Manila? manila is like the most unlivable place in the country, why compare?

why not compare it with the cities that rated highest in HDI?

where Norway is number 1, in UNDP's human development report for 2013...

and the Philippines is at 114, tied with Uzbekistan.

and if province were countries, Manila with 0.718 is almost at the same rank as the Russian Federation (0.719) while iloilo province is at the same ranking as Paraguay at 0.642.

or maybe at least aim for singapore (0.846)? because if we keep comparing ourselves to manila, we'd end up overestimating our "quality of life". numerous people actually gave Iloilo City an "8" (using the scale of 1-10, with 1 as the lowest and 10 as the highest) since it's "way way better than metro manila".

i gave it a "5" though. some said that's really very very low for a city that's working so hard to get its acts together. but i said that my kid cannot cycle from our house to the school. or make that my kid can;t even cycle without a peloton of guards from our house to the park, why would i give it an "8"?

right?