Dubai And Our Gas Dollars

[Wezil]

Yeah, I want to vacation in a desert.

[Sandman]

Solar power

[Krill]

Originally posted by Wezil
Yeah, I want to vacation in a desert.

Why not, lots of people want them by the beach.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Oerdin
That's their stated goal. Supposedly Dubai is almost out of oil and that's why their Emir is going on a building spree; to create an alternative economy to the oil economy. The big problem I see is he's trying to create an economy by subsidizing everything in order to attract companies to relocate to Dubai. Once the oil runs out, and thus the subsidies, what's to stop the companies from simply relocating to the next subsidy haven?

Quite. It'll be a ghost towns soon enough, unless it can recreate Vegas.

[Wezil]

I don't think gambling and show girls will be the next fad in Dubai.

[Dinner]

Speaking of our gas dollars at work the government paid for yet another mega hotel in Dubai and had a very nice fireworks & light show to mark it's opening.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7740887.stm

Supposedly Dubai only has 10-20 years worth of oil left so they're hoping to become the resort capital of the mid-east along with the financial capital. Still, the city seems like a nice place to visit once or twice but not really to live in. It's just a collection of big buildings none of which are human scale, you probably can't walk any where, and the climate sucks.

[Space05us]

Spec should take up walking, or bike riding.


Hopefully the risk of turning Dubai into a huge playground pays off for them.

[Zkribbler]

What I like most about Dubai is that it gives "The Street" in the Middle East an alternative goal to the endless bloodshed offered by the radicals.

[Dinner]

The petals are off this rose. Dubai never actually had much oil or gas of its own so they tried to become the tourism, business, and finance center for the more oil rich parts of the Persian Gulf. The problem is without their own money they mostly financed their building boom with borrowed money and now all those white elephant construction sites are sitting empty while Dubai is supposedly becoming a ghost town. The NYT has a great article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/wo...i.html?_r=1&em

Highlights include:

- A lot of the construction is actually substandard and infrastructure hasn't kept pace. The famous "Palm Island" man made peninsula wasn't properly compacted so now the land is sinking breaking water lines, sewer lines, and building foundations.

- Several of the mega buildings don't even have working water any more and in expensive mega hotels you turn on the tap and nothing but cockroaches come out.

- Dubai didn't let people actually immigrate, they just got temperary work visas, so now that thousands are being laid off they have 30 days to find a new job or leave the country. This means much of the 90% of the population which aren't citizens are now leaving making the property crash even worse.

- Dubai also still has debtors prison laws so tons of foreigners are simply leaving rather then going to jail. They're leaving behind massive amounts of unpaid credit card debts, cars that they can't get out of the country, and unpaid mortgages where the property is only worth a fraction of the outstanding loan balance.

- Many of the massive white elephant construction projects have had to stop work because of lack of funds while the city is full of empty skyscrapers. There were never enough people to fill all that office space but the government just kept funneling more and more money into it.

- The Emir has responded by becoming more totalitarian and absolutist declaring it a felony to "harm" Dubai's reputation or to question its economic vitality.

- The airport parking lot is full of abandoned cars as foreigners drive them there and then abandon them rather then go to debtors prison.

- Just last summer Dubai, using government money, opened the world's biggest shopping mall. It's now mostly empty with empty stores and few costumers willing to spend money.

I'm sure things will improve economically for Dubai but the days of spending hundreds of billions of borrowed money in a giant real estate speculation game are pretty much over.

[Combat Ingrid]

There are also zombies in the shopping malls, and beware of the lizardmen in the Al Quoz district!

[Dinner]

Like I said they'll bounce back but it looks like the good old days are over and they're coming back to Earth.

[Dis]

kind of fitting in a way. Their great civilization status faded quickly as the land in the middle east quickly lost fertility. But now they will rise to power once again. at least until the oil runs out