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Dubai Is Building a Refrigerated Beach
dataxtream writes "The world's first refrigerated beach is to be built at a luxury hotel in Dubai, located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. The beach will include heat-absorbing pipes under the sand along with large wind blowers, which will keep tourists cool and guard their feet against the hot sand. Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there." I believe I've just thought of a way we could solve this whole global warming thing I've been hearing about.
much of the beaches in Dubai are artificial. More in the sense that they have dredgers which constantly infuse new sand on the beaches to stop beach erosion. My main concern with Dubai desire to be the playground of the rich and famous is what they plan to do when terrorist realize there are infidels partying in their neck of the woods.
I've never heard Dubai speak of how they plan to handle potential hostility from extremists. It wont be long before what happened in India finds its way to Dubai
Are you implying that this audience isn't interested in domes cities and artificial living environments??
Read some science fiction man! I grew up on this stuff.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
not all nerds collect hard drive platters for a living .... I have an architectural background and think it quite interesting when fringe type ideas make it unto slashdot. Nerd =! Computers there are many other types of Tech out there besides C++
Why bother going to Dubai anyhow? It is too hot, they only have sand and some fake islands that no-one wants to buy and no culture (unless you are into modern, megalomaniac architecture). And in terms of population, there are just overwhelmingly rich locals, western expats designing toy projects for said locals and Indian immigrants actually building those toy projects. If you are choosing a holiday destination, I could not thing of anything less interesting.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Given that there are more foreign workers in Dubai than there are citizens, and that most of those foreign workers get by on little better than slave wages and with few rights, I'm amazed something nasty hasn't happened already.
Dubai is building their playground for the rich on the backs of exploited foreign laborers. That sort of arrangement is rarely successful over the long term. Eventually the scattered civil unrest gets larger and more organized, and then the real trouble starts.
No, I don't expect you would hear them speak about it. Better to have it just be a surprise to the bad guys, but I'd be very surprised if there isn't a plan. Also, in a small country like Dubai, it's easy to both know and control who goes in and out, and how they do so. Additionally, I expect that in Dubai, their laws probably give them rather broad authority in that are. Finally, Dubai is at least somewhat less of a target simply by virtue of the fact that it is an Islamic nation. That isn't to say that the terrorists have any qualms about killing other Muslims with whom they disagree - they most certainly have none - but it would make them look bad to attack an Islamic nation, and while they care not a whit for human lives, they do care about image and PR. Marketing, in fact, is probably the thing they are better at than anything else.
The funny thing is though, that if you go back a generation you'd see a role reversal in the jealousy with regards fancy Americans with their indoor plumbing and other technological innovations.
Comes around. Goes around. Etc. Get off the merry go round or keep cycling in what amounts to self hatred.
What do the people in your office do? Are they out there building and maintaining the wonders of Dubai's skyline? Working the dredgers that build up the artificial islands? Serving the meals, cleaning the sheets, polishing the brass, driving the trucks?
Yeah. Of course the office workers aren't getting the slave wages. They're the rich people the slaves are building Dubai for.
Jeez man, think a little. Just because you need a job doesn't mean you're poor.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Uh, no.
That was all true for a long time without an global economic depression.
There is a recession in the US and some other places which may become a global economic depression because of a massive credit seize-up in the wake of, among other things, the bursting of the housing bubble in the US, and because of other factors (including the decline in income in the bottom four quintiles even during the most recent expansion in the US) reducing both industrial and consumer demand. The global reach of the crisis is due to the effect that the world economy is massively integrated through investment and trade.
The independent central banks that have become a near-universal norm have only marginal relevance; they aren't a significant cause of the problem (government policies in the US, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, probably a significant role, but that's not central bank action.) Nor, for that matter, are they capable of doing much about the problem; they are mostly capable of short-term stabilization of minor disruptions, big crises render monetary responses mostly meaningless except as slight mitigation at best.
Um, there was money in circulation when the Federal Reserve was set up.
"the Founding Fathers" did no such thing. Certain of the Founding Fathers opposed a central bank (Jefferson and those that went on to form the nucleus of the Democratic-Republicans), OTOH, certain of the Founding Fathers (e.g., Alexandar Hamilton and the rest of those that went on to form the nucleus of the Federalists) certainly favored a central bank as a desirable thing.
Yeah, because all those imperialists in Darfur, Bali, the Philippines, etc., etc., really had it coming to them.