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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.
I lived in Daytona until i was 12 and remember the beach landscape constantly changing. Wouldn't they have to keep moving the pipes? Like bury them deeper at times and shallower at others based on what the beach is doing that day.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Documentary Narrator: Fortunately, our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last minute way to combat global warming. Ever since 2063, we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean now and again.
Suzie: Just like daddy puts in his drink every morning. Then he gets mad.
Documentary Narrator: Of course, because the greenhouse gasses are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time, thus solving the problem once and for all.
Suzie: But...
Documentary Narrator: Once and for all!
I'm not normally the one to complain about this, but seriously, it's getting ridiculous. I have no problem with Idle being its own separate entity that I can ignore or follow as I choose, but I do have a problem with Idle stories leaking into Main. A story about a refrigerated beach with an Idle-style picture and a stupid joke at the end is not News for Nerds or Stuff that Matters.
I believe I've just thought of a way we could solve this whole global warming thing I've been hearing about.
You mean, power the giant beach refrigerator by attaching a generator to the spinning corpse of old Sadi Carnot?
The world is in a global economic depression because everyone's too worried about the global economic depression to spend enough money to pick the economy back up. If you've got the money to spend on something that takes an enormous amount of labour it will be a great thing for the economy as the extra cash circulating will boost everyone's confidence to spend their own. Plus, if you ever wanted to have something like this built, now is the time.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Entropy's a bitch, but I'll be damned if she isn't a faithful one.
No booze on the beach. Pass. No half-nekkid chicks. Pass. I'll save my beach-going for a land that loves sin...
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
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]
Run massive copper pipes into the ocean, and let it cool it from scorching to walk-able.
And if they could make it levitate that would be awesome. I hope they spend their next 100 billion dollars on that one.
...to relax after a hard day on the ski slopes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4491210.stm
http://www.skidubai.com/
Am I the only one that thinks mixing sand with giant blowers may be a bad idea?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Some countries spend money they have on refrigerated beaches.
Some countries spend money they don't have on illegal wars.
Keep on driving those SUVs - that's what's ruining your economy and feeding theirs.
No sig today...
What they are proposing is just to extract the solar thermal energy from the beach sand. The solar energy doesn't have to be wasted. If they were to take the solar heat laden coolant, and pass it through a heat exchanger, and into a Stirling engine, they could use it to generate electricity to power desalination equipment, for example. Using the cooler ocean water as the heat sink wouldn't produce very high efficiency, but it would still be a net gain. It wouldn't cost very much more than just throwing the heat away. They could get coolor sand, and generate solar power at the same time. Just a thought...
It's like when Homer Simpson tried to beat the heat by pitching a tent in front of an open refrigerator door.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
but we prefer it in one state than the other
Weebl & Bob
FGD 135
and funding the terrorists.
how else did you think osama's family made their billions?
oh, the irony......
...and there's definitely no heated football fields in the "developed" world, right?
No sig today...
The world is in a global economic depression because everyone's too worried about the global economic depression to spend enough money to pick the economy back up. If you've got the money to spend on something that takes an enormous amount of labour it will be a great thing for the economy as the extra cash circulating will boost everyone's confidence to spend their own. Plus, if you ever wanted to have something like this built, now is the time.
The world is in a global economic depression because the wealthiest nations have all adopted a centralized banking system like the USA's Federal Reserve. This system, inherently and by design, has more debt than currency in circulation to pay that debt because interest (the "prime rate") is attached to money the moment it is created.
Let's say that the Federal Reserve has just been set up. There is currently no money in circulation so the first money is created. The prime rate (to make up a nice workable number) is 5%. Let's say the Fed creates ten billion dollars. The Fed gives the USA Government ten billion dollars. In exchange, the USA Government gives the Fed government bonds (a promise to pay back) worth $10,500,000,000 (the original ten billion plus the 5% interest). Now you have money in circulation. Except now you have a problem because there is only ten billion dollars in your entire economy and there is ten billion five-hundred million dollars in debt. The only thing you can do is keep borrowing more money (also at interest) to pay down the interest, and to borrow yet more to pay down the interest from that, ad nauseum. What you have is a downwardly-spiraling cycle of debt. Debt, the only form of slavery that's still legal. What's funny about this is that even if you could pay off all debt (and under this system, you can't), the result would be no more money in circulation!
To say that inflation is built into this system does not even begin to scratch the surface. You have more debt than you have dollars in circulation, and the dollars effectively represent debt and not wealth. That excess debt doesn't just go away. Someone ends up holding that debt. These are your bankruptcies and foreclosures and your bailouts. Bad decision-making causes many of these, but with this system they must exist no matter what and furthermore, they must get worse because it's a debt cycle. So, decision-making merely decides who winds up with this debt. And what is the result of debt and bankruptcy? The result is that the banks foreclose and become the owners of actual wealth (as opposed to fiat currency) like real estate.
That's why the debates about whether to bail out The Big Three are phony. The debate about whether efforts to give credit to people with poor credit histories caused the mortgage crisis (during which less than 5% of buyers defaulted) is also immaterial even if every point raised is valid. The system is inherently broken, no amount of tinkering will fix it, and it's not like the media is going to point this out even though this fact can be known by anyone who cares to study the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking.
I hope people understand why the Founding Fathers considered centralized banks to be more dangerous than standing armies or why Nathan Rothschild said "Let me issue and control a nationâ(TM)s currency and I care not who makes its laws.â Maybe you also see how the media is not your friend; they will maintain the illusion of lively debate but always in a way that can't possibly change anything because it's completely irrelevant and doesn't address the actual problem. How many examples of that do you need to see before you start thinking that maybe it isn't an accident?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Economic depression comes around every 10 years, give or take a few years. No matter what you do, it repeats. In the beginnig of a depression, people start to work harder again, and in the of the good times, everygbody's changing jobs to get more money, everything's chaotic and companies lose money. Buy your stocks now, it's the best time.
I thought osamas family made money from construction?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
This idea is as stupid as the indoor skiing slope. Not only is it a waste of energy, but it will NEVER capture the true feeling of being on a beach, especially if you forget your sandals. I hope the footwear industry lobbies long and hard to block the refrigeration of beaches -- there's some revenue to be had in those overpriced sandals one could buy near the beach.
Go to Bermuda for your next vacation, a place where the sand isn't scorching hot.
It's about location, location, location. And Dubai isn't the location.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So this is where all that money went that came out of our pockets to pay for fuel.. Brought a country's economy to it's knees so you can air condition a beach. Yet you already complain that your economy is not doing well. Good to see your spending it wisely..
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.
Somebody needed to deflect attention from America's excesses and take the spotlight for needless waste and overspending. Go Dubai!
You are right regarding how money is 'made' - but don't tell anyone. It's still a secret.
The apparent cost of goods had me worried a decade ago, when things like DVD players dropped well below their apparent worth.
Now I can buy a dvd player for $35 (AUD). If you open one up you can see parts in them that supposedly add up to $5? That's ridiculous!
$5 manufacturing
$5 wholesale profit
2x$5 distribution and freight - country of origin to country of destination
$5 local wholesale profit
$5 dealer profit
with a leeway of $5 for approximations.
So the difference between apparent worth and real worth has been skewed by trade, economies of scale, taxes and offsets to make monetary value a joke. It's just unrealistic.
The fact that reserve banks can create money just by adding a zero or two makes the whole world economy very suspect. It's broken badly and the solution may be to get back to basics, and that is trade.
I'll give you a boat-load of iron for a boat-load of grain.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
My point was that you have a broken system and oddly enough, you are getting bad results from this broken system. Much of what I did not go into depth about but did imply is that I believe that much of this current crisis is either engineered to begin with or at least leveraged in the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution pattern so frequently seen in modern governments. You did not address my core point which is that so long as you have a system like the Fed, you will always have more debt than dollars in circulation and no amount of tinkering will change that. The system is destined to collapse one way or another, for many of the same reasons why Ponzi schemes must eventually fail. The items you mention, like the bursting of the housing bubble, only impact when this system fails. I never claimed that you can't have a depression without a fractional reserve system, only that this built-in debt that no one in the mainstream media ever talks about (except in vague aggregate terms like "national debt") is a huge factor in the current depression.
Also, I gave a figurative illustration for the sake of simplifying the explanation. Yes, there was money in circulation before the Federal Reserve was set up. It also took a while before the gold-backed and silver-backed currencies were phased out because you don't just change your entire monetary system overnight, it's not quite so simple. None of these implementation details had much to do with my overall point, so I omitted them. It was an obvious omission and it was intended to be an obvious omission. Pointing this out is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I really need to disclaim every analogy and every simplified explanation so that someone doesn't come along and say "ah-HAH!" and sincerely believe he's really nailed me this time? Because I've tried that and found that the people who want an easy "victory" that badly will ignore any disclaimers or clarifications I give. Well, I say "victory" but what they really seem to want is to dismiss you without actually addressing the points you raise. The primary motivation is not that they have reasons for disagreeing and would like to see if a consensus can be reached but because they dislike what you say. I suppose at this point I should sigh and, just for you, add something like "of course, having a primary motivation of disliking what a guy says and having actual reasons to disagree are not mutually exclusive". Generally, people don't seem very interested in truth; what they seem to want is palatable truth that makes them feel better. This is one of those things (a character weakness, actually) that I consider to be "not my problem" and I generally refuse to accommodate it.
Assuming you are sincerely interested in this, you may find it interesting to research Andrew Jackson, his stated reasons for opposing the central bank of his time, and in particular what he says about said bank's control of government and his warning to future generations. The current situation is yet another example of failure to learn from history. I'm pretty tired of these to be honest with you; I'm wondering when we'll finally make some novel mistakes.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Dubai has pretty much run out of oil, for your information. also, the US imports less than 15% of its oil from ALL the middle east. i hate correcting simple facts.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Fuck, time to start stealing gasoline again...
The world is in a global depression because everybody's listened to Milton Friedman (Pinochet's best buddy), and it turns out the creep was just completely bonkers; even 'bubbles' Greenspan admits it.
Turns out that traders are as useless as they seem to be, that the whole finance system is just a collection of Ponzi schemes.
This has'nt got much to do with central banking, because here those banks that failed (Lehman and friends) were creating money (borderline illegally), through what the bozos called "leveraging."
so what? Osama's not really in the good graces of his family.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
There must be a significant amount of counterfeit currency floating today, because I believe it is actually possible for the government to pay off the total current debt without removing all money from circulation.
I especially like the way the auto industry and energy industry are putting on a repeat performance of 1973, right down to getting everybody to drive big gas guzzlers just before jacking up fuel prices 300%, and the resurgent interest in wind/solar/electric vehicles, etc.
Indoor ski slope... Refrigerated beach... "I'm crazy Dubai -- I'm gonna build me a ZERO GRAVITY WATERPARK! Woo! I'm crazy!"
16 June 2008, correlates with the spike in traffic on the year graph.
Slow dropoff as FF3 and IE7 start getting adopted with better ad blocking.
How does Alexa track traffic, if ABP or other security mechanisms block the cookies/1px gif or other tracking mechanisms, it might be a artificial dropoff.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
... it's a dump.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
You most makes no sense because money is a debt owed to the holder of that money. Money is a good that is traded not for it's direct utility or value but for the expectation of future utility or value when it is used to buy something. Yet, a promise of future value is the very definition of a debt. This is independent of whether there is a Federal Reserve system or not, a gold standard or not. With that in mind, your comments really sound like gibberish to me.
I live in Dubai. I read one of the local newspapers here this morning just before I checked Slashdot, and it turns out the air-conditioned beach has been put on hold until they find a way to make it more "environmentally friendly".
This system, inherently and by design, has more debt than currency in circulation to pay that debt because interest (the "prime rate") is attached to money the moment it is created...
Let's say the Fed creates ten billion dollars. The Fed gives the USA Government ten billion dollars. In exchange, the USA Government gives the Fed government bonds (a promise to pay back) worth $10,500,000,000 (the original ten billion plus the 5% interest). Now you have money in circulation. Except now you have a problem because there is only ten billion dollars in your entire economy
You don't understand the terms you are using.
First, the prime rate is the interbank lending rate, and not directly related to treasury bonds.
Second, you can't say "there's only 10 billion in the entire economy" as though that means something. Nobody (except for conspiracy nuts) measures an economy by the amount of available paper money! That's insane!
A simple exercise of your limited imagination would have revealed that, one, there's far more "money" than there is cash (about 8 times more if you count time deposits as money), two, the ability to work and to pay is not limited by the quantity of money. Do you have to amass $500,000 at once to pay off your mortgage? No! Wrong!
When your understanding of money is sourced from conspiracy nuts, it's only expected that you will be grossly uninformed.
... else these wouldn't be ideas...
They'd benefit atleast a minority of the population .. a waste of money and environmental space? definitely!
It sure gives an entire different definition of a living-in-the-dome experience, for tourists.. maybe?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
A great variant, I have to say, on "Some are born posthumously", Ecce Homo.
Wikileaks, no DNS
I wonder if you could design this in a way that didn't use any energy (post construction)... using ocean water (which is ostensibly cooler than the sand) and using the force of the waves, or tidal pressure to move it through the pipes.
Perhaps most simply, couldn't you fill an underground tank during high tide, and then during low tide just let the cool water leak slowly through the pipes, and then out into the ocean?
Patent!!
Marketing, in fact, is probably the thing they are better at than anything else.
I have to disagree. If the "terrorists" were so good at marketing then why hasn't most of the world condemned the US for invading souverein countries based on nothing more but lies and assumptions? Wouldn't you agree that the underdog is usually always favored (in movies for example) than the bigger and badder opponents?
This has nothing to do with marketing at all, this is all a direct result from the narrow minded approach of the US to call whatever resistance they meet "terrorists". People in Iraq who blow up soldiers because they have blown up their houses? "Terrorists". Fighting Muslim groups in India which have been fighting and quaralling for years now, long before 9/11? "Terrorists". The Kurds who have been fighting for their own nation for years and have been fought by both Saddam as wel as Turkey and many other surrounding countries? Prior to 9/11 Turkey was fighting dissidents. But ever since Iraq was invaded they suddenly started fighting "Terrorists".
So suppose something will happen in Dubai; how easy it is to blame it all on "terrorists" even though these may simple be the original residents of the place who are getting fed up. But no; we'll blame "terrorists" so the blind will immediatly link this with groups as Al Quada, Hamas, and so on without any furhter explenation needed.
So, be carefull with who or what you call terrorists.. It may be made to serve a complete different purpose.
They are wasting their time with a refrigerated beach.They should be working on hot snow.
You sir, have just described every type of regulated currency in existence. It isn't that *our* system is broken or poorly conceived, it is that in order for one person to have something ( home, car, air conditioned beach), someone else must be without the materials that went into creating it. This is where currency comes in. I will trade you these paper notes for your time, materials, etc...Thus I'm in debt to you, but I'm giving you these universal IOUs that you can then use to get a commensurate level of time, materials, etc... from anyone else. I've seen the You-Tube video that describes America's currency system as 'debt-based' as well, and some points are valid. But the idea that the system is "fundamentally-flawed" is incorrect. It is the only way to continuously grow an economy indefinitely. Fixed asset (gold-standard, etc...) systems will eventually become systems in which a select few will possess all the money in the world while the rest grovel at their feet, or revolt and take it back.
WHAT THE ****? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_pakistan Get your head out of your *** and realise this stinking fact, terrorist care for NOTHING and I mean nothing for silly things like PR. They have killed thousands in my country, heck in my own city Rawalpindi even, and they care ZILCH who their victim is, infact they are dead-sure the persons will most likely will be an innocent muslim.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I typed [i]nothing[i] (forgot the slash, then again, I am not a programmer, I am doing CA)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
have these people not heard of global warming?
That's why they try to apply local cooling to their beach.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I've talked to a lot of people from the middle east and the terrorists like Dubai too. Let's not forget that before Atta and his buddies knocked down the WTC, they took a trip to Vegas and partied it up a bit. Every culture likes a party and the middle east is no exception.
To make matters even more interesting, Dubai is the Switzerland of the middle east and wants to be the next Switzerland of the world. In Dubai, secrecy of transactions is becoming the norm, there's no transparency and very little regulation. So yeah, a terrorist might hate westerners in Dubai, but he's not going to screw with it as Dubai is where he gets paid.
This is my sig.
I mean, what happens if the beach system goes out of control and creates some sort of super-cooling vortex? Would they cancel Dubai just like they canceled SGA?
> It is the only way to continuously grow an economy indefinitely
And this belief is exactly why people continue to fall for these Ponzi schemes time after time, and why we inevitably have busts. Because you CANNOT grow an economy indefinitely.
> Fixed asset (gold-standard, etc...) systems will eventually become systems in which a select few will possess all the money in the world while the rest grovel at their feet, or revolt and take it back.
As opposed to what we have now. Oh, wait...
and I can see why this would be needed. It was 26 in the winter. I would however worry about the effect of some kid digging into a freon tube with a shovel or a leak. Nevertheless, it would make far more sense to use the natural deep water to pipe up onto the sub-beach level to act as a heat-exchanger. Duane Nickull http://technoracle.blogspot.com
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
OTOH, it's worth remembering that Federal Banks are allowed to lend more money than they have on deposit. Don't remember the details, whether, e.g., it's 1/3 more or 1/4 more, but it *is* magically creating money out of thin air (and statistics...that not all the depositors will ask for their money back at the same time).
It always feels like cheating to me, but really no more so than the Fed printing up as much money as it decides to print.
OTOH, governments ALWAYS debase their currency. The gold standard isn't a solution, Rome was on the gold standard, and they just started decreasing the amount of gold in their official minting. It's essentially an invisible way of raising taxes.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Funneling earths heat thru a "Malcolm Tunney matter bridge" is flawd, forget it. As seen on TV weeks ago.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
And my point is that you completely failed in attempting to identify the part of the system that was broken, in accurately describing the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken, and in accurately describing the historical context of the part of the system that you mischaracterized as broken.
I didn't address that point because its a completely beside the, well, point (at least, the point that matters). I did address the important (and wrong) point you made related to that, which is that not only does more debt than money exist, but that that is somehow a problem.
This statement of faith is unsupported by evidence or reason.
No, this is simply wrong. Ponzi schemes must eventually fail because they require an exponential increase in the number of participants each round of operation, and because each participant has an incentive to maximize the frequency of the rounds; in most, it takes very few rounds before the number of required participants exceeds the population of the planet, failure is guaranteed at some point no later, and often much earlier, than that. The modern banking system, in general, does not have that problem (speculative investment bubbles, which have existed both before and after central banking became the dominant international norm and are independent of it, often exhibit dynamics not unlike a Ponzi scheme, but, again, that's a different issue than central banking.)
Bursting of speculative bubbles cause very similar economic failures whether or not there is central banking. They don't influence the inevitable failures that result from central banking, they directly produce failures on their own.
National debt is not a vague aggregate, its a very specific measure of debt of a specific entity (the federal government), and it has little to do with the inherent debt in the kind of money system we have, since the system does not prevent any individual entity, including a national government, from having zero or negative debt. You seem to either not understand what nation debt is, or be engaging in the fallacy of distribution. And your broader point remains wrong, no matter how many times you repeat it.
That would explain your conveniently simple, but both economically and historically ignorant description of the roots of our problem.
It might be better for you if you would consider it "your problem", and would try to refuse to indulge in it.