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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?
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
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]
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...
...and there's definitely no heated football fields in the "developed" world, right?
No sig today...
No engineer would ever think of that - the water is miles away!
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
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
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!
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.
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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.
A great variant, I have to say, on "Some are born posthumously", Ecce Homo.
Wikileaks, no DNS
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!
> 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...