Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/middleeast/12dubai.html?_r=1 ^

[Orange1998]

And may I add Smarter!

[garyhope]

Thanks for the right link. What an unbelieveably depressing story. It doesn’t surprise me. Like the Pizza Hut girl at the end of the article says: “everything is fake”.

Reminds me of Obammy and the Dims. All fake and built on shifting sand.

[garyhope]

I also watch a lot of the History channel, Discovery, etc., and I’ve seen programs on all of this and my thoughts were the same. Where does all the money come from, how much does all of that cost, who’s going to pay for it all and who’s really going to live there. I didn’t and still don’t think it’s going to work. There is so much phony real estate developement in the world. Always has been.

And who the hell would want to live there? There are large areas of the world I don’t want to ever go to much less live there. Who the hell would would want to live in any Muslim country anyway except Muslim fanatics?

To me, all those places seem like hell on earth.

[PrinceOfCups]

Thanks for the Ping. I've been back in US for year now; I've been working for a Defense contractor. I've been mostly writing technical proposals for security RFPs. Right now I'm situated in Southern Maryland near PAX River Naval Air Station.

If you spend anymore time in Iraq you are going to go native!

[strange1]

good ones, thanks!

[PapaBear3625]

This is actually not good news. UAE, along with Turkey, was one of the few prosperous Muslim countries that didn't have either a petrol or narco based economy. The ruler there (name escapes me), is fairly progressive as far as Muslims go. It would have been nice to actually have a country in that region that had an economy based on tourism, trade and retirement living. It's too bad that it appears it was a house built entirely of smoke and mirrors.

Take it as a leading indicator of what's really happening in the petro-kingdoms. UAE was where the elites did their banking and such, and took vacations in a slightly-less-restrictive environment.

This is a signal that all is not well in Saudi, Kuwait, and the rest. Their oil revenues are flat and their populations are growing. Each oil sheik has multiple wives and many children, each of whom expects to live as well as daddy, on a fraction of the pie.

The collapse will not be pretty.

[RinaseaofDs]

The funny thing here is that a nuclear power plant, or a few nuclear power plants, could do Dubai a world of good.

1. They’d have the power.
2. The waste heat could be used to desalinate water, pretty much as much water as you want.
3. They could build and electrical distribution network and sell the power to Oman and others.

They could use Thorium as their fuel and cut their build costs by 100 fold.