Yippee Ki Yeah...
It's Monday, raining, cold and generally miserable outside. Days like this do make me glad that I work inside.
I don't have much to say, so I'll point out a few links of interest. First, from jaylake, I give you The Dark Side of Dubai. It's a lengthy piece, but the gist of it is:
1) Dubai is built on the assumptions of expensive oil and easy credit. Take away one or the other, and the whole economy will go down in flames.
2) The legal system there is straight out of the middle ages, to include debtor's prisons, no labor laws, and absolute dictatorship.
Other than that, Dubai's a wonderful place to live. Although considering 95% of the locals are not Arabs, if the non-Arabs ever get organized, things could get really ugly.
My second link is via the great libertarian think-tank, Tranterrestrial Musings (a Rand Simberg production). He suggests that a solution to piracy is to privatize the oceans. My (as of this writing unanswered) question to him is, "how does a private entity make money from buying an ocean and paying to defend it?"
I don't have much to say, so I'll point out a few links of interest. First, from jaylake, I give you The Dark Side of Dubai. It's a lengthy piece, but the gist of it is:
1) Dubai is built on the assumptions of expensive oil and easy credit. Take away one or the other, and the whole economy will go down in flames.
2) The legal system there is straight out of the middle ages, to include debtor's prisons, no labor laws, and absolute dictatorship.
Other than that, Dubai's a wonderful place to live. Although considering 95% of the locals are not Arabs, if the non-Arabs ever get organized, things could get really ugly.
My second link is via the great libertarian think-tank, Tranterrestrial Musings (a Rand Simberg production). He suggests that a solution to piracy is to privatize the oceans. My (as of this writing unanswered) question to him is, "how does a private entity make money from buying an ocean and paying to defend it?"