Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Nothing today, everything tomorrow.
There is an excellent piece by the Guardian on the craziness that is Dubai. It reads a bit like the fictional metropolises of the mind by William Gibson, a blend of insane ambition and forced labor, or like Neal Stephenson's quasi-independent republics in The Diamond Age. I'm more and more intrigued with each passing day.
I'm the one on the right, waving.
On a less positive note, I just HAD to catch a cold on the day before the big trip. Bleah. I hope the desert air (or at least a snotful of the dry sand) will cure this.
..."Mushroom City", Ravi Piyush, a plumply content dealer in the Gold Souk, said to me. "Nothing today, everything tomorrow." The World Bank reckons that the reconstruction of Iraq is going to cost $53bn. Here, along the strip of footballer-friendly sand that stretches 25 miles or so along the shores of the Persian Gulf, there is, at a rough estimate, about $100bn worth of projects either underway or planned for the near future. That is a numbing figure, ungraspable. It is the equivalent of every single dollar invested in the United States from abroad last year; almost twice the foreign investment in China.- Boom Town, the Guardian
I'm the one on the right, waving.On a less positive note, I just HAD to catch a cold on the day before the big trip. Bleah. I hope the desert air (or at least a snotful of the dry sand) will cure this.
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