Dubai cuts ribbon on world's tallest building Dubai is trumpeting the completion of the Burj Dubai - the world's tallest building, whose 800-plus metres took five years, 12,000 labourers and an estimated $1.5bn to construct. The exact height of the structure will not be revealed until an official ceremony, when the emirate's ruler Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum will …
Huh? Is it just me, or have they deliberately designed it to look like the old classical image of the Tower of Babel? Compare, e.g. http://www.rereviewed.com/images/kircherbabel.jpg
(checks reuters site) well, I guess the resemblance is a lot less strong once they put the facades on, but still! The under-construction photo really made me look twice!
This would mean that construction began in 2005. In 2003, it was already announced that Freedom Tower - or 1 World Trade Center - would be 1,776 feet high.
I find it to be somewhat in poor taste that they would go off and build something taller than that. But then, so was renaming Freedom Tower to have a more safe and innocuous name.
They're getting bailouts from neighbours, most ex-pats have fled abandoning 4x4's at the airport (at the rate of 40-odd per day, I gather, and often just keeping what they can physically carry), the average hotel occupancy percentages are uneconomically low thanks to the massive oversupply, and the country developed everything too quickly for its own stability. Unless they can kick-start everything all over, this will be a very tall empty building in 20 years, when unoccupied floors make it less desireable!
This is yet another attempt at Dubai's ruling elite to create wealth for themselves while neglecting the larger Arab populace...12,000 workers, mostly imported from eastern Asia, most service jobs again to be staffed by same, and all of the profits flowing nicely into the hands of a few handfuls of rich Arab businessmen/princes - the same ones that used to make their money on what little oil Dubai had, and who have now moved on to other things.
Things in the Middle East can never be improved until the entire region shifts from a mindset of splitting abundant wealth (from oil or tourism), into a mindset of CREATING abundant wealth by actually producing things... Until then it will have a large, permanent underclass very eager to listen to any teachings that seem to give their lives fuller meaning - and making them excellent recruits to become terrorists.
The Dubai Tower is no symbol of greatness, it is a symbol of a rich few investing in capital-intensive annuities for themselves (the service fees in the building are staggering), while modernising Dubai's real economy not in the slightest...do not look at it as a symbol of man's progress, look at it as a symbol of a people's oppression.
According to the US Census Bureau in 2004 , 35.9 million people live below the poverty line in America, including 12.9 million children :
http://www.soundvision.com/Info/poor/statistics.asp
That figure has rocketed over the last five years.
Also in 2003, according to the Survey of Consumer Finances:
- The top 1 percent of wealth holders in the United States (with lifetime accumulated wealth of $13.8 million per household or more) held nearly 26 percent of the wealth among married households ages 60 to 69.
- The top 5 percent of wealth holders (with accumulated wealth of $4.02 million or more per household) had almost 51 percent.
- The top 10 percent had about 63 percent of the wealth.
- By contrast, the bottom half of the income distribution had only 6 percent of the wealth.
Put your own house in order first.
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