Dubai

Expo 2020 Airbus 380, LAX

The decoration on this aircraft got my attention, so I did a little checking. Expo 2020 is going to be held in Dubai next year. Looking at the website, I notice this little blurb: 

How can we build more inclusive societies?

I thought that was a little odd considering that regimes in the Mideast are among the most draconian in the world. From Wikipedia:

Companies in Dubai have in the past been criticised for human rights violations against labourers. Some of the 250,000 foreign labourers in the city have been alleged to live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as "less than humane".

Okay, that's not news. As I recall most of those laborers are from India and/or Pakistan. I suspect conditions in those countries are what prompted those laborers to come to Dubai. Could it be that working for as a wage-slave in Dubai is better than their life back home?

Okay, enough about the downtrodden masses, how about a little real-life James Bond type adventure?

Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum in January 2018

Seems Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, daughter of the Prime Minister of the UAE (United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is one), tried to 'escape' with the help of a former French intelligence officer via jet-ski and sailing yacht but was forcibly brought back.

Sailing yacht Nostromo

Could it be Latifa doesn't care for Dubai's brand of inclusiveness?

Dubai Museum of the Future

Dubai Museum of the Future
289 piece jigsaw puzzle

Dubai is just nuts. You have to give these guys credit for not falling down the Jihad rathole, but then they are probably working hand in glove with the CIA. As long as they keep their slave population under control, they'll probably be just fine.

Dubai Museum of the Future

P.S. Stu asked what the writing says. After a little digging I found this on WHAT'S ON:

The Arabic calligraphy consists of three quotes (in English followed by Google's Translation):

‘We may not live for hundreds of years, but the products of our creativity can leave a legacy long after we are gone.’

 قد لا نعيش لمئات السنين ، لكن منتجات إبداعنا يمكن أن تترك إرثًا طويلاً بعد

رحيلنا.

‘The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it’ and

 المستقبل ملك لمن يستطيع تخيله وتصميمه وتنفيذه

‘The future does not wait. The future can be designed and built today.’

المستقبل لا ينتظر. يمكن تصميم وبناء المستقبل اليوم.

 Good luck verifying whether that is what is actually written on the building.

Disneyland for Divers

World’s deepest pool with a ‘sunken city’ opens in Dubai
South China Morning Post

Dubai is has got to be the strangest city in the world. Tiny, rich, popular with tourists in spite of being a freaking steam bath in the summertime. (Okay, it's probably very nice the rest of the year.) It's in the mideast but only gets a small fraction of their income from oil and gas. It's been run by the same family for pert near 200 years. 

Dubai has appeared here before. Also here. And don't forget about Abu Dhabi which is just down the road a bit.

Richie Rich

Dubai

Bentley (the car people) have a new ad campaign for selling their over-the-top lux mobiles to people with more money than god, and it starts with this image of Dubai, which has the world's highest concentration of potential Bentley customers. Bentley knows what side their bread is buttered on, and it's the side covered with sand and oil.

The original image has a zillion pixels. You can see it, and pan and zoom, here. Funny thing is that there are almost no people visible. Oh, there are a few people walking around at ground level, but no crowds like you might you see in a real metropolis, that is, one with a climate that makes going outside something you could do without being fried to crisp.

All the windows in all the skyscrapers, at least the ones close enough to provide enough detail, also seem to be devoid of people. Does anybody actually live in all these exotic palaces? Maybe they do, but they are all hiding in air-conditioned inner chambers away from the sun's burning glare. Or maybe they have all flown away to someplace with tolerable temperatures.

But back to the Bentley. You can't have a car ad without the car and it's right there in the center, parked on the roundabout sticking out into the water.

Bentley

The whole tone, or maybe texture, of this digital image kind of reminds of the video game The Sims. It's like it's not real, but maybe that was the effect they were shooting for.

Update: While I was talking about the color / brightness / hue in the images, another part of this 'Sims' effect could be the apparent isometric view of the car. Everything in The Sims, or at least in the versions my kids played, was depicted in an isometric view. Most pictures of cars are shot from much closer, so perspective frames the image. This one is not absolutely isometric, but when you are looking from far away, the effect of perspective is minimized and it looks like an isometric view.

Dubai is on the Persian Gulf, near the straight of Hormuz.

Via Road & Track

Previous Bentley posts.

Dubai

Downtown Dubai

Burj Al Arab

Burj Al Arab (Arab Tower), a Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai

I'm watching a video on YouTube and an ad for a hotel pops up. Jumeirah? Sounds Arab, and it is. Pretty building, and a very expensive hotel. Built on artificial island. The builders had to dewater the island in order to build the foundation. Dewatering is done by drilling a series of wells around the perimeter, putting pumps in the bottom of the wells and pumping all the water out. On an island like this you will never get all the water out because the sea is constantly seeping in, but you can lower the ground water level, which is good enough, I guess. Seems like they might need to keep the pumps running forever to keep it stable, but maybe if you built a foundation that was big, heavy, deep and solid enough you wouldn't need the pumps anymore.
    Dubai is a really weird little place. It's over there with all those other Arabian oil empires (map), but it's really tiny, kind of like Monaco, so there's no place to drill. Money is flowing into the place and the only reason I can figure is that money attracts money. The picture is very pretty, but the place itself doesn't strike me as very nice. The climate is about like Phoenix, Arizona, and maybe a little worse because of the high humidity in the summer. I guess if you were rich you wouldn't hang around in the summer, probably go some place cooler, like Switzerland.
    Then you've got all the horror stories about not-so-rich people having problems like being thrown in jail for being raped or broke.

Delhi Crime: Season 3 - Netflix Series

Delhi Crime: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Shefali Shah, Huma Qureshi, Rasika Dugal | Netflix
Netflix India

The third season of Delhi Crime moves away from its primary Delhi focus, following a sprawling, interstate investigation into a brutal human trafficking network that targets vulnerable young girls across India.

Badi Didi is a 30-ish woman who runs this smuggling operation. She gathers up young women (15 to 18 years old) and ships them to John Ji, who I thought was in Thailand but I may have got that wrong. He may just be somewhere around Bombay. The story Badi Didi is telling the girls is that they are going to get good jobs, like maid or waiter, but the implication is they are being sold into sexual slavery. I mean every way point on their journey to Badi Didi is a brothel. On the other hand all the girls speak English and apparently have passports. I'm pretty sure you don't need to speak English in order to have sex, so maybe they aren't being sold into sexual slavery, but maybe they are being sold into call center slavery.

Finished the series last night and this morning I see this on the Daily Wire:

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

FBI Makes Largest Crypto Seizure Ever In Global ‘Scam Compound’ Crackdown

The FBI recently took out a massive internet scam network, arresting over 300 people, freeing over 2,000 people from human trafficking, and seizing over $8 billion in cryptocurrency.

The FBI said last week that it primarily focused on taking down what it calls “scam compounds” in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The scam compounds are typically guarded and filled with trafficked workers who are forced to conduct romance scams and fake investment schemes that target many Americans. Over 2,000 people were freed from the compounds.

The operation focused on Prince Holding Group, a company in Cambodia. Authorities also took out a criminal compound in Dubai, Myanmar, and Thailand. Altogether, the FBI seized over 127,000 bitcoin from the nine scam compounds, which is over $8 billion, making it the largest crypto seizure in human history.

People in a shipping container

At one point Badi Didi drugs 20 girls and loads them into a 20 foot shipping container. The plan is for them to only be in there for 10 hours. Just looking at the map this looks like a bad deal. It takes a full 24 hours to drive to Bombay. Google says one person could survive in container for a day or two. This website has a full analysis of container survivability, and they claim three days for one person. Having a bunch of people in there is going to reduce that number considerably.

Season 1 of Dehli Crime

10 Short Videos #6067

10 Short Videos #6067

Romanian Couples Forced to Share Everything to Avoid Divorce

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POV: Diving Into a Water Tower

Is it 110v or 120v?!

Rain Man cafe scene

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Being on-call as a dev in 2025

The Difference Between UAE, Dubai & Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪 What Are the Emirates

Wood. Inside a Turbine. In 2026.

Steering Mods Hit Different

Happy Hanukkah

Hannukah menorah at Burj al-Khalifa, world’s tallest building in Dubai

This is a nice surprise. I've been hearing that the entire Arab world chanting 'Death to Israel' since forever, and now we have several Arab nations singing a different tune. I wonder how this is going to play out. I imagine numerous Imams are going to have a problem with it.

Via Head Noises