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Every dark cloud has a silver lining.
It'll be fun touring the ruins of Dubai in a few years, after the slave revolt, the looting, and everyone who has somewhere else to go returns home.
Why wait? You can go to Las Vegas today.
I see it as the pyramids of our time. You would think with all that money they would build a canal to bypass the straight of Hormuz, but no, islands shaped like trees.
I do believe that as a result of the war that Dubai as well as most of the gulf states are done. It’s no longer safe to travel or to invest money in them when a $50k drone can blow up your lambo or slave camp to build another stupid waste of water and materials.
Aren't they pretty much unimaginably rich? I'm sure they'll be fine.
What happens if their tourism fails and Iran destroys their oil/gas infrastructure? Back to pearl diving?
Dubai doesn't have much oil and it doesn't rely on it at all, it's why it's fucked. It depends almost entirely on the foreigners living in a "safe," tax free, consumerist state. When the rich people leave, they have nothing left.
Doesn't work, they destroyed their coastline to build artificial islands
Never understood the fascination myself. Dust bowl with no natural beauty. Authoritarian government. So hot you can't even go outside for half of the year and worst of all legalised slave labour. Wouldn't live there if you paid me.
Apparently Oman is the opposite, focusing on "authentic" tourism, and avoiding becoming a mass tourism trap.
Couldn't've happened to a better group of people. Free your slaves and maybe I'll have some sympathy
Dubai was always an economy built on a bubble. As much as I hate how they treat foreign laborers and as much as I hate their current leaders, I have some respect for how far they were able to get with this model.
But ultimately, they are a country with little land, little water, terrible weather, and surviving on a vast expat population that has no path to citizenship and will always just see it as a destination to milk for as much money as possible.
I don't see how such a model could ever be seen as sustainable in the long run.
I'm kinda annoyed that even with infinite oil money, they proceeded to design a compleltly unsustainable city for as cheaply as possible.
I would have thrown that money into some next gen terraforming and serious civil engineering projects to make a technological hypercity.
Instead we just got the billionaire's backyard of concrete, glass, and roads.
infinite oil money
You're thinking of Abu Dhabi. Dubai doesnt really have much oil money which is why they went hard on the "sharia Vegas" thing. Abu Dhabi has actually bailed them out in the past.
Dubai was always an economy built on a bubble
You could almost say it was built on sand...
One could say the same about Singapore, yet it seems to be here to stay.
Singapore isn't in the middle of a desert
I've lived in both and while the similarities are there, it's a bit different. Singapore still has a majority non expat population while Dubai has only about a 10% local population. Singapore also invests heavily in local education with one of the highest densities of PhDs in the world.
Dear Iran, please bomb the currently under construction: Disneyland, Abu Dhabi south of Dubai. No one wants that shit.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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