The toys (skyscrapers to vehicles) are remarkable. (And "shiny"!) But I had not got thru one of these colllections (these collections are unrelentingly positive) when I started seeing a ghostly blogpost that does not yet exist: The Fall of Dubai, Surely Dubai is exceedingly fragile, depending on the central role of petroleum and the health of the banking system !!!! Not to mention the support of foreign patrons. If these supports fail, one can imagine what Dubai will look like. Dr. Beachcombing whose intelligent blog yet survives talks about Rome c. 600 AD and imagines the near-ghost town it must have been:
Let’s take the lowest sensible estimate for classical Rome – half a million – and the highest for Rome c. 600, about 50,000. That means that the population has not only been decimated, but that it had been decimated nine times over. And what is more these heirs of Rome (as fashionable ‘late antique’ historians call them) were resident in an echo box; a city that they no longer had the technology to repair, let alone recreate, where nine out of every ten residences were empty, where three and four story buildings gradually keeled over into the streets and where the Parthenon [Pantheon?]and the Coliseum looked down mockingly on the little people below, not so much dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, as blue-bottles buzzing around a cow’s backside.Then, remember, perhaps the actual population of Imperial Rome was more like a million and the population of Rome c. 600 was more like ten thousand, a hundredth of what it had been. The psychopathic Anglo-Saxon guard, the tourist from Scythia and the Pope and his tiny administration could shout as loud as they wanted and no one would have heard them in their ghost town. No one was listening, not even the red baked tiles made in a happier age.
Is this the future of Dubai? I wouldn't bet against it.
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