Tuesday, December 11, 2007

These are not olive trees.

I can't quite decide whether these buildings planned for Dubai qualify as cutting edge architecture, or a bad acid trip. Either way, I'm not quite sure how buildings being built for $1000/square foot of useful space qualify in any way as "sustainable" or "environmentally friendly." They might be great targets for Al-Qaida when built, though.

H/T Anthony Bradley, who has a somewhat different view of what's going on.

7 comments:

Shawn said...

they qualify as sustainable because sustainable can mean any of dozens of different things, and almost anything can be certified as 'green'.

Mark said...

Hey, whatever.

If it keeps our worthless Buck leaving the country, I'm all for it!

Shawn said...

mark...what do you mean by 'keeping our buck from leaving the country'? If, as I assume, you mean that dollars leaving the fanciful confines of the U.S. borders somehow makes us poorer, the economists that I've read/listened to would point out that this fear is a complete fallacy. If that's what you meant (and you weren't being sarcastic), and if you're interested, I can point a few things out for you to read so you can not be terriLouDobbsified about 'dollars without borders'.

Mark said...

Ah. You've mis-quoted/-read me, Shawn. Therein is part of the misunderstanding...

We are only poorer if the flood of worthless Federal Reserve Notes stay here or ever come back.

When the rest of the world becomes tired of it, we'll learn the true meaning of inflation. :^(

Bike Bubba said...

I think Mark is simply pointing out that the increased demand for American services evidenced by these projects is going to prop it up a while and help reduce the damage the Fed is doing.

And well said about just about anything can be called green. Yeesh.

Shawn said...

...ya know...it's funny: I've completely jumped into libertarian thinking, and most of it makes perfect sense. When I listen to Rothbard (or, well, on an audiobook) talk about the fed's thievery-via-fiat money, it makes perfect sense, but I'm just not worried about it.

Maybe because Milton didn't seem too worried about not being on the gold standard, I'm not either.

Bike Bubba said...

Lots of people aren't terribly worried, but I would still recommend that we be wary about the whole issue. The ugly reality is that the whole reality of time preference and debt has been badly warped by loose fed policies. You're paying a price for it, whether you know it or not.