01/14/10 Stockholm, Sweden – Not an emirate known for taking the most practical approach to real estate development, Dubai’s latest effort of constructing a “22-mile-long indoor mountain range” has had to take a back seat to budgetary reality. Or, so says a parody from The Onion.
The new story describes its seemingly endless mission of providing every perk that is completely incongruent with natural life in the middle of the desert:
“‘This is a very sad day for the emirate of Dubai,’ Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed al-Maktoum told reporters at a press conference held inside the gold-plated anti-gravity chamber in his palace. ‘Although I believe it is the basic right of all who visit us to be able to scale to the top of a 15,000-foot-tall manmade snowcap, these tough economic times have made it an impossibility. Never before has our proud municipality faced such a grave crisis.’
“Added Sheikh Hamdan, ‘The time, I’m afraid, has finally come for us to tighten our jewel-studded belts.’”
Read the rest of the hilarious satirical look at Dubai excesses in an Onion article on how its debt crisis has slowed the emirate’s progress in building the world’s largest indoor mountain range.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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First of all, exactly what is a “gold-plated anti-gravity chamber”?
That in itself is about as ludicrous as building a “22-mile-long indoor mountain range” with a “15,000-foot-tall manmade snowcap” in the middle of a desert.
Well, as I have always been fond of saying, “More money than than brains”.
Now that I think about it, is the “gold-plated anti-gravity chamber” just an ornate old fashioned water closet?
And to think they were conducting the interview in a bathroom. And what were they using for TP? A roll of US $100 dollar bills?