Such is life. Look at Tigre. All he can think of is mandatory Crossfit and sex grottoes in a railroad tycoon's crumbling mansion outside Cleveland.
I have lots of other ideas, like a personal submarine base, personal giant construction equipment play zone, and "road of bones" built by libertarians circling Hudson's Bay.
I've read that the collapse of the Saudi oil economy is not far off. Apparently (and I have only the one article to back this up) the Saudi approach to oil production is one that leads to lots of oil up front followed by a rapid collapse. Given their general shortsightedness about everything I think that's plausible. The article suggested a timeline of about 20 years or so before Saudi Arabia suddenly has to grow up and get a real job.
They are truly awful people. Like a grotesque racist caricature of themselves.
I've read that the collapse of the Saudi oil economy is not far off.
The lead guy for the next generation, whose name I have forgotten and would pretend to have forgotten even if I hadn't, because fuck the House of Saud, is apparently engaged on a project to move the money fountain from oil to finance on a five year perspective. So, sadly no.
The three essential things that keep the House of Saud in power are largesse for their populace (they don't just buy cheetahs and Bentleys, they also provide a mess of great social programs and services for no income tax), the support of the clerics, and the spectacle of the monarchy's prosperity and success. So, those are the things they spend money on. It is perhaps not so mysterious, crap-tastic though it is.
Be interesting to see what comes of the Saudi campaign to go solar.
By "largesse for their populace" you mean of course their indigenous populace and not the quasi-slaves employed as domestic and manual labour, mostly from South ans South-East Asia,
2: Heavy construction play zone? It's been done. Diggerland is that product.
3: This was Matthew Simmons' "Twilight in the Desert" $300/bbl by 2010 thesis. It hasn't exactly worn well, to say the least.
they also provide a mess of great social programs and services for no income tax
Not for immigrants, though, right?
You can currently buy that book for 1 British penny, so long as you pay the postage to take it away: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/047173876X/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1470150256&sr=8-1&keywords=Twilight+in+the+Desert
5: that would be the innovative and bomb-happy Mohammed bin Sultan al-Saud, I belief.
9.1: you underestimate the scale of Halfordismic ambition. Diggerland is great, but it only allows you to drive things like this. http://www.jcb.co.uk/products/machines/backhoe-loaders/3cx-eco
The Halfordismic vision is a Diggerland where one is allowed to drive things like this. http://www.miningglobal.com/machinery/1207/VIDEO-Biggest-and-Baddest-Mining-Equipment
I enjoyed reading that book, although it had the odd problem that the most sympathetic characters as written were the oil fields themselves.
Indian">http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/indians-stranded-in-saudi-arabia-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-issue-116080200186_1.html">Indian Workers Starve In Saudia Arabia this week, other articles easy to google
"The Saudi government was forced to cut its spending last year on the back of plummeting oil prices As a result, it created pressure on the financials of local construction companies. Such firms employ foreign workers and rely on state contracts. The resultant strain on the firms led to nearly 10,000 workers being laid off, and left them with no money to even eat food. More than 2,500 Indians are said to be living in labour camps with no food for the past 10 days." Some not paid since November
Indian financed evacuation may not be easy.
"Yes. As per rules in Saudi Arabia, employers must sign the papers to send their staff to India. It is only then that the embassy can issue an emergency exit visa."
The real question to me is, if the west lost patience with them and walked away with their chequebooks, what would they be capable of doing while they were throwing their predictable tantrum?
what would they be capable of doing while they were throwing their predictable tantrum?
Ordering the murder of tens of thousands of our citizens. Always remember the SFO's BAE Systems corruption investigation and how and why it was shut down. The Saudis are capable of threatening Western governments with terrorist attack merely to avoid embarrassment to a few family members. In the face of something like you're suggesting, they would go all out.
To put it another way: look what ISIS has managed to achieve without overt support from the Saudi government. Think what they could do with it.
16. Yes. See also air traffic activity on September 12, 2001. Basically they've got us over a barrel, and our lords and masters know it.
The only counter we have could be, interestingly, places like Sandhurst and West Point, where the Arabs like to send their ineffectual princes as cadets, or as I would like to phrase it "hostages". Dangerous business, military training.
I don't think they let foreign swells like Saudi princes into West Point, but I could be wrong.
(Which, obviously they'd be smart to take a look at that what with a third of their population being migrant workers. But their native subjects are a solid and very well-taken-of constituency and that's what the system is clearly designed for, is what I'm saying.)
All of this suggests that competition in energy markets may shift from crude oil to refined products.
So the big Saudi plan to move up the value chain is to refine oil, not just sell it. A totally logical first step, in about 1950.
12: Misread "Diggerland" as "Doggerland". Halford, if you need a location for this construction playzone that will be extremely expensive and will require lots of backbreaking labor from political prisoners to produce, I know exactly where to put it.
19 They have a glut of princes, mostly useless when not actively harmful, and every one of them drawing enormous allowances, so you'd actually be helping them out there.
Draining the southern North Sea does sound appropriately Pharaonic.
26: let's hope the Saudis love their children too.
5: Hey, they can't just go from producing something useful to making money by engaging in finance sector shenanigans. That's London's turf.
If they were smart they would have been insider trading on the oil futures markets all these years. Which presumably the oil ministers have all done on their own dime, but I doubt the sovereign wealth fund has.
30: they aren't even planning shenanigans: the plan is to sell Aramco, put the money into a colossal SWF, and use the proceeds to run the entire country.
28 Of course they do. But the princes are pretty much reviled by a lot of the population.
The war they are currently prosecuting in Yemen is criminal. And the US is fully aiding and abetting it.
There was a World Bank report about six months ago that said the KSA has about 5 years of current financial reserves at the rate they are spending. A lot of that spending is going to their horrible war in Yemen.
They've recently announced cutbacks in benefits. The kind they use to buy off their (indigenous) population. I can't recall the details but it was widely reported here. I think some of them were to be phased in over the next few years. I have serious doubts as to how long they can keep things together there.
Individual Saudis I've met professionally have been friendly and charming. Their despotic government is evil as hell.
17: are you sure ISIS would be more dangerous with overt Saudi support, rather than just money?
So you sell Aramco for what, 10x annual revenues? And then you draw from the trust fund to cover the 90% of your budget that used come from Aramco. So the fund lasts a solid 10 years and 5 weeks. Investment returns aren't a plan, they're a supplement to a real economy that doesn't exist.
the plan is to sell Aramco...
Unless more details have emerged in the last few months this may be less than it seems. I think the plan was to privatize some minor parts of Aramco and leave the rest untouched but I haven't seen anything recently. Of course just touching Aramco is crazy, it's the only real part of the place that actually functions effectively and efficiently. I'm not sure why they've decide to fuck with it.
Reading the recent history of adjacent countries it looks like some ruling families took a look at the trajectory that KSA was on and decided to nip it in the bud by spreading the wealth to the whole of the indigenous population rather than hoarding it all to themselves. Of course they're still insanely wealthy. And it helps that they don't have the same structural and demographic issues facing them that are present in KSA.
Individual Saudis I've met professionally have been friendly and charming. Their despotic government is evil as hell.
Entirely agree with both parts of this.
are you sure ISIS would be more dangerous with overt Saudi support, rather than just money?
Saudi-employed preachers in Saudi-funded mosques in every country in the world, preaching support for ISIS? I think that would be a bad thing, yes.
I'm not sure why they've decide to fuck with it.
Because they're a bunch of inbred aristocrats who haven't had to deal with how anything actually works for generations?
And it helps that they don't have the same structural and demographic issues facing them that are present in KSA
Could you expand on what these are in particular, that are distinct from their neighbours?
Does Saudi Arabia have the royal-title-inflation problem as tsarist Russia, where every son of a prince is also a prince?
39 Most significantly they have a much larger population compared to other GCC countries. Around 100 times larger than their smallest near neighbor. That's a lot of people you have to spread the wealth around to, handing out public sector jobs left and right just isn't going to cut it for long, especially not when oil gets as low as it's been.
Also they have a small but significant Shi'ite minority, most of whom are concentrated in the oil producing region of the country. And it's a big fucking country.
Why on Earth would the Saudis be interested in supporting ISIS, anyway? This is the group that boasts of wanting to blow up Mecca. Their both being evil doesn't make them any kind of natural ally.
Rebuilding Mecca would provide lots of jobs.
Doggerland would provide more.
40 The problem is multiplied many times over by the practice of polygamy combined with divorce. King Abdulaziz had about 50 sons and thousands of grandsons. Every one of whom gets an allowance amounting to millions of dollars a year.
While we're comparing hypothetical insane despotisms.
44 Ha! They've been rebuilding it like crazy. It's more like Las Vegas than a holy city, much to the dismay of people who care about such things. Almost every trace of the past has been erased, whether it dates from Muhammad's time (in which case it is actively blotted out because of their strange ideas) or the more recent past because they just don't give a shit.
My favorite lines from Syriana, and basically what I think of KSA.
I knew an American convert who had lived in Medina and wanted to do a guide book marking all the historic spots, places that Muhammad or his companions did this or that, their houses, tombs, etc. And just gave up in despair. One notable place became a parking lot for some American chain restaurant, a Dairy Queen IIRC.
How had those spots not been monetized for pilgrims centuries ago, like Jerusalem?
51 That's an interesting question. My impression is not to the same extent but I'm not as familiar with the literature as I should be (it occurs to me that I could answer this at work tomorrow, we have a lot of early traveler's literature to the Holy Land and Arabia including Mecca and Medina).
Almost every trace of the past has been erased, whether it dates from Muhammad's time (in which case it is actively blotted out because of their strange ideas)
At first I thought that was odd given that the rulers are fundamentalist in the literal sense of the word, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. They want a simple narrative that they can control.
51: Years ago I went to an exhibit called Treasures From the Holy Land that was all about pilgrimages. Most of the items on display had been made specifically for the pilgrim/tourist trade (dates ranged from late antiquity through late Renaissance).
Unsurprisingly, things were run very much like they are now, with the souvenir merchants required to pay higher fees to set up shop near the more popular sites. At least if the exhibit text is to be believed.
53. Also that the delightful Mohammed ibn abd al Wahhab regarded the veneration of sites associated with the great and the good to be idolatry and totally forbidden.
In my one semester of ME history I visibly pissed off the lecturer by answering the question 'Why was possession of the holy sites valuable?' with 'Tourism'.
Fundamentalism and modernistic cash lust often work pretty well together.
55 - right, it's my (not particularly well-informed, correct me if I'm wrong) impression that it's as if Jerusalem got taken over by a particularly austere bunch of Calvinists, except that for some reason the austerity applied only to religious sites and didn't prevent gilded faux-tuscan palatial hotels.
I guess that was mean towards Calvinists, whom I generally like.
Anyhow, the BEST part about reclaiming Doggerland wouldn't just be the gigantic construction equipment. You could build the fanciest hotel in the world, and then invite one's powerful enemies (including, e.g., the Saudi royal family, Peter Thiel, who knows) as guests. When all have arrived, you stand atop the great dam and announce "OPEN THE GATES," turning Doggerland back to the sea as you watch your enemies flooded before you to serve as food for eels.
I fear the grand banquets of Halfordismo will come to suffer from many politely refused invitations.
A real Generalissimo does it all big all the times.
Why would one's powerful enemies accept an invitation to a hotel in a valley with a dam?
Speaking of Thiel, have you seen the latest about his thirst for young people's blood to prolong his life?
what part of fanciest hotel IN THE WORLD don't you understand. This is a fucking fancy hotel in reclaimed Doggerland.
67 - yes, through Nosflow. That actually made me sympathize with Thiel a bit, it's the kind of billionaire crazy we need more of.
Which movie will Peter Thiel's biography be an eerie parallel of? 2001? Brazil? The Dark Crystal?
Step 1: Privatize aramco
step 2: embezzle most of the ipo funds and move to chelsea.
step 3: Whoever ends up holding the 'actually live in saudi arabia' bag nationalizes aramco.
The fun (to me) historical irony of Aramco is that if the US had fought the most blatantly corrupt, corporate-driven war in American history to keep it owned by Exxon, Texaco, Chevron et al, the world would be a vastly better place.
Imperialism -- unreliable when it could actually do some good.
Also kind of a historical irony that Peter Theil's spending so much on child blood and none at all on idk, gills, when it is inevitable and obvious he's going to drown in the Doggerland Surge.
Didn't we have a discussion about body modification where we reached consensus that we would all get gills?
Didn't we have a discussion about body modification where we reached consensus that we would all get gills?
That sounds like a really bad drunken evening, at least if there was a plastic surgeon involved.
Now that's a thread I'd like to read
Haven't read the comments yet, so I could be pwned, but Saudi princes can indeed enroll at West Point: http://www.usma.edu/admissions/sitepages/pros_cadets_international.aspx
Actually, people have been reclaiming Doggerland since the middle ages, only they call the reclaimed bits Holland and Zeeland.
East Anglia was extensively drained in the 16th century, but I don't think it was actually below sea level before that. In fact once it was drained the soil dried out and shrank, which is why you have the peculiar setup there of fields several feet below the level of the water in the canals beside them.
(I have been reading "Cuckoo" by Nick Davies, which is an absolutely cracking piece of nature writing.)
Makes sense. The same thing happened in the Sacramento delta. Maybe pre-modern Holland as well?
On balance, I think the east coast of England has lost more than it has regained in the historical period. Up to the 17th century most of East Anglia, and much of Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, was marshland, with islands inhabited by fishing communities (There was dry land as well.). They imported Dutch engineers to drain it for agriculture.
76: No, as far as I can tell. But ogged (almost) definitely wouldn't mind.
83: I don't think anyone was putting together large-scale marshland drainage projects in pre-modern Holland or pre-modern anywhere else in Europe, just because that sort of thing needs a lot of capital, but I could be wrong.
Before Hillary Clinton, there was no capitalism.
I have been reading "Cuckoo" by Nick Davies, which is an absolutely cracking piece of nature writing.
I briefly read "Davies" as "Cave", making the sentence one of the more surprising I've seen in awhile.
I don't know how he is as a writer but I would definitely watch a Nick Cave nature documentary.
83, 86: I'm guessing this is a 20C definition of "modern", not the post-Renaissance/Enlightenment one.
Depends on your definition of pre-modern. The full scale draining of East Anglia started in the 17th century, and was resisted strongly by the locals. Oliver Cromwell as a back bench MP opposed drainage in his constituency because feeling there was against it. Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector was strongly in favour of it because he had vast sums of money invested in such projects. I have known several people with odd names that are corrupted from the Dutch, who have told me their ancestors came over to work on drainage projects, mostly in the later 17th/early 18th.
90: I meant mediaeval. Draining in East Anglia started on a small scale in the 16th century, by a company of adventurers chartered by Queen Elizabeth, and then, as chris says, ramped up in the 17th century. I'd be surprised if it was happening on a large scale much before then anywhere in Europe.
86: Not large scale, but there were a lot of small to medium scale reclamation projects in the pre-modern Low Countries, increasing in ambition as time went on. I've heard it argued that the collective investment and reward involved in these projects contributed to the development of Dutch capitalism, which is to say capitalism in general.
Wikipedia, which may or may not know what it's talking about, says that a key development was the introduction of windmill driven pumps in thw 15th century. Allowing that the spread of technology was always slower in those days, that makes a lot of sense.
OT: Is there any TSA regulation against taking an already dissected cicada corpse on an airplane? Link appreciated. Asking for a friend.
96: They were reclaiming land way before the 15th century, just not with the iconic windmills. I'm not sure the exact tech they used, but the towns had a parallel government structure just for maintenance of polders and flood control.
For sure. But not on a really industrial scale. It was more artisanal reclamation. A dam here, a dyke there...
Wasn't there an incident during the Dutch revolution, so later 16th century, where they flooded the polder so as to stop the Imperial troops reaching some city? So there must have been quite a bit of reclamation by then.
By pre-modern I meant pre-industrial revolution, which was sloppy.
86: It calls for moving a lot of dirt, not necessarily spending a lot of capital. Vast stretches of land in China have been drained over millennia, including huge areas reclaimed from the sea. All of that done by corvee labor, and IIRC also maintained by specialized local government structures. Like say, piecemeal, but it adds up.
The Dutch did cut dykes at least twice during the 80 years' war.
97: Sure. The TSA has no rule against carrion luggage.
Just be sure to get it inside your bag before rigor sets in.
That's not hydraulic capitalism, this is hydraulic capitalism
104: But Daaaaaaaad, that's not fair!
(I was looking to see if my friend's taxidermy outfit sells its cicada-mounting kits online, but it looks like not. I have to figure out where and how to display the three we have in the new house.)
99 - right. The plan in 62 could be implemented by the Dutch government, if they built near Rotterdam the fanciest hotel in the world.
106: 1) mounting a cicada sounds insanely finicky, and
2) who the hell wants a cicada, mounted or not, in their house?
Are you sure they're old enough for that, Mobes?
who the hell wants a cicada, mounted or not, in their house?
A proud cicada-hunter. (The kill itself is not difficult, but waiting 17 years for your quarry to emerge from the ground is a true test.)
Well they announce their presence quite emphatically. It's not like you have to crouch over a breathing hole in the ice.
When they emerged round here I took a day or so realize the citywide clamor wasn't some novel construction machinery.
The cicadas around here seem to have said fuck it and now emerge every year. Or maybe we have enough subspecies with different hibernation lengths that it just seems that way.
108: I didn't intend to buy them each a $20 dead cicada when I took them to bug day at the museum center, believe me! These are better-looking than the average cicada and I'm sure it's educational to play with pinning it out to dry and so on, but they've been up on the third floor a long time and I'm not sure I'm up for framing them right now.
These sound like objects that could easily be misplaced in the course of moving house.
105. I think Pratchett had a reference to that thing in one of his later efforts.
The whole cicada subthread is wonderful.
Thorn, have you looked into shadow boxes for the cicada. I've seen some lovely butterflies pinned in them.
I have! But I'm not sure what size would be right. And one big shadowbox with three spread-winged cicadas in it or three small ones? etc. (I was thinking maybe have the girls do some abstract watercolor as a backdrop. I have thought about this, just haven't done anything in the 18 months there have been cicada bodies in boxes in the playroom.)
With some nicely lettered labels? Latin and common names obvs.