Me & Twitter

In a post the other day about blogging I said I couldn't get my head around Twitter and I should do a post on it so that, maybe, you can tell me where I'm going wrong.

Today Sarah has an excellent post about Twitter at Dubai-ified, which prompted me to write my post on it.


I understand the concept of instant, brief messages. I understand, as Sarah says, that Twitter is connectivity to the rest of the world. But there's much I can't get my head around.

Blogging I understand, it makes sense, it doesn't need you on it 24/7, it's clear and concise, easy to read.

Twitter is the opposite.

The first bit I struggle with is knowing what to follow. How the hell do you decide when there's so much of interest going on. And new, unpredicted things of interest regularly popping up out of nowhere, such as the Benihana Kuwait blogger-bashing story. I'd end up following so many subjects that my computer would go into meltdown.

And that leads me on to the other thing I don't understand - the time you need.

Twitter by its very nature provides instant and constant updates on all sorts of stuff.  But if you're not monitoring it all the time you miss huge wads of the stuff and when you get back to it it's like missing the middle section of a movie.

And if you have your own Twitter page, how do you find the time to keep posting (or is that tweeting?). With this blog I can post something every day, sometimes longer like this and sometimes just a photo. I can check back for comments, I can reply to them...but I don't need to be on it all the time.

Then there's the content.

For example, I followed the link from a visitor tracked by my Statcounter:

alimustafaok: Queensland baby born in cyclone Yasi shelter {exclusive video of baby...must watch} - http://tinyurl.com/69q54rr
KrystleJondahl1: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi TishaMcmain5429: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi rosethistleart: RT @CBSnews: End of Cyclone Yasi Brings Australia More Woes http://bit.ly/eZi18N
YuetteFinley968: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
CBS News: End of Cyclone Yasi Brings Australia More Woes http://feedzil.la/g8juoy
AdamColeman25: End of Cyclone Yasi Brings Australia More Woes (CBS News): Share With Friends: World news - Top Stories News, KiyokoWires3264: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
MonicaRingstaff: The energy from Cyclone Yasi could power the world for a year
 LaurenLandolt74: The energy from Cyclone Yasi could power the world for a year
teetee65: RT @CBSnews: End of Cyclone Yasi Brings Australia More Woes http://bit.ly/eZi18N
AllineYerhot194: The energy from Cyclone Yasi could power the world for a year
ThomasGoracke92: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
WanitaRied3601: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
Levi_Fourie: @JackieEatsBabys search up cyclone yasi!! :D and be amazed we got lucky :L other owns didn't :(
MiriamMazzoni59: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
RT @CBSnews: End of Cyclone Yasi Brings Australia More Woes http://bit.ly/eZi18N
ElenoreBueche60: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi
KiaraCiarletta3: The energy from Cyclone Yasi could power the world for a year
Louth: Tail end of Cyclone Yasi in Werribee. Pictures: http://bit.ly/fh5ocd Video: http://youtu.be/IiHCvNmRE2w [Not mine!] - More rain to come too.
Louth: Tail end of Cyclone Yasi in Werribee. Pictures: http://bit.ly/fh5ocd Video: http://youtu.be/IiHCvNmRE2w [Not mine!] - More rain to come too.
AliseCumpston27: All our thoughts with Queensland as they brace themselves for Cyclone Yasi

It goes on ad nauseum like that. Page after page with messages being repeated by dozens of people. Most of it is just quotes from the mainstream media and people re-tweeting what others have already tweeted, so it's page after page endlessly repeating exactly the same thing. In reality there are only five or six things being said, which you read over and over again.
 
I've just had a look at Alexander McNabb's Twitter page and that highlights another problem I have. Dozens of conversations are going on at the same time. It's like being in one of those business meetings where the chairman loses control and everyone starts talking amongst themselves. So much is going on at the same time you have no idea what's going on.
 
 
Here's part of Alex' page:

  Now. THAT is awesome. #Jan25
.@bilalhouri I do not somehow feel a deep sense of loss.. @tfehh @jarofjuice @mark248am @MaliZomg
.@bilalhouri Now the only voice on Facebook is the boycott page... LOL indeed... @mark248am @MaliZomg @naseemfaqihi
.@bilalhouri Yes, I rather think they did! Yet more great 'how to' lessons in social media! :) @mark248am @MaliZomg #BenihanaKUW
.RT @allawati: People are now forming to make the word "Leave" for the helicopters to see http://twitpic.com/3wbys0
.RT @Andrew_Bone: Last call for Jeddah. Would all passengers board immediately. Come on, Mr Mubarak #Jan25
.Fast Company on BenihanaGate. Hey, Benihana Tokyo? WAKE UP! http://bit.ly/faxZE2 #BenihanaKUW (Via @okassim)
.@okassim Yes, it was a despicable swipe against an alienated sibling. And quite fun...
."Reporters Without Borders is horrified... an all-out witch-hunt against news media... in Egypt" http://bit.ly/gjBXy7
.@okassim Yeah, but search 'Benihana' and you catch the growing global outcry. And it's actually scary. #benihanakuw
.@Beirutspring @krmaher Well, some ISPs are capable of anythingng... ;)
.@Beirutspring @krmaher Saudi IPs - IP addresses. See the post on the host's site: http://bit.ly/hsKEnv
.Hmm. The Slashdot effect? #BenihanaKUW http://bit.ly/hodSAS
.@bilalhouri @noornet @Beirutspring @MaliZomg Post is mirrored here: http://bit.ly/hsKEnv
.@Beirutspring According to the hosting provider, traffic spike plus attacks from Saudi-based IPs!
.@money1963 Benihana Kuwait! You might find this informative: http://bit.ly/gr0414
.@noornet @Beirutspring Guys, the blog is offline temporarily as the host is having traffic issues. http://bit.ly/hsKEnv #jan25
.RT @GKnieschot: Vodaphone #Egypt statement on Government abusing phone networl: http://bit.ly/gnVesi #Jan25



And I have a problem with the way it's presented.
 
There's all the link stuff, more than half the message, to wade through:
 
pippalovespink: RT @smh_news: RT @smhenvironment: 41 degrees: Sydney's sixth day of sizzling: http://bit.ly/gjYhnN #weather #environment #sydneyheat
 
Ninety-four characters of links to wade through to read forty-one characters of message. 

And making it even harder to read what's there, the platform can't accept apostrophies so you get:

marielviray: @meteoritecrater also, Sydney's in a heat wave and Melbourne's flooding. Australia's weather is so bipolar.

User friendly it ain't.

Assuming that with practice I could work out how to cut through the dozens of  simultaneous conversations and how to read through all the 'ses I still have two problems.

How to follow all the many, many subjects I'd want to follow and how to find the time to do it.
 
How to find a way through the endlessly repeated clutter and just read a message once.
 
 

On blogging

A lazy weekend, Mrs Seabee's gone into the office and I have a couple of hours before we meet for lunch so I thought I'd just post a couple of thoughts that came up on the Dubai Eye Radio blogging programme I was delighted to be involved with on Tuesday, and in conversations since.

It's the business equivalent of talking shop so if you're not a blogger you'll probably want to leave now, but thanks for stopping by anyway. Bloggers, addicts as we are, might stay with me...

One of the things that was touched on during the programme was anonymity when Hussein/Who-sane was asked about it.

I don't think of it as 'anonymous' though. I, and many others, are doing nothing more than using the age-old tradition of a pen name, a nom de plume. Was Eric Blair 'anonymous', or is David Cornwell?*

I've been known in business for years as Seabee, my wife calls me Seabee (among other things that aren't suitable as a pen name) so I use it, my nickname. I've been interviewed on tv and appeared in several documentary films in which I'm not masked or disguised, so I don't think I'm anonymous.

Why not use the name on my birth certificate? I suppose the main reasons are that that I'm just more comfortable using Seabee (I can't explain that), I prefer people to have their own picture of me in their mind (like a radio play where you imagine what the characters look like) and to avoid being harassed at home.

The latter comes up because in the pre-blogging days when I got things off my chest by forever sending letters to newspapers, I got phone calls from people who'd looked me up in the telephone directory. Not all were abusive, in fact they were the minority. But even with people calling to say they agreed with me I didn't want to be disturbed at home by them any more than I want sales people calling to offer deals they insist I'd be stupid to refuse.

Then there was the reason we blog anyway. How we started and why.

There are probably as many different answers as there are bloggers, we're all individual personalities. Some started to keep in touch with family and friends. Some are simply daily diaries, replacing the old paper diary. Some are specialist blogs, promoting a favourite football team, talking fashion, some are travelogues. We have awful  blogs to promote extremist and racist agendas. Political blogs, self-promoting blogs. The list is endless.

For me blogging is an extension of what I've always done, but expanded through the internet. I'm interested on what goes on around me and in the wider world, whether it's a major event or trivia, and I usually have an opinion about it.

I talk about those things with family and friends, and conversations, debates, arguments, ranting, complaining, praising are the result.

That's what I do through this blog too. To me when I post I'm starting a conversation, which you join when you read the blog. Some of you actively join in by leaving a comment, and I thank you for that. The conversation may well go on for a while through the comments section - that happens in particular when I get people foaming at the mouth, purple-faced, when I touch on a sensitive subject. (Passing thought: I haven't done that for ages, I must try to think of a provocative subject to post about).

Then there's the future of blogging, where we think it might it's going.

My thought is that in a very short space of time we've gone from being a new, breakthrough medium to being old hat. We're edging towards being mainstream (traditional even?) media. Hussein and I both recounted instances where our blog posts were picked up by the traditional print media and became big stories, joining us with the mainstream.

Other example of this merging are links to this blog from mainstream media, for example such as *horror* Fox in the US (my post on a Brit facing jail for giving the finger to another motorist) and the New York Times (my response to Johann Hari's infamous 'Dark Side of Dubai' story).

Many people have moved to Twitter - dare I say the less committed, less serious, bloggers? (I really don't understand Twitter and I must do a post on it one day). I suspect that there may well be fewer traditional (that word again) bloggers in the future but that it will be the more serious of us. Again I suppose that nudges blogging even closer to the mainstream.

Another thing that came up was earning money from blogging. I seem to be in the minority (of one?) in saying that I won't have any advertising, any paid-for content, on my blog. I want absolute freedom to say, with no pressure from anyone, exactly what I want to say. Agree with what I say or don't, but what you read are my observations, thoughts and opinions. There's no commercial influence anywhere in them.

But that's me. I respect the others' views that they'd like to earn some money from blogging, as both fellow-Aussie Sarah  and  Micheline said they would.

Fellow guest in the studio Bebhinn has a website dedicated to fashion, at Hellwa Fashion, but to me that's a different thing from blogging. It's a fully commercialised site, much like an online magazine (and very good it is too) designed to make money from a subject dear to the heart of the publisher.

I was asked by co-host of the show Alexander McNabb whether I ever worry about censorship. It's something that's come up in more than once in comments left on this blog over the years. Usually they're from 'anonymous' and are heated claims that we all write as we're told to and are terrified of being thrown in jail if we don't.

As I didn't expect the question I hadn't given it any previous thought, and it's not something I've ever given any concious thought to so I stuttered somewhat in my reply, trying to think it through as I answered.  And I think that's the point - I haven't given it any thought.

I've always believed that the laws of libel apply to anyone saying anything on the internet and I bear that in mind. I try to be reasonably polite even when I'm critical. But beyond that I say what I want to say. I certainly don't sit here thinking that I must be careful what I say in case big men in dark glasses pound on my door at 2am.

And here's Mrs Seabee ready for lunch so I'm off.

Have a great weekend.


* To save you googling, that's George Orwell and John Le Carre.

Learning from mistakes?

Major factors behind the global economic meltdown:

Historically low interest rates held for a very long time.

Vast amounts of money spent or committed by governments.

Banks' tele-sales people pestering consumers with phone calls offering credit cards.

The financial industry creating 'complex financial instruments' (actually worthless pieces of paper), sold to each other and unsuspecting investors for huge amounts.

Huge salaries and bonuses for bankers and other business executives, based on short-term (this year's) profits and share prices.

Retailers offering big-ticket items at big discounts with no deposit, nothing to pay for several months and financing at very low interest rates.


How we're dealing with the global economic meltdown:

Historically low interest rates held for a very long time.

Vast amounts of money spent or committed by governments.

Banks' tele-sales people pestering consumers with phone calls offering credit cards.

The financial industry creating 'complex financial instruments' (actually worthless pieces of paper), sold to each other and unsuspecting investors for huge amounts.

Huge salaries and bonuses for bankers and other business executives, based on short-term (this year's) profits and share prices.

Retailers offering big-ticket items at big discounts with no deposit, nothing to pay for several months and financing at very low interest rates.




Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

"What salary do I need?"

One of the most frequently asked questions on various forums I'm active on is along the lines of "what salary do I need to live in Dubai, and to be able to save."

Some are more specific, quoting salaries they've been offered which are often four or five thousand dirhams a month.

Answers vary, but usually say that whatever the figure quoted is, it isn't nearly enough.

I always say "it depends" and try to explain, so that the questioner can work it out for her/himself.

It depends where you come from, what your standard of living is and therefore what standard of living is acceptable to you, how you want or are prepared to live, what your current salary is and whether you're able to save anything from that.

In terms of saving, the cost of living in your home country comes very much into the picture. Transfer a thousand dirhams to many countries and it's a huge amount, in others it won't buy you much more than a few meals out.

I know people here earning Dh100,000 a month, with luxury accommodation, family air fares, school fees, top medical insurance, a luxury car all paid by the company.

I know others being paid Dh2,000 a month and sharing a villa, living ten to a room. And yet others being paid Dh600 a month and living in storerooms.

As a general rule too, I find that those at the bottom of the ladder are often providing for an extended family back home, while those at the top of the salary ladder are usually responsible only for their immediate family.

What they have in common is that they all say they're better off than they were back home.

Gulf News had an illuminating full page yesterday on the subject.

The main story is about Diane, a Filipina now working in Dubai.

In 2004 she experienced what happens to so many people; to pay the placement fee, in the Philippines, for a job in Taiwan she borrowed from a loan shark. The employment deal was a scam, the money she borrowed disappeared and there was no job.

After a year she managed to find a job in Kuwait, on a salary of about Dh1,280. On that meagre salary she managed to not only pay off the loan shark but also apparently saved 'a few thousand dirhams'.

She returned home where there was an ailing mother to take care of and siblings needing money, so her savings didn't last long.

Like so many others she came to Dubai on a visit visa, did some visa runs while she searched for a job, and eventually after almost a year she found one that paid Dh2,500 a month. This was early 2007.

The story gives details of her expenses and lifestyle. She shares a room with seven others, eats cheap take-away lunches, buys storeable food to cook at home, such as canned goods and rice, rarely goes out.

She not only lives on the Dh2,500 a month, she saves between 20% and 40% of it and is helping her brother buy a property back home. The story tells us that in three years she has almost fully paid the equity line on the new home, which is equivalent to 19 per cent of the property value. "I'm almost down to a zero balance. And I did it without borrowing money! I paid the equity line in cash".

On a salary of Dh2,500 a month.

The story ends with the fact that it's not the lifestyle she dreamed of before she moved to Dubai, with its prospect of a high salary.

On the other hand, she hasn't gone back to the Philippines so the assumption has to be that she's yet another person doing better here than she would back home. She's able to live, to save, to buy a house.

It explains my 'it depends where you're from' answer to the question of 'how much do I need'.

Let's take Diane's current Dh2,500 a month and look at it from others' perspective.

No way in the world would an Aussie be prepared to live as Diane does - nor would a Brit, an American or many, many others. Share a room with seven others? Not on your life. We'd be so much better off back home.

We wouldn't be able to live on Dh2,500 a month, let alone save. It's about A$785, or GBP435, or US$680.

We wouldn't accept that kind of money anyway, a fraction of our 'back home' salary. Again, we'd be much better off back home.

On her small salary Diane's able to buy a house back home. To do the same thing an expat Sydneysider buying a house at the median price of A$630,000 (over Dh2 million) would be paying about Dh13,000 a month on a mortgage.

To live to a standard we're prepared to accept and be able to provide exactly the same things for when we go back to our home countries, it depends where you come from.

The Gulf News story gives an insight into what a lowly paid worker can do with a small salary and it gives some typical salary ranges for various job functions.

Gulf News has it here.

Impact from the DW issue

I treat this blog not only as somewhere where I can express my own opinions but also as a place for conversation. I start the conversation by posting something, people join in by leaving comments, I and others respond and so the conversation goes on.

This post is an example, I'm continuing a conversation by responding to questions left on my last post about the Dubai World debt issue and the PR surrounding it. I started to answer in the comments box but it was really too long as a comment so I decided to turn it into a new post.

The question was: How do you think this will impact Dubai in the next 3 months and also, if this has just come out now, what other stories do you think will start to 'appear' that have remained hidden so far?


First a disclaimer: Predicting the future is nothing more than a guess. Whoever does it, however expert they are, it's just making a personal guess as to what may happen.

I've been asked what I think, I could be right or I could be wrong, it's only a guess, but here goes:

Impact over the next three months? Three months is a very short period. My thoughts are that we won't see much impact down here at street level in that time. Unless you work for one of the DW companies, that is. If you do then you can expect even more changes than you've experienced over the past year. But for the rest of us, no.

There is currently bad publicity internationally for Dubai on a massive scale and I'm sure that will continue, but it relates to business so I don't see it affecting, for example, tourist arrivals.

As for the financial world, after the initial and inevitable panic, and when eventually the information vacuum is filled by official, meaningful, believable statements from the authorities here, things will settle down. It will take a long, long time for confidence to be restored but it will be eventually.

In the real economy, as a result of the global downturn we, like many other places, already have economic slowdown, redundancies, companies closing, invoices not being paid resulting in huge cashflow problems, a property price slump, tighter credit conditions, less spending. I don't see the DW issue making any difference to that in the short term.

The Feds are in damage control mode, taking action to limit impact on the economy in general.

There's been the entirely expected run on the local share markets this morning, when they re-opened after the Eid holiday. Dubai’s lost 7.2% late morning, the biggest drop since November 2008, and Abu Dhabi’s index was down 8.2%, the most since May 2006.

Big drops, but we've seen it before. They'll bounce back.

The Feds have announced support for the banks, the companies most at risk from the Dubai World problem, having set up a special liquidity facility for local and foreign banks operating in the UAE. They've also stated that they will support selected Dubai companies, without naming them. I assume it will depend on which ones they think are viable.

There are obviously high-level meetings going on between Federal and Dubai government officials so I expect more measures will be announced if they're felt necessary as the Feds get to the facts.

Put into perspective, ignoring the terrible handling of the issue in Dubai over the last year culminating in the new PR disaster, the root of the issue is that a company is planning to restructure its debt. That's normal business practice and if it had been handled competently we wouldn't have the problem we now have.

So in the next three months, which was the question, I don't think we'll experience any impact specifically from this Dubai World issue.


To carry on the thought, over the longer term I think the impact will be positive.

What I expect to see is a stop to the overdevelopment, especially of farcical projects which were simply not viable and were nothing to do with commerce, the lifeblood of Dubai. They're what caused the problem in the first place.

The companies in DW group will be reorganised now by someone who knows how to do it, and who according to the reports will be given the authority to carry out whatever's necessary. I assume there'll be payment of overdue invoices, a restructuring of debt and the companies left in the group will be commercially viable.

In a more general sense I think that instead of focusing on property and the speculation that goes with it the focus will go back to Dubai's tradition of trading based on its location, plus the new tourism industry. That should have been the focus for Dubai's latest development boom; they should have built the airport, the commercial cluster 'cities' and at least parts of Dubailand but not Palm Deira, Palm Jebel Ali/Waterfront, The World, the Arabian Canal for example. They didn't, they got carried away and lost focus but I'm sure it will now get back to those basics.

Politically, I think there'll also be far less independence in future for Dubai, and the other emirates, with a much stronger federal government.

On that subject it'd be interesting to know whether the complete lack of comment from Dubai authorities is voluntary head-in-the-sand or whether the Feds have said 'keep quiet and leave it to us'.



The other question was: Any other hidden stories? The normal way of dealing with bad events in this region is to do it behind closed doors, sort out the problem without letting anyone know there even was a problem. Maybe there have been others, will be others, which will be dealt with in that traditional way.

But I can't see another similar problem to this Dubai World debt thing appearing.

It's the big one. It involves the biggest companies, government related or owned, responsible for the biggest, most-publicised projects.

For months the authorities have been saying there would be no problem with meeting the commitments, the markets have been led to believe that governments were underwriting the debts. Then an out-0f-the-blue announcement that there was problem. And of course the realisation that the government had never actually said that it would guarantee company debts.

I don't think there's another one to spring on us.

A PR disaster

On Thursday, the morning after Dubai World's bombshell announcement that payment of the Nakheel bond due on December 14 was to be delayed, I said it was "badly, badly handled all round".

An understatement.

It was actually a classic of mishandling. Business schools should use it as a case study of exactly what not to do. Of how to turn bad news into a disaster.

There's inevitably been over-reaction, with bond and stock markets plunging from Europe to Asia to the US to Australia, bank shares hammered, a flight to safe havens, damning stories all around the world.

"Nervous traders, trying to understand what it meant, caused havoc across global markets. Shares plunged, currencies were battered and billions of pounds were wiped off the value of all companies with Middle East connections. British banks, considered to be among the most exposed to Dubai, were at the centre of this new maelstrom and collectively shed £14bn in value on Thursday alone."
Daily Telegraph

An overreaction of course but panic is the natural reaction of markets to bad news. After a short period it settles down as people think rather than just act but blind panic is always the first response.

To put it in perspective the amounts involved (about $60billion) are tiny in relation to what's been going on in the world. Companies like Lehman Bros ($613billion liabilities), banks by the dozen, countries like Iceland were leveraged multiple times more than DW, making Dubai World's debts almost petty cash.

But Dubai's reputation is taking a battering because of the way the thing was handled.

Statements in the months leading up to the maturing of Nakheel's bond were that the finances were all in order, then came the terse announcement on Wednesday that payment due on December 14 would be deferred at least six months. The timing of the announcement minutes before the ten day holiday added immeasurably to the problem, causing the doubts and panic, increasing the fallout. An obvious attempt to dodge the hard questions that were bound to be asked.

The problem isn't only the admission that the commitments couldn't be met - there's still belief that Abu Dhabi will come to the rescue. The way it's been handled leads people to believe that Dubai's much-vaunted business acumen is a myth. If they can't even handle something like this competently...

I've been glancing through some of my regular reads and I'm finding:

"Released after the markets shut, ahead of the 10-day Eid holiday and the Thanksgiving break in America, the notice was designed to have minimum impact. It wasn't the Dubai government's first miscalculation.amateurish...botched messaging...episode of incompetence...the biggest debt-market cock-up...this week's events have damaged its reputation for economic competence"

The Nakheel bond has been the subject of much speculation for a year at least. It was the big test of Dubai's ability to service its debt, of Dubai's ability to run businesses effectively. In a wider sense it was also taken a representative of Islamic bonds in general.

Past months have seen senior government figures reassuring the markets. Dubai could and would meet its commitments they said.

Even earlier in the day of the announcement statements were released about Dubai raising another $5 billion from Abu Dhabi banks.

So everything was under control.

What happened?

They decided to make the announcement of what is being seen as a default at close of business.

At close of business on the eve of a ten day holiday.

Drop a bombshell as you leave for holiday.

"Dubai’s authorities have acted badly....This week’s revelations were not only unexpected; they were also delivered just as the Gulf states shut up shop for an extended holiday. This is the action of a company that seems to think that it can operate in a globalised marketplace only when it suits its purposes."
The Times

I seems it's not only investors and traders who were caught by surprise. More than one report suggests that even Abu Dhabi wasn't aware that the announcement was going to be made.

"Thursday's market turmoil appeared to take federal officials in the capital Abu Dhabi by surprise. One person familiar with their thinking said there was dismay over the reaction to the handling of the announcement."
Wall Street Journal

There are also reports that 'frantic phone calls' to government officials and business leaders were unanswered.

Naturally. Everyone's on holiday. Try again about December 6. No problem, that's not even two weeks away and everything's under control anyway.

It was carefully planned, according to the statement issued late on Thursday.

I like the column by Alistair Osborne in the Daily Telegraph on the subject:

"Why we must consider Dubai's 'careful planning' a work of pure genius

Let's be generous here. Maybe Dubai was just trying to set another record.

It's already given us the biggest building, biggest indoor ski slope, biggest shopping mall and biggest theme park. Surely, it was only a matter of time before it went for another biggie: the biggest debt-market cock-up.

The Wall Street journal says:

"For Dubai to now claim it had anticipated the market reaction to its "sensible business decision" is preposterous. Dubai stands accused of irresponsibility, incompetence and bad faith. Few will trust now anything it says."

So, a PR disaster of the highest magnitude. Unbelievably badly handled. I can't imagine what they were thinking, it shows a complete unawareness of the real business world.

It's astonishing from a city that owes its very existence to commerce. A city that's been a successful trading, commercial centre from its beginnings. Where business is the culture.

It really should, and probably will, be required study at business schools.

But it won't be the end of Dubai, in spite of what some commentators will now be saying. We've already seen some of that, plus highly critical pieces using the announcement as an excuse to come back into print, such as the latest Johann Hari piece in The Independent.

The sky won't fall in. The desert won't reclaim the city. It won't be a ghost town.

Think of it terms we've grown accustomed to over the past year. Think of it as toxic debt. It's separate from the real economy. It's like the financial markets and the real economy, they're very different from each other.

This is about the ability of one company in particular, and associated companies, to repay its loans.

Dubai has two sectors, the most important is the real economy where tens of thousands of generally SMEs are still trading, still doing profitable business. Dubai Chamber of Commerce has over 100,000 members for example, and Jebel Ali Free Zone alone has over 6,000 companies registered there.

Other large government-related companies such as Emirates Airline, Dubal, Ducab, Dubai International Airport, Dubai Duty Free are all producing excellent profits.

And of course the old established merchant family conglomerates are still going strong - Al Ghurair, Al Futtaim, Al Majid, Al Habtoor, Galadari and the others.

So business goes on much as usual in the real world. It's always been there, trundling along quietly and profitably out of the news. Dubai's history since the early eighteen-hundreds has been about being commercially successful and going on into the future that will continue.

The other sector is the fantasy world of unsustainable development. But that was a blip in the grand scheme of things for the last five or six years, for other parts of the world too, not just for Dubai - although Dubai's was more outrageous, more unsustainable than probably anywhere. That's what's dead, the fantasy world, the parallel universe, to which Nakheel was the worst contributor.

I said earlier that Dubai's culture was business, which is what I've long argued with people who've said there's no culture. People are here to work, to do business, and always have been. It's the focus of just about everyone here and it's the reason for the city's existence.

But another part of the culture is 'I must have it now' and that's been a large part of the problem. Wanting to build a city the size of Singapore in a decade.

What's actually been achieved is amazing but Nakheel in particular went far too far in too many grandiose developments at the same time. Reality went out of the window and they were off in the land of the fairies. Reality always reappears as it has now.

It's a pity the old established merchant families weren't in charge. In fact it seems with the recent sackings and sideways transfers of some big-name rising stars that the old guard is being brought in to get things back onto a more sensible level.

A huge PR disaster, damage to Dubai's reputation, damage that will take some time to repair, and a setback for Dubai's growth. But not its collapse.


You can read some of the international press I've quoted from here:

The Times.
Daily Telegraph.
Wall Street Journal.

A complex society

There was an interesting report in Gulf News the other day about labourers' salaries that gives some insights into life here.

I keep on about putting things in context, particularly with complaints from the media outside the area and expats using their own culture and societies as a basis for what they think should happen.

In particular I've talked many times about the unique guest worker society we live in, where expats can't become citizens, where eighty percent of the population are here temporarily. It's very very different from the societies we come from.

I've heard many expats complain, for example, that education isn't free, nor is medical treatment, that there's no social security, that we have to pay for everything.

In reality of course those things do exist - for citizens. As temporary guest workers who pay no income tax it makes sense to me that we should have to pay our own way.

People have complained endlessly about 'hidden charges' when they buy property, such as the Community Fees. But we don't pay what are called council rates back home, a charge from the municipality for things such as street cleaning and garbage collection. The Community Fee is simply that.

But I digress - back to the report.

In an attempt to stop the problem of companies not paying wages on time, or making illegal deductions, the government made it mandatory for salaries to be paid through banks.

They're trying to find a way to get on top of a problem, a problem for which Dubai has been criticised, unfairly I should add because it's private companies which are responsible for creating the problem. Nevertheless, the government has introduced regulations to try to stop the practice - but then you start to look at some of the difficulties involved.

Here's part of the report:

Every payday, workers line up at a solitary Automated Teller Machine (ATM) at the former Jebel Ali Village.

One man at the head of the queue proceeds to ask for their personal identification number (PIN) and the amount they wish to withdraw.

The workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cannot speak, read or write in English. As such, they cannot read the instructions on the machine after they insert their bank card into the ATM.

The man at the head of the queue - the literate one - charges a nominal sum (usually a few fils) to aid the workers by withdrawing money for them.

Many of the workers apparently do not know that it is not safe to provide your PIN to anybody.

The problem of illiteracy or the language barrier crops up many times in all sots of areas.

Safety is another example - if the workers can't read the signs they don't know what they're supposed to do or not do.

In a society with a reported 180 nationalities, language is always going to create huge difficulties.

Then there's the problem of the lack of bank branches and ATMs. We all face those problems but it's worse for the labourers, who don't have transport.

"I have to walk quite a distance to get my money," said Kumar, a pipe-fitter working with a Jebel Ali company.

He said there were a few banks in the area of New Dubai where many construction projects are currently underway.

That's going to be even worse for them now that the temperature is up in the mid-forties celcius and humidity is rising.

Then there's the cost.

"I heard from my friends that if you withdraw from another bank you are charged Dh2."

While all banks are linked through a central system, one is charged for using ATM with other banks.

What we think of as tiny amounts involved are actually significant to the lowly paid.

I realised that early on when the security guard in my building asked if he could have my morning newspaper when I've finished with it. To buy one for a couple of dirhams a day means Dh60 a month, which is about ten percent of his monthly wage.

Can you imagine spending that amount just to buy a morning paper?

I have a feeling this is one of the world's most complex societies to try to administer and one that it's very difficult to get our heads around.


Here's the Gulf News story.

Population ups & downs

We have plenty of conflicting reports about Dubai's population, varying wildly from large decreases to large increases over the next year.

They're all guesswork of course, crystal ball gazing, so I view them all with some scepticism.

The DNRD have said that many more new visa are being issued than existing ones cancelled. But as I said in a March posting the 'journalists' failed to clarify the figures so we don't really know what they mean.

We've had projections of population reductions from UBS (down 8%) and EFG-Hermes (down 17%) while the Ministry of Economy says Dubai's population will grow by 7.8% this year.

The EFG-Hermes predictions also include something that many people are saying - a mass exodus in July: "...a number of people who lost jobs in the beginning of the year are staying on to allow their children to complete the school year, and will leave once the term ends."

I take that with a pinch of salt - if they lost their jobs at the beginning of the year how are they staying until July, given the visa rules?

My gut feeling is that the population will stay about the same in number but with a noticeable change in its makeup.

I don't suppose my experience is much different from most others. Friends and aquaintances have been moving on for a variety of reasons - they've been here long enough and it's simply time to move on, or the contract's ended and they move on to another one somewhere else, or they lost their job in the panic redundancies companies have been making. But there are new arrivals too, some replacing people who've left while others are coming into new positions.

There's also the huge new retail job market. For example, WAM reports that the Dubai Mall is now the region's single largest new employment generator, creating 10,000 jobs this year. There's also the new Dubai Marina Mall, and the extensions to Ibn Battuta and Mall of the Emirates. Plenty of additional hotels too.

So while jobs are being lost in areas such as financial services, real estate and construction, many more jobs are being created elsewhere.

So the big, bulk change in makeup I see is that construction workers, who are mainly Indian, are leaving while retail and hospitality workers, who are mainly Filipino, are arriving.

There's been a huge and noticeable change in the number of Filipinos here already and I think that's going to accelerate in the coming year.

For the rest of us I don't think there'll be much in the way of a noticeable change, perhaps a few less Europeans and Arab expats overall.



WAM retail report.

Down 17% prediction.

Down 8% prediction.

Up 7.8% prediction.




LATE ADDITION. MARCH 2010

I'm still receiving visitors to this post from Isaac's post a year ago on Submedia. You may have arrived here from the link he gave.

In it he said I and other Dubai-based bloggers: "along with the government-monitored-if-not-owned newspapers are the only ones defending the city as the whole world cackles at a dirty dream that has been exposed for what it really was.

A response to that was required, and so were corrections to the untrue claims & statements and misinformation in his post. You've read what Isaac had to say, now you can read the real facts here.

So how bad is it?

The Times revealed yesterday that many expatriates are abandoning their cars outside Dubai's international airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans. Police have found more than 3,000 cars, mainly Mercedes and large 4x4s, at the airport in recent months.

When the market collapsed and the emirate’s once-booming economy started to slow down, many expatriates were left owning several homes and unable to pay the mortgages without credit.

"...the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Dubai is emptying out,” said a Western diplomat.


That's the thrust of many of the recent stories in the international media. And of course at dinner parties, with people competing to pass on the worst doom & gloom rumours.

I do think we need to get some balance into the picture.

Over the last month we've visited friends & family in Singapore and Australia, and we're in touch with others there and in other countries.

The story is much the same everywhere, worse in some countries than others. Unemployment is reaching record highs - in the US half a million workers are losing their jobs each month. Australia is doing better than most countries, but unemployment is reaching the worst in two decades.

In Singapore my sister-in-law is working reduced hours, and therefore receiving a reduced salary. In Australia my nephew, an electrician, is struggling to find work.

In countries which have expat labour a lot of them are leaving to go home, either because they've lost their job or by choice. Eastern Europeans are leaving the UK, Asian workers are leaving Singapore.

Surely no-one could have thought that Dubai would be any different. Of course people are losing their jobs, of course expats are leaving to go home. But that's very different from the economy collapsing, the city emptying out as all the expats flee.

In the UAE it's reported that US$582 billion of construction projects are on hold - but another US$698 are proceeding. That's a huge amount of construction work under way by any country's standards.

We know more than a few people who've lost their jobs, many of them unable to find another so they've left or are planning to. But give it a moment's thought and we know very many more who have not lost their jobs.

The roads are a bit quieter and probably a small contribution to that comes from there being less people about. But there's still an awful lot of traffic on the roads.

Tourist figures are down, but tourists are still coming. Retail spending is down, but the shops are still doing business.

So while there are people being fired, while there may be fewer cars on the roads, while spending may be down there are still plenty of people working, plenty of cars being driven, plenty of money changing hands.

It's a slowdown for sure, but not to the degree many of the reports would like us to believe.

Something that's particularly apparent to me is that if you've lost your job there's a recession. But if you're one of the eighty or ninety percent still working, there isn't.

In Singapore, in Sydney, in Aussie country towns, in Dubai along The Walk at JBR and at many of our five-star hotels, the restaurants are full. At weekends you struggle to get a table.

Reports from all over are that people are spending less, saving more - just in case. Rainy day money. That makes sense. But they haven't stopped spending entirely. Business is still being done. A lot of business.

Some balanced reporting would be nice. And even better would be some accurate figures, clearly explained and put in context.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Deja vu

Can anyone explain to me how a problem can be fixed by repeating what caused it in the first place?

That's what's happening to fix the meltdown in the world's economy and I can't find any sense in it.

The root cause of the problem was ludicrously low interest rates.

The problems we're now facing stemmed from those rates. The access to easy money they presented was the catalyst.

The relaxation of regulation and oversight added to the problem because it allowed human nature, such as personal greed, free reign.

People are blaming the banks and greed for the crash, but they came later. Without the low interest rates none of it would have happened.

As a result of rates as low as zero (Japan) and several other major economies at one and two percent the world was awash with cheap, easy money. Billions of dollars were being poured into the stock markets and as a result listed companies were valued at up to a hundred times earnings. They were never worth that much and it was unsustainable, but fund managers didn't know where else to put their weekly flood of money - the Australian superannuation funds are a good example.

Because money was so cheap and therefore easy to get, retailers of larger ticket items were advertising 'no deposit, no interest, no payments for twelve months' deals.

People could get money easily and looked for things to spend it on. That demand meant that under the rules of supply and demand house prices were pushed to unsustainable levels.

Living on credit, living beyond your means, can only last a limited time. At some stage the bills have to be paid.

The day of reckoning came and suddenly no-one had money, demand for products plummeted...and the old rules of supply and demand came back into play. But this time they drove prices down.

Property, such an important underpinning solid asset of many countries' economies, plunged in price. People, financial institutions, companies now had negative equity - their debts were larger than the assets guaranteeing them.

Companies earlier valued at many times their earnings now find themselves in some cases valued at less than the cash they have in the bank.

Crash.

So to fix the crisis our leaders have come up with answer. Put the rates back to the levels which caused the problem in the first place.

I believe they're doing it because they simply don't know what else to do. We need a new financial model but no-one's come up with one.

Interest rates need to be in a neutral range, between six and seven percent in my opinion.

That gives a reasonable return on investment for everyone, individuals and companies. It means that people such as the rapidly growing number of self-funded retirees can live on their investments. They don't need to ask for pensions or social security payments from government.

It means that people who are credit risks are less likely to be given loans, including for mortgages which are beyond their real means.

I know there are furious arguments about what the right action to take is. As far as I'm concerned reducing interest rates back towards zero is the very worst action.

Changing times

A sign of the times. Dubai, the UAE in general, isn't isolated from the economic problems of the world.

I'm sure we won't be hit as badly as many other countries. In fact to me the world seems to be dividing into two...countries such as the US, UK, the Euro zone into deep recession while others such as China, India, UAE, even perhaps Australia, will see a slowdown but their economies will still grow.

I'm sure the recession hit areas will have a long deep recession and the massive government borrowing to fund their injections of capital will take a long long time to pay off. They'll be affected for many years to come, in fact may never be the same again.

It makes you wonder why in the decades - hundreds of years in many cases - they were the world's economic powerhouses they didn't create sovereign wealth funds.

Only a few months ago they were ranting about SWFs, how they were A Bad Thing, how they had to be controlled, dangerous foreigners buying up their assets. Now they're pleading for handouts from them, and I bet they're wishing they had their own to call on.

What an astonishing lack of good business and good government over the decades. All that wealth generated, from the Industrial Revolution to the European empires plundering wealth from so many colonies and on into the post colonial era when they were still the big economic powers, and they didn't save a cent. Didn't think to establish a Sovereign Wealth Fund.

I find it quite amazing that governments such as the US and UK actually don't have any money. They don't have the trillions of dollars they're throwing into their economies, they're having to borrow it. To be repaid by future taxpayers of course.

We're very much part of the global economy so naturally we're being affected here. Money's tight, jobs are disappearing, projects are being delayed and I'm sure some will be cancelled. The talk is all about real estate jobs and projects but it's much wider than that. Jobs will disappear in all kinds of businesses because a recession affects the entire economy across the board. In fact I'm hearing about job losses in all kinds of companies already.

There's always a ripple effect from any action and economic problems are no different. People in Europe are losing their jobs, they buy less goods so manufacturing is hit in China. They travel less so airlines, hotels and tour operators in the UAE are hit. Hotels have less guests which means they buy less food, have less laundry to be done, and that hits small local businesses.

But if you think it's bad here just check out the situation 'back home' and you'll realise we're actually not too badly off.

In fact as I said in a recent post, I think it's a blessing in disguise for Dubai. A slowdown, a chance to stop and think, a chance to plan properly, a chance for infrastructure and laws to catch up with what's already happened.

It's also an opportunity to get back to sensible buiness practices. And that applies not only to Dubai but to the world in general.

People here are complaining that banks have introduced new lending criteria, such as a minimum salary of Dh20,000 a month and giving mortgages of only 50% or 60% of the purchase price. In fact that's good, sensible business. We wouldn't be in the mess we're now in had basic good business rules been followed over the last fifteen or twenty years.

Remember the dot.com bubble burst? It was inevitable. We were putting a share portfiolio together then and we wouldn't touch dot.com companies with a bargepole. The supersmart new kids on the block were ridiculing the 'old world' saying this was a whole new world we didn't understand, the old rules simply didn't apply.

They did. They always do and they always will.

Stupid people believed the hype, poured billions into companies with no assets, no turnover, no profit. The companies spent a lot of the money running multi-million dollar advertising campaigns which said nothing whatsoever. I kept looking at them and asking what they were selling. The answer was of course nohing, because they had nothing to sell. The rest of the investors' money they used to buy other dot.com companies which also had no assets, no turnover, no profit.

One day it all just disappeared. The great dot.com bubble burst because the basic rules of business were ignored.


More than a few of us were predicting the implosion of the world financial system five or six years ago. It was unsustainable and was obviously so. We were in a spiral of ever increasing debt, personal and government, that one day would have to be paid. In Australia we had motor dealers offering new cars at no deposit, no interest and nothing to pay for two years. White goods retailers had similar offers.

Money was being thrown at people by the banks, with very little checking on the creditworthiness of the borrowers. Salesmen on commission for granting loans or giving out credit cards were earning fortunes.

The government of John Howard was buying votes by giving regular handouts from the budget surplus to voters, instead of investing in much-needed infrastructure - or even setting up a Sovereign Wealth Fund.

The trouble was that no-one was thinking about the day when the bills would have to be paid.

So this crisis is also hopefully the end of unfettered capitalism of the style of the American right, with no government regulation or oversight and total reliance on self-regulation.

It's as extreme as communism and can only end in the same way.

Neither extreme takes into account human nature, so neither can work in the long term.

It started as far as I'm concerned with Thatchernomics and Reaganomics. Give the markets complete freedom, remove oversight, sell off essential services such as water and power generation to private enterprise. Trust 'the markets', which means people, to do the right thing.

Astonishing naivete. People do not do the right thing. People don't think ahead. People do what is good for them in the short term.

Alan Greenspan, who is as responsible as anyone for the disaster we now have, admitted at a Senate hearing that he hadn't taken human nature into account when he formulated his disastrous policies.

He believed that people in the financial markets, in business, would do the right thing, the honest thing. They'd think about the long term viability of their companies, run things in a professional businesslike way.

What they actually did was think only of their own immediate future. That was entirely predictable because it's what people do. They gave no thought to the long-term health of their companies but simply created short term profits and share price increases - often by creating worthless 'assets' - so that they could pay themselves vast bonuses. Wall Street bonuses amounted to, literally, billions of dollars a year, and other financial centres such as London, and even Sydney, paid multi-million dollar bonuses.

The thinking is still with us unfortunately. Almost weekly we're getting stories of huge bonuses being paid or having been promised by banks, including those already bailed out with taxpayers' money.

We had the Big 3 car company bosses flying to Washington to plead for money in their private jets. That's another example of bad business - badly managed companies with overpaid greedy workers, overpaid greedy management, producing badly designed products which are poorly made. They had to hit the wall sooner or later.

But the dinosaurs will have to change because surely the world has changed. After two or three decades of reducing regulation, reducing oversight, governments surely cannot afford to continue with the experiment. It's costing trillions of dollars already and who knows how much more is to come. Those trillions are a debt which has to be paid by future generations.

I'm sure that not only do we have to have a completely new model for the world financial system, the power of the players will change too. A report a few weeks ago said that the G7, who set themselves up as the all-important financial arbiters, actually have only 20% of the world's currency reserves. BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, have 40%. The Middle East can no longer be ignored either.

So there's another change coming, surely. The west is asking countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE to put more money from their SWFs into organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. But they were set up by and run for the benefit of the western countries. Surely no-one expects developing countries to simply hand over money without being offered a say in how it's used, without being offered a seat at the table.

BRIC and ME countries will be expecting involvement in all the world organisations I'm sure. Not only the financial institutions but the UN Security Council will be on the agenda, and long overdue in my opinion.

So we're living in momentous times. There will have to be huge changes to the way our world works and to the relative influence of the players.

And it was caused by the excesses of the last twenty or thirty years. The USSR tried extreme left wing politics and that collapsed. The west has tried extreme right wing capitalism and that's collapsed.

In just about anything I can think of the middle road is the one that works. A mixture of freedom and regulation. We accept it as necessary in many aspects of our daily life and areas such as business or the financial markets also need it.

We have, because we need them, road rules, speed limits, consumer protection laws, criminal laws. We need them because of human nature. Remove regulation and oversight and you have anarchy.

Ignore human nature and you create a disaster. We did and we have.

Height of luxury.

“The United Arab Emirates is the most luxurious place for an expat to live”

HSBC Survey of expats.

This morning I came across another expat revelling in the luxury...

Another glimpse of Dubai life

A follow up to my Better off in Dubai post last Thursday.

The coffee shop I use for my regular morning caffeine hit is in a commercial area so it was closed for four days over the Eid holiday.

The barista told me that they were nevertheless only being given two days off, the other two days they would have to work in another branch.

This morning I asked whether he'd had a good holiday.

"No holiday"

I asked why not.

The owner had changed his mind, decided they shouldn't have a break at all so they had to work at the other branch throughout Eid.

"Did he pay you extra?" I asked.

"No extra."

In an earlier conversation with him he was complaining that he hadn't had a salary increase in the two years he's worked for the company. And a colleague hadn't had one in four years.

His salary? Dh2,000 a month.

I asked him why he didn't go home.

In The Philippines, he said, he would also earn 2,000 a month - but not dirhams, pesos. That's a fraction of his salary here, it's about Dh155 (£24 or US$42 or €30).

So in spite of the salary, in spite of the way he's treated, he's better off here.



I have no reason to disbelieve his figures by the way, there are plenty of reports available. For example, USAID says that the average annual income per person in The Philippines is US$1,170 and that over 40% of the 90 million population live (live?) on $2 a day or less.

USAID.

Better off in Dubai

We talk very often about the sub-standard accommodation which the lower paid, labourers in particular, endure in Dubai.

There's no doubt that too many are not housed appropriately, but while I in no way condone people being treated in any way other than decently I believe that it's important to always put things in context. People from different parts of the world have a different view, different culture, different standards, different expectations from each other.

(I'm struggling with this a bit, I need to be very careful with the words so that what I'm trying to say is not misunderstood).

I couldn't live with ten or more people in a small room. I couldn't live in a broom cupboard. I couldn't leave my wife behind and see her only for a few weeks every two years. But I'm from a prosperous western society and inevitably I look at things from that background.

But as I posted here back in January, people do and can live in a way that I and most, if not all, westerners wouldn't accept.

In the conversations I posted about then I asked 'why stay here under those conditions, why not go home'?

The answers were 'it's better in Dubai'.

Mrs Seabee has just come back from a business trip to India, the camera chip full. A lot of the photographs are of the modern buildings, the five-star hotels, the smart offices reflecting the booming economy.

But she also took a lot of street scenes, which help to explain the 'it's better in Dubai' answers.

The shots were taken from the car as she was being driven through Mumbai and New Delhi.

Thousands of people living on the streets, under bridges, in doorways, in drainage pipes. And in hovels cobbled together from cardboard boxes, bits of corrugated iron, plastic bags. Surrounded by garbage.

She asked her driver about the people who lived like this and he told her that a lot of them were construction workers.

Here's a handful of the shots showing accommodation in which people in Mumbai and New Delhi are living. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them, to better see the awful reality:










They help to give the view from a different perspective, to make some kind of sense of why people are prepared to live here in a way that I couldn't. Living in a broom cupboard in Dubai is actually better than back home.

Thirty days to move...to where?

There are reports that Dubai Municipality has started the clock ticking on its one-month deadline for landlords of shared villas to evict the tenants, or, presumably, evict all but one family. It's part of DM's ‘One Villa-One Family’ campaign.

It seems to me that it's another knee-jerk reaction. Another simplistic blanket ruling to a highly complex problem.

First of all, there's a obvious safety implication of overcrowding.

Rooms divided by flimsy partitions, tens, even hundreds, of people crammed into inadequate space, means of escape compromised. And the sanitary and health problems of so many people living in such close proximity sharing limited bathroom and cooking facilities.

Obviously action must be taken to remove this problem.

But not all shared villas are overcrowded. Some are comfortably shared by singles or families, each having sufficient space and facilities and living in harmony.

There is a big difference between sharing and overcrowding.

You also have to factor in the accommodation that people are prepared to live in - I talked about a couple of examples back in January, here.

Then there's the economic factor. People have to share accommodation because they simply can't afford anything on their own. That takes us into the whole business area of salaries. Not only whether companies are prepared to but whether they can afford to increase salaries in line with accommodation and general inflation increases.

Do we need regulations on the number of people moving into Dubai until adequate accommodation is available? Not to mention the rest of the infrastructure, including hospitals, police, fire brigade, ambulances, roads & transport, power, sewage treatment, water...

About 800 people a day are moving here. Even deducting those who leave it's still a huge, relentless population increase that seems to be unsustainable.

Then the much-discussed question of the whole real estate sector being focussed on high end, luxury, expensive developments with little or no affordable accommodation being built.

That needs government involvement because land and construction prices are going through the roof and developers naturally want to maximise their return on investment.

And the big human question - how on earth are all the evicted people going to find alternative accommodation in one month? Where are they going to live if they can't find anything?

Most of the comments seem to be that they're desperately looking in the northern emirates. But there's a shortage of accommodation there too, and the additional people trying to move in will inevitably push rents up.

And if many of them do find accommodation there, it will add to the chaos on the roads into Dubai in the mornings and out in the evenings.

It's a vicious circle isn't it.

And last but not least, what about the year-in-advance rent that tenants have paid? Is there a guarantee that they will be repaid, or have their post-dated cheques returned?

Major cities around the world are struggling to find an answer to the problem of accommodation being beyond the reach of essential but lower paid workers, who are moving to cheaper areas. That includes essential workers such as cleaners, bus drivers, even nurses, firefighters and so on.

As with so many other areas, Dubai could and should have learnt the lessons of other cities around the world and planned to avoid the problems. It could have been done, we had the ideal opportunity because Dubai is being built from scratch, from empty desert.



Khaleej Times is running the announcement today, here.

"UAE tops in providing luxury to expatriates."

That won't ring true to Dubai's boys in blue, the thousands of labourers building the city - and the cleaners, retail assistants, drivers, gardeners, teachers, nurses, office juniors and all the others who keep it going.

But, mainly because the UAE gets a high ranking, HSBC's survey of expats has been given a lot of media coverage.

In what's claimed to be the world's largest expat survey, they had response from 2,155 expatriates across four continents about the opportunities and challenges that come with a life away from home.

What I can't find is who the respondents were.

Pretty obviously though, the results are referring to western, management-level expats and as we know in Dubai that's a tiny sample of the global expatriate population.

According to the results, while half of expats spend more on food, shopping and socialising in their new country of residence they also save and invest more than they did in their country of origin.

While I was reading the reports an e-mail arrived from a friend about the effect of Dubai's inflation at street level. It also shows how unrepresentative the much-publicised survey is of most expatriates.

Ten years ago my friend started using an automatic car wash, where 5 guys dry and vacuum your car afterwards. In 1998 it cost Dhs 15, in 2001 it went up to Dhs 20 where it stayed until 2006 when it went to Dhs 25. Because of Dubai's rents my friends moved to Umm Al Quwain and hadn't used the carwash for a while. Yesterday they did and the price is Dhs 35.

I'll just quote the e-mail:

I commented to Suresh (one of the cleaners that has been there since 1998 at least) about the high price.

He tells me "Yes, madam. Everything too much expensive now. After Diwali this year I will return home to my family. There in India I can work as a driving instructor and earn a better salary than I earn here (at the car wash he earns a basic salary of Dh950, with approx. Dh200 in tips every month) and I only work 8 hours (and not 12 hours like in Dubai) and my family is there.

I need to make savings for my children's education and I cannot do that here in Dubai. Now with the new visa laws, it will also be very difficult to bring them here, even if I stay and get a better job."

She related this to a colleague. He had a similar story.

From when he arrived in Dubai three years ago, cleaning and ironing a shirt cost Dhs 7. When he picked-up his shirts yesterday he was told that they now cost Dhs 11. The friendly attendant who knows him well apologized and said that next month they'll be Dh13, and not surprisingly "customers are leaving us now".

He went on:

"For me also, there is no more reason to stay in Dubai. I am going home to Bangladesh, there I will work in a call centre, I earn the same salary as here (Dh1,400 a month) but I only work 8 hours a day (and not 10 to 12 hours at the dry cleaners). There, I can live with my family and make many savings."

And my friend makes an interesting point:

Everyone talks about the "Brain Drain" in the GCC… of highly educated Arabs seeking employment in the West. What about the "Muscle Drain", i.e. all the service staff like waiters, delivery drivers, store attendants, etc. etc. etc. who can no longer afford to stay here?

Dubai is far from unique in becoming too expensive for the essential lower-paid people to live in, cities around the world are struggling with the problem. But we need so many more than most cities because of the frantic construction and expansion, so solving the problem is more urgent here.

Back to the survey and a sample of the headlines: "The United Arab Emirates is the most luxurious place for an expat to live" and "UAE tops in providing luxury to expatriates" and "High salaries pull in expats".

Unless you're a highly paid western managerial expat, you might want to treat them with some scepticism.

Expats enjoying Dubai's luxurious lifestyle...

Gulf News report is here.

The survey is here.

Food for thought

A couple of conversations recently.

One was with my Filipino barber - or 'hairdresser' as they prefer to be called these days. It was the end of the year and I asked whether his family was here and what he would be doing to celebrate.

He told me his family was back in the Philippines and he sees them once every two years. There would be parties with friends in the accommodation. Three hundred people live in the villa he said. When I looked surprised he said it was "a very big villa, we're only eight or ten in each room. Each room will do a party & we'll visit each other."

Sees his family once every two years, shares a room with nine others.

"Why don't you go back to the Philippines?" I asked.

"Here is better." he said.

The other conversation was with one of the full-time cleaners in our apartment block. He told me he was going to see his family in India, the first time in three years.

He lives in a cuboard.

It's actually called the 'Utility Room', where they keep the brooms and other cleaning materials. He has a thin mattress on the tile floor in there.

Same question from me: "Why don't you go back to India?

Same answer: "Dubai is better.

Neither earns what I consider acceptable money, neither see their family as often as I think is acceptable, neither has what I consider acceptable accommodation.

What do I know.

More pointless murders

Reuters

On reflection I suppose it really wasn't a surprise that Benazir Bhutto was murdered. In fact she talked of the danger herself several times recently.

Plus the 'collateral damage' of others killed and injured as a result of the attack on her. And make no mistake, there will be even more deaths in the coming days and weeks as a result of this.

What an appalling comment on where we are as human beings. Tens of thousands of years of evolution and we're mentally still in the Stone Age, brainless, the worst animals on the planet.

Pakistan, India, the USA - it doesn't make any difference which part of the world we're talking about. Find someone you disagree with, you don't like, or even a complete stranger who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - and kill them.

And then, these days as so many do, kill yourself as well.

I'm speechless.

Abuse of terrorism legislation.

Bear with me, this is long and complicated but important.

There's been much comment and criticism of various countries' terrorism legislation, in particular I'm aware of the US, the UK and Australia. I have been and continue to be a critic.

The criticism centres around the erosion of rights, the removal of checks and balances that have been hard won over centuries of struggles to advance human rights, to have a (reasonably) fair system of justice. Lady Justice's double-edged sword, scales and blindfold.

Those in favour of the laws typically deride critics as left-wing bleeding heart liberals, as traitors, as terrorist sympathisers.

The concern of critics is that the very foundation of our justice systems is being eroded. The very real fear is that government and government agencies will misuse or abuse the powers.

There's a case going on in Australia at the moment that proves we are right to be concerned.

Mohammed Haneef is an Indian doctor working in Australia, one of a group of doctors detained by police in connection with the recent failed bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. He was arrested at the airport in Brisbane, capital of the state of Queensland.

Dr Haneef was arrested on July 2 as he 'was trying to leave Australia'. Sounds sinister doesn't it, those words used in the reports. "Trying to leave Australia" with its suggestions of fleeing. His wife in Bangalore had just given birth to their baby who was very ill - the report could have equally well have said "as he was on his way to visit his wife and new-born daughter".

I've talked about the power of words before. The deliberate choice between using benign or sinister phrases depending entirely on how the subject is going to be depicted. In this case, early in the saga, the media decided that Dr Haneef should be presented in a bad light. Not for the first time, that changed as what was really going on became more apparent.

Dr Haneef was held without charge for eleven days, the police applied to extend his detention, then decided to withdraw the application. Australian anti-terrorism laws allow 24 hours of questioning of a suspect. After eleven days in detention Dr Haneef had only been questioned for twelve hours.

That's a major concern with the laws on both counts. One, the length of time someone can be held without charge. Two, that the time allowed for questioning can be spread so thinly over so many days.

Now we get to July 14. After twelve days in custody without charge Dr Haneef is charged with 'reckless support to a terrorist organisation'.

When Dr Haneef left Britain in 2006 - repeat, in 2006 - to work in Australia he left his SIM card with his second cousin Sabeel Ahmad.

It was alleged by prosecutors that the SIM card had been found in the Jeep rammed into Glasgow airport. They said that Ahmad had passed it to his brother who was alleged to be the driver of the Jeep. In fact it never had been, it was still with Ahmed hundreds of kilometres away in Liverpool where they arrested him - he has not been charged with terrorism but with 'withholding information'.

As the ABC commented: "It seems the facts were not as they were presented in court."

Stuff-up or something more sinister?

(When we visited Cairo recently, Mrs Seabee asked her company's agent there to buy me a SIM card so that we would have communication when we were out & about at different places. He'd never met me, but he handed over the card unquestioningly).

Now onto July 16, charged and finally in a court of law. The magistrate ordered Dr Haneef be released on A$10,000 (Dh32,000) bail, saying he had no known links to a terrorist organisation and that police were not alleging his SIM card had been used in the British terror plot.

Now we get the government doing just what all we bleeding heart liberal lefty terrorist sypathisers had been warning would happen. The government decided the law wasn't doing what it wanted it to do, so it over-rode the magistrate's decision.

Within hours of the court's ruling Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said he had cancelled Dr Haneef's visa and ordered him placed in Sydney's infamous Villawood immigration detention centre.

Just look at this: "I reasonably suspect he has or has had an association with persons engaged in criminal activity, criminal conduct, namely terrorism in the UK," Andrews said at a news conference. He said Dr Haneef had failed a "character test" and had used his powers under migration law to cancel his visa."

So much for fair justice for all. A magistrate in a court of law grants bail, based on all the facts before him. The government decides that isn't acceptable and throws the man straight into another jail.

Then the obviously deliberate attempt to blacken Dr Haneef's image further. Rumours were spread, picked up by tabloids, that he had been plotting to blow up a high rise tower on the Gold Coast south of Brisbane. The evidence? They'd found at his home what hundreds, maybe thousands of people have - a photo of the world's tallest occupied residential building, on the Gold Coast. A spokeswoman for the Federal Police said "We will not confirm or deny the allegations."

To the ill-informed, to the far right, to the bigots, that's as good as saying he's guilty. Just as his detention in Villawood had done.

(I have plenty of photos of the world's newest tallest building, Burj Dubai, at home).

It was then alleged that police had written the names of overseas terror suspects in Dr Haneef's personal diary. Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty was forced to deny those reports and also deny that Dr Haneef was being investigated for plotting to bomb the Gold Coast skyscraper.

By July 23 the press was reporting that the charges were about to be dropped. But that the government would deport Dr Haneef.

Innocent, but sentenced as guilty.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's description of the false evidence, blunders, rumours as making the Federal Police"look like the Keystone Cops" seemed pretty accurate to me, although it's far more serious than the link to slapstick comedy suggests.

And so to the last couple of days. Now that the true facts are being published, in many parts of the world, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has announced a review of all material relating to the case. Reports from legal sources in the UK and Australia say that Dr Haneef has not been a significant focus of the British investigation into the terrorist plots and they say that his name has barely been mentioned to his second cousin during questioning.

It's all looking like panic actions, the misuse of the laws, the government overriding the law, as well as lies, false evidence, spiteful rumour spreading. Tragically that all sounds so familiar from our governments and their agencies these days.

Since 9/11 really.

And it's happened over so many issues. The invasion and destruction of Iraq, the illegal spying on Americans by their government, Guantanamo, the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' programme, unnecessarily draconian laws which are open to abuse and misuse in the US, the UK, Australia.

I've had many debates and arguments over these laws and the probable abuse of them. Typical arguments against me have included:

'Our government wouldn't do that', a particularly naive comment.

'They (government) know things that we don't know' - I had that shouted at me when I argued against the invasion of Iraq before it happened. Yeah. What they knew that we didn't was that they'd falsified documents and deliberately lied to us.

'No smoke without fire' - those arrested are obviously guilty or they wouldn't have been detained.

And worst of all the naive belief that only the bad guys are affected by the terrorism laws. That innocent people will not be caught up in the paranoia. The reality is of course that any of us could be caught up in it. Just like the competely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes who was murdered by an out-of-control bunch of gunmen killed by eight gunshots by a team of highly trained anti-terrorist police at Stockwell Tube station in London. A completely innocent man on his way to work.

I'm not suggesting Dr Haneef is either guilty or innocent. But I am saying that he, and everyone, should be dealt with in a way that is consistent with our established values of justice, of fairness. That overly draconian new terrorism laws are open to abuse and that they will be abused.

If we allow our governments to erode and gradually destroy our established values, we're going backwards.