Signage, fish and terrorism

Road signage, whale sharks and terrorism laws don't have anything in common except that they're subjects on my mind today, so this is a bit of a mixed bag of a post.

First the road signage and a detail related to our new address system which I've talked about previously.

Having road names and building numbers is obviously the best address system, as proven around the world for over a hundred years.

But to drag the directional signs on our roads into it is a huge mistake. As I've said before, the directional signs should remain as they are, to suburbs. Like this:



Instead, the RTA is changing the signs to things like this:



Where the hell is that?

It's hard enough trying to find our way around Dubai as it is, with the endless construction, diversions, new roads, moron drivers, without this confusing signage.

We know we want to go to, for example, Umm Suqeim 1 or Al Quoz or Al Barsha. We can't be expected to learn and remember thousands of street names.

I passed the sign to Al Rasaas Rd while driving along Sheikh Zayed Road earlier today. It was pointing to an exit in the direction of Jumeirah/Umm Suqeim...or it could have been to a flyover looping across to somewhere in entirely the opposite direction such as Al Barsha. I have no idea and the sign does nothing but confuse me.

So, feedback to the RTA. The new addressing system is great, but please don't confuse it with directional roadsigns. They are two totally different things.


And then the fishy business going on at Atlantis with the captive whale shark.

Gulf News has a major 'free the whale shark' campaign under way and it's getting an inordinate amount of radio air time. On Thursday the International Herald Tribune ran an Associated Press story about it, which you can read here.


I really don't need to say more about the subject than obviously the animal should be released the moment she's fit enough.

What interests me about it all is the appalling way the hotel has handled its PR over the issue. They've acted in the same way over the other negative stories in the media here and overseas, about rooms not being available, of no water, of running out of beer and wine, of no parking space. The PR strategy seems to be ignore it and it'll go away, which is absolutely the worst possible approach.

Look at this para from the AP story carried in the IHT:

Representatives of Atlantis resort, which is located on a man-made island built in the shape of a palm tree, did not return calls to the AP on Thursday. They also did not respond to AP's request to speak to one of the marine specialists the hotel says monitors the whale shark around the clock.

That kind of non-communication raises all sorts of doubts and questions.

They originally announced that the whale shark was in their aquarium for medical treatment after fishermen had found it in distress. But they fudged around the timing of her release in the one interview I've heard, since when they've gone completely to ground.

Full marks for helping the animal. But refusing to say even that she will be released leads to the suspicion that they intend to keep her as an attraction for the paying public.

That leads naturally to suspicions about the capture by fishermen, particularly as it was just before the hotel's opening. And to whether the announcement of it was nothing more than a sales pitch to let the paying public know she was in their aquarium.

The answer is simple - call a media conference, announce that the animal was in distress, that they're doing all they can to restore it to health and the moment it's recovered sufficiently they will release it. That gives the hotel nothing but good publicity.

Instead they've ignored the many opportunities they've been given. In this day and age I can't believe any company could handle their PR so badly.

There's an old truism. It ain't the problem that's the problem, the way you handle it is the problem.


And so to terrorism laws.

Again this is something I've talked about in the past. The terrorism laws introduced by our governments are open to mis-use and abuse by our own governments and their agencies. And they're doing it.

The latest example is the UK government using their terrorism laws to freeze billions of pounds of Icelandic bank assets held in the UK.

Here's what the Financial Times has to say:

Financial crime lawyers said the government's un-precedented decision to apply the freezing order for purposes other than tackling terrorism opened the way to its use in other cases centred on commercial and political interests.

The Treasury's action on Wednesday to protect the deposits of British account holders has highlighted broader concerns that some security-related laws passed since the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks are so widely drafted they are open to abuse.

I had many a debate when the laws were being introduced in the US, the UK, Australia and I seemed to be a voice in the wilderness. The general opinion was 'we need the laws to catch the terrorists' and 'our government can be trusted'. As I argued at the time, that's naive in the extreme.

I've talked before about the previous Australian government's use of terrorism laws in the case against Dr Haneef, which was thrown out of court. You can read about that here.

Of the UK government's threat to use terrorism laws against climate change protesters, which you can read about here.

Now we see the use of them against institutions of a friendly country, as reported in the Financial Times which you can read here.

I'll simply repeat a few things I said in those previous posts:

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.

...everyone, should be dealt with in a way that is consistent with our established values of justice, of fairness...overly draconian new terrorism laws are open to abuse and they will be abused.

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

Terrorists are laughing - our own governments are doing their work for them. The destruction of our way of life is coming from within.

Sorry, if you stayed with me this far that is, I seem to have rambled on for much longer than I intended.

Now it's almost time to go out for dinner, to a Chinese restaurant we like very much at the top of Beach Road. I should post about that tomorrow because if you enjoy Chinese food you should give it a try.

Property-linked residence visas

The main headline in this morning's Gulf News business section is Ajman freezes freehold visas

It's a subject I've posted about in the past because it's a case of moving the goalposts while the game is being played. I gave my opinion of the policy change in that previous post, so I don't need to repeat it here.

The report says:

Ajman is the second emirate to have made an about turn on the crucial issue after Dubai - after years of assurance of visa sponsorship linked to property ownership.

A source has told Gulf News that Ajman will not only stop issuing new visas, they will also not renew previously issued visas.

The reason for the change in Ajman, as given by 'the source', simply doesn't make sense.

"This step was taken in order to regulate the visa rules. Some used to buy an apartment to obtain a residence visa and then sell the apartment to somebody else who already had a visa"

But the answer to that problem is so simple that I just can't believe this is the reason for the change of policy. There must be another reason.

If the visa is linked to property ownership, the sale of the property should result in the cancellation of the visa.

A blanket ban on all visas is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. And it's very bad business.


Gulf News story is here.

The worst thing you can do is panic!

Gulf News' banner headline across the front page today is

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

It says 'investors suffer another day of bruising body blows to their financial security'

There are quotes from people who've invested in shares in the local market:

"I lost more than Dh400,000"

"I've lost half my investment"

"...put around Dh150,000 of my savings and have now lost more than Dh100,000"

"We went from middle class to poverty...we'll have to resort to begging in the streets"

Half the front page is covered by this.

STOP IT!

This kind of nonsense is adding to the panic.

Only if you panic and sell the shares will you lose any money.

If you have a thousand shares in a company and you don't sell them you still have the thousand shares.

You will still receive any dividend the company pays.

If you've bought shares in a solid company you hang on to them, you collect the dividends and you wait because the share price will rise again over time .

Only if you sell them now will you actually lose a large part of your investment.

So don't sell!

Don't take the loss.

Naturally the same applies in reverse. When the share price is rising you don't actually make a profit until you sell them.

In any situation, in any aspect of our lives, the very worst thing we can do is panic.

Goodbye to Satwa

Over the last four or five years a lot of people have complained that the new developments in Dubai are being created at the expense of the old Dubai. That the older parts of town are being demolished to make way for them.

I've always argued, including in posts on this blog, that this is not accurate. 'New Dubai' is being built on what was desert, nothing of the old city was being demolished to make way for it.

That's not true any more, with the announcement of the new US$95 billion Jumeira Gardens project.

Yes you read it correctly. Ninety five billion dollars.

Billed as a city within a city, the wonderful old suburb of Satwa is being demolished to make way for it.

Apart from the nostalgia for an area I love walking around there's a practical problem and I wonder whether it's being addressed in the master plan. The press release makes me doubt it.

Not only does Satwa provide much needed lower cost accommodation for poorly paid but vital members of our society, it also provides a huge variety of retail outlets where they (and we) can buy things we need at sensible prices. So it provides affordable living for many, many people.

It's a convenient location for people working in either the original city or the new developments and it provides affordable accommodation. But more than that, we can get glass cut or furniture made, shoes and watches repaired, tyres replaced or repaired, typing done. We can buy groceries, plants, fruit & veg, perfumes, fish tanks, shoes and clothing, beads and buttons, fabrics of all kinds. We can buy second hand goods from television sets to mobile phones. And inexpensive food from dozens of cafes and restaurants. At affordable prices without the surcharge for a designer label and without the rental of a shop in a marble mall being factored into the price.

If this accommodation and retail district disappears, what happens to the people we need to keep the city running but who are paid very little?

Where will they live? In the new developments? Where will they shop? In the designer outlets? On salaries of a few thousand a month?

International City was supposedly 'affordable' accommodation. A studio flat there is Dh60,000 a year. Five thousand a month is twice as much as an awful lot of people are being paid.

If they can't afford to live in the city they move away. In other countries they move to smaller towns, in Dubai moving to the northern emirates and commuting in every day is becoming a non-option because of gridlocked traffic and, more importantly, fast-rising rents there too. So the option will be to leave the country.

Cities can't operate without this essential workforce. It includes a whole range of people, including retail workers, security guards, bus drivers, cleaners, police, teachers, nurses, firefighters.

Major cities around the world have been struggling with the same problem for some time.

Does this sound familiar..."Essential workers are being priced out of town, and this having an impact on staffing for vital services such as health, transport, policing and education."

It's from the London Government website.

This is nothing new, other cities have already faced the problem and we could avoid it by learning from them. For example, have a look at the London website, here, to see how they're tackling the problem.

Astonishingly it seems that we're not learning from them, we're plunging ahead and creating the same problem right here.

Demolishing an area which does provide affordable living to make way for yet another high-end development adds to the problem.

This is not a small development by the way. If you know Dubai you'll realise how much is being demolished to make way for it. It stretches from Satwa's Al Diyafah Street down the coast to Al Safa Park, from Sheikh Zayed Road to the sea. In fact even into the sea because the map shows that huge new islands will be built.

If you don't know Dubai the landmarks won't mean anything, but you'll understand the size when you realise that it covers over 2,500 acres/1,000 hectares.

Here's the model of Jumeira Gardens being displayed at Cityscape. Running diagonally across the right are the new islands just offshore, the road running diagonally across the bottom left corner is Sheikh Zayed Road:


Photo: Ahmed Ramzan. Gulf News

And here's the plan released by the developer:



I've used these photos in earlier posts (click the 'Old Dubai' label) but here they are again as a glimpse of what will be lost:









Jumeira Gardens and Satwa are two very different places and in the photos and report I see nothing that even remotely suggests affordable housing or shopping.

You can read the report and see more photos here.

Accepting responsibility

I'm quite prepared to acknowledge that more than a few things annoy me.

I post regularly about my irritation with things like bad planning, management incompetence, lack of communication, the mangling of the language, bigotry.

There's another thing which annoys the hell out of me that's just cropped up again - leaders saying they accept full responsibility for their actions.

We get it from politicians, leaders of business, of the armed services, of the police.

After their actions have caused problems in the lives of others, caused people to lose their jobs, their homes, their lives in some cases, the waste-of-space 'leader' stands up and says he accepts full responsibility for his actions.

And you know what accepting responsibility actually means to him?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

He's affected in no way whatsoever.

It's the ultimate insult to our intelligence. The final middle finger gesture to the people whose lives they've damaged.

The latest to do it is the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, the bankrupt investment bank. Richard Fuld was testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman.

Reading the same script which so many 'leaders' have read before he told the committee:

"I take full responsibility for the decisions that I made and for the actions that I took...this is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life..."

What a fatuous remark it is, stating the bleedin' obvious. He made the decisions, so how could he be anything but responsible for them?

But his pain will be eased, I'm sure, by the 'compensation' (as salary packages are called these days) he paid himself while steering the good ship Lehmen onto the rocks.

The firm, in the days before it filed for bankruptcy, sought board approval to pay three departing executives more than $20 million, according to Waxman.

"Even as Mr. Fuld was pleading ... for a federal rescue, Lehman continued to squander millions on executive compensation," Waxman said.

Some members of the committee took particular issue with Fuld for his salary and bonuses. Fuld received a $22 million bonus in March. Waxman added that Fuld "will walk away a wealthy man."

Waxman displayed a chart that detailed what he said was $480 million in compensation since 2000 and pointed out that Fuld owned a $14 million oceanfront home in Florida, an extensive art collection and another home in Sun Valley, Idaho.

"Your company is now bankrupt, the economy is in a state of crisis, yet you get to bring home $480 million," said Waxman.

Naturally, Fuld disputed the tally of his earnings.

Fuld said that Waxman's figure included stock holdings, while Waxman insisted it did not.

The reality is that he took tens, almost certainly hundreds, of millions of dollars out for himself, which he will keep.

I'm amazed he was able to keep a straight face as he 'took full responsibility.'

I would like one of the committee members to ask him:

You have told us you accept full responsibility. Please detail to this committee exactly what that means. How will accepting responsibility manifest itself?



A report on the hearing is here.

Blinded by the light

Driving on the constantly changing roads through endless roadworks is enough of a challenge but there's an additional hazard that we really shouldn't have to face.

Construction lights shining in drivers' eyes like oncoming full beam headlights.



Whoever sets up the lights obviously has no thought for safety, and there appears to be no authority (police, RTA?) taking any steps to stop it.

It isn't only the driver who's safety is compromised. Often the street lighting is bad or non-existent, there are shadows everywhere, lights blaze into the driver's eyes and on more than one occassion I've narrowly missed labourers wearing dark overalls who wander in the road.

This photo happens to be in Dubai Marina but there's the same problem in every construction area I've driven through.

World's biggest fish?

According to the copywriter "Standing tall in the heart of Dubai Maritime City will be the new architectural marvel Amwaj. A shining light for conglomerates aspiring to embark on their next business destination, the next level."