armchair pundit

There have been a couple of interesting developments in news media in recent weeks. The first development is the mostly symbolic vote by the House of Representatives to “defund” NPR. I’m a big fan of NPR, but I’m divided on this. I can’t say philosophically that I believe the government should be in the news and media business. On the other hand, I think the healthiest news media is one that’s not-for-profit and publicly-funded.

In the second development, the New York Times unveiled its paywall. It’s live in Canada and soon to arrive in the US. I won’t make any snarky comments about Canada as the guinea pig, and I won’t waste words on the details of the paywall itself, which you can easily learn about elsewhere. It will be interesting to see whether it works, both from a business-model standpoint and a technical one. On the technical side, the Times is already playing whack-a-mole to kill a number of loopholes and workarounds.

The buzz around these developments has raised a number of good-news bad-news scenarios. What if the paywall doesn’t work, and the Times continues to hemorrhage money until it eventually goes bankrupt? What compromises might NPR need to make in order to survive?

There are a few reasons I’m not really concerned about the future and possible demise of the New York Times, and for the same reasons I am worried about NPR.

For-profit news is compromised

News outlets take great pains to protect their editorial operations from the advertising side of the business. But it doesn’t matter, because there’s no getting around the fact that the editorial operations depend on ads. Editors like to believe the dependency is reciprocal, that the advertising side of the business depends on them to produce high-quality journalism to attract audiences. But there are two problems with this argument.

First, it’s a leap to suggest there’s an inherent link between quality and the size of the audience (the “customers” of news). If this were true, then McDonald’s would have gone out of business long ago. In a for-profit news organization, the advertising side of the business merely needs the editorial department to publish whatever grabs the biggest audience, or the most desirable audience segments. Trashy tabloid news is a big seller, and I assume their ad-sales departments aren’t complaining. Serious news organizations are interested in a different segment of the population, but they still don’t like to publish things that challenge the opinions of their readers and viewers too much. This is why you never see people on FOX News discussing the need to address climate change, but it’s also why the New York Times didn’t challenge the Bush administration during the run-up to the Iraq war. The Times only started to challenge the administration in earnest after the tide of public opinion had sufficiently shifted against it, and the war.

Second, while news outlets may be able to protect themselves from the direct influence of advertisers, to ensure there’s no quid-pro-quo, the content of the news coverage most certainly helps determine who buys advertising. If a news organization has historically gotten a whole lot of its ad revenue from, say, the banking industry, then this fact is bound to affect how it covers that industry. The effect isn’t direct, it’s probably not immediate, and it’s subtle, but it’s surely there. This profit imperative may drive editors to make coverage appear even-handed, even if the facts overwhelmingly support one side of a debate (see major news coverage of climate science vs. global warming deniers); it may drive editors to bury important stories; it surely drives the news away from certain topics and toward others.

People innately get this, which is why a lot of “news” is actually opinion. Or satire.

With opinion and satire, at least people know what they’re getting. Opinion and satire can be a substitute for news, to a point. But only to a point. Satire in particular can speak truth to power and knock the powerful down a few pegs. But satire can also zap the power out of things that are truly important. It can make us laugh at things in a way that anesthetizes us to real injustice.

Big news outlets need big-corporate money to operate

It’s expensive to operate a big news organization that has global news gathering capabilities and global audience reach. This kind of news organization needs million-dollar checks, and only big companies can throw around that kind of money. Now this is where I get cynical: Big companies are evil, or at least unethical… or at least ethically agnostic. A small neighborhood business needs to care about its neighborhood, but a big company doesn’t have a neighborhood. A company incorporated in Delaware, with its main offices in New York and London, doesn’t really care about the damage it’s doing to a small town in West Virginia, much less to some village in Ecuador. It starts to care about those things only when enough of its customers start to care. Its job is only to make as much money as it can. This is not how I want my news to be financed.

The news causes brain damage

Major news outlets plus the power of the Internet produces strange bedfellows. It’s trendy right now to use “social” data to drive experiences, so you see lists like “most emailed” or “most shared.” This is great, but it’s also what puts a headline about Charlie Sheen’s latest antics right next to one about protests in Libya. When everything is equally important, then nothing’s important. This kind of forced equivalence can’t be good for our brains.

We probably don’t need so much news reporting

Journalism is hard work. News reporting is easier. A lot of news we could live without. And I’m not even talking about the trashy tabloid stuff. Test this yourself. Next time you see headlines that trigger feelings of outrage (anything involving Michelle Bachmann for example, or the Westboro Baptist Church), don’t read the articles. Bookmark the items you feel the urge to read, and ignore them until the moment passes and the news has moved on to other things (which will probably take a matter of hours). After a few days, are you still outraged? Are you even interested? What about after a month? What if we didn’t know about the protests in the Middle East as they were happening? There are lots of things we don’t know about, or don’t think about all the time. We turn our Twitter profile pictures green to support protesters in Iran, but we go to work every day not thinking about the plight of the Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation, or folks living in the projects right down the street. We’re always filtering things out. What if you only paid attention to news you were willing to take action on?

All this news generates anxiety, which can be addictive. So can outrage. Outrage is particularly thrilling because it’s accompanied by a sense of moral superiority. “Look at those idiots!” we say. We eagerly forward the latest Glenn Beck snippet because we want to share the thrill of outrage with our friends (the genius of Glenn Beck is that both the people outraged with him and those outraged at him pass around clips of his show).

We probably need more journalism

By journalism, I mean stories. Well-researched and well-told ones, which are often long and take months to produce. Most of this kind of journalism still happens in the for-profit media, in magazines like the New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair, and on television shows like 60-minutes. But some of the best of it comes out of non-profit organizations like ProPublica, PBS (Frontline) and the BBC.

These are turbulent times for the news media, but ultimately I’m not worried about the future of journalism. There will always be intrepid, curious humans who are compelled to investigate and share, and there will always be an audience for their stories. The economics will morph and evolve and go up and down, but I have faith that we’ll always find ways to link the two. I’d just like it to be direct and democratic, rather than compromised and corporate.

As promised. The second article I alluded to in my last post is really a series of articles ars technica ran last month. It’s an absolutely riveting tale of how the CEO of a well-known Internet security firm stirred the wrath of a loose collective of hackers known as “Anonymous” and paid a heavy price.

Anonymous has been around for a while, but if you’re unfamiliar with them (it?), they’re not easy to define. The Wikipedia article on Anonymous refers to them as:

“…representing the concept of many on-line community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain. It is also generally considered to be a blanket term for members of certain Internet subcultures”

This does not exactly roll off the tongue, but the article goes on to explain that this “representation of a concept” evolved into “a decentralized on-line community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner, usually toward a loosely self-agreed goal.” Initially, their goal seemed to be entertainment, or the lulz, but more recently the’ve channeled their efforts into various causes. They made a few headlines for example when they launched a DDoS attack against the websites of MasterCard, PayPal and others after those companies terminated their relationships with Wikileaks.

This is when Aaron Barr, CEO of a well-regarded Internet security firm called HBGary, enters the story. A self-described fan of Wikileaks, he nonetheless sensed a business opportunity in the attacks by Anonymous on MasterCard et al. He hypothesized that he could identify the culprits using data from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and he knew this would raise his – and his company’s – profile in the Internet security business.

To test his hypothesis, he went undercover in IRC chat rooms and other places where the denizens of Anonymous are known to travel. Eventually, he thought he identified several of the “top leaders” of Anonymous, and he revealed himself to them in an ill-advised moment of hubris.

This turns out to have been a bad idea. Hours later, his company’s website was wiped out and replaced by this (click to enlarge):

But that’s not all, to put it mildly. Members of Anonymous hacked Barr’s Twitter and Gmail accounts, pilfered the company’s email, purged terabytes of backed-up data and more.

I’m not doing the story justice though. It’s a great read, and a kind of primer of basic hackery. Enjoy…

How One Security Firm Tracked Anonymous and Paid a Heavy Price

Anonymous Speaks: The Inside Story of the HBGary Hack

Virtually Face to Face: When Aaron Barr met Anonymous

Anonymous vs. HBGary: The Aftermath

In my last post I attempted to list the things I found especially resonant last year in media, entertainment, art and journalism. I say “attempted” because I didn’t keep track of this stuff very well during 2010. In lieu of keeping track, I retroactively scoured my bookmarks in places like delicious, Instapaper and Evernote, and as a result I probably favored things I consumed toward the end of the year and forgot things I encountered in January and February.

In the spirit of trying to do better in 2011, I’ll mention over my next two posts a couple of articles I’ve read recently that are bound to make my greatest hits list at the end of the year.

In the first, Dr. Atul Gawande who writes perhaps better than anyone about healthcare had a recent piece in the New Yorker about the burden of addressing “super-utilizers,” or the most expensive patients. He examines some pioneering new initiatives which show, counter-intuitively, that hospitals can significantly lower costs by giving even more attention to these neediest patients.

He follows a doctor named Jeff Brenner in Camden, NJ who was inspired by the way urban police departments study crime statistics – clustering crimes block by block into hot spots, then targeting law enforcement to get the biggest bang for the buck. He applied a similar strategy to zero in on healthcare hotspots and found, for example that:

…a single building in central Camden sent more people to the hospital with serious falls—fifty-seven elderly in two years—than any other in the city, resulting in almost three million dollars in health-care bills.

And in one low-income housing tower:

…between January of 2002 and June of 2008 some nine hundred people in the two buildings accounted for more than four thousand hospital visits and about two hundred million dollars in health-care bills. One patient had three hundred and twenty-four admissions in five years. The most expensive patient cost insurers $3.5 million.

Armed with this information, Dr. Brenner reaches out to numerous doctors in several hospitals and offers to take on their “worst-of-the-worst” patients, and with the help of his small staff he starts to give these patients the highest degree of personal attention he can. He sees some patients every day. He nags social workers on behalf of patients and escorts them to AA meetings. With this kind of care, these patients who used to visit the emergency room half a dozen times a year, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in bills (paid for by taxpayers), suddenly don’t need the hospital at all. Daily maintenance costs much less.

Gawande visits a company called Verisk Health that specializes in “medical intelligence” for organizations that pay for health insurance. A doctor analyst named Nathan Gunn drills into patient claims and shows Gawande a typical example of the kind of patient who stands out:

All these claims here are migraine, migraine, migraine, migraine, headache, headache, headache.” For a twenty-five-year-old with her profile, he said, medical payments for the previous ten months would be expected to total twenty-eight hundred dollars. Her actual payments came to more than fifty-two thousand dollars—for “headaches.”

Was she a drug seeker? He pulled up her prescription profile, looking for narcotic prescriptions. Instead, he found prescriptions for insulin (she was apparently diabetic) and imipramine, an anti-migraine treatment. Gunn was struck by how faithfully she filled her prescriptions. She hadn’t missed a single renewal—“which is actually interesting,” he said. That’s not what you usually find at the extreme of the cost curve.

The story now became clear to him. She suffered from terrible migraines. She took her medicine, but it wasn’t working. When the headaches got bad, she’d go to the emergency room or to urgent care. The doctors would do CT and MRI scans, satisfy themselves that she didn’t have a brain tumor or an aneurysm, give her a narcotic injection to stop the headache temporarily, maybe renew her imipramine prescription, and send her home, only to have her return a couple of weeks later and see whoever the next doctor on duty was. She wasn’t getting what she needed for adequate migraine care—a primary physician taking her in hand, trying different medications in a systematic way, and figuring out how to better keep her headaches at bay.

A typical strategy companies employ to lower their healthcare costs is to require employees to pay higher premiums. Employees respond by decreasing the frequency of their doctor visits. Unfortunately, even the sickest employees put off visiting the doctor, which winds up generating higher costs in the end. Dr. Gunn and Verisk Health use this kind of information to persuade companies that better, more-focused care is a more effective strategy than higher premiums.

Finally, Gawande spends time at a clinic in Atlantic City run by a doctor named Rushika Fernandopulle who invented a role he calls “health coach” and hired eight of them to work on his staff – outnumbering his doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners. His approach is a more formalized version of what Dr. Brenner is doing, where each staff member is tasked with meeting very specific goals. One nurse practitioner for example is in charge of getting all the patients to quit smoking.

Gawande is not a political writer, and this isn’t a political article. It’s a delight to read a piece on healthcare that is completely devoid of demagoguery. It’s almost unfortunate that Gawande notes in passing at one point that the Affordable Care Act (I refuse to call it “Obamacare”) makes some money available for the kinds of pilot projects highlighted in the article, and Dr. Fernandopulle’s clinic has made use of that money. I say unfortunate because the mere mention of the healthcare bill will be read as endorsement, and for some readers this will cast a dark shadow across the whole article.

My own feeling is that conservatives who decry the healthcare bill because of its failure to address costs should perhaps appreciate the way the bill encourages private sector solutions, and the way it requires many super-utilizer patients to be insured and thereby help pay for the kind of high-touch ongoing care that keeps them healthier and ultimately saves taxpayers money.

The House recently passed a major financial reform bill, and the Senate will vote on it as soon as there’s enough Republican support to push it through. By most accounts, the Republicans are mostly on board, which is probably why we’re not hearing a whole lot about it from the media. There’s not enough conflict and hysteria to make it television fodder.

18 months ago we were told we were teetering at a precipice. We felt anxiety, which subsided into anger as we learned more about how the firms we paid to rescue had precipitated the crisis. Now we’re no longer feeling the acute fear, and the anger at Wall Street has fizzled somewhat, so I’ve been a bit worried that the final reform bill won’t have any teeth.

This inspired me to do some digging. I’m not a financial whiz, but having devoured many accounts of the crisis, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what needs to change.

Too Big To Fail is a maddening phrase we heard a lot, and we’ll never know what would have happened if the federal government had rejected the premise outright – meaning we’ll never know what would have happened if the government didn’t bail out the banks. There are lots of smart people on both sides of the debate around the bailouts, but ultimately hindsight is blind.

Given this fact, too big to fail is one of the key things that Congress has vowed to fix in the financial reform bill. Specifically, they want to be empowered to break up companies before they become too big to fail. I for one have little confidence in the government’s ability to define big in a way that would lead to action down the road. The truth is, the government will never be able to know exactly when or how they should intervene, so I don’t think this will really be a meaningful part of the final reform bill.

Another piece of needed financial reform has to do with incentives. Up and down the whole chain of cause and effect, from home buyers in the suburbs to folks on Wall Street assembling mortgage-backed securities – people had good incentives to make really bad decisions. But this is something the companies themselves need to fix.

That makes one thing the government can’t fix, and one thing they shouldn’t fix, so what should we expect from a reform bill? I think there are three obvious things:

1. Create independent ratings agencies – Agencies like Moody’s and S & P are paid by the firms whose bonds they are responsible for rating. This is the only reason a CDO made up of hundreds of garbage loans put together by Goldman Sachs was able to get a triple-A rating, and it’s obviously insane. Either the government should put together its own truly independent ratings entity, or it should require the existing agencies to operate independently. Either way this is easier said than done, but it’s pure common sense.

2. Eliminate huge private transactions – Wall Street firms routinely make multi-billion-dollar deals with each other that are not reported on anyone’s balance sheet or visible on any index. If the larger financial market is exposed to the risk inherent in these transactions – which it obviously is – then the larger market needs to know about them. The financial industry will fight this tooth and nail, and we’ll certainly hear lots of manufactured reasons why it’s a bad idea. Look for the “trickle-down” attack – you know, the one that says that any restraint imposed on big business is bad for the economy because that’s where the jobs come from.

3. Regulate “hedging” – This is a tough one, because it’s subjective. A few firms made a lot of money from the deals that led to the financial crisis by aggressively touting certain investments to customers while simultaneously making big bets that those same investments would fail. Executives from Goldman Sachs were questioned about this by Congress, and a series of deals engineered by a firm called Magnetar makes a perfect case study. Companies call this “hedging” and claim it’s just a prudent part of doing business – you make a bet, and you “hedge” it with a side bet, as insurance.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the side bets they refer to as hedging were mostly secret, back-channel deals, whereas the affected investments they promoted were very much the opposite. In other words, they aggressively sold certain investments that they secretly bet would fail, and the more of these bad investments they sold, the more money they stood to make from their failure. Secondly, many indications suggest the so-called hedges were often bigger than the bets (which means they’re the real bets and not hedges at all). This is hard to prove, given the secrecy around these “hedges,” which is its own problem.

Again, this is something the financial industry will fight tooth and nail, but we should all demand transparency. We have the right to know about both the hedges and the bets, so we – meaning not only ourselves, but our banks, mutual funds, etc. – can make informed investment decisions

One proposal put forward in the financial reform bill is to establish a new government entity called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to alert us to red flags in potential investments (like giant side bets), and this is what the Republicans are opposed to, because they see it as unnecessary government bureaucracy. This is a valid point, but I’m not sure what else they’re offering. Alternatives suggested by Democrats in an effort to gain Republican support include beefing up  the consumer protection power within one or more existing agencies.

In any case, consumer protection should give us more freedom, serving to illuminate risks in complicated financial products without prohibiting those products. It’s transparency we need, and that’s what we should look for in the financial reform bill.

[UPDATE] The good news is that items 1 and 2 are in the bill that passed the House. Item 3 is fuzzier, although there are a number of provisions in the bill that might have some impact on the way that firms will be allowed to make bets vs. side bets. Maybe worthy of another post.

It’s been a while since I posted here, and I’m introducing a new category: Elimination Dance.

Instructions: An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor.  At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination, say, “Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine’s Day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis.” Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues (e.g. “Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board”) until a single couple remains.

(from the description of Michael Ondaatje’s book by the same title)

This new category, in other words, is for all the things I wish would go away. My first is small-government fanatics. For some reason I’ve allowed myself to rant in the comments of a couple friends’ blogs this week in response to passionate small-government fanaticism and comments I somewhat unfairly deemed as such.

The rest of this post is a lightly-edited re-post of a comment I left on my friend Jay’s blog…

Small-government fanatics seem to believe we are a prosperous and successful country in spite of our government – rather than because of it, whereas I believe the truth is very much both.

We are beneficiaries of two centuries of government protection and support – much of which we basically seem to take for granted at this point, and much of which few people would really want to go back and undo. Of course there have been missteps too, but the small-government libertarian crowd usually fails to acknowledge the ways in which we have benefited.

One core principle of small-government fanatics is free markets, or as my friend Jay unambiguously put it: “The free market is one of the greatest gifts to mankind in all of our history.”

I think, however, that total market freedom almost inevitably leads to “tragedy of the commons” scenarios. People and businesses will pursue their own desires even to the detriment of everyone’s needs. They pursue immediate individual gains that risk (and often cause) generalized future catastrophe.

If government does not serve to protect the commons from the individual, then what – or who – will?

Before the FDA required drug companies to prove their products were not dangerous prior to putting them on the market, there were numerous incidents of contamination – sometimes maiming or killing thousands (thalidomide, diethylene glycol). What’s the free-market alternative to this? The free-market response might be to put a company out of business because one of their products killed a few thousand people, but um… the company KILLED people. That was the free-market drug industry before the FDA.

What about a more straightforward tragedy of the commons? I have a hard time envisioning a free-market solution to protecting fisheries from individual companies competing against each other to pull in the biggest catches. The companies know when they are pushing fisheries toward collapse, but they also know that if they hold back, then others will just step in and out-fish them. What’s the free-market answer?

This is similar in nature to what happened in our financial markets. Smart people knew they were taking insane risks that were not sustainable, in order to reap huge short-term gains. But they also knew that if they didn’t do it, plenty of other people would out-gain them in the short term, and they would be fired.

For whatever reason, it’s easier for me to stomach this problem with the financial markets (as part of the cost of doing business – even if it hurts a lot of innocent bystanders), than with things like forests and fisheries. Damage done to forests and fisheries is longer-lasting.

I have a hard time believing our country’s major parks and wilderness areas would ever have been created without our government deciding to do so (imagine how many more dams could have been built along the Colorado River and how many more trees harvested in Appalachia if companies were free to do so). I’m personally happier to have the parks and wildernesses.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about atmospheric carbon and climate change for five decades, warning us about a point-of-no-return. We probably needed to start doing things differently 10 years ago to avoid the point-of-no-return, but what free market incentive existed to do so? None, and that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in.

If you believe there are no situations when the collective good is more important than individual gains, then my argument is lost on you. I don’t believe this. And it’s hard to imagine who would aim us toward the collective good if the government was not trying to do so.

It’s fair to argue that the government does not operate effectively or efficiently enough, but I think the answer is to improve it, not to eviscerate it.

I think it’s good and necessary to debate each threshold of government intervention (currently, healthcare), but I think we need to acknowledge how much existing government protection and support we take for granted and would not want to give up.

I have a somewhat irrational affection for Costco. The selection is good, the prices are low. They have a generous return policy (my friend just returned a printer he bought there four years ago and exchanged it for a new one). The folks who work at the one in San Francisco always seem to be enjoying themselves.

But many of my green-minded friends see Costco as a perfect embodiment of modern-day consumer culture and all that is wrong with America.

When you think about it though, one giant jug of laundry detergent requires significantly less plastic than the same amount of detergent sold in six smaller bottles. And buying a mega-bundle of toilet paper means fewer trips to the store than buying six rolls at a time. Plus, they sell recycled paper products and phosphate-free detergent.

I’m just sayin’

My job has sent me to Amsterdam for the week, and when I went to the Continental Airlines website to check in for my flight the other day, I was presented with the option to buy carbon offset credits – powered by an organization called Sustainable Travel International.

The whole idea of carbon offsetting is met with some harsh criticism. Skeptics argue that it’s just a way to help people feel better about themselves without having to change their consuming, polluting lifestyles…

But there’s no reason why purchasing carbon offsets can’t be just one part of a person’s overall change in lifestyle, instead of an alternative to change. And the truth is the money spent on carbon offsets does make its way into projects like wind farms and reforestation initiatives.

It might be better to avoid air travel altogether, but of course it’s unrealistic. I’m happy that the airline industry is promoting not only awareness of the issue in general, but a quantification of my own individual contribution. And I’m happy that they point me to one way of mitigating at least some of the damage.

It won’t save the world, but it’s better than nothing.

…and not just because my recent investment in oil futures depends on the price continuing to rise.

The sudden upsurge in the price of gas has been the top news story for the past few weeks, and there doesn’t seem to be any relief in sight. Oil is a finite resource, and as China, India and other developing nations have… well… developed, the worldwide demand for oil has shot up. As Americans turn to the government – and the three people campaigning to be the next president – for a solution, it seems amazing that no one saw this coming.

Of course the US leads the rest of the planet by a long shot when it comes to oil consumption, thanks to a combination of massive suburban sprawl, the popularity of gas-guzzling SUVs and a system of government subsidies that keeps our gasoline cheap compared to the rest of the world.

Progressives have lobbied the government for years to raise the mandatory average fuel-efficiency requirements of American cars, and the government’s response over the last eight of those years – especially from that bunch of oilmen in the executive branch – has been predictably dismissive.

The normal Republican philosophy regarding such things is to let the market take care of it. Keep the government out of it, they say. In an ideal world, I totally agree. The government is bloated and slow and bad at getting things done. In reality though, the problem with the Republican hands-off philosophy is that Republicans are totally disingenuous about it.

If the real price of gasoline was actually reflected at the pump, then people would stop using gasoline simply because they couldn’t afford it. People would stop buying gas-guzzling behemoths in favor of smaller cars. People who work in cities would stop moving into houses way out the suburbs, and people who already live in the suburbs would start carpooling or taking public transportation (if it’s even an option). That’s the market at work. We know the market would do its thing because it’s exactly what happened in the past when gas prices shot up for any length of time.

And it’s happening again. Even the modest rise we’ve seen over the past year or so – and it has been modest for Americans, no matter what it feels like – has sent a surge of riders to mass transit, according to this recent article in the New York Times. The difference this time is that given what’s happening with China, India and much of the rest of the developing world, oil prices aren’t likely to level off again… ever.

The bottom line here is that the Republican philosophy works. We just need the courage – yes, courage – to let the market actually do its thing.

Of course there’s another part of me – the part that loves to travel – that’s afraid to see what all this will do to air fares.

The fantasy known as Dubai, home of the world’s only 7-star hotel, is planning to burn another billion or so on what will be the world’s largest and tallest spanning arch bridge, The 6th Crossing:

(rendering by FXFOWLE)

Obscene displays of money are nothing new to Dubai, and why not? They might as well spend everything they can as fast as they can, because in 100 years I’m guessing Dubai will look something like…

(photo by daarkfire)