Luxury Living in Dubai

I received the following email today that's being circulated around the internet, and wanted to post it here, along with my response. I just couldn't help but seize this opportunity to speak my piece on this.

As follows:

RE: FW: Dubai

It certainly would be nice to LIVE at the richest nation on earth and wake up to these views each day.

Every house has its own beach!
Now see this stuff

This is taken from world's tallest building 'Burj Dubai' @ 2,620 ft / 801m!!!

What do you think guys?

Really amazing

Look at the edge (uppermost right corner) of the picture-- you can almost see the turn of the earth

The persons who are working on the uppermost girders can see the 'ROTATION OF EARTH'

Best Regards from the poorer side of earth!

And my reply:

WTF? How can vistas from the world's tallest building include views of other buildings that tower above the clouds? That can't be real. And if it IS real, it can't be right! Hehe!

Regardless, it would suck living in a cookie-cutter house amid a sea of other cookie-cutter houses occupied by snobby rich people who all want to live in cookie-cutter-houses in a sea of cookie-cutter houses. How much imagination is involved here, really.

The first thing I'd do, if I had that kind of money, is find the remotest natural place I could find in a small town with a smattering of "common" people with imaginations, hearts and souls, where everything -- trees, houses and people -- all had their own unique character. Oh... wait... I'm already there. :-)

Speaking of trees, there seems to be a real shortage of them there, but I guess that's to be expected in an artificial oasis in the middle of a desert. Give me trees! :-)

Oh, and it's a good thing they have all of those absurdly tall buildings nearby, 'cuz they're gonna need them when their luxury houses become submerged in ocean waters that are rising due to global warming caused, in large part, by the mass consumption of the very product from which, directly or indirectly, they all became rich. See? There is justice in the world, after all.

And we thought the real estate and mortgage markets were in crisis here...