from technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com to world@lemmy.world on 09 Mar 23:42
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/65080969
Dubai has only ten days of fresh food left after the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has cut the United Arab Emirates (UAE) off from all its imports, including food. In Abu Dhabi, with the prospect of the region becoming unliveable, real estate prices are also collapsing.
As bne IntelliNews reported, the Hormuz chokepoint could kill Dubai, a hub of investment and business in the region. The Gulf countries don’t have any water and don’t produce much food for their combined population of around 60mn people. Fresh products in particular like vegetables and fruit are almost all imported. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Straits of Hormuz to oil exports on March 2, but the embargo also effectively blocked all food imports at the same time.
The Emirates imports between 80% and 90% of its food, with roughly 70% of food shipments to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries normally passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the 100- odd ships that traversed the Straits until a week ago.
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#world
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Good.
Who do you think will go hungry first?
The powerful or their slaves?
Goddamnit you’re right. Nevermind. Hopefully the elite there will evaporate in a big hellfire.
The slaves for sure, but it also creates a situation where the powerful may not be giving enough food to their security forces, and their security forces turn on them, joining the slaves in outright rebellion.
Not that this will bring more food in, but it could result in some of those “powerful” people suddenly not being so powerful.
But how many toilets do they have left?
That Dubai some time, just not enough
If they’re unable to reopen the strait, perhaps they can force Trump to halt attacking Iran by stopping their own fossil fuel production. Something oil embargo.
Maybe a few more gold plated jets will do the trick
The US is less reliant on products which traverse the strait then in the other population center on the planet. It actually may be in its strongest strategic interest to continue on a course which keeps the strait closed, ignoring the humanitarian impact and loss of soft power and goodwill.
True but they can’t escape the coming inflation wave. As fossil fuel supply thru the strait decreases, intl buyers would seek to buy from other sources, bidding up prices everywhere. That includes American producers who’d gladly export instead of feeding the domestic demand. This could change if the US gov’t decides to move away from free markets and imoses export and price controls.
Sounds like socialism.
Comrade Krasnov’s plan all along!
I mean. I’m a socialist. Just not a corporate socialist.
Not democratic. Socialism isn’t just when the government does things.
Explain to me how this doesn’t encourage a United bombing run on both Israel and the states.
They’re starving working class plebs like you and me right now. Something about the internal class war in the states makes me livid about that wherever it’s happening. Viscerally.
A handful of guys decide to shit on one another and the rest of us are supposed to bathe in the excremental splatter and like it. Why FFS?
These same assholes are supposed to be in power for the express purpose of shielding their people from said shit.
Nukes. The US has a lot of fucking nukes. We’ve used them before, when a sane government was in control. If anyone bombs the US it will literally be the end of civilization.
That’s not hyperbole. This orange fuck will absolutely let the nukes rip.
Israel also has a lot of nukes.
And Israel has the Samson option
No he’s not. Any nuke use by anyone would be completely geopolitical collapse and even americans would probably refuse the order.
The secretary of ““defense”” of the US is an actual doomsday accelerationist.
Is “““defense””” in scare quotes because his real title is Secretary of WARRRRR?
I don’t care what the department is called, but I don’t remember it doing much defense except for a brief time in WW2.
A big chunk of American administration is salivating over the idea of geopolitical collapse. Sure, maybe a few might refuse, but that just means they will find a replacement or find leverage that convinces the person to follow orders.
Think of Nazi Germany. While some soldiers followed horrific orders gleefully, many others did them because hurting someone else prevented retaliation against themselves or their families. It’s easy to say you’d never hurt anyone, but harder to adhere to if you’re watching a gun aimed at your child’s head.
with the context from the rest of your comment, the fact you still believe this is astounding.
I don’t believe it’s true. I do believe it should be true.
Oh NO! RICH people live in Dubai!
-The Media!
But let’s just send our food over to them. Surely it will trickle down this time!
Horse and sparrow ftw
there’s also many slaves who live in dubai
i sure wonder who, of the two, will be denied food
Maybe they’ll eat the rich
I wonder if the LARGE NUMBER of slaves might discover an alternate source of nutrition?
Nobody, because there is plenty of food. The article even says so.
“There you go, bringing class into it again.”
I don't know what's scarier. The fact that half the commenters didn't read that far into the article or that they couldn't figure out for themselves that fresh food is not all food.
I think the headline is designed to be misleading - the dramatic tone implies a worse situation than the actual words describe.
It's not how headlines are written now, but it would be more honest to say:
Dubai to rely less on fresh food
Perishable food in limited supply
Fresh fruit and vegetables affected by war in iran
Add to the scary list: that some people think it’s no cause for alarm if a country resorts to grain reserves to survive.
How is the UAE stockpiling frozen foods? Feels like the least cost-effective way for this country to store anything long term as emergency stock.
They aren’t. But the rich aren’t going to eat rice and lentils for very long. Just have to hope those shelf stable stores are available to the slaves.
UAE and specifically Dubai live on PR and marketing
When the surgically perfected bikini-clad Dubai influencer has to eat barley porridge and frozen veggies, it’s not good content 😆
People will survive, they won’t starve. But how will their PR machine spin this?
I kind of hate how we now have “content creators” who make “content” instead of, you know, people who make videos and stuff. Bland corporate language.
Maybe we should tell snobbier sort of influencers in Dubai that if they want to produce the Content, they unfortunately have to eat the Food.
Watched a clip by some standup comedian who described an odd encounter and then unironically said “Well, I went to my car, you know, created some content, uploaded on Insta.” I had to rewind and hear it again. Felt like I glimpsed into some parallel bizarro reality.
That’s the issue, gen Z bred to believe that a recording of themselves is the equivalent of “creating” something with effort lmao
www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Con…
Tbf it’s a great differentiator shorthand to know whether the topic of discussion is about actual creatives or diet pill shilling slop.
Can’t wait until all the professional airbreathers are replaced by simple AI models lmfao
Move over unhealthy Dubai Chocolate and say hello to Dubai Gruel, packed full of super grains and cryo-rich greens that will help you lose weight and stay healthy.
They will find a way to turn those tin cans into some kind of content.
To be fair, that title says fresh food.
But fresh fruit looks nice in my fruit bowl even though I don’t eat it
What you say as a piece of shit is swirling around the toilet? Doo-doo, bye! Or watching Trump & Netanyahu make out… Du… Bi?!?
No need to brag about it, Dubai.
Let them eat those stupid ass chocolate bars
Shouldn’t they be more worried about water hasn’t Iran started targeting desalination plants that are 90% of the supply there (I think).
yes, after the us attacked iran’s desalination (which it depends on much less than other countries in the region do) opening the door to in-kind retaliation
Eh, they have been in a what shortage since before this war so it might be more important to them
There’s a cold, dark calculation I’m sure Iran has done which probably determines less people = more water.
After killing the protestors (which btw, Trump was too stupid to support so good luck on that rEgImE chAngE) plus casualties from war simply happening, there’s more water for the remaining.
So even though they’ve lost some water supply, they’ve also lost population, balancing things out.
Trump and Netanyahu don’t want protesters in charge. They want a puppet.
Yeah but the classic CIA playbook is to support/arm rebels and place your puppet among them as a leader.
As for Israel, I think they want the territory. They want all the territory.
Iran has a population of 90 million. How many people do you think have died to make a significant difference?
Do they not have land trade routes?
Why drive through a desert when you have a port?
To not starve?
I think the point is that they werent doing it before the war. (Because it was so much more costly)
Getting that kind of infrastructure set up will take time. Were talking hundreds of refrigerated trucks and a couple thousand miles. Longer depending on where they come in from. Are they trucking across Saudi Arabia? Landing shipping vessels in a port outside of the strait and running along the coastal roads within Iran’s drones range?
Sure but you’d think they’d have a plan b or something for such an obvious threat they lobbied for getting into themselves.
Nah someone will bail us - let’s build more fake island shaped like flaccid cocks.
Capitalism does not like redundancies. Most of the globe is relying on single points of failure in their supply chains
Do you have any idea how hard it would be to logistically set up? This isn’t driving to the grocery store, it’s feeding a whole damn city
Even if they wanted to do this, it would take months to set up even at a breakneck pace
Yes land and flight (I imagine limited now) freight but surely orders of magnitude more expensive.
First example I found cnbctv18.com/…/dubai-allows-alternative-route-for… “a nearly fivefold increase in freight charges.” which I also imagine is a margin error if you ship expensive technological equipment or luxury goods but if it’s “just” tomatoes and salads, quite different.
They do, but their sources would be Oman or Saudi Arabia. Both are already helping their neighbors but the UAE has sabotaged their relationship with both of them.
Oman: old issues.
Saudi Arabia: they have been attacking it over refusing the Abraham Accords, destroying their Yemen separatists supply lines, and backing the Sudanese government in their fight against the UAE backed RSF. They don’t want to look weak by resorting to Saudi who have been helping all the other GCC countries. Also have been playing Israel’s advocate and attacking Saudi for not joining the war against Iran.
Edit: Saudi dedicated an entire airport near the border for Kuwait airlines, and dedicated a terminal for Bahrain in an other airport. For Qatar they announced free transit for any shipments coming via Red Sea ports headed to Qatar.
Thoughts & prayers.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/ef407ba1-0f7d-4d55-824e-3ffe114107ad.jpeg">
Is that a Harry & David gift box by chance? I caint see shit b/c I caint find my dang spectacles. There they are. Nope. Not Harry & David but much better than they are getting.
I see you want to poison them with tater tots.
Considering the only people at risk of starving there are the migrant workers and indentured servants to royalty, then yeah, we should probably give a fuck about the innocent people who didn’t ask for this.
They’re not starving.
I’m sure the uber wealthy have plenty & will share unselfishly.
Spec Ops: The Line was a very good game.
Never finished it and won’t.
Game directly tells you you can stop killing Civilians at any time by just not playing.
You know, that’s an interesting point. I think it can be really interesting to explore the „darker“ sites of one’s psyche through choices offered by better RPGs.
I refuse to play games which revolve around what I perceive to be normalization of and desensitization towards amoral killing, though. I simply don’t enjoy them because I can’t help but wonder what playing them does to people’s minds.
I think this has been bleeding over into television as well. There have been series I have just stopped watching because there was no longer someone I could consider a protagonist. Not everyone has to be a shining paragon of virtue, but for fucks sake, if you just give me a bunch of sociopaths running amok am I supposed to keep watching and hope they all die in the end? The latest series I dropped for this reason was Alien Earth, which was pretty decent up until near the end of season 1.
The only shooter I’ll play is Hell Let Loose because it really makes you feel like canon fodder.
You got it right.
That’s kind of silly. I get where you’re coming from, but since it’s a video game that’s telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and since the people are not real people in any sense of the word, wouldn’t it make sense to just finish it to see how the story ends?
Yeah. The story is on rails. It’s not an RPG where you can choose the good path or the evil path. I can imagine feeling bad about playing the evil path in a game where you had the option not to do it. But, if you want to see the story in a linear game like that you have click the mouse in the way required to get to the next save point. Feeling superior about not finishing a game like that is like feeling superior because you read a book where the main character is an antihero, and you chose not to finish the book.
Besides, it’s “deep” for a modern AAA shooter video game, but not particularly deep or upsetting in terms of storytelling.
The story isn’t strictly on rails - you do get some choices (especially how your character reacts in the end.) When you reach the part where you are told that you have to kill one of two guys, you can actually refuse to kill either and take on a massive firefight.
Does that actually change anything beyond the firefight though?
Yeah, it’s a cool game, but you could just read Heart of Darkness instead and prob be better off
Yeah. I read Heart of Darkness long before I saw that, plus I’d watched Apocalypse Now, which is a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness. I saw a list of their influences in making the game, and I’d already seen all of the other ones too. So… it was definitely taking FPS military games in a new direction, but it wasn’t anything really new overall.
Yup. Undertale’s Geno Route is much better at this. Not only can you avoid it, you need to actively go for it and make sure you don’t “fall” out to the Neutral route halfway through. Not to mention the skill curve walls (if for no other reason, you should do the Pacifist route first for practice).
Still worth playing in 2026? I have it and never played. I just have a hard time pulling the trigger (no pun intended) and starting to play mms’s. And that’s even with all the old guard game reviewers like tb praising it, which is why/how I own it in the first place. It just sits uninstalled in my steam library and I think about it every few years.
Yes, its still worth playing.
It may have lost its cultural significance some since the 2000’s US invasions have been forgotten a bit, but its not all about that anyway. Its still poignant. Maybe it will make it easier to decide if I tell you its a short campaign.
Still one of the best games with a story that subverts its own genre alongside KOTOR 2, definitely worth experiencing.
Absolutely, especially if you care about good story and atmosphere in games.
I played it again last year on a whim and was not disappointed.
What about Bahrain and Kuwait? How are they doing without the Straits of Hormuz?
In a city of billionaires, 10 days of food is about enough for 1 days of food for one of them.
Haha I hadn’t even considered this.
The airports are gonna be jampacked for days with instafluencers trying to catch the first nonstop flight back to Connecticut.
I just talked to a coworker who has friends out there who spent 7 days to get home being flown ping pong all over the region. It’s quite the chaos with lots of price gauging.
i hope nobody starves but fuck Dubai
Oh don’t worry. The modern day slaves - the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, and Filipino workers will absolutely suffer.
Now would be a great time for these overworked and underpaid masses to do the funny thing to the besieged city of millionaires.
Except that they wouldn’t be obtaining the land they toil on to feed their children because the land there is a fucking desert, and their land and families are an Emirates’ long haul flight away.
I was thinking more they’d do it to get what food remains or they’d starve.
The starving have nothing to lose, slave or not.
Pile of rolexes (blood rinsed off) would fund a plane ticket home and some home improvements back in Bangladesh.
Maybe they can sell the shiny parts of the Ozymandian nightmare city and use that to pay they way home?
Also, they could livestream burning the rest of it on pay-per-view or something. There would certainly be an audience for it.
Oh, that great, I almost worried anyone important might have to skip their favorite breakfast. /s
They should honestly try to go home by any means necessary at this point, even if it means deportation (since a lot of predatory contracts confiscate their passports).
The families responsible for why everything is unaffordable will be fine.
It’ll be fine. Maybe they could build a 100km long trench and call it a city, like MBS is doing in Saudi Arabia.
They have run out of money and apparently will now only build 550m of it!
The property values will sore! <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9b90fccc-59a2-4291-a8ec-3cfd9200a97a.jpeg">
Lmao NSFW this pls.
Maybe one of those vanity projects could have been a greenhouse or something, but I guess it’s too late for that.
With what water?
It’s a desert. Solar powered desalination plants might have been a good idea.
That’s a nice soft target there. Would be a shame if something, oh iran bombed one already.
I’ve had a look at their bank balances, they could afford a few backups
water.fanack.com/desalination-plants-water-weapon-gulf/
The American Israeli coalition directly and intentionally destroyed a desalination plant in Iran. Barhain’s desalination plant was damaged by debris from a drone strike on another target. Those are very different statements and very different levels of destruction.
But yes, they’re soft targets if the people attacking you are complete degenerates willing to commit way crimes!
With the amount of money and access to tech that’s available over there you could build an advanced hydroponics greenhouse that would recapture at least 95% of your water (some obviously leaves the system inside the plants). Build that and fill your reserve tanks during the times you’re not under blockade and you could function for a long time. It might not be enough to feed your entire population a full serving of fresh fruits and veggies every day but it would minimize the impact in situations like this.
lol It’s Dusell now I guess.
Lol, that’s cool. haha <3
The people with wealth have already fled to their spring palaces, the people left to starve there are the workers and migrants.
Haha, that’s the fun part. This news is truly awesome. All that matters is that the important people are safe and sound. Who would care about those others? They’re just casualties of war.
God I fucking hate being trapped in this country… 😣
Shouldn’t have been an ally of the US and Israel.
They’re not allies of the US nor Israel but just try to play being allies of everyone, just like Qatar, Turkey or India
If you’re hosting some other country’s military bases you’re either its Ally or its Vassal.
I can understand why they do it, but none the less there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Why not? It’s not like the true “Allies”, the billionares of Dubai, will be affected by the food shortage. They will just fly off and abandon every worker and tenant (if any?) in dubai.
It’s imoral, but the scumbags lose nothing.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
If nothing happens that society and its practices will never change and the pain will continue.
If the whole castle of cards collapses due to this, whilst it’s a small consolation for the current slaves given the pain they’ll endure, it’s way more pain spared for would be future slaves.
Further, the scumbags will definitelly lose if the whole slave-using realestate-bubble empire whose value supports their wealth collapses back to nomads camel fucking in the desert.
Also how did people historically live there? Before desalination plants
In XVIII they lived from fishery and hunting clams. In XX they lived from port and trade. In second half of XX they lived from petroleum. Now they live from youtubers who are testing rooms and food there.
It should also be mentioned that considerably fewer people lived there back then.
Yes
You left out the slave trade in XIX but yeah…
Obviously far fewer people lived there. They probably got their fresh water from a wadi or an oasis.
They’re not going to starve because they have a reserve of canned and frozen foods (as it says in the article), but they won’t get fresh food for a while. And, if you live in a modern city, you also import all your food, often from across an ocean.
The problem we’re seeing a lot in the modern world is that everything has been ultra optimized. Lots of just-in-time delivery, as little warehousing as possible. Products are bought for the lowest possible cost, even if that means they’re shipped from the other side of the planet. When it works, that’s fine. But, when there’s a disruption it’s deadly. I remember at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the price of bread in Egypt skyrocketed since all the grain they used came from Ukraine.
UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, etc. are in a bad geographic situation. They have ports on the sea but to get anything into their countries it has to pass by the Strait of Hormuz. Iran can mess with that traffic any time it wants, and Iran isn’t exactly friendly with those countries, or particularly stable. I wonder if those countries have backup plans to ship things in via say Oman.
Most of the Arab peninsula was inhabited by nomadic tribes that continuously moved with their cattle and tents, with the exception of a few scattered cities that thrived on trade and light agriculture (dates).
I think we have the solution
There are roads between the eastern side of the strait and Dubai and there is a cool technology called “trucks” that can be used to transport produce. Yes, it’s more expensive than boats but I read somewhere that Dubai is very rich.
See the problem there is, that they don’t have the oil /s
No for real they don’t have the trucks they would need and to acquire them takes time
If your infrastructure is all geared around getting everything in by port, it might not be possible to switch to getting it all in by truck.
There might not be enough trucks, or enough truck drivers. If they can get enough trucks and drivers, the roads may not be able to support that much traffic. And, that’s assuming they even have enough ports, and the right kinds of ports to unload any ships that come in on that side.
There’s thousands of trucks driving every night
There’s so many trucks they are not allowed to drive during the day. So the night it’s just one straight line of trucks from RAK to Abu Dabi
They don’t have trains so its the main way of moving goods between the emirates
No, surely they just didn't think of it.
You need the trucks in place now, and port capacity in the off coasts. It’s fair that they can work out an alternative to starving.
What, you mean you dont actually need helicopters to do that?
Trust me. They know about trucks. From 8 in the evening to 6 in the morning it’s miles and miles and miles of trucks going from the north to south
You need ships to get those trucks there in the first place. Also they have to be manufactured and bought.
Damn, one of my co-workers just left to go visit there. He had some serious reservations about going home for a couple weeks. I hope he makes it back okay…
Good.
All the Andrew Tate bro types are going to FAFO.
REAL MEN DON’T STARVE!
Then they shouldn’t allow US bases that get them embroiled in unprovoked conflicts.
Have they heard of airplanes? They flew through the air and can bring food and equipment along for the ride?
Tell me you haven’t read the article without telling me you haven’t read the article.
Can’t they just deliver shipments on the east coast and drive it in? It’s not far
Not an expert, but if all your deliveries had short drives and now they’re all long drives; you are way short on trucks.
It’s like 1 hour 30 min max
The whole country runs on long haul trucks.
They can easily figured out a solution
Well they must just all be morons then since they live there but you solved it with no actual information about their infrastructure or logistics or anything. That’s the kind of people we need in the C suite!
Just saying they’ll figure it out
I mean yeah they’ll figure it out, they’ve got enough money. It’s just very unlikely to be so simple.
Pity they abandoned the railroads
They are planning them again. They don’t have exit road space to fit all their trucks
Huzzah!!!
Dubai had no problem using slaves to build the Burj Khalifa. Maybe they should have their slaves bring some food for their masters?
Perhaps a few cocktails as well
I propose the slaves eat their masters
It’s a food pipeline they need, none of them gas ones.
It’s fine, I’m sure all the instafluencer porta-potties can just order Amazon!
Let them eat Uber.
The other issue these gulf states have is potable water. The majority of it is generated at a few desalination plants. The Iranians have already demonstrated their ability to reliably hit infrastructure all over the region. They can up the ante and create absolute chaos in the region. Even if the US-Israeli strikes cripple Iran’s infrastructure, Iran is in a stronger negotiating position. I’m appalled at the EU response to this unprovoked attack. They seem to think that appeasing a bully like trump is going to benefit the EU. Trump started this conflict in order to distract us from his other crimes. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
UAE Does not have/grow any Local Food???
or is that for all Middle east countries.
It is literally in the last paragraph of the write-up.
UAE imports 90% of its food while overall the gulf countries import 70% of their food.
Not much of a surprise, they are not known for their swathes of farm land.
Okay thank you.
I should read more next time.
Oh, anyway
How many days of “fresh food” can someone possibly have left?
Zucchini in the fridge will last for more than a week easy. Eggs last a month or longer. Onions don’t even need a fridge and last months.
How are the lentils and rice stockpiles looking?
10 days are over now. What is the update?