Dubai in decline

There are some great collections of photos showing Detroit’s decline.

Now comes a collection from the jewel of the Gulf – Dubai. From the New York Times:

As the orgy of building ground to a halt earlier this year, the photographer Lauren Greenfield set out to tell the story of Dubai and the foreign workers who make up most of its population.

“I call the story an improbable fairy tale,” Ms. Greenfield said. “Anything that could be fantasized could be built. It really was the land of opportunity. It’s more Las Vegas than Las Vegas.”

Nationalizing biology: Political borders are becoming biological borders when a fence is erected, even if it’s a few strands of barbed wire. Researchers are finding diversity from one side to the other. From Edible Geography:

For example, the antlion surplus in Israel can be traced back to the fact that the Dorcas gazelle is a protected species there, while across the border in Jordan, it can legally be hunted. Jordanian antlions are thus disadvantaged, with fewer gazelles available to serve “as ‘environmental engineers’ of a sort” and to “break the earth’s dry surface,” enabling antlions to dig their funnels.

Exaggeration? Environmental Working Group says an ethanol lobbying group is vastly overestimating job growth from a change in federal ethanol blend standards:

Our analysis shows that only 12,000 to 27,000 jobs would be created at a cost to taxpayers of between $195,000 and $446,000 per job per year for a total cost of $ 5.4 billion per year. Other independent analysts suggest that 38,000 jobs would be created at the cost of $139,000 per job per year.