When the lights go out in Dubai for the last time, an all too soon occurrence, all the British ex-pats and various other elite who own suites in this modern day 'Tower of Babel' will have one very long, hot, dark descent down a pitch black stair well into increasingly hellish heat. Those that survive will emerge into a country in civil turmoil and catastrophic shortages of everything needed for basic survival.

Welcome to your own personal hell.

Capitalism CREATES wealth does it not?

Dubai is a Constitutional Monarchy and already has a King. They have no plans to steal another country's oil.
There is no reason for them to destroy the building.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Now who has the BIGGEST one? Perhaps Freud was on to something.

Rivals their enclosed ski trail in the desert for waste, pomposity and the rejection of concern for the mass of humanity.

Technological brilliance for cretinous purpose.

A monument to the idiocy of capitalism.

I always found it poetic that Dubai, the country flaunting wealth and perverse triumph over Nature, will be one of the first to go under the rising sea levels.

Looks like an easy target to me, when the US turns against its Dubai "allies".

I have to say, nothing that man makes is beautiful or worth a crap and particularly this useless shrine to the wayward elite.

looks like a bunch of racist haters in here. CAIR should be notified.

Modern day pharaohs, a monument to another failed empire.

Disgusting.
Considering the poverty and suffering in Gaza and elsewhere in the region. When children in Gaza were asked what they wanted most. Overwhelmingly the answer was: a glass of water in the morning before they go to school.
Let's call this tower a Tower of Shame.

Dubai is the perfct symbol of human society today.

Ignore reality. Move forward as if only religion and money matters.

But Obama, and the sheikhs of Dubai will have to live on this planet another day.

Population increases and resource depletion will continue to destroy the environment.

Their tower in the sky will have no heat, no air conidtioning, no lights, no water. It's lobby will soon be under water.

And Obama's children and the familie's of sheikhs will live in a world that they helped to create.

Could it be that some Americans simply cannot stomach the idea that the Arabs - a race vilified, slandered and detested beyond imagination by the collective American psyche - have just constructed the world's tallest tower, in doing so stealing the limelight from the Empire State Building and Sears Towers ?

For decades, much of the world admired, envied and sometimes resented the United States for its technological prowess. Perhaps now Americans are projecting the insecurities of their collapsing economy onto other nations that are beating them at their own game.