The biggest country in the world without a single river, see how it gets water for it's citizens.

A river is a stream of water with the shape of a ribbon that is forced downward by gravity. It's possible for a river to be wide and deep or it can be narrow enough to be crossed by wading. A moving body of water smaller than a river is referred to as a stream, creek, or brook. Others are only present during certain times of the year.

There are no rivers in Saudi Arabia, but despite this, the kingdom uses twice as much water as any other developing nation on the planet. Most of the water used in Saudi Arabia comes from desalination plants that purify seawater of salt, as well as from the ground. In the entire world, it uses the most desalinated water. More than 75 percent of the subsurface water that is not replenished has already been utilized. The water solution should soon come to an end.

There is hardly enough water left to last another ten years because they wasted so much water on crops. Water is evaporating at a faster rate due to widespread water extraction for home and industrial consumption. 

The Saudi government has taken many measures to prevent the catastrophic water shortage that has already made it illegal to grow wheat crops. Around 200 dams constructed by the government in different parts of the nation hold 6 billion cubic feet of water total.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spans a territory of 830,000 square miles. It is the twelfth biggest country in the globe, with mountains, plains, and a barren desert making up the majority of its terrain. There are no permanent rivers within its limits. It is one of just 17 nations in the world without rivers.

65 percent of Saudi Arabia's wastewater is recycled at a number of facilities spread out around the nation. Water and oil-filled puddles surround Saudi Arabia. The nation is now using its substantial resources to buy land and plant crops in other, more productive nations.

Things rich people buy that the poor don't even know are available

They say money can't buy happiness. But it can give you access to things many of us have no clue are even on the market.

Some time ago, a now-deleted Reddit user asked everyone on the platform "What do the rich buy that the poor don't even know is available for purchase?" And apparently, the shopping list of the elite is exactly what we're interested in; the post has received a whopping 16.5K comments.

However, while pet cloning and celebrity rentals sound appealing, let's not forget that over the last 50 years, the poverty rate in the U.S. has barely budged: in 1970, about 12% of the U.S. population was considered poor. In 2019, around 11% was. It's crazy to think that some splash hundreds of thousands of dollars on these luxuries while others don't have even the essentials.

Time.

All that you do commuting, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning your house, waiting on hold, paying bills  all those chunks of your life that are eaten up by minutiae - rich people buy out of all that routine garbage.Time is all you really get in your life. Rich people buy it back.

Luxury ice cubes.

Gläce Luxury Ice Co produces perfectly square ice blocks for “minimum dilution and maximum cooling”.

Hand-carved and completely clear, these cubes are sold in bags of 50 and each bag costs $325.

A person to go to jail for you in your stead.

This is a known phenomenon in Latin America but I imagine it happens in other places as well.

Landing 747s in small airports.

I grew up around Lexington, KY. The region is huge on horses, particularly Thoroughbred horses. The entire city is surrounded by horse farms, and these farms breed some of the best racing horses in the world. The rich and famous will often come here to buy Thoroughbreds to add to their breeding stock.

One such person is a shiek from Dubai (i think?) who owns his own private 747. Now the local airport isn't rated for 747s, and it's not legal to land one there unless it's a emergency. The shiek doesn't care though and lands his 747 there anyways. The airport fines him every time he does this, which he is totally fine with paying. I've been told that many of the upgrades to the airport over the years where almost entirely funded with money from those fines.

You can buy houses "ready to move in only with a suitcase". These house are more than fully equipped. Everything is already there like the whole furniture, glasses, knifes, forks, spoons, tissues and toilette paper, towels, toys and games for the children etc.

You can rent celebrities for your private events. Not just musicians, but bona fide actors & actresses.

Super rich guy in Bel Air used to host his kid's birthday party in late October, so they went all out for a Halloween themed party.

Everyone at the kid's school was invited, plus their own friends.

Each year they'd hire some fantastic athlete to appear at the event; 1 year it was Tony Hawk, another year it was some Olympic gold medal gymnastic winners.

The one that threw me was when they hired Demi Moore, Anthony Kedis & Benecio de Toro to be "guests" at the party, to hang out and pretend they were friends with the kid.

Mind you this was a KID'S Halloween party, set outside in a huge, massive garden, spread out over tennis courts & lawns, with games, buffets, dessert tables, taco stands, omelette stands, bbq, pizza, burgers, etc... no booze, no one allowed inside. All the event staff were dressed in halloween costumes, it was VERY cool.

Entire floors of hotels or multiple floors. Entire restaurants. Chefs from literally any restaurant in the world to cook for them, wherever they are.

I saw all of those things done by a Prince Of Saudi Arabia: We estimated it cost him $50,000 just for the one private meal in our restaurant, given that he:

1. Had the top four floors of our hotel booked (for the hundreds of staff to take care of him, his wife and his two kids; plus likely some concubines, if I'm being honest). As someone in this part of the world, being rich= the number of people who work for you.

2. He paid $30k just to close our restaurant for one meal.

3. Flew his favorite chef from New York to Orlando to cook for him, on his private jet; and then back again. Of course, it was likely the OTHER private jet he had just for his staff, not for himself or his family.

4. Make food our entire staff, all the kitchen staff, all the federal, state and local security and him, his wife and his two kids.

I have posted the entire story somewhere else in the past, but I couldn't find it easily.

I had a buddy who taught ski lessons to another Saudi Prince's little kid and had some nearly unbelievable and yet similar details during his interactions with them. That kid had an entire team around him or probably ten staff, plus vehicles, snowmobiles, a helicopter, and so on.

I later met a guy who worked on an ultra-luxury 300-foot yacht and served Bill Gates and his wife, among other super-rich people. Their primary job was to operate without interacting with them, or at least as little as possible.

This shows you, in some sense, that having people around you doing stuff you need to be done but doing it invisibly is another perk of being rich.

A while back some guy on here was talking about his experience working as a sort of personnel manager for a billionaire and how things are just wildly different for them.

The specific example he used was how things work when these people want to go on a trip, and give any notice at all to their employees.

What happens is that an advanced team gets sent ahead by a few days to scope out the rented/bought location and report back exact dimensions for closet space, drawer space, etc. People back at the home go through the clothing, jewelry, etc, and draw up a priority list which is sent to the advanced team. The advanced team then spends the next two days purchasing the list of items.

 Entire wardrobes, jewelry sets, makeup kits, bathing supplies, etc. Anything they cannot get (not enough time, or is one-of-a-kind like the family heirloom watch the rich dude wears every now and then) is relayed to the house-team. The family's schedule is arranged such that the moment the family leaves the house on the day of travel, a whole team of people rushes through and packs up all the remaining items (only after the family leaves, you wouldn't want to deny them access to their items for even a few seconds) which are then sent ahead to the airport while the family has a lunch or something somewhere.

 Upon landing, their luggage takes one route (direct) and the family takes a similarly indirect route (unless otherwise directed) such that by the time they get to the location all of their items are not just unpacked but in their proper organized locations and ready for use without any of the advanced team ever being visible to the family.

What happens when the family leaves the location? The same situation in reverse, but quite frequently all of the repurchased items are just disposed of in some method. It's just easier, if not cheaper, to rebuy them each time the family goes somewhere if they aren't travelling to too many different locations in quick succession.

I don't see it on here, but the vast majority of financial products are out-of-reach for all but the rich. One reason the rich get richer is that they have access to investments that we've never heard of.

 Ever seen "The Big Short" why do you think Goldman Sachs took a week to correctly price Dr. Michael Burry's housing-short position? Because they were securing that position for themselves and their clients. 

Those financial instruments are so complicated and the regulation on them so byzantine that it wouldn't surprise me if Goldman actually didn't do anything illegal, like they're allowed, at their discretion, to misprice an asset for a certain period of time. Probably under the guise of the assets being complicated to price, but really it's just a buffer for them to get an edge that regular people couldn't believe.

Imagine going to a horse race an being able to bet on the horses near the end of the race. Rich people get that.

China is Taking Over The World

Banks fail and Clueless Janet gives a speech identifying the main international financial problems as racism, abortion, and climate change. More banks fail and Janet gives another speech saying it was caused by a failure of the regulatory system which she was instrumental in establishing but it is not her fault; we need more regulations.

Credit Suisse fails. The Saudis are the largest shareholder. They, and other Gulf Arab investors, who own 25% of Credit Suisse because of recent investments to prop it up, hate to lose their investment so propose a takeover plan to save it. They are stiffed by the Swiss government which will only accept a “Swiss solution.”

Joey gets a series of fist bumps from the Saudi Crown Prince. Right to the gut. But Joey does not seem to know it. First, the Saudis accept a detente with Iran brokered by China. This does not make them pals, they have been enemies for centuries. But it does mean they will not actively shoot at each other and will work together on common problems - such as increasing the oil price. Then, the Saudis announce they are joining the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS, both organizations dominated by China which offer international financial options to supplement China’s Belt and Road system. 

The SCO has 21 full members and affiliates waiting to become members. BRICS has 14 members and affiliates. Some are also SCO members. Other Arab countries and OPEC members can be expected to follow the Saudi lead to join these groups. 

These moves by the Saudis not only re-align the power structure of the Middle East but of the world. China is now dominant not only in the Middle East, but also Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa and has a “no limits” partnership with Russia.

Most of the world does not care about the “U.S.-led International World Order.” China is knocking it down before our eyes. Most of the world does not care about Ukraine. Most of the world does not care about U.S. or European sanctions on Russia, Iran, Venezuela, or anybody else. Even Japan has broken away from the Order and is now buying Russian oil above the “price cap” established by the U.S. and Europe.

These are profound changes. The U.S. Administration seems unaware.

After establishing this power re-alignment, the Saudis, Russia, and OPEC announced they would extend last October’s production cuts to the end of the year and add another million-barrel-per-day cut as well. Oil prices jumped back up into the 80s. Joey said this was “inadvisable.” Of course, no one was listening. Most people do not listen to the babblings of a fool.  

All this seems less a repudiation of U.S. leadership than a recognition that the current U.S. Administration is incapable of leading anything – much less the Free World. Its president has to be led off the stage after a poorly-delivered speech which makes no sense to anyone but him. The Diversity Cabinet is unanimously incompetent. The Secretary of Energy is silent about these events - which profoundly affect energy markets and supplies. These events mark a massive failure of our foreign policy and the Secretary of State seems not to notice. The Secretary of Defense faded away a couple of years ago and hasn’t been seen or heard since.  

China is winning the competition for world dominance. It is winning not because it has a strong economy, financial system, or an attractive social system. It does not. China is in bad shape economically, demographically, and financially. It is winning because it has a strong leader. It is facing an opponent with a society trying to figure out what gender it is.  

The U.S. is left with a few reluctant floundering allies, mostly in Europe and they are also in terrible shape. Many of them are finding that willy-nilly subsidies for renewable energy and mandates against fossil fuels are either unaffordable or leaving them unemployed and freezing in the dark. Policy according to teenage hysteria. 

New estimates for future oil demand are out. Despite the economic damage caused by climate mandates, various OPEC, EIA, IEA, and Goldman forecasts estimate world oil demand will increase between 2.0 and 2.3 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2023. Oil is still a major component of the world economy. Thankfully, many projects for new supplies have been announced recently. 

Years ago, British Petroleum was government owned. It was a rather stodgy unimaginative company surviving on what was left of the Empire.   

But then BP was privatized, bought several U.S. major integrated companies, and grew into an aggressive international oil company. Recently, however, British government mandates against fossil fuels, as in Europe, crippled BP and other energy companies and distorted their business. They caused a major energy shortage, exorbitant costs, and a crisis in the British economy. 

Yet roughly half of the British people think a re-nationalization of the energy business will fix the problem.

And, with all the obvious failures of the Biden Administration it still has about 40% support of the American public. Go figure. Is this because the public does not know or understand what is happening or is it Stockholm Syndrome? Whatever the reason, it demonstrates how democracy will eventually vote for its own destruction. 

Trump raves against the United States president following a brief arrest, saying "World War III is likely under Biden, and the dollar will lose its value."

"Our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat in 200 Years," Trump said while speaking at Mar-a-Lago.

After a brief arrest in the hush money case, Donald Trump on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on US President Joe Biden and accused him of destroying the country. He said the world soon witness World War III under President Biden and the dollar, which countries keep as a reserve currency, may no longer be the world standard. "Our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat in 200 Years," Trump said while speaking at Mar-a-Lago.

On Tuesday, Trump was criminally charged in a Manhattan court for falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. He pleaded no guilty to 34 felony counts and later said the only crime that he had committed was to "fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it". Trump said the Democrats had weaponised America's system of laws like the USA had never seen before.

The former president, who is preparing to run for another term next year, said the world is likely to face an all-out nuclear World War III under Biden. He said that there were open threats by various countries of the use of nuclear weapons, something which was never discussed by other nations during his administration.

"This could very well lead under the Biden administration's leadership to an all-out nuclear World War III can happen. We're not very far away from it, believe it or not," Trump said, in an apparent reference to Russia which recently announced that it will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

Trump said America was now in a mess under Biden, who took charge as President in January 2021. "Our economy is crashing. Inflation is out of control. Russia has joined with China. Can you believe that? Saudi Arabia has joined with Iran," the former president said, adding that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have come together as a "menacing and destructive coalition".

China recently brokered a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Beijing is also deepening its relationship with Moscow as they both are opposed to the US-led global order. Russia has already adopted the Chinese Yuan as one of the main currencies for its international reserves and overseas trade in the face of Western sanctions.

China's yuan has replaced the US dollar as the most traded currency in Russia, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The yuan surpassed the dollar in monthly trading volume in February for the first time, and the difference became more pronounced in March, the report said citing data from daily transaction reports from the Moscow Exchange.

Last month, the government said the RBI had allowed banks from 18 countries to trade in the rupee. Recently, noted economist Nouriel Roubini said the Indian rupee could become one of the global reserve currencies over a period of time. 

"One can see how the Indian rupee could become a vehicle currency for some of the trade that India does with the rest of the world, especially South-South trade. It could be a unit of account, it could be a means of payment, and it could become a store of value. Certainly, the rupee over time could become one of the varieties of global reserve currencies in the world," Roubini said during an interaction with Economic Times.

High-level pressure that compelled Ruto and Raila to negotiate

President William Ruto and Azimio One Kenya leader Raila Odinga kept secret their talks to end the twice-weekly protests that had started hitting the economy and jeopardized lives and property.

The two played their cards close to their chests, keeping details of their discussions secret even from their closest allies after they were warned to be wary of vested interests from their respective political groupings.

It has also emerged that the President opted to climb down to avoid yet another violent confrontation with Azimio leaders and supporters yesterday.

At the same time, reports indicate that Delaware Senator Chris Coons — credited for playing a part in the President Uhuru Kenyatta-Raila 2018 “handshake” that ended a similar stand-off, played a major role in efforts to break the ice between President Ruto and the Azimio leader.

Although they were kept in touch with each other over the weekend, President Ruto and Raila never met in person, only engaging through a senior official in the Office of the Directorate of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) who acted as an intermediary and who relayed messages from one party to the other.

Some sources indicated that the President turned down a proposal for a physical meeting that religious leaders were pushing for. In the absence of direct talks, the senior official was engaged to act as a go-between relaying the two leaders’ respective positions.

So secretive were the negotiations that only three people on President Ruto’s side were aware of the developments; Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki, his Transport counterpart Kipchumba Murkomen and Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot. On Raila’s side, only his 2022 presidential campaign running mate, Martha Karua, and Wiper Party leader Kalonzo Musyoka were looped in.

Former Defence Cabinet Secretary Eugene Wamalwa, Roots Party leader George Wajackoya and the rest of the Azimio leadership was in the dark over the goings on until the last minute. “The stakes were high and we told the two leaders that they would be held responsible should the country burn, and therefore they had to take up the initiative,” Mombasa Catholic Archbishop Martin Kivuva, who also chairs the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) and was part of the initiative, told People Daily yesterday.

The clerics approached the two leaders directly after they realised that the talks were being frustrated by hardliners in the respective corners. As a result, the negotiators asked the two leaders to leave out their allies considered to have taken hard-line positions.

International community

Sources privy to the talks indicated to the People Daily that though there had been several initiatives geared towards brokering a truce between the two leaders, they were later whittled down to two.... one led by the international community and the other by KCCB (see separate story).

The initiative by the international community was spearheaded by Coons, who led a US delegation into the country and first held a meeting with Gachagua on Wednesday before meeting Raila later in the evening.

An initiative by the Inter-Religious Council of Kenya (IRCK) was shelved after Raila’s camp reportedly raised reservations over the presence of a leading clergyman in the team, whom they accused of being partisan.

Senator Coons, a close ally of US President Joe Biden, also met retired President Uhuru Knyatta and later President Ruto on Friday before departing for the US later in the evening. According to one source, President Biden had dispatched Croons to broker the talks.

Yesterday Daadab Member of Parliament Farah Maalim, a Kalonzo ally, attributed the success of the talks to Coon’s intervention. “The biggest game changer here is not the church, the religious sector, or the political class. It is the American Senator Chris Coons who talked to everybody and told them to stand down,” said the MP.

Before the Sunday announcement, there had been fears over the future of the talks after allies of President Ruto and Raila appeared to harden their positions.

For instance, Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua had been highly critical of Raila, with some of his allies saying that any talks could only centre around Raila’s permanent retirement from politics and calling off the protests.

Gachagua had on Saturday heightened tension when he claimed that Monday would have been the last day for Azimio to hold any demonstrations before the government “asserts its authority”.

Speaking in Malava, Kakamega County during a thanksgiving ceremony of the area MP Injendi Malulu, Gachagua said: “I want to assure the people of Kenya today from Kakamega County that tomorrow, nobody, and I repeat nobody, will be allowed to destroy property anywhere in the Republic of Kenya.”

A day earlier, Raila had claimed that Monday, April 3 would have been the “mother of all protests”.

Sources within his camp had told the People Daily that Azimio had threatened to storm the Nairobi Central Business District (CBD), a threat that Inspector General of Police Japhet Koome had vowed would have been met with “the full force of the law”, meaning that this would have ended up as violent confrontation between protesters and police.

The government was determined to keep Azimio out of the city centre as it is considered the heart and soul of government and commercial operations.

Azimio protests centred on the need to reduce the high cost of living, including the price of unga, the opening of last year’s presidential election servers for a forensic audit, stopping the reconstitution of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and respecting multi-party democracy to allow all parties to flourish without the government enticing opposition legislators to its side.

On the other hand, President Ruto’s side had ruled out discussing anything related to the outcome of the 2022 General Election, which the President said was settled by the Supreme Court judgement.

The team also ruled out discussions on the constitution of a new IEBC team, a position that the President vacated on Sunday during his address to the nation from State House, Nairobi. Talks have already started to make this a parliamentary process since MPs must pass a new law once they agree on how the new commissioners are to be selected.

On the high cost of living, President Ruto had insisted on being given more time to enable the measures they have put in place to start working. And on Sunday, he said consignments of foodstuff would be arriving in the country’s ports this week and, once in the market, they were expected to ease the cost of basic goods, hence manage inflation.