Dubai

A writer logged how a 'modernized' Dubai restaurant turned one brunch into admin: a lone QR menu six people scanned in turns, a meter app that interrupted the table with a two-minute warning, and a split-payment screen so muddy that 24 dirhams walked out unpaid.

The frame is Rory Sutherland's doorman fallacy: automating a job's visible task while deleting its invisible value. The sharpest pushback came from a former big-tech engineer who lived in a doorman building for a decade and calls doormen a luxury, not a fallacy.

An Oxford study cited in the thread projects nearly half the world living with extreme heat by 2050 at 2°C of warming. The lived answer is already here — disposable labor that works until health breaks, then gets replaced.

Wealthier economies adapt structurally: siesta, night shifts, air conditioning. One reader adds the cruel detail — heat sickness isn't one-and-done; once it hits, tolerance can take a month to rebuild.