Fuck the Environment

[kthx]

Manbearpig is on the loose after all.

[Displaced]

I am also curious about you Displaced. Did you work in Dubai yourself? or had you been a kid just under your parents guidance? After reading so many stories of why people go to Dubai and the abuse of laborers there I am curious to know if your family or yourself had maids and servants at your command like slaves? Just a curioisty question and not saying that this is what you and your family had at your disposal.

Ill read the article when I get off work, and will comment on it afterwards, don't have the time to do so atm.

I moved to Dubai in 1994, so I was like 9, left when I was 18.. As such I've done both, worked in a IT company from age 15/16.

We didn't have a maid or any other kind of help around the house, It's not something I personally believe in, nor is it something my parents were comfortable with, but it is very common in the UAE as a whole to have 1 or multiple maids to handle everyday chores.

Our neighbours for example (from New Zealand and from the US) both had a maid, IIRC their wage was (ballpark) 500AED a month, which was about 100USD a month. (boarding in a offsuite room with toilet was provided)

Sure, there are people who treat their maids like shit, and the general "working class" (construction workers etc) are treated very badly. I.e. passports are taken away when they enter the country, paid 10USD a month, and live in plywood shantytowns somewhere in the desert.

The UAE also has very "strict" rules when it comes to employment contracts in general, your employer is your sponsor for a residence visa, and many companies have state backed contracts which state (by law) that they are allowed to take their employees passports.
There are also laws in place which effectively prohibit you from changing jobs at a whim, i.e. if you "quit" your job, you are not allowed to move on to another job within 6 months, or you are forced to pay severence to your ex employer, around 5k USD.
Employers can also freeze your assets if they feel you have breached terms in your contract etc, basically, employers and the states hold all the cards, there are no unions or anyone else to complain to if you end up getting shafted.

The UAE is also turning more conservative as we speak, public showing of affection is banned, under the threat of deportation/prizon.
Flipping someone off in public = prizon.

The base behind all of this is that the local populous is miniscule, around 7% of the population is local, and a growing number of that populous feel that their country is being overrun by foreigners, and that they are losing their Arab heritage and Arab identity to the influx of westerners.

The current economic climate is also doing its part, since the new year over 100,000 westerners have been deported from Dubai alone, houses full of stuff, cars left at the airport, debts unpaid.

Others are "less" fortunate, others have been sent to prizon to repay their debts, passports confiscated, family unable to leave the country, but also unable to get any work since they have been blacklisted by the government. It's a vicious cycle atm, and only time will tell when/if Dubai will settle back to what it was in the mid 90's. (A safe haven for westerners looking for a fast buck)

Huoh, I wrote a hell of a lot more than I had expected.

[Displaced]

404, read the article now and i do have to comment...

It paints a very one sided picture of Dubai, and the UAE as a whole, written to provoke some kind of reaction.

Yes there is a totalitarian government, but Sheikh Mohammad's pictures aren't plastered on every other building. Infact the Sheikh is quite low key.

Yes the imported "unskilled" labor from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/Sri-Lanka etc aren't payed well, and are housed in makeshift plywood towns on the outskirts of Dubai.
They aren't however forced into it or tricked into coming, and not allowed to leave after their contract expires.
These makeshift houses are airconditioned, and everyone is supplied with food and water, clothes + their paycheck. Even though the pay to us is insignificant, you need to consider that they have no expenses to pay. (boarding, food, clothes, electricity, etc)
I spent an internship at Ernst & Young in Dubai, and have talked with a LOT of these unskilled laborers, most of them come to Dubai for a year or two, go back to wherever they came from and build themselves houses and are generally better off than they were when they arrive. (granted there are exceptions, some workers are mistreated)

Also saying that the workers are "forced" to work ludicrous hours in the sweltering heat is untrue, the unskilled workforce aren't allowed to do anything major, or complex. They do arbitrary things at a slow pace, i.e. sort construction scrap, but generally they try to do as little as possible, which is possible, since there are literally thousands of them at one construction project at a time.

"Skilled jobs", such as welding is done by trained welders who have completely different paychecks and living conditions.

The heat is the same for everyone, be it a unskilled worker or the foreman, it doesn't differentiate between different social classes...

The case of the Canadian man + woman seems more like a case of stupidity rather than anything else...
Dubai is not some makebelieve wonderland, where you can do as you please.

It is very much a MUSLIM country, with very strict rules and regulations. These regulations are available to everyone online, or from your local embassy. It should come as NO surprise that if you quit your job, and have huge debt, that your accounts are frozen and sent to prizon to pay off the remainder.

The fact that they were not smart enough to arrange a translator for the court hearing was a fault of their own, one is NOT provided by the courts, rather must be found by the defendant if so required, just as a lawyer is not provided by the courts. The official language in the UAE is Arabic, not English, don't expect preferrential treatment because you are Canadian...

Not to stereotype anyone, but for some reason it does seem like people coming to the ME from Northern America have absolutely no clue about local law or local culture. Every time something happens in accordance to local laws, they are the first to cry foul.

I.e. during our stay in Saudi, we had a new neighbour come in from Texas, he had his wife and kid with him. After a few weeks, she decided it was time for her to go to the nearest supermarket, which was about 10 miles from our gated community.
She got in the car (Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia), left the gated community. (Foreign women are not allowed to leave gated communities without the supervision of their Husbands)
She left the community wearing a t-shirt and shorts (Women are required to wear traditional Saudi Abaya at all times outside of said gated communities).

Ok, so she arrives at the store, where some Saudi national sees here getting out of the car, and calls the Religious Police (Muttawa), they show up and tell her to get her husband on the phone so he can come take her back.
She gets all pissed off about it being her "RIGHT" to go shopping by herself, and how they cannot tell her what to do.

Well, she then gets beaten, and both herself and the husband get deported from KSA, they then proceed to cry foul about how their rights were violated to the Saudi Embassy...
COME ON! Follow the rules of whichever country you are in, not the country you are from.

There are multiple similar events that have occurred all over the UAE too, where westerners have been deported for having sex on the beaches or being drunk in public, then gone on to complain about it to the media... Is common sense a fleeting notion?

The part about locals becoming uneasy at the amount of foreigners in the UAE is true, and I touched on that in my earlier post.
It is also true, that the root of pretty much ALL of the problems in the UAE currently, stem from the fact that it is and has developed much too quickly for its own good. It has gone from literally nothing, to having an excess of everything in less than one generation. Legislation doesn't have a chance to keep up, and progress is in constant battle with heritage and tradition.

When I first visited Dubai in 1991, there was literally ONE paved road on the Jumeirah side of the creek, there was no Sheikh Zayed Highway through the whole city, there was no beach road. Where the Burj Al Arab recides atm, there was a Chicago Beach hotel, that was connected by a dirt road along the coast to the rest of dubai some 20 miles away, there really was hardly anything.

Now there are multiple highways, countless high rise buildings, more 6 star hotels than you can shake a stick at, indoor ski slopes, ice rinks, FIA approved raceing circuits, the worlds largest and most glamorous malls, restaurants, golfcourses, all of the locals have their every need met for, and there are more ferraris and lamborghinis per square mile in Dubai than in Maranello or Sant'Agata.

i.e. a Picture taken at the current Sheikh Zayed Road in 1974:

Picture taken in the same general area a few years ago.



Yet the older generation grew up being nomads or pearl divers, living a very traditional, minimalist lifestyle. There is bound to be some kind of conflict between the two, and it will take time before the legislation of the UAE is to the same standard as Europe or North America, which developed over centuries, not in decades.

[Galleleo]

Are prizons tougher than prisons?

[Cops]

Just delete threads that are obvious attempts at trolling people for attention. No ones that stupid Wark, not even you.

[Cops]

YES! good thing I've lived there for 10 years.. my carbon footprint is huge!

although, there are multiple springs in the UAE from where they gather drinking water, such as MASAFI brand water...

Tap water is distilled/desalinated seawater, but that is the case in most of the Gulf states, i.e. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, etc.

Edit:
Dubai also has a "air/water purificator", which collects moisture from the humidity in the air, and condenses it into drinking water.

Interesting, you lived there?

[kthx]

So we should delete this thread, then you show honest interest in the thread, awesome.

[Cops]

So we should delete this thread, then you show honest interest in the thread, awesome.

Don't flatter yourself, this thread is a piece of garbage but it's interesting that Displaced lived in Dubai for 10 years. I'm pretty sure I could ask him about this in or out of your thread. I doubt the mods will close your thread so I might as well derail it with something more interesting. I think it's a bit more frustrating for you to not get a response and have people talk over you, so continue on with your thread while I wait for more details from Displaced.

[Displaced]

Yeah Cops, lived there for 10 years, what do you want to know? :turned:

I grew up as a bit of a world traveler, I've lived in 6 different countries before my 10th bday, seen a lot of other places along the way too.

[Cops]

you know that thread about people you've wanted to know more about and never asked, while you're my number one choice right now.

What's your background (polite way of asking ethnicity)?

Where were you born?

Why have you moved around so much?

Why have you never mentioned this before?

Why Dubai?

What's the Rents do?

Ever lived in Canada?

Shawarma or Kabobs?

and Name the countries

[PaulOakenfold]

Is it true Dubai is just all smoke and mirrors?

[Cops]

How awesome is Dubai? Besides not being able to drink how much fun is it?

[Displaced]

What's your background (polite way of asking ethnicity)?
I'm caucasian, Finnish by nationality.

Where were you born?
Helsinki, Finland

Why have you moved around so much?
Dad is/was a engineer for a multinational corporation, to get ahead in his chosen career, he needed to travel to a lot of different places. His family tagged along.

Why have you never mentioned this before?
I thought everyone and their grandmother already knew this, it has been mentioned quite a few times :P

Why Dubai?
Why not?
Truthfully, it was emerging as a great market opportunity at the time, and the company decided to relocate its ME branch to Dubai, my Dad was one of the people they hired due to his previous engagements in the region.

What's the Rents do?
Rents do? engrish?
Rents were considerably cheaper when we moved to Dubai then they are now, IIRC annually our rent for a roughly 2400sqft villa was ballpark 175k AED per annum, or 35k USD.
Similarly sized villas are fetching about 250-400k AED per annum atm.

Ever lived in Canada?
No such luck.

Shawarma or Kabobs?
Shwarma, every time...

and Name the countries
Lived in: (2 years or more)
Japan, Hong Kong, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Dubai.

Visited:
Portugal, Macau, China, Singapore, Thailand, S.Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, India, Russia, (Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain: UAE as a whole), Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Spain, England, Ireland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Switzerland.

Might be forgetting something, but somewhere along those lines lies the truth...

Dubai was pretty awesome, its going downhill fast though, so god knows how "fun" it'll be in a few years time...

Oh and you can drink in Dubai, go to a club or bar that is attached to a hotel = they have a liquor license, there are also state run alcohol stores, where you can purchase booze with a card given to you by your employer, depending on your monthly wage, you are allowed to spend a certain amount per month on booze.
Plus there is a black market for the stuff too...

It is legal to drink in places with liquor licenses, and on "private property", but you aren't allowed to go to the public beach and get drunk.

[gran guerrero]

terrorist

[D1st0rt]

terrorist

takes one