And typically in the US it is illegal immigrants who face these sorts of issues. They’re illegal in the first place so they rarely surrender their passports and tend to vanish back into the underground economy.
What makes this situation particularly egregious is that it appears to be somewhat state-sponsored.
Lastly, cherry picking a few quotes from clueless Westerneres really isn’t the biggest issue here Reply. The real issue is a system that allows this type of behaviour to continue. Vent you’re rage at the true evil and not the strawman.
Yeah, but it sounds like they are being preyed upon at both ends…from recruiters in their home countries promising the moon (and indebting the workers), and then being asked to surrender their passports on the other end of the deal, and being forced into a lower paying job than they were told, living in concrete hell, forced to work yeoman’s hours in the hot desert sun and generally being miserable.
Didn’t I? Not just the system, either, but the influx of foreign personnel and money that turn a blind eye to it. The rant really is directly more towards human selfishness in general than any one particular city or group.
This is true. The recruiters in India, Sri Lanka etc are just as much to blame… and these people’s Embassies do little to help. Sri Lankan newspapers are mostly a few articles and hundreds of ads for work in the Gulf… and lots of money does come back so it is a difficult situation.
The article is truly disturbing. I’m curious how Dubailand, a resort that was supposed to be twice the size of Disney World (although the comparison isn’t totally apt) has been affected? Is it still being developed? Is it going to be anywhere near the size it was originally planned?
I think we’re getting a better idea of wherefore (whence/wither/whatfor) Dubai - considering that Dubai World just essentially defaulted on their loans, sending shockwaves through the global markets. (Abu Dhabi seems to have declined to bail them out.) It grew from the sand, and it will fall back into the sand. Any lessons learned will probably be some time in coming, and not nearly enough.
(Apologies for the slight violation of the zombie revival guidelines - I figured it was a sensible resurrection.)
Not exactly the same part of the world, but one of my fellow postgrad students was from one of the other Gulf states.
She wouldn’t accept any help or advice from anyone, including our supervisor. She wasn’t a complete idiot but she came from a medical background not a scientific one so she was always going to need a fair bit of support.
People tried to help her out and she started writing letters, I really find it hard to watch people screw themselves, but when you point out to someone that they have set up their pipette wrong and they start complaining to their actual embassy it’s time to let them make their own mistakes.
She spent the next three years presenting figures that she thought showed an effect but actually were completely flat because she didn’t know how to plot her axes properly (this would be a worrying mistake if made by a first year undergrad), she could never get her error bars to work properly because they were several times bigger than the graphs :eek:.
She got her PhD and headed back to head a lab there.
I was told by another student who’d spent some time in that part of the world, that her government really didn’t give a toss about the actual standard of education that it’s students came back with but she had to be seen to have a PhD from a western university in order to “run” the lab, whilst all the actual work would be done by hires.
No idea whether this could be seen as typical though.
She did tell some of us that there would be jobs for us over there if we wanted them, but I can’t imagine that anyone could ever pay me enough to work for her.
Abu Dhabi is the largest, and Dubai the second largest, of seven coastal Aram sheikhdoms that retained their independence from the Saudis as a British protectorate (Trucial Oman). When Britain left in 1972, they became a federation of semi-autonomous emirates, the U.A.E. The Sultan of Abu Dhabi is head of state, the Sultan of Dubai vice head of state. It would be incorrect to see them as city-states, but the large capital city of each emirate, which has the same name as the emirate, is in normal circumstances the only place you’re likely to hear about per emirate.
The other five, FWIW, are Umm al Qaiwain, Sharjah, Fujairah, Ras al Khaimah, and Ajman. They are clustered on the Musandam Peninsula, and the political geography is complex, with each having exclaves in, and enclaves of, one or more of the others.
The gay thing is a reaction to a state that separates the sexes until marriage. Even at a wedding the women and men are separated. So, men dance with men and boys. The women are off by themselves. Suppressing sex does not work, particularly at the teen years.
Oh the pedantic issue of wherefore again? Why not Dubai?
Dubai because it has always been a hotbed of seaminess due its place on trade routes.
What we call “human rights” are not automatically apparent in all of the world’s cultures, and painting on a money driven veneer of diversity doesn’t suddenly make a country adopt secular values.
EDIT: Just realized the zombie nature of this thread - nevermind.
No matter how much money you make, if you spend more ,you can go bankrupt. Mike Tyson, M.C. Hammer, and many others have proven that. This is just doing it with more zeros.
Seems that the biggest direct loan to Dubai World is from RBS, one of the UK banks that i) nearly went under, ii) took secret loans from the UK government, iii) took even more public loans from the government iv) was eventually bought by the government.
Potentially worse still, a large number of bundled derivatives, all over the fucking world, are tied up in Dubai real estate. It’ll be like subprime, but on a city/state basis. Wonder how many other places there are like that… Singapore? Hong Kong? Shanghai? China?
Yeah, this doesn’t bode well on many levels. I wonder just how big and long-lasting the ripple effect on the global markets will be. I can’t imagine it being too terribly bad, though, right? Dubai has got to be far and away a net importer, so wouldn’t the most dramatic impact be upon Dubai itself, aside from any and all loans Dubai ends up defaulting on, or is there a deeper issue still?
and headed back to head a lab there.