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[OT] The USA is a great place to live!

LabattBlue

By LabattBlue
in The Aud Club

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Two or less First Liner

Two or less

Posted
Posted

lol not shocked at all. They are the same people who cut your fingers if you get caught stealing. Had a friend who went there to work for 6 months, the pictures he came back with were unreal, it's like a true paradise and the plans they have for future projects are unreal. They have a indoor ski resort. Yeah, like wtf? He once showed me an article, that Dubai has like 10% of all world cairns right now. Some crazy stat like that. It's an amazing place to live, very beautiful and lots to do, but you just need to make sure you know the laws and def make sure you never break them.

apuszczalowski First Liner

apuszczalowski

Posted
Posted

its their own fault, you have to know the culture of a place before you go visit.

 

As for Dubai, they have alot of plans, but right now the money isn't there. The are in serious financial trouble getting bailed out by Abu Dhabi (I believe)because the real estate market has taken a huge hit. Their only income is from oil, and they know that when that happens, they will have to rely on being a tourist location to survive

biodork First Liner

biodork

Posted
Posted

The crazy thing is that in the article they indicate the guy involved lived AND worked there... so shouldn't he have known ahead of time that the whole public affection thing would get him into trouble?? Very stupid on his part.

Eleven Hall of Famer

Eleven

Posted
Posted

How 'bout the UAE spends some money stabilizing the region instead of building resorts? That's my main bitch with that part of the world. Hey, these are your brothers and (oppressed) sisters, right? Help 'em out before you start building indoor ski resorts (Dubai has one, look it up).

Eleven Hall of Famer

Eleven

Posted
Posted

Do they have government health care????

 

They don't have free speech yet. I doubt they're advanced enough to have government health care (which we've had for decades upon decades).

deluca67 All Star

deluca67

Posted
Posted

They don't have free speech yet. I doubt they're advanced enough to have government health care (which we've had for decades upon decades).

There's free speech in the USA? I thought Bush and the Religious Conservative Nazi Movement eradicated that after we all saw Janet Jackson's breast.

 

The USA will never truly be a "great place to live" until it gets it's priorities straight. Create a enemy and start a war and everyone is all rah rah about it. Bring up the idea that every American should have access to the medical treatment they need and people lose their sh!t. Suddenly they don't care if the elderly are wasting away in medicare facilities as long as doctors and insurance execs can still make their Ferrari payments.

inkman Hall of Famer

inkman

Posted
Posted

As for Dubai, they have alot of plans, but right now the money isn't there.

Dubai is built by slave labor.

 

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

 

Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.

 

He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.

 

The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.

 

The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

 

He is currently working on the 67th floor of a shiny new tower, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.

 

Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows their anger. You can't. You get put in jail for a long time, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-cannons and blasted them out and back to work.

 

The "ringleaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."

 

Since the recession hit, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."

 

This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are meant to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat – but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one. These men are conned into coming and trapped into staying, with the complicity of the Dubai authorities.

 

Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover-up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.

 

At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stands, oblivious.

chileanseabass Third Liner

chileanseabass

Posted
Posted

Dubai's an interesting place. I spent a week there last month for work, and have been to Abu Dhabi as well. There are skyscrapers everywhere and most are empty. You can now get a condo for less than half the price it was just a year ago ($300,000+). The problem is that their money is not derived from oil. Abu Dhabi has all the oil, and that's how they were able to bail Dubai out of their loan problems. There's a huge rivalry between the two Emirates - Abu Dhabi is the government seat for the UAE and has the oil, while Dubai is the trading/entertainment center. Abu Dhabi is now pulling ahead after years of growth in Dubai. Dubai is mostly just a trading hub for Asia and Europe as there are no sales or import taxes there. People come from all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to buy stuff, and with the purchase of consumer goods on the decline around the world, Dubai is feeling their crunch now. Abu Dhabi really showed them up by paying a large chunk of the outstanding debt on Burj Dubai (world's tallest building) and changing the name to Burj Kalifa (Kalifa is the current ruler of Abu Dhabi), which is pretty much the ultimate "we own you, b!tch" statement in their rivalry.

 

Ink's right on the slave labor front. EVERYBODY there with any sort of a manual labor or service job is brought in from India, Pakistan, Malasyia, Phillippines, or places like that. I went to an Iranian restaurant one night and not a single person working there spoke Arabic (neither do I, so it was easy to order, but just found that interesting).

SwampD Hall of Famer

SwampD

Posted
Posted

Dubai's an interesting place. I spent a week there last month for work, and have been to Abu Dhabi as well. There are skyscrapers everywhere and most are empty. You can now get a condo for less than half the price it was just a year ago ($300,000+). The problem is that their money is not derived from oil. Abu Dhabi has all the oil, and that's how they were able to bail Dubai out of their loan problems. There's a huge rivalry between the two Emirates - Abu Dhabi is the government seat for the UAE and has the oil, while Dubai is the trading/entertainment center. Abu Dhabi is now pulling ahead after years of growth in Dubai. Dubai is mostly just a trading hub for Asia and Europe as there are no sales or import taxes there. People come from all over Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to buy stuff, and with the purchase of consumer goods on the decline around the world, Dubai is feeling their crunch now. Abu Dhabi really showed them up by paying a large chunk of the outstanding debt on Burj Dubai (world's tallest building) and changing the name to Burj Kalifa (Kalifa is the current ruler of Abu Dhabi), which is pretty much the ultimate "we own you, b!tch" statement in their rivalry.

 

Ink's right on the slave labor front. EVERYBODY there with any sort of a manual labor or service job is brought in from India, Pakistan, Malasyia, Phillippines, or places like that. I went to an Iranian restaurant one night and not a single person working there spoke Arabic (neither do I, so it was easy to order, but just found that interesting).

The pace of their construction was(is) just as ridiculous and unsustainable as in Florida and Las Vegas.

shrader Hall of Famer

shrader

Posted
Posted

My boss went to Abu Dhabi about a month ago for a conference. The stories were absolutely crazy. You almost forget that a place like this can even exist in the middle east because the two wars over the past 20 years have painted a very different image of the area.

 

Anyway, as a gift at this conference, they were given these giant 2+ foot tall metal eagle statues. These were a bunch of doctors who travel all the time and are used to only bringing carry on luggage. Try to picture all these doctors attempting to get these large metal statues into their carry on bags. They had no trouble getting them out of the UAE, but the security for the connecting flight in Germany wasn't too crazy about these people flying from a middle eastern country carrying luggage with large metal objects onto a plane.

 

And for the longest time, I never realized Abu Dhabi was a real place. To me it was always that strange town where Garfield would always mail that other cat.

MattPie All Star

MattPie

Posted
Posted

Dubai is built by slave labor.

 

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

 

Thanks Ink, I was looking for this link to offer to the conversation.

Assquatch Third Liner

Assquatch

Posted
Posted

lol not shocked at all. They are the same people who cut your fingers if you get caught stealing. Had a friend who went there to work for 6 months, the pictures he came back with were unreal, it's like a true paradise and the plans they have for future projects are unreal. They have a indoor ski resort. Yeah, like wtf? He once showed me an article, that Dubai has like 10% of all world cairns right now. Some crazy stat like that. It's an amazing place to live, very beautiful and lots to do, but you just need to make sure you know the laws and def make sure you never break them.

 

What are cairns?

inkman Hall of Famer

inkman

Posted
Posted

What are cairns?

I believe they are large oafish NHL defenseman prone to fighting and bad penalties. :beer:

 

 

See also: McSorely, Hatcher, and Gill

Eleven Hall of Famer

Eleven

Posted
Posted

 

No matter where you stand on the issue of whether teens should be allowed to wear revealing clothing to school events, you've got to acknowledge that she's far better off with the choice between suspension and paddling in Alabama, than she would be in most Middle Eastern countries.

Stoner Hall of Famer

Stoner

Posted
Posted

No matter where you stand on the issue of whether teens should be allowed to wear revealing clothing to school events, you've got to acknowledge that she's far better off with the choice between suspension and paddling in Alabama, than she would be in most Middle Eastern countries.

 

Schwing.

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