> > Sorry. But after reading that article, I just don't believe your
> > personal experience is indicative of what's going on in Dubai.
> > You're the one who sounds out of touch.
>
> I want to put this down in a way to further the conversation. "But
> after reading that article, I just don't believe..." - that
> statement. You read a news article - I've read many too - and you
> feel educated enough to make a judgment on my personal experiences
> including very upper class people, Western skilled workers, and
> some poor people who were maids, sanitation people, etc. After
> reading a news article, you feel confident to make a judgment that
> someone else's firsthand experiences are not indicative of how
> things actually are, and that the person is out of touch.

It was more a judgement of your description of your personal
experience than the experience itself. Clearly, no one has access to
your personal experience, so they can't judge it directly. But we
can judge what you tell us (compared to what the author of "The dark
side of Dubai" article tells about his personal experience).

> > Have you even gone to interview the workers slaving away to do
> > construction on Dubai's skyscrapers as the author of this article
> > did?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Have you seen where they live?
>
> Yes.

Then why didn't you mention it? Why did you start going off about
how good project managers and stewardeses have it in Dubai instead
of talking about the people interviewed in the article: the workers
slaving away building the skyscrapers and the people who've had
their passports taken away? Do you dispute the accuracy of what the
author of the article has written about them?

> I don't think people realize how bad poverty is. So when you
> read that someone worked 12 hours in terrible conditions for
> $800/month, that sounds incredibly horrible. But people don't
> realize that when a meal at a cafe costs 11 cents, $800 goes a
> long way. I've spent time in third world countries. Most people
> who get righteous when a story likes this comes out, haven't. $800
> goes a long way in the third world.

First, the article mentioned people were making £90 ($147) a month,
not $800 a month. Second, Dubai is not a third world country, so
I really doubt the workers are spending 11 cents a meal. According
to http://www.expatforum.com/articles/cost-of-living/cost-of-li...

"An individual expatriate will spend around 500 euro on food and
other grocery items every month. Costs of food products are
especially high... Water is generally expensive all across the
country... Dubai relies mostly on imported food and drinks, which
explains why they are also more expensive."

The monthly cost of food of 500 Euro is about $750, more than 5
times the monthly wage mentioned in the article. Of course, the
typical slave worker probably isn't going to be eating food that's
as expensive as that of your typical Western expat, but I doubt
they'd survive on $10 of food a month, which
is what three 11 cent meals a day totaled over a month would amount to.

Then there's the debt that the slave workers get in to to just
have the opportunity to work in Dubai. The article quotes it as
£2,300 ($3,772), which would take 25 months to work off at the $147
per month salary, if we don't count the cost of living in
Dubai (which would make repaying the debt even harder).

Finally, there are the dangerous work conditions, physical violence, and the non-payment and delay of salaries that the article mentions, which would literally put the workers' lives in jeopardy. That doesn't exactly sound like the opportunity of a
lifetime, even for someone coming from the third world.

> Some people pulled themselves out of poverty by working in Dubai.
> I'm not talking about the up and up people. Some poor people
> pulled themselves out of poverty in Dubai. Bad things also
> happened there, but good things happened too. That doesn't dismiss
> some terrible things, but the article ignores some people who
> literally turned their lives around there.

There will always be exceptional people who can overcome some of the
worst adversities. This article wasn't about them. That's true. The
author chose to mostly focus on the less exceptional, and more
representative people in Dubai, and nothing you've said has proven
the author of this article did anything less than a stellar job at
researching and describing his chosen subject.