Thanks for the post, NA. Sadly, I have been all too aware of what a shithole Dubai is for quite some time now. I have lots of friends who have been lived there either through governmental posts or working in the telecoms industry for years. As a matter of fact, my husband's best friend and his wife currently live in an expat closed community in Dubai. They cannot wait to leave. His wife is from Lagos, and believe it or not, they think moving back to LAGOS would be a step up from Dubai, imagine that!
We have been invited to visit on numerous occasions, and we have begged off every time. I have no interest in that or any other UAE country.

I always thought of Dubai's "Capitalist Paradise" as having ONLY a dark side. Sad but unsurprising to see it's getting darker.

Dubai has always freaked me the fuck out. I have a friend who almost moved there for a job designing a theme park before the economy collapsed, and I have to admit I think a little bit less of him because he was willing to contribute to that huge illusion.

BP, as someone who was unaware of the darkside of Dubai for a long time, I had wanted to go because it seemed so odd and alien. Now I'm waiting for time to level Dubai back into the desert. Honestly, how do they not understand the attention they're getting for their horrible human rights practices?

I read this article in Fast Company last year and it said pretty much the same thing. The part that struck me most:

When Dubai upgraded its waste-disposal infrastructure some years ago, it failed to anticipate the population explosion. Today, large swathes of the city have no sewage connections, so it is collected by hundreds of trucks and ferried into the desert to Dubai's only sewage repository, 35 miles outside city limits. During the boom, the trip took as long as 17 hours (depopulation has since cut that time), and it became routine for drivers to short-circuit the process by dumping into drainpipes along the way, sending the waste flowing back to Dubai to reappear on its upscale beaches.