Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dubai Debt Trap

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–356 of 356 posts

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#351

Post by knownjorbist »

BeetleB wrote: post #206
knownjorbist wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the face of all of this, the US remains the most desirable place to emigrate to. The logical conclusion here is that the impression you have from news is not the complete picture. The US is massive and diverse. If you go by the county level, the US contains the highest HDI areas in the world.

Eh - Dubai is a lot more diverse than the US. A similar comment could be written about it.

Dubai is not more diverse than the US. The largest disapora of essentially every other nation on Earth reside in the US.

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#352

Post by fennecfoxy »

I would love to visit the middle-east (especially Egypt, so many cool ruins!) but as a gay man I refuse to support any country that persecutes people, whether it's women or minorities or anybody really.

Stoning, hanging and imprisoning people like me is a surefire way to not get my tourism dollars. Unfortunately, not many people feel the same way.

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#353

Post by fennecfoxy »

_hhkg wrote: post #25

As a Bay Area native who moved to Abu Dhabi / Dubai roughly four years ago, I have a lot of issues with the way the UAE is portrayed across sites like Hacker News and Reddit. A lot of them are in the comments for this story, focusing on all the negatives of the country, structural racism, human rights abuse, etc and we certainly have a right to raise these things (of which I actively fight against here every day). Th…

I take the salt the Earth approach with countries that would imprison me, as a gay man for being gay. Or countries where simply being born a woman affords you fewer rights. I have zero respect for the UAE.

Your argument is a logical fallacy. Yes I'm sure the UAE is improving, but that doesn't mean we should stop vilifying it for the terribly evil laws it has and things it does. It's not "complex", there's just no motivation to make actual, sweeping change, only token change to appeal to the West, whom the UAE relies on to do business with. Dubai should not exist, it's an artificial Oasis in the desert in a world where global warming is becoming a serious threat. Dubai was built on slave labour.

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#354

Post by pradn »

oh_sigh wrote: post #278
pradn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to Egypt a few months ago and was met with incredibly warm people, with perhaps even an excess of hospitality. Yes, you do get charged extra for being a tourist at the tourist spots. But that's only a small part of the country. That said, I am Indian and was met as an Egyptian most of the time (people would start speaking to me in Arabic 70% of the time), so I had the benefit of fitting in well. The delicious…

I'm guessing you're also a male, since I've literally never heard a good story about a female traveler without a male companion in Egypt or the Maghreb in general.

I am a man. Yes, it is unfortunate that the differences in experience persist. :(

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#355

Post by canucker2016 »

webmobdev wrote: post #264
JohnGB wrote: post #7

One of many reasons that I will never enter the UAE. There is no rule of law, and so no protection if anyone decides to charge you for anything. I've read of women being raped and then being charged for reporting it which essentially admits sex outside of marriage, or of foreigners who get driven into by a local and then charged as if they were the ones being reckless. That's not even going into their de facto slaver…

> I've read of women being raped and then being charged for reporting it which essentially admits sex outside of marriage That's more true of Saudi Arabia, than UAE. The first thing you are told to tell your female relatives is to never ever travel alone outside in SA, anywhere, as the police can and do use that as an excuse to arrest them and molest or rape them. The reverse also happens - some rich womenfolk often…

Also Qatar.

from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10538379/Female-Wor...:

    A female World Cup official is facing a sentence of 100 lashes and seven years in jail for 'extramarital sex' after she reported being raped while working in Qatar.

    Paola Schietekat, 28, from Mexico, was working for the World Cup organising committee when she complained that she was raped by an associate who broke into her apartment and threatened to kill her.

    She reported the June 6, 2021 attack to the Qatari authorities, who responded by accusing her of having an affair and charged her with 'extramarital sex', which is illegal in the Gulf state.

    Schietekat was told by lawyers that one way of avoiding conviction was to marry her attacker but instead decided to flee the country, leaving behind what she called her 'dream job'.
The charges against Schietekat, who is a behavioural economist, are still valid and she is expected to be sentenced in absentia on March 6.

Re: The Dubai Debt Trap

#356

Post by titanomachy »

dredmorbius wrote: post #274
titanomachy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't love reading long articles in fixed-width fonts.

Then pipeline to a PS/PDF generator. For most modern Web publishing, this is mostly a matter of finding and extracting the block, as well as metadata (title, byline, dateline). html-xml-tools is quite useful for this. I'd created a WaPo extractor that reduced pagesize by about 95%, stripped the nags and paywalls, etc. Endpoint was HTML, but that could just as easily have generated PDF or ePub if I'd wanted.

I applaud people who take advantage of the fact that the internet is still largely machine-readable and hackable.

I am much lazier, but I use "reader mode" to similar effect.

Post reply on HN