Good infrastructure, clean streets, adequate public transit, no crime. Well connected globally.

> Good infrastructure

They don’t even have a working sewage system.

Hmmm. this article from 2011 says they do: https://web.archive.org/web/20130504074926/http://gulftoday....

This company is still advertising its tanker services in 2020.

https://dotless.ae/how-does-dubai-manage-its-sewage-water/

From 2016 so Dubai may have had a working sewage system for a year, so I could be wrong.

> Dubai: The emirate of Dubai will get a new deep tunnel sewerage system costing Dh12.5 billion in the next five years to replace more than 121 sewage pumping stations.

Pumping station meaning tankers transport the waste away.

https://gulfnews.com/uae/government/dubai-to-get-a-new-sewag...

From the end user perspective that still seems like a working sewage system, no?

It’s not like they’re making residents pay high taxes to pay for the tankers either.

We disagree on what a working sewage system means. Tanker trucks aren’t it. Dubai may have had a working sewage system for a year now. Not great but better than I thought was the case.

Your definition involves strange mental gymnastics to turn a perfectly functional albeit expensive sewage system into a non-working sewage system.

The end user experience of the sewage system in Dubai is no different than in regular Western cities. That’s really all that matters when trying to figure out if it’s “working” or not.

Restaurants, flight connections, quality of services, friendly tax regime. Restaurants obviously being the most important metric.

Sure, it’ll lose out to London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, …

But it won’t lose out to cities like Manchester or Liverpool.

>Restaurants obviously being the most important metric

This reminds me a bit of Eddie Izzard's impression of the Queen: "A plumber? What on Eaaarrrthh is that?" Not everyone can eat at a restaurant nightly. Not everyone can eat. And some of the reason for that is designed into the current system.

Sure, but HN audience is primarily rich tech workers, entrepreneurs and temporarily embarrassed versions of those.

In this context it makes sense to look at things from that perspective. On reddit it would of course be different.

I’d hope rich tech workers and entrepreneurs aren’t all ok with the amount of slavery and oppression going on in Dubai.

There is no slavery in Dubai, oppression yes, but not actual slavery.

You’ll find more slaves per capita in the US where prisoners are widely used as actual slave labor.

There are definitely people who are enslaved in the UAE under the Kafala System. It’s unclear to me how widespread it is, but it does happen. When I was there, I personally met a woman on Tinder, and on our date she told me she had been forced into prostitution by the person who brought her to the UAE. She had to earn tens of thousands of dollars to get her passport back from him.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafala_system

This is absolutely illegal and you can get your passport back within a day or two by just calling MOHRE.

A decade ago this stuff may have been more common, but the government has cracked down heavily to the point that it doesn’t exist any more than it does in Europe.