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.
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 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.
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.
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.
But it’s surely better than almost every other city in the world.