How extreme heat made Las Vegas, again

Posted on by July 21, 2024
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LAS VEGAS SHATTERS ALL-TIME HEAT RECORD!

See update at end of post

This material is drawn from a post during a similar Las Vegas hot spell in the summer of 2023.

On this 248th birthday of American independence the apprehension is palpable. Will Las Vegas soon break its all-time any-day-of-the year high temperature of 117 degrees Fahrenheit? That’s the prediction by early next week from the National Weather Service. This mark has been touched five times in recorded history, twice since I became New To Las Vegas in 2016. Yesterday’s official high at Harry Reid International Airport was 113.

Accompanying this is lots of moaning and groaning and swearing by locals about how unbearable it is to be hereabouts during the day and even at night, when the lows still hover around 90. All this is absolutely true. But there are plenty of other places around the country–like Death Valley barely two hours away by car (if it doesn’t overheat on the ride) and even the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles–and throughout the world that are frequently hotter.

However, for some reason Las Vegas during the summer seems to have become a national proxy for hot weather. Perhaps it’s the phenomenon I previously have described in which bad stuff that happens in Las Vegas gets insane publicity even though the same things happen elsewhere. In the case of hot weather maybe it has something to do with the satisfying notion to some of Sin City burning in hell. I even confess to playing that game a bit with a running box at the top of this blog listing the current temperature, automatically updated hourly. (My data comes from private OpenWeatherMap.com and sometimes varies a bit from the National Weather Service, the official record-keeper.)

Now I don’t want to make light of genuine suffering and deaths caused by heat, which certainly happen around Las Vegas, a place that has been called the country’s fastest-warming city. But having lived in a few other toasty climates–Houston, Albuquerque, the hot Santa Clarita Valley near Los Angeles and even Cairo, Egypt–me thinks many of the locals here doth protest a little too much.

Indeed, as I see it, it is the extreme heat–getting all the more extreme thanks to global warming–that helped give Las Vegas a viable economy in the first place. Hear me out on this. Continue reading →

Corporately, Las Vegas and Nevada again seek a race to the bottom

Posted on by July 3, 2024
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race to the bottom

Ad by a firm soliciting incorporation business

In many ways the economic well-being of Las Vegas and Nevada is based on a race to the bottom of human decency. Nearly a century ago, it was the enactment of laws allowing open gambling, quick divorces and even quicker marriages that jump-started what had been a dying 19th century financial model based on little more than mining and ranching. Suddenly, folks had a reason to come here and cough up some of their money with little in the way of inhibition.

The addition 50 years ago of legal houses of prostitution in a number of Nevada counties (not containing Las Vegas or Reno) added to that perception. The lack of a state income or corporation tax insured that the public education system would remain underfunded and dreadful, a scenario welcomed generations ago by political leaders (although efforts are being made to fix that now). This tax structure is much to the benefit of well-heeled retirees or even moderate retirees with grown kids fleeing states with good school systems–paid by state income taxes, be they high or low.

Here at the New to Las Vegas world headquarters I’m watching the latest phase of Nevada’s ability to profit from the foibles of others. Over the past several decades the Silver State has been changing its corporation laws to make it easier for officers and board directors of public corporations to avoid accountability by shareholders (perhaps you with a retirement account) for many of their actions. Continue reading →

SCOTUS to Las Vegas: Drop Dead

Posted on by June 14, 2024
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drop dead Las Vegas

U.S. Supreme Court photographed in a secured building

No further comment is required from me beyond my headline above on today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the manufacture of bump stocks that led directly to the massacre of 60 folks on October 1, 2017. That tragedy was along the Las Vegas Strip, seven miles from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.

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In Las Vegas, a faux firefighter charity mails an illegal solicitation–to a dog

Posted on by October 9, 2025
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faux firefighter charity

Illegal request for payment addressed to a Las Vegas dog

I’ve written it before, and I’m writing it again. National Committee for Volunteers Firefighters PAC is one dumb organization. Why? The outfit, which says it is based in Boston, keeps calling me at the New to Las Vegas world headquarters asking for money even though I’ve blistered it several times in this space (click here and here).

NCVF-PAC presents like a charity–it’s not–and has spent virtually none of the money raised nationally during its entire existence on its stated mission of, well, helping volunteer firefighters politically. (PAC stands for political action committee.) In the world of fundraising, making follow-up calls to a possible donor under these circumstances can’t get any more moronic. That’s why NCVF-PAC, which I call a faux charity, long has been a candidate for my running list of America’s Stupidest Charities, which you can see nearby on this page.

On top of this, the recent outreach to me violated a 2021 Nevada law prohibiting all fundraising for, among other topics, firefighting personnel within the state without first registering with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and making filings, on pain of incurring civil penalties. I checked, and there’s no registration in Nevada for NCVF-PAC. Never has been. Yet the presenting NCVF-PAC caller–not an actual human but rather a computer-generated voice using the bland name “Tom Evans” secretly monitored by a real person with soundboard technology–falsely told me when I asked point-blank that the organization was indeed registered to solicit in the Silver State. That strikes me as a possible separate violation of Nevada’s deceptive trade practices law.

NCVC-PAC and other faux charities make tens of thousands of illegal calls a year to my fellow Nevadans, some of whom, alas, fork over some hard-earned funds. Yet it’s my perception that the Nevada state government, which runs without a state income tax, is not exactly overstaffed with investigators or lawyers tasked with regulating these kinds of matters to protect the public.

So I decided to play along, with an appropriate twist, to see what kind of documentary evidence I could generate to prove beyond my own words that NCVF-PAC was illegally operating in Nevada. A few minutes later, I told a different computer-controlled NCVF-PAC voice, “Emma Thompson” (I’m guessing at the spelling) that a pledge card could be mailed. A name and an address were provided. Days later, the pledge card asking for payment arrived in the mail.

Addressed to my dog.

Yes! You can see part of the invoice letter nearby, with some identifying detail redacted. Carrizozo, my nearly 10-year-old basset hound, is being billed for $30 by NCVF-PAC’s cynically named “Fundraising Committee.”
Continue reading →