Coming back from my morning walk I couldn’t help but notice that they’ve built houses all the way to the mountains and now they’re cutting terraces into the hillsides to make room for even more houses.

That tall building is Sunset Station and if you click on the image to see the larger version and look at the hillsides behind the hotel you can see what I’m talking about. Miles of recently leveled land.

As far back as I can remember I’ve looked over that lava covered landscape and wondered why anyone would buy it. The soil is too thin and rocky and the hillsides are too steep. -Obviously I was wrong.

I didn’t realize that we would soon have 6000 people a month moving in to the valley. That’s 72,000 people per year, which means we have almost a million people moving here every 10 years. And that doesn’t include all the children that weren’t counted, the babies being born and the huge volume of undocumented people who don’t appear in the statistics.

We now have something like 2 million people living in southern Nevada and 90% of them live in the Las Vegas valley.

This leads to our schools being overcrowded, our county provided services being swamped, massive traffic problems and air that’s so hazy that being able to see Red Rock is almost news worthy, not to mention a major water shortage.

Things have gotten so bad that the county hospital has a billboard that tells you the ER wait times. In fact they now have an app for that… Nope, I’m not kidding.
–But this does raise the question: Just how many times do you need to go to the E.R. before you need an app to tell you the wait time?

You would think that with this many warm bodies we’d have more industry. But taxes, transportation, petty tyrants in inspection/permit enforcement, and weird ass county/city rules designed to protect someone’s job/power base instead of promoting growth have crippled everything except casinos. And now our economy has tanked.

So where does that leave us?….. In really deep shit.

We have the highest foreclosure rate in the nation.

We have an unemployment rate that’s among the worst in the country and which is actually much worse than the official numbers indicate because of the number of people who no longer qualify for benefits.

We have at least five, maybe ten times more cars on our roads than they were designed to handle and every time the-powers-that-be “fix” the problem it just seems to make it worse.

We pay more for utilities than they do in many other states. This is due in part to the skewed logic that says the power company deserves a rate increase because they told us to conserve power and we did. Now their profits are down and they need to make up for lost revenue.

We have a major water shortage that they blame on the drought instead of too damn many people. –Just how much water does several million flushes a day use anyway?

As far as I can see we’re at or probably past the tipping point and yet we continue using up our limited resources to enrich the few. While the folks that can’t afford to pack up and move to the city or country of their choice are getting screwed.

Sigh….. I know. “And this makes today different how?”

I haven’t begun to run out of things to rant about, but I’m hoarse from all this shouting into the wind so I’ll be climbing down off my soapbox now.