About the weed $$$$.

Bottom of bad lists update. Perhaps pioneered by WalletHub, surveys are taken and cities are rated for … dog friendliness or date night options or car color or whatever. And then the ratings are emailed to news organizations, in the hope they’ll publicize the name of the outfit that did the surveying/rating, I guess.

I’ve no idea how or if this marketing, if that’s what it is, works, nor do I think I care. Which is yet another indicator of why I’m not one of those people amassing oodles of prosperity out there on the cutting edge of the attention economy. But I digress.

These rating thingies were brought to mind this morning because the R-J wrote up one about Las Vegas having “one of the lowest quality of life ratings in Northern America related to cost of living and affordability.” 

Which in turn reminded me I’d seen another one in my inbox yesterday that included the line: “I'd like to report that Las Vegas came in as the #88 happiest U.S. city!” 

Really! Out of 100 cities ranked! Wow! (Sometimes I suspect people who write press releases don’t pay the closest attention — or maybe the author is simply one of those people who ends every sentence with an exclamation point instead of a period, which I understand is a thing these days. Also, yes, get off my lawn. But again I digress.)

So two (2) items in as many days asserting that by some metrics Las Vegas is … a bit of a hellhole, evidently.

Whoa if true. 

No seriously, how is that even possible? I seem to remember being informed by Nevada’s Smartest People that if the public gives handouts to tech bros and professional sports teams and MrBeast and on and on and on, prosperity would ripple out into communities and enrich everyone. And we have done just that. 

So it’s tempting to simply declare the rating thingies are daft. 

Though an alternative explanation may be that Nevada’s long-held bipartisan economic development philosophy — give public money to private entities that don’t need it and wait for the riches to trickle down — has failed so miserably that even headline-hunting rating thingies can’t miss it.

IN NEVADA CURRENT

About that weed money. It has not fulfilled the silly notion, once (still?) harbored by some, that it would enrich the state government so we could have nice things. So let’s get that out of the way. Meanwhile, the once-nascent, now “mature” industry has been working under sort of a byzantine tax system under which some of the industry’s players appear to have been getting legitimately hosed. Not as much as customers, mind. But still. April Corbin Girnus reports: Lawmakers mulling cannabis tax revisions

“Hopefully, any Nevada-specific election mayhem Trump may attempt to lob Nevada’s way in the coming days, and perhaps weeks, will suffer the same fate as all the other fake crimes he’s accused Nevada of over the years, and get laughed out of court, withdrawn by the people who lodged them, or otherwise collapse under the weight of their phoniness.” My column: So how malevolent will Trump get in Nevada this time?

Most of these cases are in three states — South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Alabama. But the story also mentions the woman who was charged in Nevada under an obscure law enacted in 1911. Stateline’s Sofia Resnick reports: 900+ women criminally charged for their conduct during pregnancies

“I’m not running to make history, but it’s about damn time there was a Native American woman serving in the United States Senate,” says Peggy Flannigan. This is a nicely put together and quite well-rounded profile of a candidate in Minnesota that also touches on a lot of federal policy issues vis-a-vis Indian Country. Via the Minnesota Reformer. What Peggy Flanagan’s Senate victory would mean for Indian Country

Good Luck