User profile: DMCVegas

To address "KillerB"

1. Yes, a PT Cruiser is in fact a sedan. It has 4 doors.

2. Jumping out of a car my not be Criminal Child Endangerment. HOWEVER it is when:
A. Drinking and Driving while transporting children.
B. Overloading a vehicle with more passengers than it's designed to transport.
C. Failing to properly restrain children in a vehicle with safety equipment, let alone ensuring that the doors are properly latched.

3. Yes, all of these actions are in fact criminal behavior. Driving while drunk, open alcoholic beverages in the car, and just in general endangering the lives of children is criminal enough.

It is probably a good thing that the child fell out, otherwise police may not have seen what was going on. Had they have gotten into a serious accident, I doubt that there would have been any survivors at all.

Think before you write...

Apples to Oranges with the John DeLorean reference. DMC produced a very viable product that people were actually scrambling over themselves to purchase. There was even a lottery system at some dealerships for the opportunity to purchase DMC-12 automobiles with new cars selling $10,000 over dealer invoice, and the first used cars that arrived on dealer lots selling even higher than that.

DMC had a bad American economy it entered into, the worst winter in several decades, and a currency shift between the and the $ that forced the price of the car to double. Still they turned a huge profit in their first year of business.

When people who had the cash to purchase cars outright ran out, people who wanted to finance came next. But sales didn't last long because there was no DMC Motor Finance credit division. GMAC had to do most of the financing. Rather than form a Credit division to help sell current inventory and future cars, DeLorean got greedy and and did a stock offering to build more cars and increase raw capital used to fund other projects. GMAC pull financial support for consumers and other lenders followed suit leading to the stock pile of cars, and unused parts that are helping sustain our old cars, and build the new ones leaving Houston now.

In spite of all this, financing was still in place to save the company, but rather than payback a load, DeLorean opted for the easy way out... Sure there were threats against his family, but he could have signed the paperwork for the other loans before hand...

What DeLorean tells us is that while financial times can become tough, one can certainly survive if not thrive if they pay attention to people who not only have disposable income, but are willing to part with it.

What Steve Wynn, and yes even the Fertitas failed to heed was the history lesson of the old "Sawdust Joints" and the Flamingo. Upscale is nice, but quickly wears off. And when your business is to cater to a minority customer base (i.e. the wealthy) you're not going to weather the storm as easily. Hence why the Flamingo closed up while places like the El Rancho thrived. You can be more profitable by taking in smaller cash from lots of people, rather than constantly hoping for "whales".

Places like Red Rock and the Wynn didn't simply cater to the wealthy. Their patrons were the ones who were living beyond their means on Credit Cars. So when their customers maxed out their credit, they had nothing more to spend. And while the take is down across the board, how is it that the customer-friendly places like the ones in Henderson and many others are doing decently, yet upscale resorts are constantly suffering?

Easy Answer: History repeating itself, and people like Wynn, the Fertitas, and others thinking that it couldn't ever happen to them...

My in-laws scored some free tickets after sitting through a timeshare presentation (their first goal in Vegas is free stuff, and since fun books are rare now...). It's a pretty good show, and one that I'd recommend. As for the absence of a strong story line, well, if you're going to ANY Vegas shows for complex melodrama, you'll be disappointed.

Thanks to the Sun for printing an honest article. Especially about Construction being a failed economic pillar. Nevada, in particular needs serious economic diversification. There is just no way that we can rely upon gaming. Once upon a time, Las Vegas was the only place to go. Then there was Atlantic City. Fine. But since that time, it's just been a downward spiral for gaming. Gamblers can now just find a casino close to them to play games of chance. And between the failed experiments of the 1990's trying to make Vegas into a family resort destination, and the 2000's trying to make it a hipster hot-spot, what was left of Las Vegas that made this city Las Vegas was erased. Kitsch may not have been liked by everyone, but it was certainly what attracted so many tourists here. It may have been the gaudy souvenirs, the Elvis impersonators, the Western-themed places, or even the almost stereotypical cheap food. But that's all gone now in an effort to make Vegas more upscale. And when you do that, you've locked out your best demographic of people who are willing to spend.

Las Vegas does need to diversify, but to what? What resources do we have here? Resources meaning both natural and human. Skilled labor doesn't want to stick around. The Hospitality and Gaming industries have this attitude that people are expendable. This goes from the lowliest person sweeping up cigarette butts, to Vice Presidents. So people are going to leave to comparable salaries and stable work environments elsewhere. Not to mention better housing markets.

As for call centers, they don't pay the kind of salaries that allow people to afford a home. Not to mention they are the most volatile employers as well. Most call centers are not directly owned by corporations, but are retained under contract. If a company decides to cut back, or if they're simply not happy with the level of service being provided, they'll just let the contact expire. And with that, hundreds of people have instantly been laid-off.

As for software companies, as a whole, they can easily be exported to other states, or even countries. Remember Westwood Studios? And as for Hospitality-specific software, there's no future in it. Once something works really well, most hotels will switch over to it. Meaning one company servicing them all. To write software and design products for Las Vegas, one doesn't have to specifically be based here to do that. OPERA PMS is the big new Property Management System used by many LV Resorts now. And if you look at their website, they don't even have an office here!

Las Vegas really doesn't have that much of a bright future. I think that more people will end up being economically trapped here with a low-paying job and no way to leave, versus people who want to help build a community and live here voluntarily. The volitile RE market will ensure that.

And of course neither Cox, nor The Las Vegas Sun, the Review Journal, the Las Vegas Weekly, or any other media subsidiary of Greenspun Corporation have ever challenged this since the Greenspun family owns interest in all of these media outlets. Heaven forbid there was a major public forum to reach everyone that could have stopped the unchecked construction or even challenged any joint projects that Greenspun eventually profited from. It's just more convenient to claim that government bureaucracy is really the problem.

It would seem that the "Good Old Boy System" that Hank Greenspun fought against, his family and businesses are now the censorship arm of.