Hell even after living there and the state for a combined time of about 10-12 years i have mixed feelings, but when i visit if i stay longer than 4-5 days i start to lose my mind. A good Vegas trip is ideally 3-4 days, you could probably still have a good time staying longer but it’s diminishing returns tbh. There’s only so much partying one can do before it becomes a problem or it wears you down.
That said i love the state itself, it’s real beautiful and the places beyond Vegas are pretty great. Lots of really interesting small towns with loads of history, good hiking and off roading, haunted places, old mines, national parks, etc.
Simple version: rich bro wants to do rich bro things and unexpectedly finds out his life means nothing of consequence to his owners. But gotta rich bro!
I was going to mention it and i forgot. I think it’s kind of a tourist trap, it’s cool yet not that cool but i do recommend going for all the dam puns and for the history of it. I’ve been twice
Edit: Weirdly enough i’ve never been to the southern basin of the Grand Canyon (Zion is the Northern part of it). It’s never piqued my interest, i always figured if i ever went i would want to go white water rafting or do something cool there beyond just look at it from the top. And it’s just never happened.
I’m going to drag Mr. Kidd out there one of these days, and about the only thing he’s interested in is the dam! He wants to go once just because he’s never been. I haven’t been in a while, and I think that new interactive grocery store museum thing would be up my alley.
Take him to Lake Mead while you’re out there if he’s into that if not that’s fine. There’s also Boulder City which is nearby, but i do confess that i’ve never been so i don’t know what cool stuff might be there (or the surrounding area)
Laws that treat religion as a physical property of people are so bizarre to me. This is like saying, “in order to drink, you mustn’t like Meg Ryan movies”. Okay, so in the moment when I order a drink, I don’t. It’s not like there’s a blood protein for “likes the story about Mohammed better than the one about Abraham” that can be tested for.
The first couple times I went to Vegas I wanted SO badly to get off the Strip and go hiking, but none of the people I was with wanted to.
The last time I was there for a work meeting, I planned well in advance that I was definitely going to go hiking. I found a great hike within a reasonable drive, reserved a rental car at my hotel when I knew we’d have a break in the programming, and started telling everyone I knew would attend the meeting that I was DEFINITELY going hiking and they were welcome to join me.
Then, on the first day of the meeting, my boss comes into the conference room and pulls me out of the meeting and tells me there’s an emergency client matter I need to deal with, and I spend the next two days in my hotel room bent over a laptop working on that deal. And to add insult to injury, the deal died the day after I got home.
But one of my colleagues was able to make use of my research and did the hike while I was busy working, and he said it was great. So the NEXT time I go to Vegas…
Except Meg Ryan movies aren’t centuries long cultural and social traditions and practices that knit well over a billion people together into a shared community. They are movies that most people have not built their lives around.
Unlike state-run Christianity, Islam generally speaking has a much better track record on toleration (at least towards other major religions) and figuring out ways to allow for non-Muslims to exist within Islamic-majority places (and to allow for some variation within Islamic practices). The rise of the house of saud with their alliance with Wahhabist practitioners is actually a major change in Islamic-majority states, as they are pretty keen to stamp out religious diversity and have been exporting their brand of Islam for a while now, which has been a huge influence on the rise of the modern Islamist terrorist organization. In allowing drinking among non-Muslims, Dubai is at the very least keep up an older tradition of toleration of other traditions… but of course, in this case, the point is to bring in tourists. But then again, tourism is an increasingly major way to diversify local economies.
Certainly- I don’t mean to trivialize the situation. I just meant, for something to be legally enforceable like that, there needs to be some form of proof one way or the other. How do you prove what someone believes so that a drinking law can be enforced?
Over the years, I have used Vegas as a stopover for showers and buffet meals while on long hiking/camping trips in Arizona, and parts of Southern Utah. After a few days, eating real food while being clean sounds really good.
Did you try to hike Charleston Peak ? The hike starts less than an hour from Vegas and tops out at 11,918’ It’s a gem, one that defeated me due to an unexpected 14’" overnight snow at 7500’ (while it was 90 degrees in the city) in early May. Views from almost 9,000’ above the desert below look sublime.
That said, there are scads of great hikes at lower elevation around Vegas and all over the state.
I’m guessing that people who live in Dubai as citizens are probably registered by religion… It’s probably more squishy when regarding visitors, who are probably bound by the honor system to say whether or not they are practicing Muslims. And of course, not all Muslims abstain from alcohol, either, culturally speaking. So do you stop, say Ethiopian or Albanian/Bosniak Muslims from drinking or not, since they both have more of a drinking culture back home? It’s probably not a big deal from Muslims around the gulf states, as there is probably a higher instance of people abstaining, as there is a stronger cultural practice there for doing so?
I do think it’s pretty outrageous that Dubai considers detectable blood levels to be prosecutable drug use, it’s really hard to criticize other countries for jailing too many people when the US is the number one incarcerator in the world, where we often jail people for years without even giving them a trial.
While I don’t want to visit Dubai in part because of the injustices of their harsh legal system, it’s hard to recommend our own country in that regard.
By that measure the world is very small. Illegal slavery is rampant in the US, more slaves today than every in our history even when slavery was legal in the states. Many fishermen are slaves in parts of the world. So not cool.
Costco, Best Buy, Harbor Freight, Amazon, Walmart, Target are full of slave produced products.
Most glass weed pipes are produced by child slaves in india and sold for cheap here.
Sadly it’s very difficult to completely abstain from slavery because so much is rooted upstream in mining, cultivation, harvest, manufacturing, &tc…
Shoot look at Haiti, have we as a nation “forgiven” them for freeing themselves? No. Will we ever? I hope.
Too late for brevity so I blather on:
Cannabis has neural receptors in all parts of the human nervous system, save the medulla oblongata, which regulates breathing and heart rate. These receptors hold the inhibiting cannabinoid for 3-30 days or so. These “used” cannabinoids are expelled by our circulatory system; which hair does not have thus being able to test for various compounds even years later in some cases.
Accurate real time tests for intoxication or even reliable dating of consumption and impairment status don’t really exist yet.
Fun fact! Truffles are strong sources of cannabinoids… Specifically PHYTO-cannabinoids. These are also naturally produced by all humans in large part while dreaming. Drug tests only look for PHOTO-cannabinoids which come from photosynthetic plant sources. This is part of how we know we are more closely related to fungus than we are to plants in the evolutionary tree of life. Point is with enough money and a good chef you can get a good buzz from truffles and pass a drug test at the same time.
The openess and level of enslaved labor used in the Emirates is a real problem that highlights how big this problem is. Refusing to patronize the regimes that help perpetrate this is a perfectly legitimate response to that particular situation.
But I’m well aware that enslaved labor is a global problem, not just a problem of this region.
