The US having an entire city in the middle of the desert dedicated entirely to gambling sounds like a thing other countries would make up about the US as a joke but its real and no one bats an eye at it
You know I held myself back from going off on an infodump about the history of divorce in Las Vegas for the sake of this joke but the amount of people reblogging this version from me and not getting my history based joke about how divorce was important in shaping the economy is Las Vegas is driving me a little bit crazy
The people want an explanation so an explanation I shall give.
Basically Nevada used to be like. Nowhere. Even more nowhere than it is now. They broke several rules when they made it a state actually because the population wasn’t big enough to justify it but they wanted Lincoln to get more electoral college votes or something. I dunno.
Point is, there’s not much in Nevada. Sure, there’s silver mines. There’s local tribes who are pretty cool. There’s wildlife. There’s some neat mountains. Not much water though and water is needed for most industries and large scale civilization.
This vast emptiness ended up making Nevada what it is today though mostly because of crime. It’s hard for the feds to stop your crime when you’re surrounded by a whole lot of nothing. Is the state and federal government gonna trek through the Nevada desert to scold you? I don’t think so.
Local governments today in Nevada can often trace themselves directly back to criminal organizations and corrupt groups of politicians, including the city of Las Vegas and the very large unincorporated community of Paradise which is actually where the Las Vegas strip is. Why is Paradise, Nevada still an unincorporated community despite having over 180,000 residents? Because if there’s no city government that’s one less government entity your casino has to pay taxes to. Duh.
And these crime people and casino owners and easily bribable politicians despite their many problems did figure something out. Tourists like doing things that are illegal in other places. Californian tourists in particular. And one of the illegal things that all Americans really but especially Californians wanted to do was get divorced.
Around 1930 Nevada became one of the first states to make no-fault divorce legal. Not only that but the required waiting period became six weeks. Not only that but only one spouse had to live in Nevada for those six weeks. To this day, the waiting period for divorce in California is still six months. This was huge.
This becomes a whole industry. Not only is gambling legal in Nevada but now divorce is too. When a couple decide mutually that they want a divorce but there’s no legal reason for it where they live, one of them, usually the woman, goes to live in a resort in Las Vegas or Reno for six weeks (often called a divorce ranch) and then they can get divorced.
And while one or both spouses are there, they can gamble, get pampered, see entertainment, meet other people. Then they go home after their divorce and tell their friends all about it. Now all their friends know that there’s gambling and entertainment in Vegas. And now they know about the divorce ranches. More money in the Nevadan economy.
Las Vegas is a bright shining tax evasion island in the middle of the desert built on entertainment, gambling, crime, and divorce. God bless Nevada and god bless no-fault divorce.
It’s not, though. It’s in the infraorder Iguania, but the anole family is now called Anoliidae (formerly Dactyloidae, but Anoliidae was recently discovered to be an older name). And due to the total disaster that is anole taxonomy (because people are lazy and conservative, and have forgotten that higher taxonomy is supposed to be useful), family Anoliidae and the genus Anolis are effectively synonymous.
This is from Animorphs #1: The Invasion, published in 1996, and the character narrating is a 13-year-old boy who was just drafted into an alien war, so maybe it's okay if Jake is a little inaccurate.
Just reinforces that we should be teaching taxonomic literacy from early education. Understanding the structure and hierarchy of Life is incredibly useful, for everything from medicine to farming. The earlier people get it, the more it can shape how they understand the world around them. And in the context of an alien war, even better to understand how things do or do not fit into the system that we know terrestrial life evolved under.
No but the 1996 bit is important this might have been accurate when it was published.
That said, there's always a moment when I read that passage sans context where I wonder *what* he did Monday morning. Like, I read the book. I know. But I'm still thinking "that's maybe not information yous should volunteer, buddy"
Well, by 1996, the anoles had been resting in the family Polychrotidae for a happy seven years (they didn't move over to their own family until like 2011). But I suppose if Applegate had been reading somewhat out of date literature as her source, or had commenced writing before 1989, she can be forgiven for this oversight. It takes a long time for many taxonomic changes to trickle down, even today.
(for clarity, I did not know this was a quote from Animorphs, or its publication date, for my original response)
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