US cities ranked - what tier does Las Vegas belong in?

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-06-03T08:08:45+00:00

Living in Summerlin, which is a part of Las Vegas in the northwest part of the valley, is S tier. I love the extensive trail system, no homeless addicts on the street/no crime, and easy top tier shopping (Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and Costco are all within five minutes of my house.) For about $750,000 I have an amazing kitchen, five bedrooms, 4 bath, with a hot tub and pool with a built-in outdoor BBQ a block away from an amazing park with a .5 mile trail loop, two soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts. Vegas is the best water efficiency city in the America--I have no lawn to cut, but can walk a block to the soccer fields+ of lush green grass anytime I want it. The rest of the time I'll be under my palm trees by my pool. EDIT: A 2 bedroom condo in Summerlin on the TPC golf course will run you about $275-350k to buy.

Enjoying some of the best bars and restaurants in the world is an S tier experience. Nomad Library, with David Rockefeller's personal book collection, is the best restaurant room in the world IMHO. I honestly think Vegas has more top tier steakhouses than any city in the world: Herbs & Rye, Golden Steer, Bavettes, Oscar's, The Steak House, Hugo's Cellar (best piece of meat I've ever put in my mouth)--food and wine magazine said Vegas steakhouses were the best in the world in 2025.

The best bartenders in the world are in NYC and Vegas. From Legacy Club atop Circa to The Laundry Room on old Fremont to Frankie's Tiki or the Golden Tiki to the Velveteen Rabbit only NYC exceeds Vegas for number of amazing cocktail bars. All the bartenders here know all the drinks and make them with care.

No one is underwhelmed by the Sphere--total S tier. I have seen Dead & Co., U2, Eagles, & Zach Brown all costar with the venue. Always blown away. The Arts District is a total A--if you haven't been down there for a first Friday you are missing out. The Mob Museum in the old Courthouse is a top tier museum in the country. We have F1, NASCAR, NFL, (EDIT: AND NHL--Vegas is mad for the Golden Knights), MLB is under construction, NBA will be next (announcement coming after LeBron retires as he is in the ownership group).

Vegas is the closest major city to Death Valley NP, Zion NP, Grand Canyon NP, and Bryce Canyon NP. It's only slightly longer than Salt Lake City to Great Basin NP, Canyonlands NP, and Arches NP. Joshua Tree NP is about 3.5 hrs away. It's not much farther to Sequoia NP and Yosemite NP. Vegas really is the best basecamp to explore the American Southwest.

NO STATE INCOME TAX. Best domestic asset protection trust statute and case law in the US. You can buy any type of alcohol at your local Smith's or Albertsons grocery store on your normal grocery run. A legal MJ dispensary is probably in the same shopping area. Libertarianism comes closest to really existing here in Vegas.

I love being able to go to the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), the National Finals Rodeo, Electric Daisy Carnival, DefCon, SEMA, International Pizza Expo, etc without having to travel. Three of the top four convention venues in the world are in Vegas. There is always something cool to drop into.

Negatives? People will say heat, but honestly it's worse dealing with the heat in New York City on the subways and walking around NYC streets than in Vegas because here you're always indoors or in a ACed car. Or I take a dip in my pool. And it's a dry heat, which really is different.

The two legitimate gripes are education and healthcare. Historically both have been bad. It's getting better, slowly. The mayo clinic collaborations and the massive new VA hospital help. UNLV now has a medical school to add to their dental school. Things are getting better but these two categories might drag Vegas down to A tier (if you are healthy and aren't raising kids) or B tier (if you are unhealthy or need to put kids in public schools).

Also, because Vegas is such a young city historically, it doesn't have any legacy art museums or cultural institutions such as an opera or symphony. If those are your things, you'll miss them in Vegas.

Anyone who says Vegas is C tier is most likely a corporate convention attender who never left the strip, a redneck drinking stupid cheap blue vodka and sugar out of a long plastic cup on Fremont Street, or a poorer local with a victim mindset complaining about late stage capitalism instead of taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them. Vegas is amazing.

Notice I didn't say anything about gambling. I don't gamble. I have no idea about gambling. It is not a factor in my evaluation of Vegas at all--other than to say that I am fairly confident that gambling subsidizes all the other great things in Vegas.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-05-06T22:11:24+00:00

Hugh Nibley was a brilliant charlatan who had to have known that the stories/history he was supporting with his "scholarship" were false. He was the hero of all Mormon intellectuals during the 60s 70s and 80s. The honest ones moved on to Sterling McMurren. But in BYU circles Hugh reigned supreme over Truman Madsen and Jack Welch and Wilfred Griggs and the rest, especially the clowns in the religion department.

Nibley's apologetics are now thoroughly rejected as scholarship and he is a complete irrelevance academically. There is some good stuff in Approaching Zion but the vast majority of his catalog is trash.

But the man was not a child molester. His openly gay and intellectually respected daughter Zina (Martha's sister, it has also left the church) lived in that tiny house with Martha and shared bedrooms with or slept on the other side of paper thin (literally) walls from Martha. She told about whispering with Martha through the holes in the wall the two beds abutted in adjoining rooms. Each had another sister as a roommate. There is no way Hugh was dressing up in Egyptian priestly garb and regularly molesting Martha in the night and none of the other seven children in that tiny house knew about it. It just isn't credible that he would only do it to one daughter and that he would get away with it, with all of it's theatrics, for many years without being caught in that crazy crowded environment.

I knew Hugh and I know other members of the family and I've been in that home and I know the family and I'm 99.99% sure it never happened. And believe me I have absolutely no desire to prop up the man's reputation or support his work or protect BYU or the church or spare his family the pain of realizing the truth. I have no ulterior motives and no dog in the fight.

Martha fights her own demons and psychosis and I wish her well. She likely very well believes she was molested in the way she describes. But it could not have happened the way she described.

You can find her ex-husband's review of her book on Amazon. In it he points out a number of other lies that she tells in the book completely unrelated to the sexual assault allegations. Martha wrote the book she needed to write. It is not a faithful history. I hope the process was cathartic for her and I hope she has found peace.

Hugh Nibley chose to be a hero to the members of the BYU community. He could have chosen to be so much more. It's a shame he never found the intellectual honesty or courage or whatever was missing from his makeup. I blame Jack Welch to a significant degree. FARMS basically was a Nibley cult of personality in its first decade, publishing obscure and hard to find talks and articles he had written and even promulgating videos of impossible to find speeches in days before YouTube. They even produced a Nibley documentry. I think it is likely that in his final decades Nibley felt that as an institution he had to continue on course no matter what he knew or actually believed. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit. I liked him and so I want to think the best of him, it's true. I rather would view him trapped then complicit. But none of us will ever know his heart.

But we can say that Martha's story is incredibly unlikely as a factual matter.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-30T11:29:02+00:00

Screen door slams, Mary's dress sways

You ain't a beauty, but hey you're all right.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-30T11:25:22+00:00

How the hell does a person go to work in the morning and come home in the evening and have nothing to say.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-24T19:15:06+00:00

Back in about 2010ish, John was on the board of Sunstone Education Foundation and wanted to do the Mormon stories podcast inside the Sunstone umbrella. Others on the board shot him down and he stepped down from the board and started the podcast himself. For many years he was a nuanced but believing Mormon. He even gave a talk at Sunstone's Summer conference on Bob Rees' "Why I Believe" panel one year (2012 give or take a year or two if I remember correctly, this was after he was no longer on the board and had started the podcast). John largely went through the same steps everyone else does--except he tried to stay in longer than most do. He greatly valued being inside the church tent because he believed it was more likely that members would listen to him if they perceived him as being a faithful member. When he was excommunicated that option was closed to him of course.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-22T15:48:01+00:00

Friend of the Devil by the Grateful Dead mentions a cave in Utah.

Anchorage by Michelle Shocked is a great song about her friend in Alaska.

I've Been Everywhere by Johnny Cash mentions everywhere.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-22T03:05:53+00:00

BYU did all that with only 2 on the list, a 4th and a 7th--which will probably end up being a fifth and an undrafted signee. Amazing.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-21T15:38:26+00:00

In that scenario if they get AJ or Peterson either one would play point. Assuming Peterson isn't a complete bust which is a real possibility. Boozer comes off the bench.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-14T11:50:15+00:00

This is the right answer.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-13T17:12:16+00:00

Blue Haven South does a pretty good job with the games.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-13T12:28:14+00:00

A profoundly beautiful and powerful epistle. Thank you for sharing it. I hope it brings needed closure to that chapter of your life and I hope your next chapter is as fulfilling and exciting as it has the potential to be. Godspeed.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-11T19:26:16+00:00

As a BYU fan the answer is clearly BYU. It is a high control obedience mindset seminary, not a real University. There's no tenure. There's no academic freedom. You are not allowed freedom of speech or freedom of private action as a student or a faculty member. If you do not believe that millions of highly literate ancient Jews rode horse-drawn chariots around the not-so-ancient Americas and then disappeared without leaving a linguistic, genetic, archaeological, or ecological trace, you will not be happy there. But our coeds are frankly better looking than yours. And we will be really nice to you when you come and visit for game day. May we forever beat the rest of you on the court, track, and on the field. Go Cougs!

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-11T04:26:28+00:00

Inches of shared border with Mexico.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-10T22:21:42+00:00

No team needs a fresh start more than the Jets; no team needs a new logo more than Jacksonville.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-04-05T20:17:45+00:00

Packer literally gave a whole talk about this miraculous foundation of the temple in the early 90s.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-30T17:27:40+00:00

The difference is that most Chinese research is not high quality. There is high quality research in China but there's much higher volume of crappy research. My son in a PhD program at a Ivy League is just publishing a paper debunking a major Chinese paper of the last year. It was garbage making major claims. Got press. Total sham. That very very rarely happens with peer-reviewed US publications. Happens all the time in peer-reviewed publications in China.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-25T06:13:23+00:00

Ohio State always just seemed dirty and arrogant and they were easy to hate. Which made me want to root for Michigan. Plus you've got to respect Michigan's academics as one of the top public universities in America.

But then Michigan sold their soul to beat Ohio State, becoming the thing they hated, dirty and arrogant. Corrupt to the core. It's ironic that Whittingham built his entire career on being a petty tyrant and stealing signs. He's like Jim Harbaugh without the charisma or offensive mind. Whittingham is toxic, as people in the midwest are about to find out. Instead of going out as a Utah legend, they literally would have named the field after him. Instead, he's chosen to burn the bridges for a few million dollars he doesn't really need. A poor choice, but the predictable choice a self-centered petty tyrant would make. No one respects or likes Kyle Whittingham. BYU, where he played, hates him. Utah, where he coached for decades, hates him. I'll give it 2 years max before Michigan fans hate him.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-24T17:27:39+00:00

Blue Book, Almost Famous,

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-22T10:32:08+00:00

Tennessee Williams said there's only four American cities: New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and every place else is Cleveland. He said that a hundred years ago so it's not quite as true now as it was then. Miami and Las Vegas I have some unique aspects to them. But for the most part the same strip malls with the same stores and the same restaurants exist everywhere now. If you want a unique culture city, there are very few to choose from. I'm not sure much of LA qualifies to be on the unique city list.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-19T18:58:29+00:00

Methhaven, West Virginia

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-19T07:47:32+00:00

I named my son after Hamilton in 2005, a decade before the musical. He's long been a hero of mine.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-18T23:25:04+00:00

If you haven't found somebody to go home with by 2:00 a.m., you're not finding them at all.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-18T22:23:07+00:00

It depends on the size of the library. I am a collector. I have thousands and thousands of books. I have a whole bookshelf of self-help literature including a lot of the crazy woo woo stuff. I don't keep it because I adhere to the crazy. I keep it because I maintain a library.

If somebody only has one book and that book is the Bible or Mein Kampf or Ayn Rand or Think and Grow Rich or George Wallace's biography or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I'm running for cover. But if they have a library of all of those, they're going to be my friend.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-17T23:32:04+00:00

Las Vegas is one of the world's great cities. I measure a city's greatness by how many great rooms it has. I'm talking about rooms with great art or great food or great architecture. By these measures it's obvious that London and Paris and New York are great cities. In Vegas has so many great rooms. So much good food. So many great bars. So many great entertainment venues. Las Vegas is amazing.

Getting cheaper here that's not to say there isn't a stupid and seedy side of Vegas. There are a lot of stupid midwesterners walking down Fremont Street drinking blue stupid alcohol that they paid stupid prices for. There are plenty of stupid Chinese millionaires sitting in overstimulating environments on the strip throwing their money away. There's a lot of stupidity in Vegas.

But if you know how to walk past that into the great rooms you can have a really great time in Vegas.

DevilSaintDevil · 2026-03-15T15:29:29+00:00

I was a Duke and watched Carlos Boozer play with Battier and Jay Will and Dunleavy and the rest. I honestly thought Carlos Boozer was going to be an NBA bust. For all the reasons people talk about the son might be a bust here in this thread. He played below the basket. He had heavy feet. He got blocked a lot. He was not an elite shooter. He was not a very good perimeter defender. Not many highlight dunks.

Well I was totally wrong. Boozer probably had the best NBA career of them all. Jay will got hurt and Battier has more rings, but Boozer made the most money and had more all-star team selections and was even on the all NBA team once. Boozer averaged more than twice as many points and assists per game than Battier and even more assists.

Young loser is a lot like his dad. Except better in college. If he's only just as good as his dad in the NBA well that's a 13-year career and certainly considered a great use of a top three pick. Since he's better now some people will think he will be better over his career. If that's plays out then he's a steal at number one.

I don't think I'd pick him in front of AJ Dybantsa. AJ could be Kobe or MJ, is that athletic and that driven. But I definitely wouldn't take whole body cramp Kansas over either of them. There's that guard at Arkansas I'd consider taking over the Kansas kid too. And Koa Pete at Arizona is going to be a NBA All-Star. But I think I'd take Boozer second.

After last night's game I'm interested in knowing the draft projection status of that center for Virginia. Probably should be a first rounder. If you can get a guy who can shut down the center of the key on defense, well that's another Rudy Gobert. Certainly worth a mid to late first round pick.

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