In my last column, I observed that 2025 started with a bang — or whatever sound an exploding fireworks-stuffed Tesla Cybertruck makes, anyway.

For Nevadans, the second half of 2025 started every bit as inauspiciously. A mass shooting outside the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno left three dead and wounded three others. Then came news the next day that a Las Vegas man killed himself, along with four others, in another mass shooting in Manhattan.

Surely there was nowhere to go from there but up, right?

July: Reno ruminates on grazing goats

As anyone foolish enough to place an errant sleeve in front of a goat knows, they’ll eat just about anything. When you’re mitigating wildfires, that omnivorous instinct is an advantage.

That may explain why Northern Nevadan residents started the summer months of 2025 by watching goats graze through the foothills near Reno. In 2024, the Davis and Callahan fires sparked multiple evacuations in the region — Reno residents were hoping 2025 wouldn’t lead to any repeats. To assist with that goal, the city and the Department of Conservation and National Resources jointly funded the deployment of 250 goats to turn the dry brush surrounding the city into goat fuel.

The effort was mostly successful, though the Gold Fire in neighboring Sparks shows they may have missed a spot. Or perhaps Sparks should have gone halfsies with its neighbor on some goats, too.

August: SOS sends an SOS in response to DOJ probe

In August, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office that demanded personally identifiable information for all of the state’s 2.1 million registered voters. In addition to the information anyone can get from the secretary of state’s website, which includes names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, party affiliations and election participation histories of every voter in Nevada — all of which is already public record — the DOJ demanded driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.

According to the DOJ, this request was issued to assess the state’s compliance with federal election laws.

For many of the same reasons why you might resist providing all of your financial information to an Internal Revenue Service agent who wants to assess your compliance with federal tax laws, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told the federal government that if it wants information from its office, it needs to be a lot more specific about what it wants and why it wants it.

Likely fueling Aguilar’s distrust of the DOJ is that, according to Wired, the federal government has been shredding the Privacy Act of 1974 — one of several laws passed to prevent bad actors, such as those serving the Nixon administration who used tax data and personnel records to identify and attack political opponents, from abusing the sprawling mass of data the federal government collects about each of us — to build a master database to surveil and track people. As part of that effort, the Social Security Administration announced in November that it’s sharing “citizenship and immigration information” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

DHS, it must be added, is the same agency calling for the deportation of 100 million Americans — nearly a third of all residents in the U.S. — on social media. Regardless of where you personally stand on the morality of mass deportations (I, for one, am vehemently against them), there’s no way to achieve that quota by merely deporting foreign-born residents and their American-born children. A database of Republican-to-nonpartisan or Republican-to-Democrat voters could be used by DHS to help pad their numbers.

In response to Aguilar’s unwillingness to blithely hand over state data to an increasingly erratic and paranoid federal government, the DOJ sued. The outcome of that lawsuit will be something we’ll all get to, uh, look forward to over the next year or two.

September: “Annual” doesn’t mean what Nevada thinks it means

“Annual,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “a publication appearing yearly.” Given that information, you might assume that Nevada publishes its annual financial report, well, yearly.

As The Indy reported in September, however, the state’s been covering the clock over its annual reporting deadline for several years. The state’s most recently published annual financial report, which was released in mid-August, was for fiscal year 2023, which ended June 30, 2023. The report took 777 days — more than two years — to complete.

Yes, that tardy pace places Nevada dead last in yet another list of things other states do better than us. It also places the state at higher risk of losing access to federal funds, as legislators learned the hard way a few months later when funding for anti-domestic violence programs was temporarily paused by federal officials due to the lack of timely financial reports from the state.

October: Is sports betting gambling or predicting?

What’s the difference between gambling and predicting?

Anecdotally, it seems like a distinction without a difference. Legally, however, the difference is significant. Prediction markets are regulated as commodity futures, which are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under the constitutional authority granted the federal government under the Commerce Clause. Gambling, however, is regulated by state regulators, such as the Nevada Gaming Commission.

So, if you’re a business and you want to enable your patrons to gamble on the outcome of a football game, you have to operate according to the rules established by your state regulators. If, on the other hand, you want to enable your patrons to predict the outcome of a football game for money in a futures market, you have to operate according to the regulations established by the CFTC.

Clear as crystal, right?

Did I mention that there is only one sitting commissioner running the CFTC right now? Or that President Donald Trump nominated a former board director for Kalshi — a business that hosts prediction markets for real-world events, such as sports outcomes  — to lead the commission?

Did I also mention that the entire theoretical point of prediction markets is to accurately predict outcomes? Or that the easiest and best way to do that is by having insider information on the outcome in advance — such as, for example, knowing when Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power and pocketing $408,000 on your accurate prediction?

Before I go any further, I should probably point out what any of this had to do with last October. The answer is, according to The Indy, one prediction market business swore off of Nevada at the same time other such businesses were preparing to double down — sorry, that’s a gambling term. What I’m trying to say is that other prediction market businesses were predicting that increased mainstream adoption of their services would improve their chances of prevailing in court.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know those predictions were less immediately accurate than they originally hoped — or gambled on. A federal court ruling in November put a halt to offering monetary sports predictions (not gambling!) in Nevada, though it’s possible the Supreme Court could overrule that at some point down the road.

In the meantime, sports bettors — wait! no! predictors of sports outcomes! — get to choose between having only 90 percent of their gambling losses being written off under the new tax code enacted under President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act or having 100 percent of their prediction losses being written off under existing tax codes pertaining to commodity futures markets.

Did I mention that Marc Andreessen, whose firm invested in Kalshi — one of the largest and most popular prediction markets — donated millions of dollars to Trump’s election campaign? Did I also mention that Miriam Adelson, whose family owns a majority of Las Vegas Sands, told Trump that she would support a third presidential run and pledged $250 million toward the effort?

At the risk of being conspiratorial, I don’t think it’s an accident that Nevada’s Democratic delegation hasn’t had much luck getting the gambling tax deduction back to its pre-One Big Beautiful Bill Act level, nor do I think it’s an accident that Nevada’s lone Republican congressman is keeping his cards close to his chest on the issue. Thanks to that provision, Trump is now the recipient of a bidding war for his attention between Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the sorts of gaming companies that used to scoff at him when he flopped in Atlantic City.

As I pointed out last year, I don’t think he’s going to give up that leverage easily — and certainly not for cheap.

November: How to make safety penalties disappear deep underground

In September, The Nevada Independent reported that Tesla was able to dodge some proposed environmental regulations after it lobbied the office of Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, following some heated correspondence with the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection.

Then, in November, Fortune reported that Tesla might not be the only Elon Musk-owned company to enjoy a direct line to the governor’s mansion. According to its report, Musk’s Boring Co. — which, according to a joint report by ProPublica and The Indy, had been accused of nearly 800 environmental violations during its two-year effort to dig tunnels under Las Vegas — saw more than $400,000 in proposed penalties for workplace safety violations vanish after it scheduled a meeting with several high-level state officials.

Unsurprisingly, Fortune’s reporting led to immediate pushback from said officials. According to a statement from the Department of Business and Industry, which was published by The Indy, what actually happened was that the department’s legal counsel reviewed the fines and concluded that they had been “improperly issued.” The statement further added that “the best practice of submitting willful citations for a legal review was not followed,” and that “at no time did the governor’s staff pressure, imply or direct that the agency take any specific action beyond engaging in a fact-finding exercise.”

Taking the department’s response at face value — and there’s no reason not to — this still raises further questions. 

Are less quarrelsome or connected businesses getting fined by the state for workplace safety violations without those fines undergoing legal review? How many other such fines should be rescinded? Why are agency best practices not being consistently followed? What other best practices are being skipped or ignored? The control numbers for the policies created after the agency’s review of its case against Boring Co. — NV-OPS-001 through NV-OPS-003, inclusively — suggest there were no preceding policies in place before these policies were drafted; is that true? If so, why not?

Perhaps we’ll get answers to these questions in 2026.

December: The Reno-Murdoch succession connection

2025 wasn’t a leap year, but it certainly felt longer than usual.

Keeping in the spirit of the year, December went out with a bang. According to This Is Reno, the Nevada Supreme Court gave the state — and the nation — an early Christmas present by overturning a district court’s ruling that sealed the files in Rupert Murdoch’s trust case from public view.

Murdoch’s secretive efforts to rewrite his will to ensure control of his media companies — including Fox, the Wall Street Journal and several newspapers in Britain and Australia — would be given to his most conservative son were already international news (and arguably the inspiration for HBO’s Succession). Then the New York Times announced in 2024 that a Washoe County probate commissioner was tapped to decide the fate of the nonagenarian’s empire — suddenly what was national news became local news for Reno residents as well.

Or, at least, it would have if the county court didn’t immediately seal most of the records and deny access to the media for any of the hearings. This Is Reno reported on the lack of information being released on the internationally prominent case — after that, there wasn’t much else to report.

Once again, we have the benefit of hindsight. With it, we know that the Murdoch family ultimately settled its differences outside of the domed, Beaux Arts-style courthouse in downtown Reno that happens to double as a local bee habitat. Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s favored son, will take control of his father’s empire but will have to pay his siblings $1.1 billion each for the privilege. Now that some of the records from the Murdoch family’s court proceedings are being unsealed, we may all better understand how events in a Reno courtroom helped drive one of the world’s most influential families into making that decision.

With 2025 behind us, surely we can now look forward to a more relaxed and normal year ahead of us.

Perhaps this will be the year when — and I’m thinking out loud here — we don’t have any stories about artificial intelligence (AI) generating naked pictures of nonconsenting social media users, including a 14-year-old Stranger Things actor, on demand. Avoiding such a story this year would, in turn, prevent stories about the AI “apologizing” for doing what it’s programmed to do (including “apologize”), thus letting its programmers and the corporate interests who pay them off the hook for their very human culpability in said programming.

Best of all, avoiding such a story would reduce the likelihood that we’d hear about yet another one of Musk’s misadventures.

Yes, I believe we can all certainly dream that this year will be a better year for a better world.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenvor email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.