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Others, like MGM Mirage, are in too deep. The few operating cranes in town are scattered among the 9,500 construction workers still crawling over CityCenter, an $8.4 billion, five-skyscraper, ultra-luxury project that is the largest privately financed development ever in the U.S. Although the company has managed to keep the project going through a desperate battle for financing deals with Dubai World, a number of people who signed up for condominiums are looking to bail. So MGM Mirage, which owns the most properties on Las Vegas Boulevard - the Strip - ducked and weaved around bankruptcy for six months...
...planet. The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and '08 the third richest person in the world, with - by his estimate - a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion - more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were begging him to take their money, given his massive success in building the first Vegas-style hotel and casino...
...believe what you read in the newspaper about us, we have one foot in the pail of bankruptcy and the other foot on a banana peel, and there's a high wind. It's all wrong," he says. Adelson, always a self-believer, has reinvested more than $1 billion in his company. But he has also fired his longtime right-hand man, been sued by shareholders and shed more than 700 Las Vegas employees since November. Read "Stick It to the Recession: Wynn's Vegas Encore...
...doesn't seem too crushed by his losses. "A billion dollars doesn't buy what it used to. So it's not as tragic as one would assume," he says. "I say to my wife that the worst tragedy I could have in business deserves a two-hour cry, and I scale down from there. I didn't cry one moment." When his wife asked him to cut back on expenses, he dismissed the suggestion, telling her he still had more money than they could ever spend. Eventually he capitulated: whenever possible, he uses his small private jet instead...
What does all this mean for parents? Does your research have any guidance for raising children? One takeaway is that the billion-dollar industry of quote-unquote educational toys that are supposed to make your baby smarter is a boondoggle. There's no evidence that any of those things make a difference. Children are learning the way that other people's minds work, which is much more important to learn than even letters and numbers. I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them...