Correct, Nemo, that entire area is desert. There are a few lamb and ostrich farmers there but it's generally considered unusable. There are a few projects looking at turning it into solar farms and I've even looked into buying some land there for an off grid community but a lot of it is "natural preservation" areas (absolute bullshit because now someone wants to start frakking there).
Once again Nemo, spot on. I've been bitching about the damned special snowflakes all week because they're a bloody waste of space and then adding fuel to the fire is the fact that the vast majority of that generation here are "PREVIOUSLY disadvantaged" and now still blame all their shortcomings on the way that my grandparents treated theirs, something that I had no part in (read "I" as "current generation whiteys").