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An Algorithm to End the Lines for Ice at Burning Man
I skipped burning man this year but went for the first time in 2013. One of the only goods for sale at Burning Man is bags of ice -- to keep your own food cool, or simply to refresh yourself, you can line up to buy bags of ice that are sold by Arctica camp out of the back of a refrigerated truck under a tent. Bags cost $3 apiece.
During peak times last year, the lines were up to an hour long. This year, so I heard, the lines on the first day were even worse, because two of the three distribution points were unable to open due to closed roads, so everybody lined up at the only sales tent that was operating.
Regardless of the conditions, the procedure when you get to the front of the line is the same. You specify how many bags of ice you want, and deposit cash in a container on the counter. Then a volunteer walks back to the ice truck to fetch one or more bags from the truck and brings them back to the counter. You collect your bags and continue on your way.
OK, before reading any further -- based on what I just wrote, can you think of a way to speed up the line? No cheating -- read the preceding paragraph and think of what you might do differently. Spoilers follow!
The thought that occurred to me almost immediately after I got my bag of ice, was: Why not just have the volunteers carry the bags of ice from the truck to the counter, before people place their order? As long as the line is moving, no bag of ice would sit on the counter long enough to melt. And then each transaction at the front of the line would be reduced to: Customer pays for bag(s), customer picks up bag(s) and leaves. By eliminating the time to walk back to the truck and fetch the bag(s), the system would significantly reduce the per-customer transaction time.
I'd asked a handful of Burning Man veterans about this, and they said that Arctica had tried this at one point, but was required to stop by Nevada health code regulations, which treated ice as a "food product" and therefore said that it could not be moved out onto the counter until an order has been placed. This sounded puzzling to me -- don't cafés place other "food products" out on a counter all the time, where they can be bought and picked up by customers? And for the ice bags, why would it matter in practice anyway -- even if the state of Nevada is worried about germs starting to multiply as soon as the bag is removed from the refrigerated truck, the time the bag spends sitting on the counter is still negligible compared to the time the customer spends transporting it back to their own camp.
So I emailed the Nevada State Health Division to ask them what the regulations actually said, and if they would allow the ice vendors to load bags of ice onto their sales counter before they had been paid for by a customer. One of their Public Health Engineers replied and said, "I can assure you that we do not require the ice to remain in the truck until it is ordered" (and dryly added, "It is common for vendors to blame the health authority for imagined regulations"). Regarding the resulting long lines, he also advised me, in the spirit of Burning Man radical self-reliance (if not practicality), "You may consider bringing your own ice to the Playa rather than purchasing it from them."
So that's it. There's no regulatory reason why the ice can't be brought to the sales counter before it's paid for -- where it wouldn't even have time to start melting, if there are customers eagerly waiting to carry it away -- and no reason why the line couldn't probably move 5 to 10 times faster as a result. (I emailed Arctica to ask if they would start having volunteers bring ice bags up to the counter before customers place their orders, and showed them the email from the Nevada Health Division saying it would be legal. I received a very friendly reply, mostly asking me who I was and why I was concerned about the issue; I said I had no stake in the matter except hoping to reduce the wait times and hence the aggravation and health risks for people waiting in line in the sun. I have not received a reply to any subsequent inquiries after that.)
In a previous article I'd theorized about an algorithm for speeding up the vehicle exodus at Burning Man. (Basically, have a "priority lane" where cars can exit at different times of day, depending on the last character on their license plate. So one hour where the priority lane is set aside for cars whose license plates end in "A", another hour where the lane is used by cars with plates ending in "B", and so on. This means that drivers who want to use the priority lane, can just wait for the designated hour, instead of spending five hours queueing up to leave.) That was intended more of an intellectual exercise, as a jumping-off point for a discussion about which algorithms would work best under different theoretical assumptions, and with only the small possibility that it might ever actually be implemented at the real event.
The call to speed up the ice lines is not an intellectual exercise. Unless there's a non-obvious major problem with making this change, this is something that could be done the very next year, and would save people thousands of person-hours waiting in line in the sun.
My other suggestion would be to have a "turbo" line even faster than the main one, designed for people to complete each sales transaction in seconds. Every customer in the "turbo" line would be required to have exact change (or be willing to overpay and let the vendor keep the change), and every customer would be required to have their cash fanned out in their hand like playing cards when they got to the front of the line. (A volunteer could walk up and down near the front of the line to verify that people already had their cash displayed properly.) A transaction at the front of the line would simply consist of, "Three dollars -- bag", or, "Six dollars -- two bags", where the customer shows their fanned-out money, dumps it into the cash receptacle, and picks up one or more bags from the counter.
With or without the "turbo" line, at first it might seem like it would take extra labor to keep a supply of ice bags moving constantly from the truck to the counter, but that's not the case. For a given number of bags to be sold, every bag has to be moved from the truck, to the counter, exactly one time. So the total amount of labor is always going to be the same, for a fixed number of ice bags. To have a steady supply of ice moving quickly from the truck to the counter, you might need to have more volunteers working at the same time, but that just means that rather than having 5 volunteers with one-hour shifts spaced throughout the day, you'd have those same volunteers working simultaneously to keep the bags moving.
With the lines moving that much more quickly, what if the ice bags run out halfway through the day? Hopefully the vendor can just send the trucks back out to fetch more bags of ice to be brought back in and sold in the afternoon. But even if they can't -- even if, for some reason, the number of ice bags sold per day has to be fixed at X -- you've still done an enormous amount of good by reducing the wait time from 30-45 minutes to 5 minutes. Because you still sell the same number of ice bags, but you've eliminated the pointless deadweight loss of all the time the customers were previously wasting in line.
And if the vendors can bring in more ice whenever their existing stock sells out much faster, that's a win too -- regardless of whether they're selling the ice for profit or just for altruistic motives. If they're selling ice to help people, then selling more ice is better. If they're selling ice for profit, then selling more ice is better, too.
I'm being fairly pedantic here because I want to make it clear that I think that I think there's no counterargument to be made to this, under any combination of reasonable assumptions -- whether the vendors can bring in more ice or whether they're stuck selling a fixed number of bags per day; whether the goal of selling the ice is for altruism or to make a profit. Bring the ice out before it's paid for, shave the transaction time down to the bare minimum of the customer paying money and then grabbing their ice bags, and everyone will be grateful they don't have to wait an hour in the sun.
And if you're an adventurer thinking about going to Burning Man, my tips for making it (slightly) easier include bringing your own cooler (separate from any food storage cooler) so that you can buy a bag of ice each day, dump it in the cooler, and have your own supply of ice water. That's well worth it, whether the wait time in the ice line is five minutes or an hour.
A guy named Agner Erlang solved most of this already, and we can thank the telephone. He took his work on how to figure out the optimal number of trunk lines for a town and used that to model cash register lines. Erlang worked out that one line into many registers is the fastest and most efficient, so if one line backs up but another one moves quickly, people don't bunch up at the register that was slow. You can see this system at work at Walmart of all places, their express checkout section where they tell you what register to go to is based on this model. If there's a bottleneck beyond the register, say the ice truck, then have a second queue where individuals are provided with something like a receipt for them to obtain the ice directly from the truck. This also has the benefit of individuals being able to buy more than one bag of ice and can come back and enter the ice truck queue to fill the remainder of the order later rather than requeue in the register line. Obviously there are risks to that but ultimately the risk would be the consumers. Both of these methods are in use today and even at the same time in some cases, I saw it just last summer at a beer festival. We went through one queue to get beer tokens, and then there were multiple vendors who accepted those tokens for you to redeem it. Then the vendors redeemed their tokens from the festival operators.
Why does Bennett Hassleton keep using /. as his personal blog, and why is he allowed to? I post this question every time he does a blog, and I've never received a proper answer.
pre-emptive: Can I find anything wrong with what you wrote? Yes, the fact what you wrote is displayed where it is.
no one wants to read Bennett's ideas.
Seriously, how is this news? This is some guy's heat stress-induced hallucination fixation about carrying ice around a desert.
People not only expect to have ice, but are complaining that the lines are too long... ...In the middle of the desert.
The lines are too long. For ice. In the middle of the desert.
What the actual fucking fuck.
Seriously.
Trust fund rebel white people problems, in particular.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The united colours of Hazel Bennetton strikes again!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Your assuming that the Nevada health and safety are the local health inspector(s). A group of people who may well hate burning man and have no downside to misinterpreting the regs.
Your assuming the volunteers scale in a linear fashion while accessing the same truck.
Perhaps the altruistic vendor wants to inflate their ego by having people wait for hours for their product?
This is a scenario where if you think you can do it better rent a freezer truck and buy some ice see how well you do.
No sir I dont like it.
Now that's a good time.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
65,000 people don't belong in any dessert. That's clearly unsanitary.
Tell that to Vegas. They like it dirty.
This is a longer article than the one about India getting to Mars BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. And I thought the fact that Harry Potter has a longer WP entry than Prince Harry was ridiculous.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Just sell it from the back of a truck.. Have a guy taking money right there.
The only reason shops usually have a counter is 1) to display MULTIPLE items.
and 2) to discourage grab and run.
They are only selling ice and ice is not easy to grab and run.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Bennett Hassleton is the latest in a honored linage traced from Roland Piquepaille all the way back through the mists of time to the legendary Jon Katz. These are the alpha-trolls of /., it would behoove you to honor them.
Is there any relation between this article and the poll on clickbait?
Algorithm? check
Burning Man? check
Bennett Haselton? check
Frustrated Slashdot readers posting furiously? guaranteed
Sounds like clickbait to me.
This is not even an algorithm. I'm not going to explain why not, if you don't know you shouldn't post here.
Given that you are trying to upgrade the problem from a single threaded sequential algorithm to a multi-threaded algorithm, I feel there should be a semaphore in there somewhere.
If you want to know why companies do the things that they do, it's not because of health regulations.... It's because of money.
How about this: The ice truck workers are paid hourly. They would rather get paid for an all-day episode of unloading ice rather than just 2-3 hours.
Or maybe they got too many complaints about melted ice from customers who demanded a refund. It's the money, I'm sure of it.
This is capitalism. Supply-demand.
If you speed up the actual sale process, you will sell much more in the same time. In other words, the queue is discouraging people from buying ice thus reducing demand. Maybe arctica does not want to sell more ice. Maybe they cannot bring more in. If you speed things up, you will need more ice, else you will run out of stock.
Of course there is also psychology. If there are no long queues, ice is less desirable to own. Also you can postpone the purchase, as it is easy to get some. The overall amount sold may even decrease!
Vajk
Nobody ever got fired for doing things the way they've always been done. Maybe it's time to change ice vendors to someone willing to serve it up faster.
The long line is to convince hipsters that the product must really be special. If there wasn't a line, the $3 price would probably drop.
Next year: iIce (as long as Apple doesn't sue). No one will think twice about waiting in line overnight.
Have gnu, will travel.
Silicon Valley Queue Service Algorithm I wonder which one is Bennett ?
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Seriously; are there people in this world that are getting PAID to administrate and edit Slashdot? If so, please sign me up for this sweet gig. If not; then I can understand this kind of sloppiness as it's just a hobby.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The problem with Burning Man lines is the regular screw-ups at the gates every year. They cause lines that are many miles long with people stuck in their cars for half a day or longer. And those screw-ups are frequently technological.
http://blog.burningman.com/201...
Waiting in line for an hour to get ice while chatting with other burners... not a problem, and if it really bothers you, just come back another time.
Granola eating hippies are ineffective businessmen who are willing to tolerate losing customers to long wait times instead of increasing their efficiency/capacity because capitalism is evil... or something.
If you want to do it better: do it better. You made your suggestion. As business owners it is their prerogative to leave money at the table.
They probably have a fixed ice transport/storage capacity and don't care about their efficiency as long as they sell out every year. If they are still amortizing out their initial capital investments it may not make sense for them to increase their transport/storage capacity because of the associated risks of growing their businesses too quickly and over-leveraging themselves.
Frankly, the lowest hanging fruit in my mind is hiring an additional cashier or doing what In & Out Burger does in California(another business that keeps their prices artificially low making demand excessive/long wait times) and have the cashier walk the line and sell "ice tokens" which simplifies the cash handling at the front counter and keeps the ice distribution as an uninterrupted continuous process.
If you want Burning Man to be more efficient, ban hippies from attending since they are too busy smoking pot to care about things like "Lean" or profit maximization.
That's quite a roundabout way of saying "I've been once".
I've been to events where they take an order for a hamburger, take your money, cook that hamburger, serve it, and then take the next order. It's painful to watch.
But from what I've read about Burning Man it wouldn't surprise me that this kind of thing goes on there.
The rate-limiting factors here are walking ice bags from the truck, and making change.
Bennet doesn't offer any solution to the first problem, and his turbo line solution would offer only a small help to a subset of customers.
Here's a real solution: the desk staff take money, make change, and hand out tokens. The customer then walks over to the back of the ice truck where dedicated staff will exchange tokens for ice bags. This can be as simple as, "show me a token, drop it in the bucket, I pass you a bag." Each staffer remains at their task without switching every 30 seconds, which adds efficiency. No staffers are required to haul bags from the truck, which is an efficiency. If any bottlenecks remain, just add staff.
This guy has a serious case of it.
...by making one small... Well, read the description below of how they do things now,
I'ts one thing to have to see BH's articles but Slashdot has NEVER sunk to the level of using lame journalistic teasers. The summary should sumarize. It doesn't exist just to coax someone into loading a fresh ad.
This is the sort of crap that has shrunk the user base. Stop doing it Dice.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The existence of a queue means that people are willing to pay more for the product. So why not let them? Raise the price as the queue gets longer, and lower the price as the queue gets shorter. This stabilizes and even lets you control the length of the queue.
They should do the same at ballparks on game day. Instead of charging a fixed rate for parking, charge to go through the gate according to the number of cars waiting to get in or out. If you get there really early, you could get in practically for free, and if you tailgate after the game, you can get out practically for free. With shorter queues and a greater ability to save money, everybody wins!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This is not algorithmic. This is logistics.
A friend of mine bought Vodka in Soviet Russia and described the process as:
Get in line and at the end of that line tell the person what you would like to order. The give you a ticket for the item.
Get in another line and produce the ticket which you then pay for that item.
Then get into a third line where they will very carefully scrutinize the certified paid ticket and give you your vodka if there is any left.
He said that the time he went that the 3 lines were around 40 minutes each as the counter people were very very slow and methodical.
There is a simple free market solution to long queues: raise the price.
It's not just programmers that think in terms of effincident please processes, in fact I'd say that's more the domain of the business person. You can get a degree in how to most effectively and efficiently run an operation to deliver goods to customers, that's called a mba. MBAs, and MBA style thinking about efficient process, is not popular with the burning man crowd.
There should be a poll to see how many people actually WANT to read Benny's latest blog post.
In my opinion you need to look at the number of servers and the time it takes to serve each customer. I doubt the company who runs this service will bring out more trucks to serve the community, but if you can increase the number of actual servers at each truck it may help. However, from what the article says I would think the issue is the time it takes for each customer to get their ice from the time they step up to the counter. With a bit more information you could definitely come up with the best solution, feasible or not.
If they have a fixed amount of ice, or can only make a fixed amount per hour then they have nothing to gain from selling that amount at a faster rate. Sure, the customers may not like it but since these guys are the only source of ice, what the customers want is of little consequence.
If you really want to speed up the line, introduce some competition. A 3 word answer instead of a 1,600 word one.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sounds like you could use your "no waiting for ice" expertise to start your own ice business and taking customers out of your competitors lines. Until then, you might want to get a job in a fast-food restaurant to learn some of the trade-secrets for expediting.
More like "Bitching for hipsters". Seriously, this site continues to go down hill.
Do you need ice to survive the desert?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
First world problems. Grow up.
You must be one of those vegetarian hippies ;)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Nice one!. It would work out great for me I can wander up and down the line taking money and then just disappear into the crowd. A win-win for me-me!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
so blog posts from Bennett Haselton are never seen by my eyes.
I look forward to reading Bennett's article entitled "How I made Burning Man a more efficient place by selling ice out of the back of my own truck and then volunteering to direct traffic after" next September.
Seriously, if folks would just not post any sort of comment when this douche posts his blogs, they would axe him.
To get him off the site, just boycott his opinions.
of course an even more obvious solution is to open your own ice franchise at Burning Man, there's obviously the demand if queue's are an hour long, and £3 for a bag of water.... and he can implement his idea, make a fortune *and* post smugly about how great he is for thinking it up!
I skipped burning man this year but went for the first time in 2013.
Wouldn't it be easier to say I went to burning man once in 2013? I went to Burning Man once after it got really popular and I solved all the problems.
1600 words from The Man himself? SIGN ME UP! clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
Seriously, if we had BH posts daily, that would be enough to push me to learn to write a greasemonkey script with regex to hide them.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Automate it. Have fewer people feed bags of ice into the back side of vending machines hanging off the sides of the ice truck. You wouldn't even need much mechanical or electrical. You really only need an automated cash taker, change maker. Post the number of bags the customer wants inside the truck for someone to drop down a hopper. The number resets as bags drop down the chute until the right number is met. Next...
It all starts at 0
DeathGuild/Thunderdome worked a shift at Arctica this year (and previous years).
Basically it worked like this:
1) Some of us are in the truck and are lining up bags of ice at the edge of the trailer (single bags, block ice, bags of 3, and full bags of 6)
2) Customer approaches counter with dedicated cashier, announces what they need
3) Dedicated Ice runner moves TEN FEET OR LESS to the trailer, grabs the ice and brings it to the front
(Note for #3, the customer is still usually paying/receiving change by the time the ice is in front of them)
4) Customer leaves, wash, rinse, repeat.
That walk ALL the way back to the truck takes seconds, and the ice is there, right at the edge, and still being cooled to a degree by the trailer chillers, it takes them 15-20 seconds TOPS to get that ice. Each register also has a dedicated trailer (unless one is pulled for replacement with a new, full trailer). So what you are really saving is MAYBE 15 seconds or so per transaction, and then you have ice sitting out in 100+ degree heat.
Don't forget if we want to put out the ice people need, we would need to have every possible combo of ice sitting out there, so if we get a run on single bags, those full bags and blocks would just sit there simmering until someone comes along that wants them. I think a bigger speed up for the lines would for people to have their money ready, and not dick around in their drug addled state when we ask them what they want.
..with the simplest (and not necessarily the best) possible solution to the problem, that is described in way too much detail.
This whole piece could have been either:
1) A paragraph long
2) Far more innovative in approach, and therefore worth the time I just spent reading it.
A lot of people that show up are not prepared and mooch off of everyone in the name of "community"
We would hide our resources and tell others "nope dont have any" on a lot of occasions and those we could tell were in real need and not just lazy potheads we would share.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
At the ice truck? ARE YOU INSANE?
That path leads to MADNESS!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Offer 100 bags of ice for $250. Problem solved.
... THEN I'd be interested in the article.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Burning Man has created an artificial monopoly for ice. By the description it sounds much like bread lines in Russia. If you try to bottleneck and manage essential goods at a single source, it invariably gets unmanageable as it scales up. They're dealing with a pretty large population these days for a bunch of festival organizers.
Based on the commenter who described the actual process via way of being a volunteer, a short term solution without getting into the political questions is to massively increase parallelism during peak times. Despite the pretty simple process, the peak demand is straining the system.
If they kept statistics about load vs. time they could figure out easily when to have a whole bunch more labor present to get the job done more quickly for the throngs of thousands.
65,000 people don't belong in any dessert. That's clearly unsanitary.
[_] Shhhh ... it's made from soylent green :-)
...)
[_] Well, we had to find a new use for all those zombie parts coming on-stream thanks to ebola.
[_] "You got people in my dessert!" "You got dessert in my people!"
[_] It's Burning Man. They'll eat anything.
[_] You know our slogan - "it's real people food?" Well, what did you expect?
[_] You're right - there's not enough people in the dessert. Everyone knows 640k should be enough.
[_] At Burning Man, people desert YOU (probably because of the smell after the first few days
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Say welcome to our cannibalistic PETA overlords.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
ice vendor: What do you want? ...
stoner: um
ice vendor: No ice for you! Next!
First, it is arguable that at a a place like burning man which is allegedly a social event, the act of waiting in line is not in fact part of the stated purpose. I mean, where else do you get an opportunity to meet random like minded people. It is why waiting in line at whole foods is not big deal. It is really party time. Only overly introverted judgmental people get all stressed over it. If one is laid back and enjoying the groove, who cares?
Likewise it is reasonable to ask whether profits would increase with more ice. The writeup postulates that there is a fixed costs to bringing in ice and that profit increases linearly for more ice sold. If this were true, then there would be more than three distribution points. So what is probably going on here is that paying people to drive and sell the ice would cost more than the profits to sell the ice if more trucks were brought in. Probably three trucks of ice is probably what is sold, and through most of the day the wait time is not an hour. Wait time would probably be reduced more by people choosing a different time to buy ice. It would probably be beneficial to track wait times during the day and see if it would be possible to even out the flow of people. If more ice is needed than is supplied, then add another truck and increase if necessary.
Finally we have the cute idea of the volunteer. In the case of price gouging the last thing one want is an untrusted person dealing with the product. You might as well ask the drug dealers to have volunteers distribute the H. The marginal cost of a bag of ice is minimal, but the bags must be sold to cover the costs. If the situation is as dire as the poster suggests, there would be a large incentive for the volunteer to steal ice. Maybe each volunteer works an hour, and then thinks they are entitled to a couple free bags of ice. At minimum wage, the firm is not making any bargains off the situation.
I know how these festivals go, and roughing it is hard, but that is why we were given granola, and way clavier is not suitable for every occasion.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'd asked a handful of Burning Man veterans about this, and they said that Arctica had tried this at one point, but was required to stop by Nevada health code regulations, which treated ice as a "food product" and therefore said that it could not be moved out onto the counter until an order has been placed. This sounded puzzling to me...
this is why i don't like Burning Man...
1st problem is in bold...see, Burning Man is about overcomplicating and mystifying something to make it have social cachet...****ANYTIME**** you ask a question like this to a Burning Man veteran, you should expect a bullshit answer...somehow it will be bullshit
2nd problem is in italics...the problem is not trusting your own common sense! obviously they are full of shit and just making stuff up to sound like they know what is going on
in other words, the problem lies with the ice truck people ("Arctica")...they are just douchebags...they could try to make it better but they don't care....the problem with this system is that Burning Man as an event encourages this superiority complex mentality
Thank you Dave Raggett
"instead of having them wait either a very short time if they arrive when ice is available or a long time when ice is sold out."
If they're sold out, the waiting time in line falls to zero.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Even if the Nevada health department DID have an objection, what's wrong with having some ice bags in an insulated box at the counter and calling THAT a "cooler" or "icebox"? It wouldn't need to be powered, because it would be kept cold by the steady flow of fresh bags from the supply truck.
You'd have to run it as a FIFO, to avoid having bags sitting there for hours. (Bag porters put 'em in one end, clerks pull them out at the other - or put a moving partition in and run it as a circular buffer, so you don't have to slide them down. No additional communication between counter workers and bag-porters is necessary, because the available open space signals when more bags need to be toted. Only downside I see is that if/when the counter is about to close, you need to signal the porters to stop, to avoid having unsold bags in the cooler that need to be ported back to the truck to keep them from melting during the break.)
Such a local buffer would do all you want, without leaving the ice bags sitting on a counter in the desert. Also: The ice would be seen by the customers to be fresh, rather than partially melted while waiting to be picked up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And as the founder of the Ice Rustlers of the Open Playa, who helped lead deputized hobby horse riding citizens (many kids) to defend the Ice Bank from the Ice Rustlers of the Open Playa riding their hobby animals (unicorns, giraffes, and other creatures) with their wild and crazy hats, I remember fondly the agonized death scenes (perhaps a bit too overly dramatic) as they were stopped from stealing ice.
Seriously, you guys are way too serious. Lines are part of the fun.
If you want convenience and order, what the heck are you doing in the desert, you spoiled brat?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Problem: maximize profitability selling ice at a hippy poser wannabe festival. The constraints are:
1) Users must be at least minimally satisfied. No shouting, cursing, "line rage", or riots. The user must get a reasonable product with an acceptable wait time at an acceptable cost. The process should seem fair.
2) Costs must be minimized these include:
a) cost of labor, this is probably the biggest cost
b) materials cost, waste from melting ice must be minimized
c) transportation and storage costs. No constant shuttling to and from the supplier who may be 100 KM away. Some transportation costs may actually amount to labor costs,e.g. the cost of a driver.
3) regulatory compliance cost mostly health and sanitation.
4) Losses due to theft must be minimal. This sort of implies cash on hand must be minimal. Higher sales may require banks drops for security reasons.
Let's begin...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Customers are bottlenecks too, so you must take into account that as well. There is a faster way to parallel process knowing this: You send two people down the row of customers to take orders and give tickets to those who are ready (the first person takes everyone who is ready with cash the moment they are approached - while the 2nd employee catches those who are a bit slower / using cards) and when the line is traversed, go back to do other duties (ice fetching/accounting etc) OR leave that person deep in the line (think McDonalds 2 window system). You have one person constantly fetching ice (they can trade to avoid fatigue), you have one person to verify the tickets and allow the bag transfer. Rinse-repeat. This is why I'm a computer scientist who does business, there is always a better algorithm than the competition.
... and wouldn't selling ice not defy the very purpose of the event?
ignatius
Don't buy ice at peak times.
For fuck's sake, Burning Man is about self reliance. Sp rather than be an adult, and deal with his ice chest in the early morning late at night, or some other time with low lines he wants to change the system to suit him.
He simply doesn't understand the event. And guys like him are part of the reason I no longer go.
Figure out how much ice you will need.
Get some relatively cheap, thick Styrofoam coolers.
Put the ice in the coolers, cover with dry ice.
Put the coolers in the shade.
(Use gloves to move the dry ice around.)
What about the obvious answer--moving the cash box right up to the back of the truck. Have one volunteer taking the money, the other in the truck skidding the ice out on a dolly. It's not like labor costs are a concern? Volunteers! No pay. Take two. Also, person in truck literally has the coolest job at BM. I bet a lot of people would want to do that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Bennett, please just shut the fuck up about your improvements to burning man. For your traffic flow 'improvement', you notably didn't provide simulations, suggested a broken alternative, and didn't even bother to fully understand the situation before jumping in with both feet. For this one, you've done something similar.
In particular, the problem when the ice line is backed up is -not- because the ice wasn't prefetched. It's because half the time they can't get it out of the trucks any faster, and half the time they can't get the customers out of the way faster. Adding prefetch to a throughput bound system does not improve performance. If you had the experience of going through the lines more than a few times, you'd have maybe picked up on that before offering your advice.
I'm not going to say that traffic isn't a problem, or that ice queues aren't stupidly long at times. But these are hard problems, and they have been thought about extensively by smarter people than you, smarter people who have more information and experience than you. You insult all of them by discounting that so blatantly.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
Assuming ice production is not the bottleneck, then taking money and making change certainly is... Eliminating the ice transfer from truck to counter, even if it only saves 15 seconds per customer, would be significant. Given these facts, I thought the "algorithm" would obviously be pipelining.... like McDonald's drive thru. One queue feeds multiple cashiers to take money and give tickets, tokens or other proof of purchase... The cashier lines feed into one or more ice lines that terminate exactly at the back of the truck. You give over your ticket and then YOU pick up the ice and take it away. The ice only ever moves from the back of the truck to the front. Large truck could probably serve 2 pickup lines at the tailgate. It should not be too difficult to make moving the ice from the back of the truck to the front your bottleneck.
Exactly, that's precisely what the majority of stoned people at Burning Man will say. Of course, that's because they aren't so good at arithmetic and even worse at history. Since 1967, when the census bureau began tracking it, there has been exactly one instance of real median income falling over any five year period. That's the last five years. Every other period in American history has seen median incomes are increase. It's just these last five years that Damon republican in the Whitehouse has fucked it all up.
Your parents and grandparents actually worked, hard, in the heat, to afford an 800 square foot home. Today's young leftist mooches live in their parent's 800 square foot basement, working part time and complaining about how tough it is.
Get off my lawn - or mow it. The Mexican who came to my door unable to speak English couple of years ago pushing a broken down mower now arrives in a $30,000 dually. Because he worked for it.
There is no "line" at McDonalds, there is simply a mob of customers, some of them waiting for their order, some of them staring at the menu-on-the-wall not knowing what to order, and some eager to purchase something and eat. Somehow that mob is self-organizing and the servers are able to "Can I help you?" the next person without a line and without starting a riot.
The one time that didn't work is when I was on a long drive returning from visiting my parents in "long-term care", and as I came up to the counter to open my mouth with my order, a group of people from what looked like a middle-school sports team after a game simply surged passed me, as much as pushing me aside. Didn't say anything but from my scowl, one of them remarked, "I bet that 'dude' is upset" only in somewhat more vulgar terms. I think I said something that I had a 'long day', was very tired and hungry beyond belief, but it didn't look like I was getting anything to eat anytime soon, I turned and left.
Before someone lectures me about my sense of entitlement, that was probably an epic fail of this "store" from their training at Hamburger U. I don't stop there but instead patronize another McDonalds a little further up the road with which I have good experience.
It's not really a huge priority to make the ice experience easier. If people could swoop through like McDonald's, there would be a lot more waste... a certain fraction of the BRC population has more money than sense, and we don't want to see ice all over the playa. Everybody has to wait in line, which is a nice equalizer. It keeps everything a little cleaner, and people often remark about how much fun they have in the ice line... you meet people there that you wouldn't necessarily bump into anywhere else on the playa.
i have a solution.
test bombs on burning man.
everyone wins.
Here is a quick summary of the main ideas in the article:
Every time a customer purchases ice at Burning Man, a volunteer must walk to the ice truck, retrieve the ice bags, and bring them to the customer. This wastes time because each customer must wait for his or her ice to be retrieved from the truck. Transactions that require returning change to the customer also take extra time. Therefore, the ice purchasing process would be faster if a) the ice were already at the counter so the customer could pick it up immediately, and b) there were a “turbo line” for people who don't need change. Some nonexperts that BH talked to thought that Nevada health regulations might prohibit a), but they do not.
That's just over 100 words. Does using 1700+ words to communicate these relatively simple ideas really help anyone understand them better?
Bennett went to Burning Man once in 2013 and now thinks he's somehow relevant to Burning Man and writes about it online more than many core community members who actually get stuff done. His one experience with Burning Man was as little more than an ancillary helper at a smallish camp. His bold "solution" to this problem actually ignores the key issue that workers are not moving fast because there is no motivation to sell more ice.
The reason the ice line moves so slowly is everyone is a VOLUNTEER and they are not paid to sell ice. They just get a free ticket working for Arctica. They're also stoned, and burnt out, and aren't really concerned about moving fast in the high heat of the day to get people more ice. If they just get through their shift, they're happy -- people waiting is not a concern.
The solution Bennett should be looking for should not be some magic "algorithm," but a political one involving staff being paid more and being hired for merit, rather than knowing someone in Arctica. His attachment to this idea and even stating that there are no counter-arguments shows his inexperience and cursory knowledge about Burning Man in general. Technically, his idea might work, socially, it'll never happen.
As far as I know, Bennett's social connections to Burning Man are very limited, so this would be something that flies above his head. Burning Man is predominately, a social event, and technical/algorithm solutions ignore the fact that the reason most core contributors are there is for social reasons.
Have a token- or ticket-based approach:
1. If you don't have a token/ticket (or need to buy more), there's one line for that.
2. Folks with tokens hand 'em over in exchange for bags, preferably right at the truck so no fetching (you effectively crowdsource that bit).
Money is separate from the actual moving of product then (have to do the whole "no refunds/no cash value" thing on the tokens). For people that pre-buy tokens, the line will be lightning fast. For everyone else, it'll still be faster than before and you can flow people to the registers or to pickup as needed to deal with demand.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
The bag on the counter technique provides a time complexity improvement on the scale of O(1)... probably safe to ignore. Forcing people to complete the transactions faster is probably not practical, so the only way to increase throughput is to have more cashier stations.
Dearest Bennett Hasselton,
Your idea to shorten lines will not work because of the following reasons:
(X) People aren't logical or rational.
Thank you and have a pleasant day.
Reality
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So, you go to an event in the desert, and you expect to be able to buy ice? Why are you depending on ice in the first place. WTF people? It's hot and it's dry; that's why it's called a desert for fuck's sake. Learn a little independence and self reliance.
Never been to burning man, but why so many different products? I'd think that single bags of ice would be suitable for pretty much any purpose the ice is needed for even if not ideal for some purposes. Why not just sell singles and one size of bundles.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The problem is that ice vending is a monopoly, so ice vendor employs monopoly tactitics. Since customers can't buy anywhere else, the vendor could not care less about inconveniencing them - they can't buy from another supplier.
Solution is to have more than 3 independent vendors, and BM sets the pice. Vendors will compete on service for sales - fastest server will prevail. The vendor that just takes customers' money and lets customer pick their own ice up from the truck will be fastest.
First-world problem solved.
Nice jab at American bashing, he who has a withered up staff (pretty sure we make a pill for that, just sayin), but there is one clear and simple reason that I hate systems like this and the self checkouts Walmart now employs: I'M NOT A WALMART EMPLOYEE! Don't ask me to do your job. If you need me to do everything in the store for you, because you are a cheap ass CEO, then why am I even coming through your doors? I'm buying damned near everything now via Amazon and it works out fine. Anything that I have to have right this minute can be bought at one of the smaller chains or the mom-and-pop grocers even if it is a bit higher in price because "fuck you, that's why". It is just one more symptom of the endemic problem with corporate cost cutting that I just can't stand. Those CEOs need bigger bonuses so little Jenny can have that new Maserati and all the poor folks can go die in the ditch.
That would probably be the best solution.
I'm just here to read the comments about what an utter piece of shit Bennet Hasselhoff is. Seriously, Ben 10 is the least qualified person to write about anything. I'd rather ask a hobo for advice, because at least then I'd be asking and not assaulted with random horseshit from Chris Benoit.
Have you considered that you may risk depriving people of the line for ice? I don't think it's a bad thing!
mugging
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
How many times have you been to burning man?
It's not a monopoly. There are no vendors. The people distributing the ice are volunteers.
Even if there were a traditional profit driven vendor for the ice, he would still have an incentive to sell all the ice as quickly as possible and GTFO, because he wouldn't have to pay his workers for as many hours and pay to have the truck refrigerated for as long.
I don't think this works out. People would buy all the tokens they think they'll need for the event up front and then just turn in the tokens to get ice as they need it. That way they only have to wait in the money line once. If the delay is in the money handling then tokens and separate lines are probably a good idea, but if the delay is in the actual transfer of the ice then having money separate from delivery doesn't really change anything.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
The thing I hate the most in the world is stupid lines making people physically wait and waste their time for something. Especially when there don't need to be lines, and the problem is caused by dumb behavior, not genuine lack of resources (aside from intelligence).
Have a look at this video, which shows how Toyota helped apply pretty simple principles to reduce the wait for food after disaster hit with Hurricane Sandy in NYC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You start understanding that the average person in charge of group processes generally have no idea how much of people's time they're wasting. Which could be avoided with some simple steps, and very little additional cost.
wouldn't PETA overlords be really really easy to overthrow?
attack dogs
PETA euthanizes 90% of the dogs they get within 24 hours. They've got it down to a science. They're like people who put down their pets because "it's better than maybe going to a home where they're not loved." Maybe if we didn't have laws against them doing that to their offspring, they'd weed themselves out of the gene pool quicker.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
doesn't matter if they're volunteers...but thanks for confirming for everyone that my first point was accurate, while simultaneously *contributing nothing* to the actual conversation
1st problem is in bold...see, Burning Man is about overcomplicating and mystifying something to make it have social cachet...****ANYTIME**** you ask a question like this to a Burning Man veteran, you should expect a bullshit answer...somehow it will be bullshit
So, how does the fact that "Arctica" uses volunteers negate the point I made here:
in other words, the problem lies with the ice truck people ("Arctica")...they are just douchebags...**they could try to make it better but they don't care**....the problem with this system is that Burning Man as an event encourages this superiority complex mentality
Nothing you said addresses that at all...
They can be volunteers and still douchebags...the point is it's obvious they could do it faster but they dont care
which i feel confirms my theory about Burning Man, as does your last comment
Thank you Dave Raggett
It costs $420 a person to go to burning man. There were nearly 70,000 people there in 2013. By charging people an additional $20, the management would have an additional 1.4 million dollars to buy a fleet of 20 ice trucks, and give out ice for free at 20 locations. They could sell the ice trucks after the event, or just store them until next year.
In fact, I could do this, and make my fortune. Pre-sell "ice passes" for $30 that would entitle the holder to free ice at any ice truck.
Just pre-queueing the ice makes sense too, but having more locations means you don't have to walk as far, or wait as long. Having 20 locations means a 10 minute walk, and a 0 minute wait for most people at most times.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Pretty obvious. Because if they didn't care, they could simply not volunteer? The whole point of volunteering is to make something better than it would be if you didn't.
false choice....it's not a binary...it's not a choice between only either a) not volunteer or b) get ice slowly and not improve the system
those are not the only two options
the volunteers should try TFA's idea without a big hassle or drama...they should WELCOME a solution that makes it faster...and so should YOU
you really are continuing to prove my point with all this
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm sure they have tried it, along with lots of other ideas.
except if you read TFA, it's clear the author asked about it and was told it was a "food safety issue" which he checked on and found to be untrue
But that's not even what this is about. What this is about is someone (you) who *really* has no fucking clue what he's talking about, trying to pretend like he does.
again...you ARE indeed proving my point, that Burners like you who over-mystify something just to feel 'cool' and 'in the know' are the problem, pasted below from my OP comment:
...the problem with this system is that Burning Man as an event encourages this superiority complex mentality
and you did just that in the quoted portion above
Thank you Dave Raggett
you can chase rhetorical circles all you want but you cannot address this fact:
the people should WANT suggestions for improvement, and the response TFA author got indicates a "superiority complex" mentality
this is correct, and no matter what your experience you cannot contradict it, given what you have indicated
they should welcome suggestions, TFA author was not welcomed and was instead give a line of BS
the fact that you think that b/c you were in the ice line once makes any of the above not correct **shows that Burners and Burning Man is about demonstrating abstract superiority**
they should welcome suggestions, TFA author instead was treated insultingly and rudely....ACCEPT THIS FACT
Thank you Dave Raggett
except it's not "just" one of anything....not one rude experience, not one asshat Burner (you), not just one example
given what was described, your behavior here, and the Burners I've known, comparing to other festivals I've been to (Rainbow Gathering, Bonaroo, several others), AND other articles about Burning Man on slashdot there is no other conclusion to make
Burning Man encourages people to act with a "superiority complex"
It's baked-in to the event...ask anyone "What is Burning Man" and you can usually see the artificial scarcity of knowledge used as a way to demonstrate your superiority over others on full display....you mystify it to make you "cool" and have artificial superiority to "noobs"...it's all a game for your ego
you understand you're confirming my theory with every post you type, right?
Thank you Dave Raggett
you've got nothing but personal attacks and unfalsifiable claims to support your contentions
none of your counterpoints attack my logic or offer a falsifiable counterpoint
everything you've typed here is just random rhetoric to support your ego
if you has a logical counter to my argument you would have used it by now...
Thank you Dave Raggett
n/t
Thank you Dave Raggett
With various approaches but its not clear that they are so successful. Your particular conversation sounds like it may have been an outlier.
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-jon
Very Nice Story the Regardless of the conditions