Frankly if teachers are only contributing 1-14% to test scores then I have to wonder why we employ them at all. That's an abysmal number. We could replace them with scarecrows or hobos and still get those numbers.
Also, as I said before, I'd much rather have guesses based on data that is "fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable" than guesses based on nothing. And right now, we have nothing.
For all intents and purposes, yes, the car salesman can be fired for it. Regardless, the salesman loses the commission: no loan = no sale = no commission. This is why salesmen are good at sniffing out people with money and people without.
The real difference between the salesman and the teacher is that if the salesman can't make his numbers, he doesn't eat, wheras the teacher is just disappointed.
When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder. Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing. And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.
While I can at some level understand refusing dropouts, refusing GED graduates is stupid. The GED is basically the outer 'catch' block of the primary school system, and without it, there's no legitimate way to get a diploma if you have unusual circumstances. The fact that some kids use it to 'escape' primary school should tell you that there's either a problem with primary schooling, or that the GED process isn't sufficiently strong - but in both cases, the solution to the problem is NOT to make the GED worthless.
I really like the idea of a two stage mechanism, where the patent has to pass an initial review to be issued, and has to pass a more thorough publicly visible review when the first lawsuit involving the patent reaches some particular stage. The number of single-patent suits is actually fairly low and even a comprehensive review wouldn't add a lot of workload to the patent office, while the number of suits and patent applications would drop off due to the increased uncertainty of success.
> The problem is, by the time you start seeing serious climate problems it will be far too late to prevent things getting much worse.
I have a really, really hard time thinking that climate engineering won't be possible in a hundred years, and climate change doesn't happen fast enough to wipe out humanity in that time frame. IMHO we'll be able to put the climate wherever we want it.
> And what would the next most important concern be? Maybe the horrible pollution and environmental destruction being wreaked by our quest for more fossil fuels - fracking, strip-mining of pristine wilderness for tar sands, etc?
Nope. These are extremely low priority to me.
> Or maybe reducing the threat of global violence inherent in having our economies dependent on relatively rare fuel deposits while our need for energy to adapt to a changing world steadily increases?
This is also extremely low priority for me, as it's already happening anyway, and while some part of global violence is related to oil money, there's plenty of other reasons for people to blow each other up. Subsaharan africa and north korea are cases in point.
> This century is going to see a *lot* of geopolitical stresses as agriculture becomes far less reliable due to the already inevitable climate destabilization.
Agriculture has always been extremely unreliable, and yearly swings in weather dominate it, not climate change. Climate change is far more gradual than the time needed for agriculture to change.
> And perhaps most importantly - even if we had fusion mastered today, it would still likely take several decades to migrate the infrastructure.
Why is this any different from getting any other alternative energy source going? If anything, I'd expect continuous fusion plants to integrate just fine as they're similar to fission nukes, and ICF fusion plants to integrate just fine, as they're similar to gas turbine generators. Compared to what's needed for wind and solar, it's nothing.
Regarding population growth, most of the growth is in poor countries, where life extension will be less available, and where other dangers still cause a lot of death. While life extension does raise the projected plateau, how far it's raised depends on how fast it hits, how cheap it is, and how stable we're able to make the rest of the world. I'd bet 50/50 odds that the population in 2050 doesn't exceeed ten billion.
> assuming that neither you nor anyone you know would get the chance of being immortal, what arguments would you offer in it's favor? What rational reason do we have to extend the length of our lives?
Let me pose the same question to you, with a couple modifications:
- Assume that neither you nor any you know is dying of cancer. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?
- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know has alzheimers disease. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?
- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know lives in poor africa, where the average lifespan is barely above 40 years old. What arguments would you offer in favor of trying to help the people in this region? What arguments would you offer against it?
Aging is a horrible thing, something which frankly should not be tolerated in polite society, any more than cancer, alzheimers, and ebola. To simple take it 'off the table' as though it were uncurable and shouldn't be cured is reprehensible.
I am extremely certain that 1) global warming exists, and 2) global warming is mostly caused by mankind over the last few hundred years. As far as I'm concerned, the evidence there is more than sufficient, and deniers are nutjobs.
However, I don't really see much ecological damage that I care about at the moment, and that includes 'global warming' ecological damage. It's not that I don't see ecological change, it's simply that I don't care about most of it. It's also slow enough that mankind will be able to easily adapt going forward - easily compared to the other stuff we do day to day over the course of a century.
As for SENS, I'm not saying 'cure death'. I'm saying 'delay indefinitely death due to old age'. Why would you think we can't do that? It's a hard problem, but it's not unsolvable. At its core, life is just chemistry.
As for a ballooning population, current population estimates put a peak at under ten billion around the year 2050. There's every reason to believe that the population can be held finite.
I want to know how exactly changing out the electrode material type is supposed to get a 10k multiplier on plasma focus density. The web site and what I could find were remarkably short on detail, and I'm inclined to believe that while the beryllium electrodes are important, there's some serious confusion about what is being funded and the problems that funding is supposed to solve.
Either way, I'd much rather the money be donated to the SENS project instead. We don't currently have a power crisis, so to speak - however, we do have a hundred thousand people dying per day of age related diseases, and that seems a smidgen more important to me than dropping the cost of electricity.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong. Bootstrap/init is a complex problem, and systemd covers more of that complexity than previous solutions.
As for the three digit UUID observation, that's because those people where there at the beginning. If they're still active today, of course they would have strong opinions - they have a lot of experience to draw on.
5% is huge for a lower stage. The rocket equation is exponential, and the 5% applies to the exponent - a 5% change in the exponent may result in a 50% change in the final payload to orbit, or 50% reduction in starting weight.
I have been programming for 30 years, 20 of them professionally. I've never been fired or laid off, and I've objected to things like this no less than a half dozen times (admittedly most of it at one specific company.) I suspect you either got unlucky with who you were pushing against, or you didn't social engineer it well enough.
Either way, one doesn't get 'forced' into early retirement - you take early retirement because you don't care enough to keep doing engineering. There's countless opportunities in the technology fields, it just takes effort to find and do something with them.
Heh, thanks. Artful negotiation is very important, and not given nearly enough face time in situations like this. You have to show that you're objecting not to be a jerk, that it's not because you want to cause problems for someone else in the company; you have to show that this is just something you won't be a part of, and that there's a cost to the company in proceeding with it. It's nothing personal - that's just the way it is, and you want to make sure everyone understands that before a final decision is made.
You declare that you'll start working on it immediately and will put in overtime, but even so it won't be ready by the ship date. State that you won't sign off on it or release it until you feel it's ready, because if someone gets hurt, you could be responsible. Shrug your shoulders and wait for a response.
- If you're ordered to do it anyway, state that you can't be paid enough to cover the legal liability and you won't be party to it.
- If they take you off the project, say OK and walk out. You can effectively do nothing more.
- If you're asked to find solutions, do your best, but refuse to cheese it.
- If they threaten to fire you, try to leave a social 'line of retreat' for them to back down without losing face. Something along the lines of 'firing me won't help get it done any faster, but at least it won't be my ass on the line. If that's really what you think will get this project done on time, then I'll show myself out'.
A lot of people will complain about this, saying things like 'I can't afford to be without a job' or 'I don't want to have to find a new job' or 'I don't want to move'. To those people I say: the threat of firing is only effective on an employee who is afraid of being fired. If you want power in the employee-employer relationship, you'll have to accept this as a simple cost of doing business.
I've seen many requests for objectional software in the years I've been working, but some of the worst have been in the guise of 'content protection'. One of the most heinous was DTCP for automotive use, with intent to lock everyone completely out of the sensor network and on-board electronics. My standard response for this one eventually became:
1) I will quit before I allow myself to work on DTCP; 2) I will not support any engineer in the company who works on DTCP projects; 3) I will not support any project or library that a DTCP project depends on, or makes use of; 4) I would rather see the company close due to lack of work than have it pursue projects of this sort.
I've never been told to shut up and go back to work; granted, I had a long history with the company and was worth substantially more to them as an employee than a few paltry one-shot crypto projects.
I recognize that most people don't feel like they have the job security to make demands of this sort; however, I do, and I fully intend to make use of my tiny bully pulpit when situations arise that demand it.
Yes, it is. What you meant to say was, "I find it unlikely that anyone would offer me what I consider my home and experiences to be worth."
You can't just pay me off for my sunny spot on the back deck where the light hits just so, filtered between my favorite trees. You can't just pay me off for the trails I've made in the woods behind my house, or all the time I've spent learning those woods and enjoying them. You can't just pay me off for the squirrels I've trained to take peanuts right from my hand while sitting in that aforementioned favorite sunny spot. You can't just pay me off for needing to move away from my neighbor who I consider a close friend, or pay off his kids who love coming over to play with the cat.
I might not be able to, but there exist people who can.
Please be more clear with your wording in the future. Blatant trolling like the above does no-one any good.
Sorry, I should have clarified, as it's somewhat 'inside knowledge'. I meant that the queue was almost perfect in that once you're in it, it's pretty close to FIFO. The reason it's not perfect is because there's sections that are split into subqueues in the middle - there's two subqueues which merge to a single, then split into half a dozen independent lanes that remerge near the highway. (Changing lanes happens, but is discouraged.) The remerge process is also imperfect.
General FYI regarding your second paragraph: the wait time is never 'almost zero'. Even with no traffic whatsoever, exodus will rarely if ever be less than half an hour to get to the highway. Typical times with no traffic are 45 minutes.
Otherwise, regarding your second paragraph: putting 3% of the main queue into a priority queue does mean that the priority queue is 3% shorter; however, the wait time for the main queue doesn't depend on that 3% ratio - it depends on the ratio of priority exits to non-priority exits. If 3% of cars enter the priority queue, then it is true that a minimum of 3% of the cars leaving through the exit choke point will be priority cars - however, that's a minimum value, and it's very easy to end up in states where the it can be much larger. Consider a worst case scenario: if the exodus point can only handle 3% of the total load, you end up with all exodus cars being priority cars, and the wait time in the regular queue will increase linearly until the priority queue is empty. There are clearly situations where the wait time for the main queue is increased, and your explanation does not recognize this - it merely states that the increased wait time will be offset by a reduction in queue length, which is clearly false in this scenario.
Also keep in mind that the exit queues are almost never in steady state, which your analysis largely depends on. They are either 1) empty (parts of nighttime), 2) backing up (7 am through 9 pm some days), or 3) clearing (afternoon and night.) At a minimum, revision of your idea should probably include non-steady-state performance, not just idealized steady state operation. A large yet fixed number of cars must leave through a small, fixed rate gate, and those cars enter the queue at various times with very little understanding of the queue length or expected time in queue.
If you really want to push this idea, I would recommend creating a set of simulations which show that your idea or some derivative of it does actually work the way you claim it should. These problems are hard, and simulations are considered a minimum standard for good reason.
(because the non-prioritized line will always grow to the point where the convenience of getting out just barely outweighs the convenience of waiting in line -- but no further)
... and this is why I don't feel that you're competent to be suggesting improvements, without having gone through at least one proper exodus.
The fact of the matter is that the above assumption is largely false - people leave when they have their stuff packed, and once they get in line, they don't get out of line - because there's literally nowhere else to go. You leave when you're ready, usually on the day you planned to leave with the people around you, and you don't have any idea how long it's going to take, you just get in line. If you have to be to work on monday, you have to leave sunday. If one person in your camp of ten has a deadline, then you have to leave at a given time - and that's all there is to it.
That's not to say that there's no feedback at all for the long lines, but usually that feedback is either premediated (people who leave at 5 am based on the previous day's exodus), or forced (traffic gridlock during peak times). There's virtually none for 'this line is too long, I'm going to wait', in large part because nobody actually knows how long the wait will be, and everyone expects it to be long. Your solution -will- result in globally longer queue times, not because your solution is theoretically imperfect, but because it relies on perfect behaviour of the people in the queue.
Actually my biggest complaint with airline boarding and exit are idiots that hold up the entire line by taking 30 seconds to pack or retrieve their luggage while there are waiters blocked behind them. I make it a policy to stow and retrieve luggage as quickly as possible, while standing out of the aisle if possible, so others can go past. I also make it a policy of not politely waiting for people in rows before me unless they're physically in the way or clearly have all their stuff in hand.
Remember: when you wait for the oblivious mom or obnoxious businessman to take 15 seconds to retrieve their stuff, you've just delayed five people with their stuff in hand from leaving the plane.
Only the cars in the priority line would have reduced wait times. Because the bottleneck is actually the highway, that reduction comes at the expense of raising the wait times for everyone not in the priority line - unless the lure of the priority queue is so strong that there's enough people waiting for the priority queue to clear the highway bottleneck.
The only thing that will reduce the wait time in a fair way is to stagger departures more, so that there's lower peak load. Micromananging the current exodus process, a process which is already a nearly perfect queue, will only serve to make things worse on average, in addition to requiring more manpower to manage.
Frankly, even though you've been to Burning Man, I don't feel you're competent to be suggesting improvements to the exodus traffic problem. You've been there once, and you came in and left on a fast-track bus which was able to bypass the entire process you're trying to critique. Had you been through it a few times and seen how traffic exodus works for people who are actually in the thick of it, I doubt you'd have bothered trying to micromanage the queues.
I largely agree, however we must keep in mind that we really don't have any better alternatives at the moment. We're still too young as a species.
One thing we do know is that some systems are harder to subvert than others. IMHO, that's what we should be researching, that's what we should be implementing: systems which, while not perfect, are the ones that are hardest to subvert, the ones that work the best when the inputs are dysfunctional, greedy, short sighted people.
People's greed and lust for power is as much a part of us as our sex drive, and trying to 'keep it out' of anything is a waste of time. We should focus instead on structures which are resistant to it and which can function even in the presence of greed and lust for power - which is incidentally why checks and balances works, and why capitalism has been more successful than other things.
Slashdot Mirror
My point still stands.
Frankly if teachers are only contributing 1-14% to test scores then I have to wonder why we employ them at all. That's an abysmal number. We could replace them with scarecrows or hobos and still get those numbers.
Also, as I said before, I'd much rather have guesses based on data that is "fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable" than guesses based on nothing. And right now, we have nothing.
For all intents and purposes, yes, the car salesman can be fired for it. Regardless, the salesman loses the commission: no loan = no sale = no commission. This is why salesmen are good at sniffing out people with money and people without.
The real difference between the salesman and the teacher is that if the salesman can't make his numbers, he doesn't eat, wheras the teacher is just disappointed.
When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder. Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing. And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.
While I can at some level understand refusing dropouts, refusing GED graduates is stupid. The GED is basically the outer 'catch' block of the primary school system, and without it, there's no legitimate way to get a diploma if you have unusual circumstances. The fact that some kids use it to 'escape' primary school should tell you that there's either a problem with primary schooling, or that the GED process isn't sufficiently strong - but in both cases, the solution to the problem is NOT to make the GED worthless.
I really like the idea of a two stage mechanism, where the patent has to pass an initial review to be issued, and has to pass a more thorough publicly visible review when the first lawsuit involving the patent reaches some particular stage. The number of single-patent suits is actually fairly low and even a comprehensive review wouldn't add a lot of workload to the patent office, while the number of suits and patent applications would drop off due to the increased uncertainty of success.
Don't be a troll. As I said, the evidence for global warming is unambiguous.
> The problem is, by the time you start seeing serious climate problems it will be far too late to prevent things getting much worse.
I have a really, really hard time thinking that climate engineering won't be possible in a hundred years, and climate change doesn't happen fast enough to wipe out humanity in that time frame. IMHO we'll be able to put the climate wherever we want it.
> And what would the next most important concern be? Maybe the horrible pollution and environmental destruction being wreaked by our quest for more fossil fuels - fracking, strip-mining of pristine wilderness for tar sands, etc?
Nope. These are extremely low priority to me.
> Or maybe reducing the threat of global violence inherent in having our economies dependent on relatively rare fuel deposits while our need for energy to adapt to a changing world steadily increases?
This is also extremely low priority for me, as it's already happening anyway, and while some part of global violence is related to oil money, there's plenty of other reasons for people to blow each other up. Subsaharan africa and north korea are cases in point.
> This century is going to see a *lot* of geopolitical stresses as agriculture becomes far less reliable due to the already inevitable climate destabilization.
Agriculture has always been extremely unreliable, and yearly swings in weather dominate it, not climate change. Climate change is far more gradual than the time needed for agriculture to change.
> And perhaps most importantly - even if we had fusion mastered today, it would still likely take several decades to migrate the infrastructure.
Why is this any different from getting any other alternative energy source going? If anything, I'd expect continuous fusion plants to integrate just fine as they're similar to fission nukes, and ICF fusion plants to integrate just fine, as they're similar to gas turbine generators. Compared to what's needed for wind and solar, it's nothing.
Regarding population growth, most of the growth is in poor countries, where life extension will be less available, and where other dangers still cause a lot of death. While life extension does raise the projected plateau, how far it's raised depends on how fast it hits, how cheap it is, and how stable we're able to make the rest of the world. I'd bet 50/50 odds that the population in 2050 doesn't exceeed ten billion.
> assuming that neither you nor anyone you know would get the chance of being immortal, what arguments would you offer in it's favor? What rational reason do we have to extend the length of our lives?
Let me pose the same question to you, with a couple modifications:
- Assume that neither you nor any you know is dying of cancer. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?
- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know has alzheimers disease. What arguments would you offer in favor of researching a cure? What arguments would you offer against such research?
- Assume that neither you nor anyone you know lives in poor africa, where the average lifespan is barely above 40 years old. What arguments would you offer in favor of trying to help the people in this region? What arguments would you offer against it?
Aging is a horrible thing, something which frankly should not be tolerated in polite society, any more than cancer, alzheimers, and ebola. To simple take it 'off the table' as though it were uncurable and shouldn't be cured is reprehensible.
I am extremely certain that 1) global warming exists, and 2) global warming is mostly caused by mankind over the last few hundred years. As far as I'm concerned, the evidence there is more than sufficient, and deniers are nutjobs.
However, I don't really see much ecological damage that I care about at the moment, and that includes 'global warming' ecological damage. It's not that I don't see ecological change, it's simply that I don't care about most of it. It's also slow enough that mankind will be able to easily adapt going forward - easily compared to the other stuff we do day to day over the course of a century.
As for SENS, I'm not saying 'cure death'. I'm saying 'delay indefinitely death due to old age'. Why would you think we can't do that? It's a hard problem, but it's not unsolvable. At its core, life is just chemistry.
As for a ballooning population, current population estimates put a peak at under ten billion around the year 2050. There's every reason to believe that the population can be held finite.
I want to know how exactly changing out the electrode material type is supposed to get a 10k multiplier on plasma focus density. The web site and what I could find were remarkably short on detail, and I'm inclined to believe that while the beryllium electrodes are important, there's some serious confusion about what is being funded and the problems that funding is supposed to solve.
Either way, I'd much rather the money be donated to the SENS project instead. We don't currently have a power crisis, so to speak - however, we do have a hundred thousand people dying per day of age related diseases, and that seems a smidgen more important to me than dropping the cost of electricity.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong. Bootstrap/init is a complex problem, and systemd covers more of that complexity than previous solutions.
As for the three digit UUID observation, that's because those people where there at the beginning. If they're still active today, of course they would have strong opinions - they have a lot of experience to draw on.
5% is huge for a lower stage. The rocket equation is exponential, and the 5% applies to the exponent - a 5% change in the exponent may result in a 50% change in the final payload to orbit, or 50% reduction in starting weight.
It's really good to hear that someone is considering methane/LOX. It's a really good combination and IMHO it's unfortunate it never caught on.
I have been programming for 30 years, 20 of them professionally. I've never been fired or laid off, and I've objected to things like this no less than a half dozen times (admittedly most of it at one specific company.) I suspect you either got unlucky with who you were pushing against, or you didn't social engineer it well enough.
Either way, one doesn't get 'forced' into early retirement - you take early retirement because you don't care enough to keep doing engineering. There's countless opportunities in the technology fields, it just takes effort to find and do something with them.
Heh, thanks. Artful negotiation is very important, and not given nearly enough face time in situations like this. You have to show that you're objecting not to be a jerk, that it's not because you want to cause problems for someone else in the company; you have to show that this is just something you won't be a part of, and that there's a cost to the company in proceeding with it. It's nothing personal - that's just the way it is, and you want to make sure everyone understands that before a final decision is made.
You declare that you'll start working on it immediately and will put in overtime, but even so it won't be ready by the ship date. State that you won't sign off on it or release it until you feel it's ready, because if someone gets hurt, you could be responsible. Shrug your shoulders and wait for a response.
- If you're ordered to do it anyway, state that you can't be paid enough to cover the legal liability and you won't be party to it.
- If they take you off the project, say OK and walk out. You can effectively do nothing more.
- If you're asked to find solutions, do your best, but refuse to cheese it.
- If they threaten to fire you, try to leave a social 'line of retreat' for them to back down without losing face. Something along the lines of 'firing me won't help get it done any faster, but at least it won't be my ass on the line. If that's really what you think will get this project done on time, then I'll show myself out'.
A lot of people will complain about this, saying things like 'I can't afford to be without a job' or 'I don't want to have to find a new job' or 'I don't want to move'. To those people I say: the threat of firing is only effective on an employee who is afraid of being fired. If you want power in the employee-employer relationship, you'll have to accept this as a simple cost of doing business.
I've seen many requests for objectional software in the years I've been working, but some of the worst have been in the guise of 'content protection'. One of the most heinous was DTCP for automotive use, with intent to lock everyone completely out of the sensor network and on-board electronics. My standard response for this one eventually became:
1) I will quit before I allow myself to work on DTCP;
2) I will not support any engineer in the company who works on DTCP projects;
3) I will not support any project or library that a DTCP project depends on, or makes use of;
4) I would rather see the company close due to lack of work than have it pursue projects of this sort.
I've never been told to shut up and go back to work; granted, I had a long history with the company and was worth substantially more to them as an employee than a few paltry one-shot crypto projects.
I recognize that most people don't feel like they have the job security to make demands of this sort; however, I do, and I fully intend to make use of my tiny bully pulpit when situations arise that demand it.
I still use to this day the General Electric model F1-8147-5 alarm clock my dad gave me when I was a kid. It posts from somewhere around 1970.
"Home" does not count as fungible.
Yes, it is. What you meant to say was, "I find it unlikely that anyone would offer me what I consider my home and experiences to be worth."
You can't just pay me off for my sunny spot on the back deck where the light hits just so, filtered between my favorite trees. You can't just pay me off for the trails I've made in the woods behind my house, or all the time I've spent learning those woods and enjoying them. You can't just pay me off for the squirrels I've trained to take peanuts right from my hand while sitting in that aforementioned favorite sunny spot. You can't just pay me off for needing to move away from my neighbor who I consider a close friend, or pay off his kids who love coming over to play with the cat.
I might not be able to, but there exist people who can.
Please be more clear with your wording in the future. Blatant trolling like the above does no-one any good.
Sorry, I should have clarified, as it's somewhat 'inside knowledge'. I meant that the queue was almost perfect in that once you're in it, it's pretty close to FIFO. The reason it's not perfect is because there's sections that are split into subqueues in the middle - there's two subqueues which merge to a single, then split into half a dozen independent lanes that remerge near the highway. (Changing lanes happens, but is discouraged.) The remerge process is also imperfect.
General FYI regarding your second paragraph: the wait time is never 'almost zero'. Even with no traffic whatsoever, exodus will rarely if ever be less than half an hour to get to the highway. Typical times with no traffic are 45 minutes.
Otherwise, regarding your second paragraph: putting 3% of the main queue into a priority queue does mean that the priority queue is 3% shorter; however, the wait time for the main queue doesn't depend on that 3% ratio - it depends on the ratio of priority exits to non-priority exits. If 3% of cars enter the priority queue, then it is true that a minimum of 3% of the cars leaving through the exit choke point will be priority cars - however, that's a minimum value, and it's very easy to end up in states where the it can be much larger. Consider a worst case scenario: if the exodus point can only handle 3% of the total load, you end up with all exodus cars being priority cars, and the wait time in the regular queue will increase linearly until the priority queue is empty. There are clearly situations where the wait time for the main queue is increased, and your explanation does not recognize this - it merely states that the increased wait time will be offset by a reduction in queue length, which is clearly false in this scenario.
Also keep in mind that the exit queues are almost never in steady state, which your analysis largely depends on. They are either 1) empty (parts of nighttime), 2) backing up (7 am through 9 pm some days), or 3) clearing (afternoon and night.) At a minimum, revision of your idea should probably include non-steady-state performance, not just idealized steady state operation. A large yet fixed number of cars must leave through a small, fixed rate gate, and those cars enter the queue at various times with very little understanding of the queue length or expected time in queue.
If you really want to push this idea, I would recommend creating a set of simulations which show that your idea or some derivative of it does actually work the way you claim it should. These problems are hard, and simulations are considered a minimum standard for good reason.
(because the non-prioritized line will always grow to the point where the convenience of getting out just barely outweighs the convenience of waiting in line -- but no further)
... and this is why I don't feel that you're competent to be suggesting improvements, without having gone through at least one proper exodus.
The fact of the matter is that the above assumption is largely false - people leave when they have their stuff packed, and once they get in line, they don't get out of line - because there's literally nowhere else to go. You leave when you're ready, usually on the day you planned to leave with the people around you, and you don't have any idea how long it's going to take, you just get in line. If you have to be to work on monday, you have to leave sunday. If one person in your camp of ten has a deadline, then you have to leave at a given time - and that's all there is to it.
That's not to say that there's no feedback at all for the long lines, but usually that feedback is either premediated (people who leave at 5 am based on the previous day's exodus), or forced (traffic gridlock during peak times). There's virtually none for 'this line is too long, I'm going to wait', in large part because nobody actually knows how long the wait will be, and everyone expects it to be long. Your solution -will- result in globally longer queue times, not because your solution is theoretically imperfect, but because it relies on perfect behaviour of the people in the queue.
Actually my biggest complaint with airline boarding and exit are idiots that hold up the entire line by taking 30 seconds to pack or retrieve their luggage while there are waiters blocked behind them. I make it a policy to stow and retrieve luggage as quickly as possible, while standing out of the aisle if possible, so others can go past. I also make it a policy of not politely waiting for people in rows before me unless they're physically in the way or clearly have all their stuff in hand.
Remember: when you wait for the oblivious mom or obnoxious businessman to take 15 seconds to retrieve their stuff, you've just delayed five people with their stuff in hand from leaving the plane.
Only the cars in the priority line would have reduced wait times. Because the bottleneck is actually the highway, that reduction comes at the expense of raising the wait times for everyone not in the priority line - unless the lure of the priority queue is so strong that there's enough people waiting for the priority queue to clear the highway bottleneck.
The only thing that will reduce the wait time in a fair way is to stagger departures more, so that there's lower peak load. Micromananging the current exodus process, a process which is already a nearly perfect queue, will only serve to make things worse on average, in addition to requiring more manpower to manage.
Frankly, even though you've been to Burning Man, I don't feel you're competent to be suggesting improvements to the exodus traffic problem. You've been there once, and you came in and left on a fast-track bus which was able to bypass the entire process you're trying to critique. Had you been through it a few times and seen how traffic exodus works for people who are actually in the thick of it, I doubt you'd have bothered trying to micromanage the queues.
I largely agree, however we must keep in mind that we really don't have any better alternatives at the moment. We're still too young as a species.
One thing we do know is that some systems are harder to subvert than others. IMHO, that's what we should be researching, that's what we should be implementing: systems which, while not perfect, are the ones that are hardest to subvert, the ones that work the best when the inputs are dysfunctional, greedy, short sighted people.
People's greed and lust for power is as much a part of us as our sex drive, and trying to 'keep it out' of anything is a waste of time. We should focus instead on structures which are resistant to it and which can function even in the presence of greed and lust for power - which is incidentally why checks and balances works, and why capitalism has been more successful than other things.