Bennett, your heart is in the right place but you're really missing the mark on Burning Man culture. It used to be that before people went to Burning Man, they were often connected to Burner communities in their home area, perhaps gone to regional burns/festivals, or numerous BM-related parties in their area. Now, people with few ties to Burning Man are just jumping right in..and I think because you're that type of Burner, that's the source of your misprognostications. I'll explain...
Even given the sheer number of camps and projects that I saw, it doesn't seem like there was anywhere near enough of them there for even 10% of third- or fourth-year burners to be running their own projects.
Bit of a straw man here..I said offshoot camp/project etc, meaning they work on a contribution either of their own or done with a small group of people on the same page. This is in contrast to the typical first to second year experience, where they get invited to join a camp and decide they're gung-ho about that and do what the camp tells them to do, like work shifts. Big camps have "pods" within them that may work on individual art installations or do their own thing..many do that. Additionally, people who remain with larger camps tend to be more of the type of the person that does the recruiting/camp organizing at that point..in such a case, they've made the camp their own thing and usually cause changes to happen in what the camp does.
Besides, couldn't you be a major contributor and co-organizer of a camp project and contribute a lot in the pre-production stages, and still take the Sparkle Pony Express to get there? There's no reason for more people to drive in than the necessary number of people to drive the trucks hauling in the food and water and whatever physical hardware you need to make the project work.
While this is theoretically possible, it's not at all plausible. Typically major contributors or co-organizers come via early arrival. Early arrival usually involves bringing massive amounts of stuff for the project. There are few playa projects that do not require transportation of large items. Typically, it's the core contributors/organizers that come with the truck and do the unpacking and camp setup. That's becuase they've organized the transportation of the ride and it makes the most sense for them to come along with it.
The Burner Express also only does EA starting on Friday..very limited early arrival service, and many organizers come before Friday. By Friday EA, the black rock city roller disco is in full swing and already partying.
OK, but is this bad, if it enables people to get out to Burning Man and feed and water themselves with minimal hassle? If you're worried about camps gouging people on the prices for camp membership, presumably the solution would be a more transparent marketplace for "public" camp memberships so the competition keeps the prices down.
Of course this is bad!! If Burning Man was easy to get to, and attending was as simple as using money to purchase things rather than organizing/creating things on your own/contributing, it would become Coachella. The fact that Burning Man is so difficult to get to, has a harsh desert climate, requires you to bring your own water etc helps ensure that more committed/invested people attend rather than tourists. Making it easier for people to get to the playa cheaply and without connections to Burning Man culture would increase the number of tourists on the playa, and change the festival drastically. It would also surely increase the amount of people in the medical tents and put a strain on emergency services, since they are unlikely to read the guides/adequately prepare.
I've met first-years who merely skimmed through the guide and thought it was "exaggerated" and came with no warm clothes and summarily froze every night. They later ended up in the medical tent for dehydration and a broken ankle. How c
I definitely agree with you from a normative perspective -- Puff Daddy at Robot Heart is not cool or good for Burning Man. Elon Musk's massive plug-and-play RV camp in the back is hardly a contribution. But since these people are well known as being successful and accomplished, the goal here is to show that not everyone above their early 20s on the playa is an "idiot."
In that case I retract my comments about barely-contributing and will make it "typical first year contribution." Most of the people working "shifts" in various camps are new to Burning Man. Eventually, most second- or third- year plus Burners will either stop going, or stop trying to build someone else's dream and make their own offshoot camp/project/etc.
I've got news for you though -- most of the people who run big projects (I've been a core part of two Esplanade theme camps, and now helped build an art car (you may have even ridden on it), want people not so much for the on-playa labor but the camp dues. Getting first-year sparkleponies to pay camp dues is a major method of financing for many camps. The Burner Express helps those people get to the playa on a budget while requiring minimal camp management/resources..and not trapping anyone in a vehicle with those people. That makes it so you can get randoms to join your camp and pay dues with less drama.
You really are a tourist, eh? Monday at BM, during breakdown is not really the time you make "new friends"..it's usually a frentic and desperate effort to cleanup moop, burn any burnables, pack up vehicles, etc etc. The only people wandering around looking for "new friends" are tourists who don't have anything to pack up or camp responsibilites to attend to.
Last year, the year you went, DPW advised everyone to get off the playa due to the threat of rain....that's why the line was so long -- there was a massive rush to get off the playa before rain set in. I've been on the playa when it rains -- it's pandemonium, messes up electronics, gets vehicles stuck in playa mud...
After the temple burn, the playa really calms down and the party is over. It's time to leave no trace. Once you've done that, you'll likely be downright exhausted and sitting in the car trying to sleep is really the logical thing to do. Thus, your system doesn't offer much advantages.."pulsing" already is taking care of gas consumption etc. You're just making it so tourists spend less time in exodus. I don't think BMORG will be receptive.
An "idiot" means a stupid person..not just someone you don't like..these people are smart, capable, and have done a lot in both business and for some of them in science as well. You can't be an idiot and succeed like that, and classifying successful people that you don't like as just 'idiots' might make you the same..
This AC nailed it. The OP up above was written by a first-year, barely-contributing Burner. He took the Burner Express...otherwise known as the "Sparkle Pony Express" because people can't bring that much stuff and typically the people on it are tourists -- people with little connection to Burning man, who contribute little, just coming to check out the party and bless us with their presence.
Bennett really has no idea what he's talking about here and very little Burning Man experience...word to the wise, Bennett, you need to join a real camp, and actually contribute to Burning Man..not come up with nonsensical ways of changing traffic management that misses the bottleneck of a 2-lane road entirely.
The "old people" (defined in OP as being past early twenties) at Burning Man include Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Puff Daddy, Mark Zuckerberg, the Winkelvosses...the list goes on and on....are all these people idiots? They seem to be doing pretty well.
In the entire northern california and Reno area, all car rental companies make you sign an agreement NOT to bring the vehicle to Burning Man. You have to specially request a burning man rental. They make you sign a "cleaning agreement", up the price, and if you bring it back too dusty/etc they pack on more fees. It's a way, especially in Nevada, to profit off of Burning Man and fleece some tourists (a long standing Nevada tradition).
That said, plenty of people carpool..I for example went in an old airport shuttle bus with 16 other people towing a trailer. This is actually very common. The thing is that building a city in the middle of a desert requires people to bring a lot of stuff, so vehicle capacity is limited. Think about how many people you can fit in a sedan..when you factor in, tents, water for a week in the desert (15gallons/person, bulky), clothes, food, etc..really, it's hard to fit more than 3 people, and even that can be a squeeze.
As ineloquently as RabidReindeer may have put it, he's 100% spot on here. I've done security audits for big companies with large teams -- admins insert backdoors al over the place, then their buddies figure out they did it, and instead of being reprimanded they start using it too for convenience. Just because they have a big, publically-traded company doesn't mean the CIO/CISO cares about anything more than compliance on paper.
Nobody responds to my comment about Jon Postel, just my somewhat inaccurate reference to QUANTUM. Does anyone remember IANA?
Yes, my original NSA reference here was inaccurate -- I think I got confuzzled from reading about both of these topics in the same day. QUANTUM injects DNS responses further down the line than the root DNS server. However, things like the so-called "internet kill switch", along with other (at this point theroetical) attacks would be aided by control of the root DNS, and a trusted position on the internet between these servers.
There's many, largely political issues this solves aside from the ease-of-exploitation for spying (simple DNS redirect to an attack IP for targeted computers) -- including the U.S's ability to use an internet "killswitch" disabling root DNS servers, and reducing the likelihood of a fragmentation of the DNS system as countries like Iran or Russia seek to create their own DNS system, giving them root control rather than the U.S. They could also arbitrarily decide to start blocking certain DNS entries etc and essentially take those sites "off the internet", or at least make getting to them a hassle.
Basically, no one owns the internet and it is designed to be resilient to any one nation or actor going offline. However, if one nation controls the DNS -- and most users depend on DNS to visit web sites -- one nation exercises greater control over the internet than others.
Palo Alto's parking system, with their colored curbs and byzantine policies on how long you can park at a color and how you have to move to different colors after x amount of hours etc, is really quite a mess IMHO. Personally, I think it's designed to cause out-of-towners to get more parking tickets. If you're parking in a residential area without this, sure, but any area with parking enforcement is a nightmare. So you can park at home -- but then when going to restaurants etc, good luck.
Sixteen years after Jon Postel attempted to bring DNS root zone control authority under IANA, finally, the dream of internationalization of the root DNS/internet infrastructure is becoming a reality. A moment of silence please, for Jon Postel, IANA.
This carries big implications in NSA's spying/QUANTUM program, which use U.S. control of the DNS system to exploit systems.
Palo Alto is more expensive than SF, and Berkeley rents are pretty high -- largely fuelled by student housing demands as UCB expands. San Jose? That's about an hour+ south of SF with absolutely no public transportation taking you to other areas of the Bay.
Plus, your quote about "struggling artists can live elsewhere" is what makes people in SF really hate "techies" -- it's that attitude that is contrary to SF culture.
Hate to break it to you but DEFCON is hardly much of an alternative conference anymore -- it's run by the same guy who started and later sold BlackHat. I was there last year. Vibe was very much the after-party for BlackHat -- lots of similar corporate T-shirts in groups, I think most of the attendees were sent there by their employer and many of them sported schwag. I watched a presentation that had a big "HP" logo for Hewlett Packard on the powerpoint. Lots of vendors (albeit smaller and non-corporate ones), like the pwnpad guys that run slashvertisements.... I'd recommend HOPE or ToorCon instead.
They have to pay for slashvertisements for this product...this is marketed to the least common denominator, wanna-be hackers that don't even understand how to run Linux commands. Instead, they use metasploit autopawn or SET -- all scripted and nicely automated -- on an iPad. And having this makes you a "penetration tester?!"
The problem with this product is that it's geared towards "hackers," but doesn't actually teach you very much about "hacking" and insulates you from having to actually use Linux etc..only an unsophisticated script kiddie would use such a device with any regularity.
See, one would come to this conclusion about homepathy being pseduscience if they took the time to actually research it in a scientifically-minded fashion. How many average whole foods shoppers can even define the word "homeopathy" correctly? I bet you'd get a range of answers from "it's a natural remedy system" to "it's an alternative style of medicine" -- without any clear explanation of what those things mean.
Also, if one were to research homeopathy and go to low-quality web sites (remember, not everyone who claims to be "educated" knows how to verify references, methodologies and statistics in articles and in many cases may not even care they do not exist in an article), they may be convinced of its effectiveness. This is exactly for the reasons you identified -- skepticism of Western Medicine. But they are not skeptic of "science," and if you offer them an alternative "science" (without real scientific proof, which they were never interested in validating anyway) that jives with their pre-existing beliefs then they will accept it.
Corporate America's response to this mentality: Profit!
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
These days people have "faith" in "science"..and if that so-called science goes along with their worldview (which Whole Foods is self-selecting in that a certain worldview makes someone more likely to become a shopper there), then they may blindly accept it. Very few people have the skills and motivation to actually analyze the claims of these manufacturers and just go with their biases when making a decision.
Way too tedious (and requiring physical possession of the hardware after encryption passwords/etc have been entered!) for the modern NSA -- they'll just install keylogging hardware that communicates over radio frequencies and not the internet if they need your encryption key. Then, your hacked ethernet/bluetooth port will also send them image of your drive over RF or some other discreet channel. Who needs this!?!
Okies..well, of course there is some automation -- but the scope of the automation is nowhere near what Asimov's prediction laid out. It seems at least a half-century to a century off..so it's not a very timely prediction.
On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.
Really? I just read the original and found it to be wildly inaccurate. The basic thesis, in my understanding, is that by 2014 automation will have replaced the need for us to do the majority of mundane work, such as walking down the sidewalk, driving, or preparing our own meals. This obviously has not happened.
Claims of nuclear fission powering the electric grid globally and isotope batteries are well outside of tangibility with the current state of science.
Scientists also most recently discovered how to make a small amount of artificial meat, enough for a "bite size" after months and months. Asimov claims we'll all be eating "pseudosteak" in 2014 -- obviously getting this product to the level where it can be mass consumed will take many, many years.
In the end I find Asimov's predictions to be overconfident in the advancement of science and abundance of technology in the world at the time frame that he believed. As such, his predictions from a technological standpoint seem like that may well be a century off.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if you've been working on cleanup, you probably don't leave on Monday and don't have to worry about the exodus line. You leave Tues-Wednesday.
Bennett, your heart is in the right place but you're really missing the mark on Burning Man culture. It used to be that before people went to Burning Man, they were often connected to Burner communities in their home area, perhaps gone to regional burns/festivals, or numerous BM-related parties in their area. Now, people with few ties to Burning Man are just jumping right in..and I think because you're that type of Burner, that's the source of your misprognostications. I'll explain...
Even given the sheer number of camps and projects that I saw, it doesn't seem like there was anywhere near enough of them there for even 10% of third- or fourth-year burners to be running their own projects.
Bit of a straw man here..I said offshoot camp/project etc, meaning they work on a contribution either of their own or done with a small group of people on the same page. This is in contrast to the typical first to second year experience, where they get invited to join a camp and decide they're gung-ho about that and do what the camp tells them to do, like work shifts. Big camps have "pods" within them that may work on individual art installations or do their own thing..many do that. Additionally, people who remain with larger camps tend to be more of the type of the person that does the recruiting/camp organizing at that point..in such a case, they've made the camp their own thing and usually cause changes to happen in what the camp does.
Besides, couldn't you be a major contributor and co-organizer of a camp project and contribute a lot in the pre-production stages, and still take the Sparkle Pony Express to get there? There's no reason for more people to drive in than the necessary number of people to drive the trucks hauling in the food and water and whatever physical hardware you need to make the project work.
While this is theoretically possible, it's not at all plausible. Typically major contributors or co-organizers come via early arrival. Early arrival usually involves bringing massive amounts of stuff for the project. There are few playa projects that do not require transportation of large items. Typically, it's the core contributors/organizers that come with the truck and do the unpacking and camp setup. That's becuase they've organized the transportation of the ride and it makes the most sense for them to come along with it.
The Burner Express also only does EA starting on Friday..very limited early arrival service, and many organizers come before Friday. By Friday EA, the black rock city roller disco is in full swing and already partying.
OK, but is this bad, if it enables people to get out to Burning Man and feed and water themselves with minimal hassle? If you're worried about camps gouging people on the prices for camp membership, presumably the solution would be a more transparent marketplace for "public" camp memberships so the competition keeps the prices down.
Of course this is bad!! If Burning Man was easy to get to, and attending was as simple as using money to purchase things rather than organizing/creating things on your own/contributing, it would become Coachella. The fact that Burning Man is so difficult to get to, has a harsh desert climate, requires you to bring your own water etc helps ensure that more committed/invested people attend rather than tourists. Making it easier for people to get to the playa cheaply and without connections to Burning Man culture would increase the number of tourists on the playa, and change the festival drastically. It would also surely increase the amount of people in the medical tents and put a strain on emergency services, since they are unlikely to read the guides/adequately prepare.
I've met first-years who merely skimmed through the guide and thought it was "exaggerated" and came with no warm clothes and summarily froze every night. They later ended up in the medical tent for dehydration and a broken ankle. How c
I definitely agree with you from a normative perspective -- Puff Daddy at Robot Heart is not cool or good for Burning Man. Elon Musk's massive plug-and-play RV camp in the back is hardly a contribution. But since these people are well known as being successful and accomplished, the goal here is to show that not everyone above their early 20s on the playa is an "idiot."
Yes, except they spank you if you're a virgin. And make you ring a bell.
I've got news for you though -- most of the people who run big projects (I've been a core part of two Esplanade theme camps, and now helped build an art car (you may have even ridden on it), want people not so much for the on-playa labor but the camp dues. Getting first-year sparkleponies to pay camp dues is a major method of financing for many camps. The Burner Express helps those people get to the playa on a budget while requiring minimal camp management/resources..and not trapping anyone in a vehicle with those people. That makes it so you can get randoms to join your camp and pay dues with less drama.
You really are a tourist, eh? Monday at BM, during breakdown is not really the time you make "new friends"..it's usually a frentic and desperate effort to cleanup moop, burn any burnables, pack up vehicles, etc etc. The only people wandering around looking for "new friends" are tourists who don't have anything to pack up or camp responsibilites to attend to.
Last year, the year you went, DPW advised everyone to get off the playa due to the threat of rain....that's why the line was so long -- there was a massive rush to get off the playa before rain set in. I've been on the playa when it rains -- it's pandemonium, messes up electronics, gets vehicles stuck in playa mud...
After the temple burn, the playa really calms down and the party is over. It's time to leave no trace. Once you've done that, you'll likely be downright exhausted and sitting in the car trying to sleep is really the logical thing to do. Thus, your system doesn't offer much advantages.."pulsing" already is taking care of gas consumption etc. You're just making it so tourists spend less time in exodus. I don't think BMORG will be receptive.
An "idiot" means a stupid person..not just someone you don't like..these people are smart, capable, and have done a lot in both business and for some of them in science as well. You can't be an idiot and succeed like that, and classifying successful people that you don't like as just 'idiots' might make you the same..
Bennett really has no idea what he's talking about here and very little Burning Man experience...word to the wise, Bennett, you need to join a real camp, and actually contribute to Burning Man..not come up with nonsensical ways of changing traffic management that misses the bottleneck of a 2-lane road entirely.
The "old people" (defined in OP as being past early twenties) at Burning Man include Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Elon Musk, Puff Daddy, Mark Zuckerberg, the Winkelvosses...the list goes on and on....are all these people idiots? They seem to be doing pretty well.
That said, plenty of people carpool..I for example went in an old airport shuttle bus with 16 other people towing a trailer. This is actually very common. The thing is that building a city in the middle of a desert requires people to bring a lot of stuff, so vehicle capacity is limited. Think about how many people you can fit in a sedan..when you factor in, tents, water for a week in the desert (15gallons/person, bulky), clothes, food, etc..really, it's hard to fit more than 3 people, and even that can be a squeeze.
Disclaimer: I have been to Burning Man six times.
From TFA:
4KB Random Read (QD1): Max. 10,000 IOPS 4KB Random Write(QD1): Max. 33,000 IOPS 4KB Random Read(QD32): Max. 98,000 IOPS (500GB/750GB/1TB), 97,000 IOPS (250GB), 94,000 IOPS (120GB) 4KB Random Write(QD32): Max. 90,000 IOPS (500GB/750GB/1TB), 66,000 IOPS (250GB), 35,000 IOPS (120GB)
Judging by this, the speed is about the same as other comparable SATA III SSD's, with a little bit of a boost but nothing dramatic.
As ineloquently as RabidReindeer may have put it, he's 100% spot on here. I've done security audits for big companies with large teams -- admins insert backdoors al over the place, then their buddies figure out they did it, and instead of being reprimanded they start using it too for convenience. Just because they have a big, publically-traded company doesn't mean the CIO/CISO cares about anything more than compliance on paper.
Nobody responds to my comment about Jon Postel, just my somewhat inaccurate reference to QUANTUM. Does anyone remember IANA?
Yes, my original NSA reference here was inaccurate -- I think I got confuzzled from reading about both of these topics in the same day. QUANTUM injects DNS responses further down the line than the root DNS server. However, things like the so-called "internet kill switch", along with other (at this point theroetical) attacks would be aided by control of the root DNS, and a trusted position on the internet between these servers.
True, but it helps.
There's many, largely political issues this solves aside from the ease-of-exploitation for spying (simple DNS redirect to an attack IP for targeted computers) -- including the U.S's ability to use an internet "killswitch" disabling root DNS servers, and reducing the likelihood of a fragmentation of the DNS system as countries like Iran or Russia seek to create their own DNS system, giving them root control rather than the U.S. They could also arbitrarily decide to start blocking certain DNS entries etc and essentially take those sites "off the internet", or at least make getting to them a hassle.
Basically, no one owns the internet and it is designed to be resilient to any one nation or actor going offline. However, if one nation controls the DNS -- and most users depend on DNS to visit web sites -- one nation exercises greater control over the internet than others.
Palo Alto's parking system, with their colored curbs and byzantine policies on how long you can park at a color and how you have to move to different colors after x amount of hours etc, is really quite a mess IMHO. Personally, I think it's designed to cause out-of-towners to get more parking tickets. If you're parking in a residential area without this, sure, but any area with parking enforcement is a nightmare. So you can park at home -- but then when going to restaurants etc, good luck.
This carries big implications in NSA's spying/QUANTUM program, which use U.S. control of the DNS system to exploit systems.
Plus, your quote about "struggling artists can live elsewhere" is what makes people in SF really hate "techies" -- it's that attitude that is contrary to SF culture.
Disclosure: I live in San Francisco (proper)
Hate to break it to you but DEFCON is hardly much of an alternative conference anymore -- it's run by the same guy who started and later sold BlackHat. I was there last year. Vibe was very much the after-party for BlackHat -- lots of similar corporate T-shirts in groups, I think most of the attendees were sent there by their employer and many of them sported schwag. I watched a presentation that had a big "HP" logo for Hewlett Packard on the powerpoint. Lots of vendors (albeit smaller and non-corporate ones), like the pwnpad guys that run slashvertisements.... I'd recommend HOPE or ToorCon instead.
The problem with this product is that it's geared towards "hackers," but doesn't actually teach you very much about "hacking" and insulates you from having to actually use Linux etc..only an unsophisticated script kiddie would use such a device with any regularity.
Also, if one were to research homeopathy and go to low-quality web sites (remember, not everyone who claims to be "educated" knows how to verify references, methodologies and statistics in articles and in many cases may not even care they do not exist in an article), they may be convinced of its effectiveness. This is exactly for the reasons you identified -- skepticism of Western Medicine. But they are not skeptic of "science," and if you offer them an alternative "science" (without real scientific proof, which they were never interested in validating anyway) that jives with their pre-existing beliefs then they will accept it.
Corporate America's response to this mentality: Profit!
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?"
It's easy -- because in many ways "science" has become a religion to many. However, many people lack a firm understanding of scientific principles and methods. So, if something looks "science-y" with Latin words, molecular drawings and other intelligent-sounding but hard-to-understand descriptions.
These days people have "faith" in "science"..and if that so-called science goes along with their worldview (which Whole Foods is self-selecting in that a certain worldview makes someone more likely to become a shopper there), then they may blindly accept it. Very few people have the skills and motivation to actually analyze the claims of these manufacturers and just go with their biases when making a decision.
Way too tedious (and requiring physical possession of the hardware after encryption passwords/etc have been entered!) for the modern NSA -- they'll just install keylogging hardware that communicates over radio frequencies and not the internet if they need your encryption key. Then, your hacked ethernet/bluetooth port will also send them image of your drive over RF or some other discreet channel. Who needs this!?!
Okies..well, of course there is some automation -- but the scope of the automation is nowhere near what Asimov's prediction laid out. It seems at least a half-century to a century off..so it's not a very timely prediction.
On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.
Really? I just read the original and found it to be wildly inaccurate. The basic thesis, in my understanding, is that by 2014 automation will have replaced the need for us to do the majority of mundane work, such as walking down the sidewalk, driving, or preparing our own meals. This obviously has not happened.
Claims of nuclear fission powering the electric grid globally and isotope batteries are well outside of tangibility with the current state of science.
Scientists also most recently discovered how to make a small amount of artificial meat, enough for a "bite size" after months and months. Asimov claims we'll all be eating "pseudosteak" in 2014 -- obviously getting this product to the level where it can be mass consumed will take many, many years.
In the end I find Asimov's predictions to be overconfident in the advancement of science and abundance of technology in the world at the time frame that he believed. As such, his predictions from a technological standpoint seem like that may well be a century off.