> Would it though?

Rather than immediately shoot down your idea, let's talk about logistically implementing this:

1. Cleaning/non-compliance is already fined, if it's not cleaned properly or in a timely manner. This is serious waste like blackwater spills ($500+).

2. This would impact the the self-reliance, decommodification, and leave no trace principles. Burners don't need to be expected to clean up after themselves, they can pay someone else to do it. Yes, lots of wealthy burners would do this.

3. We'd need to set up a system of accountability. Sure, we can create a new department within the org, The Waste Accountability Department. Who do we charge for the bike graveyards (https://imgur.com/a/PolJDcI)? These are bikes that get abandoned in large clusters at the end of the event. Do they get assigned to whichever camp space they end up near? Do we start to add in plenty of surveillance (human or tech-based) to see which burner left their bike? Do we add in facial or other recognition to make sure we fine the right person? 3a. Currently bike graveyards are handled by nonprofits and volunteer orgs that take those bikes, fix them, and donate them to kids in Nevada. If we continue that program, do we pay them for taking the bikes? Do we need to appraise bikes based on their value, or do some other system of cost to repair vs value? Do we just sell blocks of "1000 lbs of bike"?

4. A core element of burning man, as mentioned in 2. is "Decommodification". This would commodify cleanup, and there are loads of first and second year burners who would absolutely pay someone $500/$1000 to clean their plot. Accountability here gets hard, as the people who are willing to pay are also the people who are unlikely to verify the quality of work. There are loads of people who would prey on burners in a rush to get out, pocket the $500, and walk off. Accountability and prosecution here, again, gets hard. The decommodification principle prevents this.

5. Who would issue the fine? Burning Man is a non-profit, the fine would require legal enforcement, collections or some other method to threaten people into paying. It would also require accounting for where that money goes and how it is used. Bureau of Land Management? They already do issue fines for blackwater spills and other serious environmental hazards (see 1).

6. Currently cleanup is handled by the Department of Public Works and Playa Resto. Both are volunteer-driven. Once we start paying people to clean up, why aren't we paying the people who deploy the porto-potties, make the streets, maintain the vehicles, and operate the core infrastructure? DPW spends 3-6 months before the event preparing the site for the event.

As I hope this demonstrates, it's not as simple as just having a group of people you can pay to clean up. There's a lot of logistical challenges, not to mention a pretty big shift in the culture.

I vote we stick with making people clean up after themselves, independent of their ability to pay.

Does the purpose change how the act should be interpreted?

> A place of pristine nature is literally destroyed by humans with zero fks given

Burners give so many fucks that we willingly do a thing historically reserved for punishment in the military (de-mooping)

> in a manner where it can never be recovered from.

Environmental sustainability is an actual goal not just greenwashing. I encourage you too look into Playa Resto https://journal.burningman.org/2022/10/black-rock-city/leavi... and note that the term volunteer is used meaning these people don't get paid.

During the rains we were one of the few places still open and where you could party, eat, and grab a solid drink. Being on Esplanade also meant we were a shelter for people to wait out the weather.

Loads of great moments by doing that.

Many camps did this, and were actually turning a profit at Burning Man by taking advantage of the community of volunteers.

A few years ago the Burning Man organization put a stop to this by decreasing or eliminating camps considered to be Luxury or Plug N Play. Not just because they were antithetical to the event, but because they became famous for a slew of problems.

White Ocean is one of the more famous camps in this domain. A luxury camp that charged exorbitant fees for extremely wealthy individuals to come and party without any responsibility. They had loads of sexual assaults, dosing incidents, and campers generally being shitty people. The leads also refused to pay the hired help. This led to a now-infamous vandalism incident.

White Ocean basically has a permanent ban on attending now.

You cannot incentivize people out there with money. You have to take something away that they actually care about.

There are lots of people out there who would happily pay fines or not get deposits back if they didn't have to do the less glamorous parts of the event. You have to take something away that they actually care about.

If a camp does a really bad job at moop cleanup, Burning Man organization talks to leads to understand what happened. Frequently what they will take away is the camp's placement in the event, or sometimes even the ability to attend the event as that camp at all.

For reference: I am one of the leads for a fairly large and famous Burning Man camp. We camp on Esplanade most years. We do exactly what you proposed: We have deposits, and the more people put into the camp before, during, and after the event, determines if we offer them a refund and an invitation to camp with us next year. One of the factors is if you help us during setup and strike.

An invitation to camp with us guarantees them a ticket at one of the cheaper tiers. We have plenty of campers that come in, pay the dues, do nothing for the camp, are generally useless during the event, and bail out leaving a huge mess.

Conversely, we have a very small (10-20%) team of highly dedicated individuals who stay past the event and pick every piece of string, fuzz, fluff, lag bolt, rebar, and debris out of the dust and take it out. These people get nearly their entire camp dues back. If they attend next year, the social capital that they've built doing so compounds into them becoming increasingly popular and famous on Playa.

If there's one thing that Burning Man has taught me, it is that very few people are motivated by financial incentive. If you really want to motivate someone, figure out what they genuinely desire. It's rarely money.

My colleagues that teach hard skills courses (like data structures and algorithms) either love AI and incorporate it into their teaching at every moment possible, or despise it in the same way graphing calculators were by high school math teachers when they were introduced nearly 30 years ago.

I teach soft skills classes to engineering students, and I'm unconcerned with students using AI. I write my problems in a way such that, if the student truly understands the assignment, prompting the AI to solve the problem and iterating on it takes a similar amount of time to doing the work themselves. AI is not very good at writing introspectively about the student. In other words, AI isn't going to be helpful when the homework question is "A fellow student comes to you asking for suggestions on how to maximize their chances at landing an internship. What advice do you give them that's immediately actionable?"

Try it, plug that into ChatGPT or your favorite LLM. It parrots the same generic tips everyone tells you, with very little on "how" do perform the action in an effective way. Read it, copy it into your advice document, get a poor grade. Try telling other students to take this advice. Note how they don't because the advice isn't actually actionable enough for them to take action.

LLMs are also not very good at the follow-up question "In a previous assignment you gave specific and actionable advice to a peer on the job search. Which of these suggestions were so good you are now doing them?" A number of students write a "Mental Gymnastics" essay, claiming they are following all their suggestions (because they think that's what the professor wants to hear) while the evidence they provide demonstrates they are not. A student asking an LLM to write the essay for them consistently produces a digital 'pat on the back'; a mental gymnastics essay that ultimately makes the student realize how unwilling they are to solve the #1 problem in their college career.

I've done away with exams wherever possible. I stick to project-heavy courses. What I've found to be far more concerning than AI use is the increasing loss of social skills and ability to cooperate within the younger generations. The number of students who would prefer to fail a class instead of talk to literally any human being is astounding.

The number of students who refuse to build soft skills, and believe that tech is truly a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is 'lines of code', there's no politics, and they won't work call or crunch or give code reviews, is also astounding.

If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"

PowerShell and most CLIs are terrifying to non-technical people. Literally Here Be Dragons. The layperson might be skeptical of a YouTuber telling them to run a dodgy script, but in the age of "delete system32" people sure as hell aren't going to run a command as admin that a user on a random forum recommends they run.

Stuff like this is why I have moved all of my systems except my gaming PC to Linux.

Edit: no seriously look at this notification https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907... Grandma absolutely does not understand what that means, She just knows she doesn't want to lose photos of her grandchildren.

The publisher for this game was Activision. They absolutely had deadlines, lots of (1987) money invested in this, outsourced to a third party company in Hungary, had the outsource team fail, moved development platforms a few times, wrote a programming language and a game engine, and then became the best selling C64 game.

Very much development hell.

You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.

Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging

When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.

Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.

My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)

2. Crypto is a unique and new player in banking and securities. Specifically, the ledger is open to all and very transparent. In order to know which wallet owns what and how much, you need to be able to look at the ledger to confirm. This design is intended to prevent fraudulent transactions. Banks and brokerages don't keep an open ledger, they keep an extremely private and heavily secured database.

3. People are heavily disincentivized to disclose this information. See: Epstein, and the people and companies that did financial business with him. Openly telling the public you sold stock to someone who trafficked underage girls isn't good for your reputation.

4. Futures in this case are similar to stocks. It's literally a market: You put in a bid to buy or sell something, someone else accepts, and both parties agree to a contract. Digital trading systems match buyers to sellers, and does so on behalf of both parties. If you trade using Fidelity and place a bid for 1,000 units of Corn at $500/unit, you might end up buying from Chase. Even if the transaction is in-person, the trader may be acting on behalf of someone else. In the case of the $580 million deal, it was spread over 6,200 contracts.

5. The STOCK Act of 2012 was supposed to prevent this, at least for members of Congress. The PELOSI Act that's currently introduced for voting is supposed to further prevent this.

6. To my original point: the problem isn't that these trades occurred. The problem isn't even that it's almost certainly insider trading. The problem is that government secrets are being leaked. The authors argument is that it almost certainly won't be investigated and any attempt at investigation will be blocked, because the level of corruption in the current administration is such that the sale of state secrets for others to profit off of is permissible. In fact, they can brazenly do it in the open while still ensuring that their privacy will be kept because of #1.

This is actually not new in this administration. Last year the president posted on social media telling people to buy stocks a few hours before he announced tariffs (https://apnews.com/article/trump-truth-social-djt-tesla-musk...).

The bigger problem isn't whether or not it can be traced, or if it should be traced. It can and it should. The central issue at stake here is the sale of government secrets to private and (presently) anonymous groups for profit. The author is stating that since we don't know who the trader of that commodity is, and because that commodity's price is tightly coupled to actions related to the war, that trader could be helping enemies of the U.S. Without the knowledge of who the person is, or how they knew to make such a huge market movement, a claim of treason can be argued.

The biggest problem is the intelligence community is heavily rooted in trust. Movements like these signal there's an intelligence leak to the general public, or more appropriately, someone with $580 million lying around. An intelligence leak reduces trust; allies are less likely to share information if it's leaked. Conversely, trust is returned when the leaks are found and plugged, and measures put in place to prevent those leaks in the future. The author is stating that these leaks are unlikely to be plugged, which will reduce trust in American intelligence. After all, as the president said, "Let's say I was gonna do it or let's say I wasn't gonna do it, why would I tell you?" (https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c4gqjyk0vx3t)

Except he is telling someone, and that someone is making a lot of money.

From there, who thought that you'd need a bachelors to be a barista and pour coffee? It's not just about the raw requirements, but about the competition you face in the job market.

Finally, more and more field service technician and electrician, HVAC, roles that are traditionally GED/2-years only, have extremely high experience requirements, and most are preferring people pursuing or with a bachelors in electrical engineering (electrician, HVAC), mechanical/fluid engineering (plumbing), or similar. Earlier this year I was in a remote-ish location (about 100 miles from a major city) and we had an electrical fault that legally required a licensed electrician to repair. We had multiple electrical engineers offer to help who clearly knew the problem and how to fix it according to code, but we couldn't let them touch it because they didn't have their J or better.

If you want to risk no degree and go for your 8,000 hours to get licensed (roughly 4 years experience for no/mediocre pay), go for it.

A 501c3 nonprofit with pretty stringent requirements (accreditation, reporting, transparency), but yes a business nonetheless.

> The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by corrupt, and issuing students worthless degrees? Graduates from the program I direct at a community college are generally earning 120-160k in IT around 2 years after graduation.

> The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability."

Universities yes, community colleges I would not consider this an accurate statement. At my community college our CTE programs (job training) are explicitly evaluated on student salaries as well as how many are actually employed in the industry after graduation, usually within 18-36 months time. It's actually two of the few metrics that are considered "high value", as in 2x the other value of other metrics like graduation, enrollment, retention, revenue-per-student, etc.

Let me dissect this article with uncompromising scrutiny:

> "...have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”

Maybe because for 30 years America sold the idea that you need a bachelors degree to do the majority of these jobs, while simultaneously implying that you only needed 2 years of vocational school? A lot of these require extensive apprenticeships and experience (576 classroom hours, 8,000 experience hours, passing exams for a journeyman electrician license in Oregon). It's absolutely not "Go to school for 2 years and get paid $120k."

Furthermore, most of the trades are brutal on your body, mind, and lifestyle.

> "we don't have trade schools anymore"

We do, and we do our best to train students on only the absolute necessary skills that get them the job and working as quickly as possible. Corporations stopped meaningfully supporting them while simultaneously raising expectations. Major companies stopped most training and orientation programs or significantly scaled them back, passed the burden of training onto community colleges and trade schools, and now complain that our tools and techniques are out of date.

Ford does at my college this while keeping their name slapped on the auto mechanic's program because they helped start the program 20 years ago. Now they're upset because they're not getting the same returns while my fellow instructors struggle to teach on supplies that are 2 decades old.

> "What we don't have are enough young people with the literacy and math proficiency needed to learn skilled trades."

A lot of the K-12 complaint is the No Child Left Behind act and the effects of Common Core. Lots of throwing up of hands here saying "Well guess there's nothing we can do. We have all these high paying jobs that no one wants"

Wanna fix this? Eliminate No Child Left Behind. Actually invest in teachers, tutors, and the people making the impact. Stop calling teachers 'heroes', and give us the resources to actually instruct kids. Stop assuming a household with 2-3 kids, 2 parents that work full time (overtime in today's America), are barely making ends meet, and have no extended family to help kids with homework or tutor, are going to somehow do extremely well.

In fact, we have loads of papers that demonstrate that math scores and grades are pretty tightly correlated with parents'/family ability and availability to help kids with homework. Maybe have parents work less so they can tutor their kids more?

> "Workers who struggle to read grade-level text cannot read complicated technical manuals or diagnostic instructions."

They don't have trouble reading grade-level text. This is a complete misunderstanding of what those tests evaluate. More importantly: If they're struggling to read those complicated manuals or diagnostic instructions, maybe it's because most manufacturers eliminated a lot of the repairability of cars in the past few decades and scaled back their service manuals? Maybe invest in technical writing again?

> They were passed on with inflated grades

Because you stopped hiring anyone with less than a 3.0-4.0. If a teacher's job is to get a student a job in the trades, you won't hire them because their GPA is poor, and we get fired if too many students fail, guess what we (instructors) are going to do?

> "If they can’t handle middle-school math they can’t program high-tech machines or robotics, or operate the automated equipment found in modern factories and repair shops."

Also not correct, and a gross misinterpretation of what the national exams show. Most students can do most math with a calculator just fine, mental math not so much, but it's rare to be in a shop without some kind of computer or calculator nowadays. If you want people who have completed a 2 year trade program to be able to competently do calculus, robotics, PLCs, and program, you need to admit that the job requires far beyond 'middle-school math'.

> ""Servicing an electric vehicle requires interpreting data flows, troubleshooting electronics, and following precise, multistep instructions." It's not a job for "grease monkeys."

Here is the crux of the problem. All of these are needs that are way beyond a standard mechanical technician's toolkit. You need them to dual train as electrical engineers and mechanical engineers with notable expertise in 12/24v and rather high voltages for EVs. You don't want 'average technicians' for 120k, you want dual-degree mechanical and electrical engineers to work for you for less than their going market rate. If your toolchain requires more than an understanding of ODB2 (or 1-2 device) readings and a solid understanding of vehicular operations and what commonly breaks, then you've spent too much time making your products unrepairable and obtuse.