Mod parent up. Burner wisdom. On Monday, Burning Man is over. Pick up everything man made you brought with you, and leave. It helps the people who are working for free accomplish their jobs of getting you all off playa and cleaning up after your feathered friends.

"I was in the Totenkitten camp and worked multiple three-hour shifts helping to keep the Charcade running."

How about volunteering for some real shifts - six hours at the Gate - so you can see how the operation is actually run?

Positing solutions in absence of all the facts isn't completely helpful. You should ask more questions instead of simply observing.

Don't shit all over him just because he's clueless. Even the clueless become helpful when given time and motivation.

For example, he could become a Greeter.

Because like most people who have something to say about Burning Man, this guy only understands half od what he's talking about.

The principal constraint has nothing to do with moving vehicles off the playa. It is Washoe County road 34, which is a narrow, poorly-graded two lane road that goes to Gerlach, there it joins with Nevada SR 447, a wider, less poorly-graded two-lane highway that runs through a town of less than 500 people. From there, it's still 90 minutes to Interstate 80.

Old US 49, Jungo Road, cannot be used by 99% of the vehicles at Burning Man, although those of you looking at the Google Maps are already thinking you've got an answer.

The 'answer' is: Don't plan anything - including being at work - for the Tuesday after Labor Day. Or leave before the Man burns. And if you're going out, consider volunteering to help the Gate, Perimeter, and Exodus Crew. Lots of good people work for free (or nearly so) to make sure the flow into and out of BRC stays as efficient as possible.

Another note: stereotyping anyone's lifestyle or motivations for attending Burning Man is an exercise in being an idiot. (Except for the feather headress-wearing Coachella fratkids. Everyone at Burning Man HATES those assholes.)

they're also resented by much of the volunteer staff, as they tend to set up resource intensive camps or fly in/out every day.

Butno judging. That's kind of at the core of the ten principles. Everyone is welcome in BRC as long as they don't shit all over anyone else.

Given that it's a dry alkali lake bed with virtually no life upon it, the impact on the playa from vehicle traffic is negligible from year to year.

Now, let's talk about all the hippies with leaky bussesand the folks from LA who show up in motor coaches carrying two occupants...that's a huge environmental impact. But they're usually the ones treating Burning Man as a weeklong party while ignoring all the staff who work their asses off.

You know people stay out there for over a month after the event cleaning up, so that the only thing left after the winter rains in December are a few ruts in the playa, right? Maybe know what you're talking about before posting.

SAABRE and the other booking systems are a bit too smart these days to actually make tickets available at some sort of pre-determined price.

Jet fuel costs four times what it did ten years ago. Fleets are getting replaced. You really think they're going to let the system release any $300 seats unless the load factor for that flight is low and converging with the flight day?

Still, it only costs about 30% more in actual dollars than it did in 1999 to fly cross country. That little fact doesn't exactly make me confident that the broken remains of what was once a diverse domestic air travel market are very concerned with the self-loading freight, if you get my drift.

Do no evil was never the operative motto for the company.

See also: aggressively pushing prescription drug ad sales Google knew were illegal years ago. Hood winking the folks at Ames research center into becoming "Larry and Sergey and Eric's Private Airport". Etc.

This is why Google's efforts lately have been received relatively poorly. People know that Google sees them as marks. There is no free lunch, and Google's products lately show a distinct lack of polish and execution needed to make it a one-stop-shop for "categorizing the world's information". People know Google is looking over their shoulders constantly, and their products aren't getting better fast enough to keep ahead of the free/utility versus 'leave me alone' curve for some.

When you are getting something useful for free, that's great. But the value for Google doesn't extend to actually creating consumer-driven, best-in-class products. It's obvious to a growing umber of people that Google's products for consumers exist solely to create value for the company by gathering, manipulating, and selling their behavioral habits

See G+(is that an echo in here?) or Google TV, which last I heard, might have shipped a few hundred thlusand units. See anything they've done in the consumer space over the past few years - it sucks and no one is using it.

Android - a product Google has to pay other companies for because if all the IP conflicts and agreements - is successful but looks to have some pretty big and increasingly worrisome problems with forking. Google could lose control of it. And more Android users I talk to are pissed - I mean pissed - that Apple supports a three-year old phone with the latest iOs, but Google doesn't give a ahit enough to work with carriers to make that experience more valuable - to the customer.

Read the article about Stanford's coziness with Valley companies to get some ideas why this brain rot is pissing actual customers off. Hint: MBAs and lots of smart kids who are pretty cocky have a lot to do with it.

Thank you for echoing what this silicon valley transplant has seen and felt during nearly 20 years here.

Stanford University is pretty much a "free hire" pass at many companies here. Based on many of the project and product managers I've met who graduated from there, that tendency has cost valley companies a lot of money, but at least the BMW dealerships and Coach stores are happy.

Exactly. Consensus hiring is Stanford voodoo clubhouse bullshit too - "we all thought you were awesome, but Arnie here wants to hire the girl with big tits who is almost as good as you, so...see you later!"

I live in Silicon Valley and most of the recent Stanford grads I meet are like West Coast Romneys: legacy kids, well-heeled by their own rich parents and friends, and already assured of that new 5-series or a spot at the VC table, no matter how stupid the idea is (paying 1 billion for Instagram...).

Yeah - I resent the hell out of the culture here. It's gone from what you know to who you know in 20 years. Now, instead of building things in Silicon Valley, we just reinvent the same scams to fleece money from consumers - thanks in part to your Stanford MBAs.

Credibility fail troll. You meant trojan, right? Because zero Mac viruses (self-spreading and replicating) exist. There's one widespread Mac trojan which masqueraded as a Flash installer with an Adobe logo - because, you know, Mac users are all stupid and clicking on shit like installers from major software vendors.

Malware "writters" must be busy doing something else, eh?

That's exactly the right analogy. The vast majority of Windows malware found on Macs is in filed e-mails from Windows users. Seriously. If you never do anything with the mail again, it's not even comparable to a dormant bacillus like anthrax because there is literally zero chance of infection of the host being infected, and a zero chance of infecting others unless direct action is taken by the "host".

Your values are not the same as those looking to make money by reselling audio content. I can assure you that various music distributors would have no problem at all working in the studio with their own or third-party engineers to produce "Mastered for iTunes" versions of a catalog if that's what they think will lure more buyers. Whether or not "Mastered for iTunes" involves a substantively changed version (for example, engineered toward smaller drivers with more bass cutover, increasingly popular these days).

Regardless of your opinion about how something should work, this kind of collaboration is an every day occurrence in the industry and never relies on "turning over" anything to Apple.