Snicker. Drug searches. Oh wait, are they serious?
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Fascist states don’t allow autonomous zones, even if temporary.
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Oh and now suddenly the Trump regime cares about the environment?
Drilling for oil on public lands, spilling industrial chemicals into waterways, allowing for killing of protected wildlife, encouraging coal production, logging on public lands, and denying climate change? All gravy.
Burning Man? Now that’s the true environmental menace.
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“Temporary” stopped being relevant a long time ago. Facilitating this is a year round endeavor, most of the infrastructure is warehoused nearby.
For attendees, sure, its one week out of the year. But the cleanup and setup take months. For any such zone to be truly temporary, it would also have tobe nomadic.
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Yeah, but the Golden Horde has just got too big, these days. I remember, back in the 13th Century, when it was just Batu Khan and a few thousand like-minded pillagers; back before they all sold out.
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My FIL was a Bohemian. Got to go to the Grove twice (although never for the Encampment). Hard to imagine a nicer stand of redwoods that actually get a fair amount of human traffic. They’d probably fair pretty well.
That said, I don’t see why BMORG doesn’t try to find an appropriate spot of desert and buy it. One of the fellows who runs the airport at BM also is part of a group that bought a lake bed nearer to Reno that he uses for some back-country fly-ins – much easier than dealing with the BLM.
ETA: It had $44MM in revenue in 2017, there’s plenty of cash to finance a mortgage on an appropriate piece of land. Net out the lower requirements for legal/regulatory compliance and I bet the carry costs on a mortgage becomes quite manageable.
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But is it accurate it’s gotten bigger?
I have gone to Defcon for a long time. When I first went it was ~5k people, now it’s more like 20k spread across 3 casinos, and it’s changed the culture for the worse IMHO.
I won’t comment on an event I haven’t been to, but I’m more inclined to find a festival or smaller event to go to than Burning Man at this point.
(Or maybe just go out into the desert and post here on BB 
)
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Thunderdome on a scale never before seen!
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The age of Trump is the age of bullying these liberal leftist hippie commies any which way you can think of. #heiltrump #maga
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My thoughts exactly. Kleptocrats feel empowered and brazen these days. I wonder why?
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The Trump regime likes shaking people down and taking bribes.
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Good submission by Cory. The replies need to be like Cory’s, containing detailed and specific reasons why the EIS is flawed - though maybe don’t crib BM’s own text quite so obviously. General objections or posts merely taking solidarity with BM are not sufficient. It’s vital that people do as Cory did and follow the suggestions of BM about submitting comments on the EIS. The deadline is April 29.
https://journal.burningman.org/2019/04/black-rock-city/leaving-no-trace/draft-eis-commenting/
Seems like some people in the Trump administration don’t like Burning Man and are trying to kill it by making total BS requirements that have no relationship to actual safety or environmental needs.
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I agree with @anon47741163: it’s hard to rationalize.
At best, it’s not a deviation from the status quo. We live, we emit. This status quo is the problem, and we have to change it; we have to stop emitting. Burning Man is entirely discretionary. It’s a local event for almost no one. Many private planes and jets are flown in. Many (not all) of the people attending are living global-top-10% emitter lifestyles. This all has to change.
We should also look hard at the Olympics. Can that really be justified? I’d say no.
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BM ensures that no trace is left behind, as Cory notes in his submission. There is absolutely no justification in fact for a massive array of dumpsters - which would just encourage people to bring more trash, and also cause trash to be blown from the dumpsters into the playa. These new rules were thought out by people who hate burning man and/or by people in an office who have no clue about the extensive civil engineering logistics that go into burning man every year.
No other event has been ordered to operate under these new insane proposals. A wild guess would be that the Trump admin thinks all burners are Dems and wants to hurt them because they can.
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I wonder if anyone has done the math on that? I’ve got lots of burner friends who are also very environmentally conscious. The art and culture of BM is worth supporting. But I do think there is a disconnect in terms of environmental impact - not to the playa mind you, as BM is amazing about protecting it and keeping it clean, but in terms of carbon footprint. Burning the Man and the Temple every year is a ginormous and profligate waste, not to mention all the fuel used to drive out people and materials to the event, run generators, fire displays and more. But, I don’t know how the actual carbon footprint compares to other kinds of events with the same kind of international attendance and scope (if there even are such things).
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I wonder if the carbon footprint is really all that much higher (if it even is higher) than the same number of people doing their usual thing. Often when these things get calculated it seems to be forgotten that it shouldn’t be a simple calculation of A (in this case the carbon footprint of an event) but rather A vs B (the carbon footprint of the same people going about their daily lives for the same period). I know my carbon footprint surely goes down when I go camping. Does that footprint go down enough to fully offset the extra used by the PA and lights in the performances?
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I’d guess that burning has way lower impact per attendant than transportation - vehicles use ridiculous amounts of energy. Multiple smaller, local events would probably be way better for environment.
Also, small internal combustion generators are horribly inefficient way to generate electricity - renting a few large generators for powering the whole event would be far better.
If you don’t include transportation, it’s probably lower, considering how popular air conditioning is in the US, and how much energy it consumes. Considering how much time regular person in the US spends on daily commute to work, typically by a car with no other passengers, even with transportation it can still be lower. And I guess that it’s way lower than vacation on a cruise ship.
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It’s about 9.5 kilotons in real-world units. You’re welcome.
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“Autonomous zone…temporary”
+1 if that was a purposeful Hakim Bey and/or Critical Art Ensemble shout out.
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Unless its a tax-free “economic zone” with kickbacks to right politicians. Then it’s all “Have at it, Boys!”
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