That’s how megacorps are. VW has almost 700K employees. Enforcing a company culture on that scale is a very diffuse and difficult thing. If you are evaluating whether you should trust a company based on their ability to enforce values throughout all their orgs, you really shouldn’t trust any company unless it’s a tiny one where this sort of thing can be a lot easier to hold the line on.
> Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.
so its making a shot of water ever couple days, provided its not too dry?
Abortion release the same amount of heat than condensation. So you can cool the material before and get condensation or absorb the water and cool the material later.
Sweating keeps you cool, absorbing the sweat will cancel the cooling effect and you will overheat and may die.
The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.
So uh, how do they get the salt out of the nanostructure? This design seems amazing but it seems like many of these designs have issues with salts accumulating and clogging up parts thereby requiring some manual maintenance or replacement parts
Evaporation cools things, that's why we sweat. Condensation heats things. Sure, a wearable dehumidifier may be novel, but does it sound like a good idea to wear a dehumidifier in conditions where you might want to drink the water from one?
You can wear silica gel since about 1918 - only needs some heat to get the water out and cold to condense it.
Then again, why would you want to wear your dehumidifier (ok ok water harvester)? Is it for excursions into damp areas, so that you can then return to your dry home to extract water?
Then, I believe everything in this video still applies.
How often do you think that happens to transit riders? Your concerns seem overblown. And by driving, your odds of getting hurt or dying in a car accident go way up. You’re trading one set of risks for another, not eliminating risk entirely.
People feel uncomfortable about others who look really crazy/shady for public transit or in parks, and in response they're told, "have you considered that maybe you're just overthinking it?"
Instead of fixing the problem, we blame those who have the audacity to notice.
Both things can be true. People can have exaggerated fears about the dangers of transit (especially compared to driving, which people seem to pretend is relatively risk-free), and the crazy / shady folks on transit can still be a problem and still need to be addressed.
I can only speak from my own experience riding transit in Seattle for 9 years. I've never had any issues. Sure, there are sketchy characters, but I've never been bothered, and never had anyone bother me. I definitely see news stories about bad shit happening on transit, but when you look at the number of people riding transit vs the amount of bad things that happen, and you look at the number of people driving and how many people die or get seriously injured in the city daily from car-related accidents, it's a no brainer. You don't see people dying on transit every day, but car-related fatalities are a daily occurrence.
Yes I am trading one set of risks for another based on my judgement of which risks I prefer to bear, as it is my right to do. Simply leaving my house entails a set of risks. I get to choose how I want to handle and prioritize those.
The point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with "class".
I have been puked on when riding the bart and know several people who have seen a person die or get murdered. This dismissal of the very real problems of public transport is why public transport has the reputation it does.
When my wife showed me the Loop ad, I told her it's a scam.
But now I'm the one using them. Haven't done as much work researching earplugs as some posters above, but like the Loops. For comparison, I have earplugs at work, that feel like someone was raping my ear every time I'm putting them on.
So, there's definitely earplugs and earplugs. If you need to use them, might be worth few hours and few bucks spent on testing/research.
Oh yeah, I bought a few different types of ear plugs to test them out. The silicone putty and the loops left my ears sweaty. I'd pull them out at night to dry them out. Tmi, I know, sorry, but yeah, I tried 'em.
I started walking every day for at least an hour in my neighborhood parks, on a nearby trail, or just the sidewalks in the neighborhood. I use it as meditation time and don’t engage in any distractions like music or podcasts. Just me and the present, mindfully observing the world around me and my own thoughts as they pass through me. It has had incredibly positive effects on my mental health.
You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.
There are some shitty Burners and those cause the most visible problems, but there are a lot of conscientious ones too (I think it’s the majority of them). Painting them all with the same brush isn’t quite right, a lot of us work hard to do things the right way (like spending hours in line to pay to dump trash at the Reno municipal transfer station). I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though, besides lots of public shaming. It’s hard to avoid having any jerks in a city of 70K people.
Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.
This is the fundamental contradiction of Burning Man values, and I admit to obnoxiously pursuing it around the fire these past three burns now.
Burning Man is a community and society, and often pitches itself that way, and attendees come away feeling that way - they're "Burners," any city in the world they go to they can probably find other Burners they've never met and hang out, and to truly understand the Burn you really just have to attend.
But the values, and event, and many attendees, reject this fact with the "radical self reliance" value. People try to work around it by doing Theme camps - tribes within a tribe. Oh you're self reliant all right, you and the rest of your suburb with whom you organized to bring water and toilet paper. But no no no, that line stops at the edge of your camp, beyond that lies only community WITHOUT responsibility.
In reality there is no community without responsibility. MOOP blows around. Your sound affects other people. And if someone is suffering from thirst or hunger at the Burn, you absolutely have a responsibility to them as a member of your community to share food and water.
This radical self reliance thing just shifts the burden of managing people to the theme camp level, without any guarantee that any given theme camp is actually itself a good member of the community (other than processes that take a while e.g. the MOOP map).
The Burn is big but so are towns. There's already infrastructure for sewage, there should be as well for trash, and imo food and shelter as well. That doesn't require violating any of the principles, and a form of "radical self reliance" can be maintained through "radical participation" wherein people can identify a problem they want to resolve about the Burn and resolve it, or organize a working group or syndic to do so.
The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
> The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
Exactly my point, so why do we maintain this illusion through one specific principle that we are "radically self reliant" when that evidently isn't the case? Just look through this thread: multiple people rejecting the idea of shared trash bins as "opposed to the values." How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
> It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
Right, it already is that, and adding shared trash bins won't make it not that. We've just shifted responsibility for managing that onto the theme camps. And in any case, we don't have a magical enforcement mechanism for the values - nothing about changing what we consider a "shared community responsibility" causes our ability to gatekeep lazy people to diminish, the same mechanism of social pressure is there either way.
Meanwhile, our community is failing to handle the very real fact that people are dumping their trash in the streets of Reno, and Reno is, appropriately, attributing this failure to our community as a whole.
> Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
My Coachella comment was more in response to your suggestion that even infra for food and shelter should be provided. FWIW I also love Coachella, but that's because I love music - many people there sure don't follow leave no trace principles and that doesn't sit well with me either.
> How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
I think it's a spectrum. From completely no services at all to everything provided. My view is that providing things like toilets and medical services are something that we all (or at least most) agree makes the city a better place with no real downside. Trash is more complicated - I believe that does compromise the principles too much because of how people behave if dumpsters were to exist. I think people would be more irresponsible than they are now, because "someone else will take care of it" on playa. You also end up with tragedy of the commons problems like some camps dumping way more than others and perhaps filling things up so much that other camps can't even dispose of their stuff, and at that point how do you enforce or manage that? You could start charging by volume or something, but then that just starts to degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it, even if it means that sometimes people do the wrong thing. How we manage the problem in Reno, I'm not sure - TBH, if people started getting in trouble for doing it in a real way, like getting charged with illegal dumping, that'd be fine with me. It would certainly be a disincentive to do it once enough Burners get in real shit for doing irresponsible things like that. I'd have no sympathy for them, that's a personal accountability thing.
> degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it
Right, but that's not happening, because people are dumping in Reno so someone else has to handle it :p
I'm a bit confused by how you said "provided." This may be a USA Burn vs regional Burn misunderstanding - it sounds like the USA burn has a larger divide between Organizers and Participant? For Japan / Taiwan, if there's communal trash, that doesn't mean trash is provided, it just means we organized group trash handling, increased ticket price if necessary, added voluntary shifts to pick up around a dumpster or whatever.
The organizers are also participants, but yes, there is a large overarching Org that manages the overall infrastructure of the city and that certainly isn't every participant. It's not realistic to expect 70K people to all band together to organize and negotiate contracts for large scale shared services like toilets and medical and things like that that end up costing millions in actual money changing hands, not to mention things like coordinating with the government for the permit and regulatory requirements, dealing with the numerous law enforcement agencies on playa, managing the airport, running the DMV, running Burner Express buses, etc., especially when these things need to be planned out way ahead of time. For a small scale event, sure, that can work, but it doesn't scale up in any reasonable way. So when I read communal trash, I'm thinking of a scenario where the Org has to contract with and pay a few million dollars to a waste management company to haul out a lot of dumpsters to the desert and haul them back to civilization to dispose of garbage, with a corresponding increase in ticket price and an increase in the problems that I mentioned before. For camp-led garbage disposal, I don't think there's anyone necessarily against that on a small scale, and sure, neighboring camps in theory could band together to come up with a solution together, but at the end of the day that adds a lot of coordination and complexity on top of an already complicated logistical nightmare. Camps are welcome to use outside services on the approved list to come up with something if they wish. It sounds like you haven't been to the Burn if your reference is Japan / Taiwan - you should go (it's a wonderful time) and I think you'd understand pretty quick why what you're suggesting wouldn't really make sense at that scale.
> Right, it already is that, and adding shared trash bins won't make it not that.
But it will change participant behavior. Most attendees work very hard to reduce the amount of trash they generate at a burn, period. This is why people bring reusable cups and plates and silverware, etc. If you provide trash services, people will be more willing to bring trash - after all, it's easy to dispose of. And this violates the LNT principle.
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