Since 2022, the organization has significantly pushed back against camps trying to package and sell "VIP packages" by restricting them from getting early setup passes, water deliveries, trailer & intermodal container delivery, etc. Without those support services, the model has become pretty unattractive.
Also, Burning Man is very intentional about its culture, with de-commodification as one of its main principles. The spotlight that got put on this issue a few years ago has really pushed these camps out, as of 2025.
As far as housing, most people sleep in tents, including specialized dome tents with reflective coating for the heat, but those are still essentially tents. Others sleep in RVs/trailers/vehicles. There isn't anyone building a condo tower in the desert.
I'm not trying to sound snarky, but the armed forces does have a category of employees who can't be involuntarily deployed: civilians. There are already many civilian employees of the DoD that work in the tech roles discussed in the article.
I've been looking at this personally. It's not stated in the article, but the initiative is known as constructive service credit for cyber direct commissions.
The way it works is basically the same as reserve officer recruiting, but with a higher starting rank.
You'd get in contact with an officer recruiter for the service branch you're interested in, using the normal channels. They have a deserved reputation for ghosting candidates, but they generally spend most of their effort on candidates further down the pipeline. One recommendation I got was to get in touch with an enlisted recruiter who can confirm your eligibility to serve and refer you as a qualified lead to an officer recruiter.
Air Force officer appointments are the most competitive (3-10% of people who meet all application requirements and medical qualifications are selected), and they are stingy on medical waivers.
The Navy is only slightly less competitive but reputed to be the most permissive with waivers.
One thing to know is that waivers for medical issues are issued without regard to your nonmedical qualifications. So if Jeff Bezos had a bad knee, that would disqualify even him.
When I moved and was looking for a new vet and dentist, I specifically asked each one about their ownership structure and didn't choose any that were owned by a PE firm.
Title should reflect that this was published in 2006.
And moreover, I don't think the article's point is true today. Python and JavaScript are both mature languages with massive libraries of online example code for anything you could want to learn about. You can get access to a JavaScript console with a single keypress in any desktop browser- F12.
Teaching kids to understand how to program has benefits, not just for the ones that go on to specialize in computing- I think about a journalist being able to use R or PyPlot to map out crimes in their city based on publicly available police reports, or a lawyer using a script to call the Shopify API to collect their client's records to respond to a discovery request, rather than taking screenshots of the web pages.
Exposure to BASIC doesn't help these people as much as more modern languages would.
My understanding is that due to Webb's location at L2, it can never point back at the Earth, because that would basically be pointing directly at the sun.
I'd say this is essentially an instance of the sequential monopolization problem and imperfectly aligned incentives due to a difference in the shape of each party's cost/demand curve.
The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale.
Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport.
Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots.
Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly.
All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated.
So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.
The employees (or any group of them, even less than half) are free to join a union and attempt to negotiate with Amazon. However, Amazon would just ignore them.
Union votes like the one described here are about triggering protections of US law that will require Amazon to negotiate with the union.
I'm personally of the opinion that 418 shouldn't be considered a joke response, but would actually useful as 418 "Unsupported Device".
What response should a printer give if you asked it to send a fax, but you have a base-model printer that doesn't support sending faxes. From the perspective of the printer, I know what you want (i.e. not a 404) and you've asked for it correctly (i.e. not 400 or 401 or 403), but I can't do it, and this does not indicate an error on my part (not a 500 or 503). Thus, 418: Unsupported Device.
Perhaps this too much of an overlap with 404 (I don't have that resource) and 501 (I can't do that verb to that resource), which I assume is why there's not a huge need for it. But if we're going to have 418 exist and receive browser support anyway, it might as well have a useful meaning rather than just exist as a joke.
This interpretation is fully in keeping with the non-joke meaning of the original RFC, as a teapot is a device that does not support brewing coffee.
How were you able to take the GED exam at 16? I looked into doing this while I was in high school, and found that I wouldn't be able to take the exam until I was 19, defeating the point.
Perhaps it varies by state? If so, I applaud Oregon for not forcing students into a daycare program for any longer than necessary. If I were a policymaker, I would even be comfortable with lowering the minimum age to 14 or lower.
I remember reading about some folks who wanted to open a bank that wouldn't make any loans, but rather just take store all their deposits as excess reserves at the federal reserve. They would take a few basis points for themselves, but offer their customers a way to have truly cash deposits that earned some interest with the absolute minimum amount of counter-party risk.
The Federal Reserve didn't approve them to do that, because they were worried that it could "destabilize the financial system."
If the landowners were adequately compensated for having arbitrary use restrictions added to their property after they bought it, they would have had no incentive to bulldoze it in the first place.
Cities change. Culture changes. It's okay to tear down bars and replace them with apartments. This reeks of Nimby-ism and entitlement on the part of the locals.
Since I got my driver's license over a decade ago, I've had to parallel-park less than ten times. I've probably changed a flat tire more often.
I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year. Furthermore, an increasing fraction of new cars can park automatically.
The chief value of having a road test, in my mind, is to force most teens to learn to drive in a structured program that introduces rules of the road and safe habits. Parallel parking is rare and not dangerous, so we shouldn't waste the limited hours that teens spend with professional driving educators on it.
The last-search thing is configurable, depending on your version of Jira. You can have it open to a specific RapidView, or your user-configurable Dashboard page, where you can add a Widget for a a specific JQL like "Assigned to me AND NOT issuestatus = Resolved"
Not that this exonerates JIRA of being clunky, but hopefully you can improve your experience.
I actually worked as a production electrician & lighting designer for a couple years, and I can say from my experience that IATSE is a cancer on the industry. I wouldn't join or support a union for computer technologists.
My main concern for the tech industry is that a union is fundamentally exclusionary. It's survival depends on preventing competition- any other activity it undertakes is only to serve that goal, or to justify it.
Unions prevent competition by demanding exclusivity in a company's labor supply, they prevent competition from new entrants by being outright hostile to young tradespeople (in most trade unions, it's basically impossible to join without sponsorship form an existing member), and they prevent competition among members by fixing wages, suppressing the earning potential of the most valuable employees.
Once a union has succeeded in restraining trade, it can extract monopoly rents from the flow of labor. At best, this looks like an ever-growing university-style administration that exists to justify its own existence. Unions can never exist to create net value, only to capture it, and that by necessity means that value is destroyed by their existence. They're antithetical to the principles of fairness, openness and inclusiveness that we claim to value.
Moreover, why would we even want a union, on an individual level? We (American citizens with a BSCS or similar) each already hold a golden ticket directly to the gentry class. We are, by pure luck of nationality, already privileged beneficiaries of the American coastal tech boom cities, of American currency and political dominance of the past seven decades, and of our restrictive immigration policies that artificially inflate wages for computer professionals across the country above their global equilibrium price. A CS graduate today can reasonably expect to be a millionaire by midlife, if they choose to save accordingly.
And if you don't like having to work late sometimes, you have the option to take a job that doesn't require it. If you don't want to live the Senior SRE lifestyle, you don't have to.
Since 2022, the organization has significantly pushed back against camps trying to package and sell "VIP packages" by restricting them from getting early setup passes, water deliveries, trailer & intermodal container delivery, etc. Without those support services, the model has become pretty unattractive.
Also, Burning Man is very intentional about its culture, with de-commodification as one of its main principles. The spotlight that got put on this issue a few years ago has really pushed these camps out, as of 2025.
As far as housing, most people sleep in tents, including specialized dome tents with reflective coating for the heat, but those are still essentially tents. Others sleep in RVs/trailers/vehicles. There isn't anyone building a condo tower in the desert.