An Algorithm to End the Lines for Ice at Burning Man 342
I skipped burning man this year but went for the first time in 2013. One of the only goods for sale at Burning Man is bags of ice -- to keep your own food cool, or simply to refresh yourself, you can line up to buy bags of ice that are sold by Arctica camp out of the back of a refrigerated truck under a tent. Bags cost $3 apiece.
During peak times last year, the lines were up to an hour long. This year, so I heard, the lines on the first day were even worse, because two of the three distribution points were unable to open due to closed roads, so everybody lined up at the only sales tent that was operating.
Regardless of the conditions, the procedure when you get to the front of the line is the same. You specify how many bags of ice you want, and deposit cash in a container on the counter. Then a volunteer walks back to the ice truck to fetch one or more bags from the truck and brings them back to the counter. You collect your bags and continue on your way.
OK, before reading any further -- based on what I just wrote, can you think of a way to speed up the line? No cheating -- read the preceding paragraph and think of what you might do differently. Spoilers follow!
The thought that occurred to me almost immediately after I got my bag of ice, was: Why not just have the volunteers carry the bags of ice from the truck to the counter, before people place their order? As long as the line is moving, no bag of ice would sit on the counter long enough to melt. And then each transaction at the front of the line would be reduced to: Customer pays for bag(s), customer picks up bag(s) and leaves. By eliminating the time to walk back to the truck and fetch the bag(s), the system would significantly reduce the per-customer transaction time.
I'd asked a handful of Burning Man veterans about this, and they said that Arctica had tried this at one point, but was required to stop by Nevada health code regulations, which treated ice as a "food product" and therefore said that it could not be moved out onto the counter until an order has been placed. This sounded puzzling to me -- don't cafés place other "food products" out on a counter all the time, where they can be bought and picked up by customers? And for the ice bags, why would it matter in practice anyway -- even if the state of Nevada is worried about germs starting to multiply as soon as the bag is removed from the refrigerated truck, the time the bag spends sitting on the counter is still negligible compared to the time the customer spends transporting it back to their own camp.
So I emailed the Nevada State Health Division to ask them what the regulations actually said, and if they would allow the ice vendors to load bags of ice onto their sales counter before they had been paid for by a customer. One of their Public Health Engineers replied and said, "I can assure you that we do not require the ice to remain in the truck until it is ordered" (and dryly added, "It is common for vendors to blame the health authority for imagined regulations"). Regarding the resulting long lines, he also advised me, in the spirit of Burning Man radical self-reliance (if not practicality), "You may consider bringing your own ice to the Playa rather than purchasing it from them."
So that's it. There's no regulatory reason why the ice can't be brought to the sales counter before it's paid for -- where it wouldn't even have time to start melting, if there are customers eagerly waiting to carry it away -- and no reason why the line couldn't probably move 5 to 10 times faster as a result. (I emailed Arctica to ask if they would start having volunteers bring ice bags up to the counter before customers place their orders, and showed them the email from the Nevada Health Division saying it would be legal. I received a very friendly reply, mostly asking me who I was and why I was concerned about the issue; I said I had no stake in the matter except hoping to reduce the wait times and hence the aggravation and health risks for people waiting in line in the sun. I have not received a reply to any subsequent inquiries after that.)
In a previous article I'd theorized about an algorithm for speeding up the vehicle exodus at Burning Man. (Basically, have a "priority lane" where cars can exit at different times of day, depending on the last character on their license plate. So one hour where the priority lane is set aside for cars whose license plates end in "A", another hour where the lane is used by cars with plates ending in "B", and so on. This means that drivers who want to use the priority lane, can just wait for the designated hour, instead of spending five hours queueing up to leave.) That was intended more of an intellectual exercise, as a jumping-off point for a discussion about which algorithms would work best under different theoretical assumptions, and with only the small possibility that it might ever actually be implemented at the real event.
The call to speed up the ice lines is not an intellectual exercise. Unless there's a non-obvious major problem with making this change, this is something that could be done the very next year, and would save people thousands of person-hours waiting in line in the sun.
My other suggestion would be to have a "turbo" line even faster than the main one, designed for people to complete each sales transaction in seconds. Every customer in the "turbo" line would be required to have exact change (or be willing to overpay and let the vendor keep the change), and every customer would be required to have their cash fanned out in their hand like playing cards when they got to the front of the line. (A volunteer could walk up and down near the front of the line to verify that people already had their cash displayed properly.) A transaction at the front of the line would simply consist of, "Three dollars -- bag", or, "Six dollars -- two bags", where the customer shows their fanned-out money, dumps it into the cash receptacle, and picks up one or more bags from the counter.
With or without the "turbo" line, at first it might seem like it would take extra labor to keep a supply of ice bags moving constantly from the truck to the counter, but that's not the case. For a given number of bags to be sold, every bag has to be moved from the truck, to the counter, exactly one time. So the total amount of labor is always going to be the same, for a fixed number of ice bags. To have a steady supply of ice moving quickly from the truck to the counter, you might need to have more volunteers working at the same time, but that just means that rather than having 5 volunteers with one-hour shifts spaced throughout the day, you'd have those same volunteers working simultaneously to keep the bags moving.
With the lines moving that much more quickly, what if the ice bags run out halfway through the day? Hopefully the vendor can just send the trucks back out to fetch more bags of ice to be brought back in and sold in the afternoon. But even if they can't -- even if, for some reason, the number of ice bags sold per day has to be fixed at X -- you've still done an enormous amount of good by reducing the wait time from 30-45 minutes to 5 minutes. Because you still sell the same number of ice bags, but you've eliminated the pointless deadweight loss of all the time the customers were previously wasting in line.
And if the vendors can bring in more ice whenever their existing stock sells out much faster, that's a win too -- regardless of whether they're selling the ice for profit or just for altruistic motives. If they're selling ice to help people, then selling more ice is better. If they're selling ice for profit, then selling more ice is better, too.
I'm being fairly pedantic here because I want to make it clear that I think that I think there's no counterargument to be made to this, under any combination of reasonable assumptions -- whether the vendors can bring in more ice or whether they're stuck selling a fixed number of bags per day; whether the goal of selling the ice is for altruism or to make a profit. Bring the ice out before it's paid for, shave the transaction time down to the bare minimum of the customer paying money and then grabbing their ice bags, and everyone will be grateful they don't have to wait an hour in the sun.
And if you're an adventurer thinking about going to Burning Man, my tips for making it (slightly) easier include bringing your own cooler (separate from any food storage cooler) so that you can buy a bag of ice each day, dump it in the cooler, and have your own supply of ice water. That's well worth it, whether the wait time in the ice line is five minutes or an hour.
Agner Krarup Erlang - The telephone in 1909! (Score:5, Informative)
A guy named Agner Erlang solved most of this already, and we can thank the telephone. He took his work on how to figure out the optimal number of trunk lines for a town and used that to model cash register lines. Erlang worked out that one line into many registers is the fastest and most efficient, so if one line backs up but another one moves quickly, people don't bunch up at the register that was slow. You can see this system at work at Walmart of all places, their express checkout section where they tell you what register to go to is based on this model. If there's a bottleneck beyond the register, say the ice truck, then have a second queue where individuals are provided with something like a receipt for them to obtain the ice directly from the truck. This also has the benefit of individuals being able to buy more than one bag of ice and can come back and enter the ice truck queue to fill the remainder of the order later rather than requeue in the register line. Obviously there are risks to that but ultimately the risk would be the consumers. Both of these methods are in use today and even at the same time in some cases, I saw it just last summer at a beer festival. We went through one queue to get beer tokens, and then there were multiple vendors who accepted those tokens for you to redeem it. Then the vendors redeemed their tokens from the festival operators.
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Trader Joe's does the same thing. One big line, many registers.
Funny how efficient it is compared to many lines for many registers.
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Carrefour does this in Argentina. People don't really understand the concept but they're starting to get used to it. Most banks have been doing it for a long time as well.
"Hyper-efficient" McDonald's and Walmart? Nope.
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I've never accused Walmart of efficiency, and McDonald's did it's motion efficiency studies decades and decades ago, and hasn't kept up the work.
Re: Agner Krarup Erlang - The telephone in 1909! (Score:4, Interesting)
One supermarket chain around Albany, NY tried implementing the single line system about a year ago. It only lasted a few months before they reverted.
At least at the grocery store, people disliked feeling corralled like cattle more than they dislike waiting slightly longer in a less efficient line. Might have been the way it was implemented, honestly. It had a rather frenetic feel to it, with the line “leader” guiding people to one of the actual registers with quite a bit of urgency and insistence. I’d guess there was probably some misguided, management-imposed, career-limiting metric system associated with the process such that the employee ultimately paid the price if customers dawdled and brought the throughput numbers down. That translated to a rather jarring mood to the whole thing.
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For grocery stores (and other shops where you'd buy a large number of items in one go) the single line is less convenient for the customer.
I like being able to stack all of my groceries onto the conveyor before the cashier starts processing them. When the cashier gets to my groceries, I can immediately start packing them (in the right order, heavy items first).
In a single-line system, you're inevitably still unpacking while the cashier processes your item, so they all end up in a mangled heap at the end of
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That method is working fine here for at least one particular grocery store. A large regional grocer named Lund's does this at a number of their stores. Of course the stores they are using it in have a certain dynamic and layout that seems to compliment its use.
Other than grocery:
Best Buy uses this method during the Christmas Season and seems to be expanding that to other times of the year when they are busy.
Local Electronics/Computer shop Microcenter has done this since they opened.
The bathrooms in our st
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Fry's electronics does this as well. It is about as efficient as it can be.
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In Canada, the Tim Hortons donut shop drive-thrus now have two lanes for ordering. These merge into a single lane and a single window for both payment and pickup.
I personally can't see how this speeds things up, since ordering is not the bottleneck in the process - it's the filling of orders that takes the most time. Why not have a single lane and two pickup windows? It's bizarre.
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McDonald's does that here too. I don't understand it either since it doesn't help anything being backwards - many into one. It's opposite to what Erlang worked on.
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The CEOs must have gone to the same seminar. It's the only reason I can think of. :)
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"Mumble mumble mumble?"
Morale of the story - get your lazy ass out of the car if you want your "fat food" fast.
The real reasons for two lines into one:
1. Once they have your order, they have you. Don't matter how long the queue takes - you're already psychologically invested, stuck in the line. Welcome to the Hotel California fast food queue;
2. Those awful speaker systems - combined with language bar
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they can pile twice as many vehicles into the very small parking lot in two lines as they could in one line before they start overflowing into traffic... In my town, there are some Timmies locations where they only have room for one line and these regularly overflow into the street blocking a lane during rush hour... People's coffee is more important than keeping traffic moving.
I drink my coffee at home.
Re: Agner Krarup Erlang - The telephone in 1909! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I thought about the separate line, but there'd be a lot of people who go straight to the ice line, causing backups while the ice salesman explained the setup. And it would create an extra unnecessary step, when lines are short.
I propose the In-n-Out drive through solution: When lines get long, have a salesman walk down the line taking pre-orders. He takes the cash, and gives the customer a number of ice tokens (it's Nevada, so they should be able to find a local company that can provide high quality casino
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I thought they would create a line of ice for lots of parallel processing (pickup), rather than a line of people for single ping processing (pickup)
Or maybe some predictive processing...hand out ice to people who look like they need it before they get in line. :P
Free Market Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a simple free market solution to long queues: raise the price.
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Further, this sounds like there's a lot of money to be made, and if your line went faster, you'd make a lot more money at the same price. Anyone capable of the logistics who wants some money? Sounds like you could make a pretty sum.
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Yeah this is basic Computer Science -- IIRC we studied this in the Operating Systems courses.
Check-in at the airport does this too.
Let's properly define the problem (Score:3)
Problem: maximize profitability selling ice at a hippy poser wannabe festival. The constraints are:
1) Users must be at least minimally satisfied. No shouting, cursing, "line rage", or riots. The user must get a reasonable product with an acceptable wait time at an acceptable cost. The process should seem fair.
2) Costs must be minimized these include:
a) cost of labor, this is probably the biggest cost
b) materials cost, waste from melting ice must be minimized
An algorithm to end BH posting (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does Bennett Hassleton keep using /. as his personal blog, and why is he allowed to? I post this question every time he does a blog, and I've never received a proper answer.
pre-emptive: Can I find anything wrong with what you wrote? Yes, the fact what you wrote is displayed where it is.
hallo, Junis, is that you? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An algorithm to end BH posting (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but this is just a weird form of Slashdot click bait.
"by making one small... Well, read the description below"
Seriously? Ridiculous.
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... just a weird form...
Don't you mean "one weird trick"? Its the first option in the current poll on clickbait for crying out loud! Why'd you all vote for that option!?
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Because burning man is cool and so is pot I guess.. Either that or a slow news/post day so they are trying to increase traffic.
Bennett solved the problem of waiting in line (Score:5, Insightful)
I skipped burning man this year but went for the first time in 2013.
Wouldn't it be easier to say I went to burning man once in 2013? I went to Burning Man once after it got really popular and I solved all the problems.
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I just tried to exclude all BH postings (using the "excluded terms" thing in the options settings) and when I do I don't see any stories at all. Is his name somehow attached to every single story on /.?
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Since DICE obviously isn't going to stop him from blogging here, can we at least make him an editor so he can post them himself and we can block him specifically?
ugh... not more of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
no one wants to read Bennett's ideas.
What the actual fuck is this article going on abou (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, how is this news? This is some guy's heat stress-induced hallucination fixation about carrying ice around a desert.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
People not only expect to have ice, but are complaining that the lines are too long... ...In the middle of the desert.
The lines are too long. For ice. In the middle of the desert.
What the actual fucking fuck.
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It's Burning Man. The people who attend have fried their brains so the obvious dichotomy of the situation is lost on them.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm being fairly pedantic here because I want to make it clear that I think that I think there's no counterargument to be made to this"
I believe part of the ethos of Burning Man is, "if you think you can do it better, then do it yourself. Don't complain, don't whine." It's cool that he thought of a way to improve the world, but in the real world, if you don't do something about it, then it doesn't matter much.
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This is the one thing you cannot do yourself. Only the ice vendor is allowed to sell ice. You are not allowed to, so you can't just take over the ice concession.
ok then, yet another example of how Burning Man has sold out. Forget it, I'll be camping in Yosemite.
White people problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously.
Trust fund rebel white people problems, in particular.
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To make it more realistic we can produce the ice using raw sewage. Now THAT is a problem....
Oh noes (Score:4, Funny)
your assuming a lot (Score:2)
Your assuming that the Nevada health and safety are the local health inspector(s). A group of people who may well hate burning man and have no downside to misinterpreting the regs.
Your assuming the volunteers scale in a linear fashion while accessing the same truck.
Perhaps the altruistic vendor wants to inflate their ego by having people wait for hours for their product?
This is a scenario where if you think you can do it better rent a freezer truck and buy some ice see how well you do.
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And good faith in regards to the 'turbo' line. It would be a great idea for line jumping. Fan some cash out but the one is actually a 10 ten argue with the person who then caves in and lets you into the the front of the hour long line. A win-win for you-you!
65,000 people in the dessert (Score:2)
Now that's a good time.
Wow. (Score:3)
Why do they have a counter? (Score:2)
Just sell it from the back of a truck.. Have a guy taking money right there.
The only reason shops usually have a counter is 1) to display MULTIPLE items.
and 2) to discourage grab and run.
They are only selling ice and ice is not easy to grab and run.
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My thought exactly. Why come up with a more efficient solution for your staff / volunteers to move the ice from the truck to the customer, when you can just make the customer do it. Which they'll happily do, since they're there anyways, and it will get them out the door and iced faster.
Clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any relation between this article and the poll on clickbait?
Algorithm? check
Burning Man? check
Bennett Haselton? check
Frustrated Slashdot readers posting furiously? guaranteed
Sounds like clickbait to me.
This is not even an algorithm. I'm not going to explain why not, if you don't know you shouldn't post here.
Threading (Score:5, Funny)
Not Health but Money (Score:2)
How about this: The ice truck workers are paid hourly. They would rather get paid for an all-day episode of unloading ice rather than just 2-3 hours.
Or maybe they got too many complaints about melted ice from customers who demanded a refund. It's the money, I'm sure of it.
Nobody ever got fired for... (Score:2)
Nobody ever got fired for doing things the way they've always been done. Maybe it's time to change ice vendors to someone willing to serve it up faster.
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Have two vendors. The one that processes more people quickly gets more money. Competition is a bad word probably though.
Marketing (Score:3)
The long line is to convince hipsters that the product must really be special. If there wasn't a line, the $3 price would probably drop.
Next year: iIce (as long as Apple doesn't sue). No one will think twice about waiting in line overnight.
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iCe?
Obligatory YouTube (Score:2)
in the *dessert* ???? (Score:3)
Seriously; are there people in this world that are getting PAID to administrate and edit Slashdot? If so, please sign me up for this sweet gig. If not; then I can understand this kind of sloppiness as it's just a hobby.
not the lines you should be worried about (Score:2)
The problem with Burning Man lines is the regular screw-ups at the gates every year. They cause lines that are many miles long with people stuck in their cars for half a day or longer. And those screw-ups are frequently technological.
http://blog.burningman.com/201... [burningman.com]
Waiting in line for an hour to get ice while chatting with other burners... not a problem, and if it really bothers you, just come back another time.
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The problem with burning man is it became hip and popular.
skipped this year but went in 2013 (Score:5, Insightful)
That's quite a roundabout way of saying "I've been once".
I've seen it happen (Score:2)
I've been to events where they take an order for a hamburger, take your money, cook that hamburger, serve it, and then take the next order. It's painful to watch.
But from what I've read about Burning Man it wouldn't surprise me that this kind of thing goes on there.
Diarrhea of the keyboard (Score:4, Insightful)
"Read on for the rest" WTF (Score:3)
...by making one small... Well, read the description below of how they do things now,
I'ts one thing to have to see BH's articles but Slashdot has NEVER sunk to the level of using lame journalistic teasers. The summary should sumarize. It doesn't exist just to coax someone into loading a fresh ad.
This is the sort of crap that has shrunk the user base. Stop doing it Dice.
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I don't have ads. The problem is that the mentality of pushing page views at all costs results in this sort of fragmentary crap.
Back before Dice I tried to whitelist ads for /. just to give back some and found that I couldn't get them anyway because they were deactivated for accounts above a certain karma/age threshold.
Supply & demand (Score:2)
The existence of a queue means that people are willing to pay more for the product. So why not let them? Raise the price as the queue gets longer, and lower the price as the queue gets shorter. This stabilizes and even lets you control the length of the queue.
They should do the same at ballparks on game day. Instead of charging a fixed rate for parking, charge to go through the gate according to the number of cars waiting to get in or out. If you get there really early, you could get in practically for free
Story from Soviet Russia (Score:2)
Get in line and at the end of that line tell the person what you would like to order. The give you a ticket for the item.
Get in another line and produce the ticket which you then pay for that item.
Then get into a third line where they will very carefully scrutinize the certified paid ticket and give you your vodka if there is any left.
He said that the time he went that the 3 lines were around 40 minutes each as the counter pe
Fixing the wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
If they have a fixed amount of ice, or can only make a fixed amount per hour then they have nothing to gain from selling that amount at a faster rate. Sure, the customers may not like it but since these guys are the only source of ice, what the customers want is of little consequence.
If you really want to speed up the line, introduce some competition. A 3 word answer instead of a 1,600 word one.
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If you really want to speed up the line, introduce some competition.
You must be new here. Free markets never work, haven't you heard?
Competition (Score:2)
Sounds like you could use your "no waiting for ice" expertise to start your own ice business and taking customers out of your competitors lines. Until then, you might want to get a job in a fast-food restaurant to learn some of the trade-secrets for expediting.
News for Nerds? (Score:2)
More like "Bitching for hipsters". Seriously, this site continues to go down hill.
Just Don't Get Ice (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
First world problems. Grow up.
/. please add a filter (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's a nice idea. (Score:2)
This is all your fault... (Score:2)
Seriously, if folks would just not post any sort of comment when this douche posts his blogs, they would axe him.
To get him off the site, just boycott his opinions.
"Read on for the rest; Bennett's idea for..." (Score:2)
1600 words from The Man himself? SIGN ME UP! clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
Seriously, if we had BH posts daily, that would be enough to push me to learn to write a greasemonkey script with regex to hide them.
Automation (Score:2)
I'm not sure where he is getting his timing from. (Score:4, Informative)
DeathGuild/Thunderdome worked a shift at Arctica this year (and previous years).
Basically it worked like this:
1) Some of us are in the truck and are lining up bags of ice at the edge of the trailer (single bags, block ice, bags of 3, and full bags of 6)
2) Customer approaches counter with dedicated cashier, announces what they need
3) Dedicated Ice runner moves TEN FEET OR LESS to the trailer, grabs the ice and brings it to the front
(Note for #3, the customer is still usually paying/receiving change by the time the ice is in front of them)
4) Customer leaves, wash, rinse, repeat.
That walk ALL the way back to the truck takes seconds, and the ice is there, right at the edge, and still being cooled to a degree by the trailer chillers, it takes them 15-20 seconds TOPS to get that ice. Each register also has a dedicated trailer (unless one is pulled for replacement with a new, full trailer). So what you are really saving is MAYBE 15 seconds or so per transaction, and then you have ice sitting out in 100+ degree heat.
Don't forget if we want to put out the ice people need, we would need to have every possible combo of ice sitting out there, so if we get a run on single bags, those full bags and blocks would just sit there simmering until someone comes along that wants them. I think a bigger speed up for the lines would for people to have their money ready, and not dick around in their drug addled state when we ask them what they want.
Typical Burning Man... (Score:2)
A lot of people that show up are not prepared and mooch off of everyone in the name of "community"
We would hide our resources and tell others "nope dont have any" on a lot of occasions and those we could tell were in real need and not just lazy potheads we would share.
solution (Score:2)
Offer 100 bags of ice for $250. Problem solved.
An Algorithm to End Burning Man... (Score:2)
... THEN I'd be interested in the article.
rewind to the real problem (Score:2)
Burning Man has created an artificial monopoly for ice. By the description it sounds much like bread lines in Russia. If you try to bottleneck and manage essential goods at a single source, it invariably gets unmanageable as it scales up. They're dealing with a pretty large population these days for a bunch of festival organizers.
Based on the commenter who described the actual process via way of being a volunteer, a short term solution without getting into the political questions is to massively incr
need strict ordering rules (Score:4, Funny)
ice vendor: What do you want? ...
stoner: um
ice vendor: No ice for you! Next!
Queue theory in an profit driven world (Score:2)
superiority complex fault (Score:2)
I'd asked a handful of Burning Man veterans about this, and they said that Arctica had tried this at one point, but was required to stop by Nevada health code regulations, which treated ice as a "food product" and therefore said that it could not be moved out onto the counter until an order has been placed. This sounded puzzling to me...
this is why i don't like Burning Man...
1st problem is in bold...see, Burning Man is about overcomplicating and mystifying something to make it have social cachet...****ANYTIME**** you ask a question like this to a Burning Man veteran, you should expect a bullshit answer...somehow it will be bullshit
2nd problem is in italics...the problem is not trusting your own common sense! obviously they are full of shit and just making stuff up to sound like they know what is going on
in other words, the problem lies wit
How about an insulated box at the counter? (Score:2)
Even if the Nevada health department DID have an objection, what's wrong with having some ice bags in an insulated box at the counter and calling THAT a "cooler" or "icebox"? It wouldn't need to be powered, because it would be kept cold by the steady flow of fresh bags from the supply truck.
You'd have to run it as a FIFO, to avoid having bags sitting there for hours. (Bag porters put 'em in one end, clerks pull them out at the other - or put a moving partition in and run it as a circular buffer, so you do
What the f*ck is "Burning Man"? (Score:2)
... and wouldn't selling ice not defy the very purpose of the event?
ignatius
False "Solution" Ignores the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Bennett went to Burning Man once in 2013 and now thinks he's somehow relevant to Burning Man and writes about it online more than many core community members who actually get stuff done. His one experience with Burning Man was as little more than an ancillary helper at a smallish camp. His bold "solution" to this problem actually ignores the key issue that workers are not moving fast because there is no motivation to sell more ice.
The reason the ice line moves so slowly is everyone is a VOLUNTEER and they are not paid to sell ice. They just get a free ticket working for Arctica. They're also stoned, and burnt out, and aren't really concerned about moving fast in the high heat of the day to get people more ice. If they just get through their shift, they're happy -- people waiting is not a concern.
The solution Bennett should be looking for should not be some magic "algorithm," but a political one involving staff being paid more and being hired for merit, rather than knowing someone in Arctica. His attachment to this idea and even stating that there are no counter-arguments shows his inexperience and cursory knowledge about Burning Man in general. Technically, his idea might work, socially, it'll never happen.
As far as I know, Bennett's social connections to Burning Man are very limited, so this would be something that flies above his head. Burning Man is predominately, a social event, and technical/algorithm solutions ignore the fact that the reason most core contributors are there is for social reasons.
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65,000 people don't belong in any dessert. That's clearly unsanitary.
Tell that to Vegas. They like it dirty.
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65,000 people don't belong in any dessert. That's clearly unsanitary.
[_] Shhhh ... it's made from soylent green :-)
[_] Well, we had to find a new use for all those zombie parts coming on-stream thanks to ebola.
[_] "You got people in my dessert!" "You got dessert in my people!"
[_] It's Burning Man. They'll eat anything.
[_] You know our slogan - "it's real people food?" Well, what did you expect?
[_] You're right - there's not enough people in the dessert. Everyone knows 640k should be enough.
[_] At Burning Man, people desert YOU (probably because of the smell af
this. Selling goods efficiently is business,nhippy (Score:3)
It's not just programmers that think in terms of effincident please processes, in fact I'd say that's more the domain of the business person. You can get a degree in how to most effectively and efficiently run an operation to deliver goods to customers, that's called a mba. MBAs, and MBA style thinking about efficient process, is not popular with the burning man crowd.
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You must be one of those vegetarian hippies ;)
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Say welcome to our cannibalistic PETA overlords.
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Nice one!. It would work out great for me I can wander up and down the line taking money and then just disappear into the crowd. A win-win for me-me!
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of course an even more obvious solution is to open your own ice franchise at Burning Man, there's obviously the demand if queue's are an hour long, and £3 for a bag of water.... and he can implement his idea, make a fortune *and* post smugly about how great he is for thinking it up!
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At the ice truck? ARE YOU INSANE?
That path leads to MADNESS!
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"instead of having them wait either a very short time if they arrive when ice is available or a long time when ice is sold out."
If they're sold out, the waiting time in line falls to zero.