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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the full article?

The whole point of the manual cleanup duty is the meticulous mapping of MOOP. This information is used by the community to learn and improve for next time. This has resulted in measurable improvement over the years, despite the event growing massively in size during that time.

I feel a big commercial machine that cleans the site up in a couple of hours will result in a community that does not espouse the 'leave no trace' principle. Because why would you care? A big machine is going to clean it all up anyway.

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You can definitely add some telemetry to this that records and analyzes realtime location to "map" the litter, even when using a device like this. The conveyor actually seems very well suited to an external camera that records and analyzes the mess to a degree that should be suitable for the purpose of "recording" litter types and concentrations based on the location, without resorting to manual sweep/dust bins which actually sounds pretty insane at this scale.

Right, needs a drone pass for mapping before and after cleaning.

Needing 150 people for weeks to clean up is too labor-intensive. Are they paid?

You’ve missed the point. This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.

The person you replied to did kindly try to explain to you, but you seem to have ignored it.

If you don’t understand the culture of Burning Man, that’s fine. But maybe don’t callously reduce 150 peoples’ labor of love to “btw just use this machine”.

> This is a cultural commitment not a logistics problem to engineer away.

Not entirely.[1] Not all the workers are happy campers. There's a high suicide rate and injury rate.

[1] https://www.salon.com/2018/08/24/exclusive-burning-man-a-uto...

You need to set those rates against other seasonal short term work. Very few people on the resto line has a stable situation the rest of the year either. We should ask if this is utilizing or exploiting society’s dregs. And ask if every event, as big as the Olympics, or as small as a street fair, isn’t burning the same heads.

I've met enough people that have that same attitude towards other people having to clean it.

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