Via the Nudge blog, according to the New York Times, the Dutch have a different solution:

When you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind.

I think this would be more effective than current campaigns urging us to, you know, just not hit cyclists. I’m going to teach myself to do it and then start getting other people to do it.

Surplus tickets will be redistributed in one of three ways:

• The official Secure Ticket Exchange Program
• Craigslist, eBay and StubHub
• Local community transactions

Since physical tickets aren’t distributed until July, there is a significant risk to buying tickets unofficially online. The official exchange program will only redistribute tickets at face value, but many Burners believe that is the only ethical price. I suspect most Burners will redistribute their tickets in their local community.

Unfortunately, applications for theme camps, art installations, mutant vehicles, fire conclave troops, regional effigies and other projects are due before many of the tickets will be redistributed. Most people who submit proposals for projects are connected to their local Burner communities, so they will have no problem getting tickets in the long run. The question is: will uncertainly about tickets cause these projects to lose momentum? Certainly I’ll have trouble continuing my personal planning and local contributions with full enthusiasm. (I hadn’t really thought about this when I first endorsed the lottery.)

Although I still think a lottery is the best general solution to excess demand for an economically-diverse event, the participation aspect of Burning Man suggests a different approach: have leaders of projects and regional contacts hand out tickets. It distributes and scales the selection on merit currently done for low income and art grant tickets. This is not necessarily more biased against virgins than any other way of distributing tickets and would skew attendees in a mostly good way.

Burning Man: the most diverse group of white people you will ever meet. – Blu

The official Burning Man blog (which is written by a volunteer) ran an interesting post about the lack of ethnic diversity among Burners. In the post and comments a number of reasons to explain the lack of ethnic minorities were put forward:

• Going to Burning Man requires a cultural sense of physical and economic security that ethnic minorities have only gained in the last generation. Economic security comes not just from personal income, but from multi-generational wealth, networking and a social safety net.
• Minority culture tends to be more sexually conservative.
• Minorities are more family and community focused, while Burning Man is heavily individualistic. Alternately, only white people need to go to Burning Man to find community.
• Minority culture grew from the civil rights movement while white counter culture grew from an individualistic movement.
• Minorities don’t like camping: “the last time [my Japanese family] went camping, it was an internment camp“
• All the cultural appropriation makes them uncomfortable.
• “Being colorful for a week in the desert might not have the same appeal for those who feel like they are outside of the mainstream all the time.“

Although one comment argued that if you control for income and education, there is no ethnic disparity. Given that none of the census reports after 2008 have been made public, it’s difficult to have an informed discussion about this.

I think it requires a level of immersion within the capitalist system that enables one to afford the luxury of attending as well as a degree of personal consumer excess high enough that one looks forward to an escape from that excess. Maybe it also requires a bit of blindness to the waste involved in a celebration that rejects attachment to worldly possessions by burning them to the ground. That said, I already have my tickets, airline reservations and RV reserved. I suspect that people of color attend in proportion to the percentage of them that have achieved this level of hypocrisy. – Paul Williams

Drama

House of Pleasures

How can you go wrong with period French prostitutes? [Opening Gala, Feb 12 14:00]

Rundskop (Bullhead)

I’d like to see more crime movies that aren’t about beautiful people committing glamorous crimes. [Feb 5 14:00, Feb 7 18:45]

Midnight Son

We desperately need reimaginings of the vampire myth that aren’t Mormon sparkle faeries. [Feb 6 19:15, Feb 9 19:00]

Nuit #1

This could be a preachy, dull look at Generation Y, but I’ll listen to a lecture if it starts with a 12-minute-long gritty sex scene. [Feb 5 19:15, Feb 11 11:30]

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)

Grizzled detectives sitting in a car at night, talking – it’s like ultra-noir. [Feb 10 21:30]

Documentary

The Redemption of General Butt Naked

I thought this Liberian warlord was fascinating before I heard he’s still alive and has converted to Christianity! [Feb 4 21:30, Feb 12 16:30]

Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression

You can’t make a straight documentary about graffiti, so like Exit Through the Gift Shop this takes a different angle by looking at people who clean up graffiti in destructive ways. [Feb 9 21:30]

Sushi: The Global Catch

Sushi is the national dish of BC, and sustainable sushi is a really important issue. [Feb 4 16:30]

A People Uncounted

Normally I avoid Holocaust movies, but the Roma are an ethnic group that I’d like to know more about. [Feb 8 18:45]

Girl Model

The modelling industry is so weird, I’m sure this will be fascinating to watch. [Feb 5 21:45]

I don’t really care what’s going on in the banana republic because I’ve written it off. I wish the companies that run the Internet would simply relocate rather than annoying me with their provincial concerns. After all, you don’t see these kind of protests over the Great Firewall of China, even though that affects more people.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” – John Gilmore

Yes, it would be very sad if the many residents of the banana republic, who share most of my culture, were not able to fully participate in the Internet. And it will be very annoying if the banana republic starts using its considerable influence to get other countries to recognize its own crazy legislation and enact similar legislation of their own. But it’s time to accept that the banana republic’s government is broken and help its current residents escape from their abusive relationship.

Don’t write your representative, move your servers to Canada or shut up already.

The actual issue is that two women who were married in Canada but live in the UK and the US applied for a divorce under Canada’s Divorce Act. Section 3 of the Act specifies that a Canadian province only has jurisdiction over a divorce if one of the spouses has lived there for a year. As Reddit commenters sagely explained, the purpose of this is to prevent hostile spouses from cherry-picking whichever jurisdiction’s laws will suit them better – the same way that corporations do for their legal disputes. This should be extended internationally to prevent, in particular, husbands from divorcing their wives in misogynist countries.

Presumably what actually happened in court was that a lawyer for the Department of Justice argued that Canada should not foot the bill for this couple’s legal dispute because it’s as if they weren’t married as far as any country’s divorce laws are concerned. I am disappointed but not surprised that every major mainstream news source in Canada uncritically accepted whatever their original source for this story was without reading the legislation or thinking about what actually happened.

The larger issue here is that getting married in another country can have unintended consequences and you really should talk to a lawyer first. This couple should have signed a prenuptial agreement that had some divorce mechanism specified. In order to protect Canada’s same-sex marriage tourism industry, the government have said they’re going to come up with some way to hold divorce proceedings for couples in this circumstance.

I also have a beef with the way that foreign commentators like Dan Savage criticise Canada when things like this happen. Dan: Your country wouldn’t even let you get married, and yet you choose to continue to live there; you chose to come here and get married without doing your due diligence; why does my country owe you anything?

First there was Ariel:

And then it spread to the other Disney princesses:

My favourite is Pochahontas:

And now it’s spreading to other Disney characters:

Engagement without deliberation is less informed, because government is relied on to fully educate the participants, and can at most ask participants to choose between pre-defined trade-offs rather than collaborative in problem solving. What governments are mostly doing now is faking engagement in order to better inform voters and make them feel good.

Although you can apply for ticket bursaries, Burning Man is already skewed toward the wealthy, because it costs far more than just the ticket price to get to the black rock desert and survive there for a week. If demand was controlled by increasing the price of tickets, it would skew even further.* So Black Rock City Corporation has decided to sell tickets in a lottery. Interestingly, the tickets are still being priced in four tiers, as they were when ticket prices increased over time – from $240 to $420. This will actually increase economic diversity over previous years because some of the low price tickets will go to people who can only afford to go at that price, not simply the most organized Burners. I think that’s worth it in exchanged for added complexity. Although just like previous years, people need to have budgeted the money early in the year to buy tickets.

Most of the tickets are being lotteried in maximum batches of two, probably to prevent scalpers. For the first time, Black Rock City Corporation will create an online market place for reselling tickets, presumably providing seller verification to prevent fakes. It’ll be interesting to see how the market responds to the scarcity, especially with a central marketplace rather than eBay, Craigslist, etc.

* If poor people don’t go to Burning Man for cultural as well as economic reasons, then keeping ticket price down works as a subsidy – just like university tuition.

I would go further and say that some climate change is probably acceptable. The problem right now is that since carbon emissions are an externality, there’s no decision process over how much is acceptable. If carbon were properly priced, the market could weigh the trade-off between carbon-emitting activities and climate change. Will economic growth now be enough to make up for environmental consequences later?

This long, self-reflective essay gives a good counter-argument:

[Sustainability] means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so…The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul…This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.

The environmental movement used to be about protecting the environment for the environment’s sake, but then it became co-opted by capitalism into this utilitarian economic thinking that I presented above: the environment is a big truck you can dump a certain amount of shit in before the tubes get clogged.

In Canada this is expressed by the tension between the Green Party, which sometimes acknowledges the trade-off between social justice and environmental justice (but mostly just promises all the justice!), and the NDP, which is a social justice party that added some sustainability policies. And the BC Liberals introduced a carbon tax because sustainability is just good business.

It doesn’t really matter because ecocentrism failed and now even sustainability is failing because the majority have decided (if subconsciously) that economic growth now is worth any amount of environmental pain later.