news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
view the rest of the comments
It's much, much more than that. Just the permit from the BLM is north of $1 million. We're also required to directly pay the salaries of all the cops that are there, as well as provide food, housing, laundry, cooks, fuel, and other amenities to them. The vast, vast majority of the ticket revenue goes to permitting and law enforcement.
You're a comrade so I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say it's believable that it's gone way up, but do you have any more updated numbers?
because the most recent info/reporting I could find was from 2018 or 19 and seemed to indicate the cost of that particular permit and the cops combined was under a million, in a year when the revenue was at least 35 million, and the graph here, while including a lot more in the permitting and fees section, still doesn't seem to bear that out either https://burningman.org/expenses/expenses-2018/
Here's the 2022 Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/452638273/202313179349309051/full. Just permitting and fees are at about $4.5 million. Most of the stuff that falls under "wages" is also not to BMP employees, but rather to law enforcement, emergency services (we also run a full service hospital that does not change for any services), airport, and sanitation (loooots of porto-potty servicing). The costs on all those things has gone up since 2022 also; there's been an ongoing lawsuit between the org and the Federal government for charging us so much with basically no explanation.
This will be my 20th year going, and I'm in a leadership position on the volunteer side of things. I definitely have a lot of criticism of the organization (and the event), but financial mismanagement isn't really one of them. They pay the executive staff on the low side of comparably sized 501c3 orgs, especially given the office location in SF. I think Marian is pretty out of touch with the ordinary burner, but she's not really getting rich off of it.
Burning Man is definitely a problematic fave of mine, but I do think it still has a lot of great things about it. Happy to answer questions as best I can without going into enough detail to ID me specifically.
lmao
is this where they put the piggies up?
I've never been, mostly because it seemed to have been long since ruined by tech bros by the time I was old enough. so I've no skin in the game but even if not "mismanaged" by the standards of large nonprofits, there's a lot of worthy criticisms of most nonprofits about scoping and growth mindsets and such. I like wikipedia as a project for example but their foundation's scope has grown so far beyond what it needs to be to effectively run and even grow, wikipedia and related projects. So when the time comes every year for them to beg as though the lights are gonna shut off if I don't kick ol' jimmy $5 it rings pretty hollow. Burning man hopefully isn't that extreme in terms of the ratio between costs to build and run and maintain the core services and the overall revenue, but it might have something similar in kind if not scale? While I understand to some extent the urge to be successful and let more people "experience the magic" or whatever, a corporate-style growth mindset is a bad fit for a community driven event. (edit: Idk, maybe thats the only way to organize it at any large scale in the US under capitalism, but I still think it sucks)
still not sure from briefly perusing that filing if this is accurate:
But I'm definitely out of my depth and don't care that much.
When they're in town, yeah (it's the motel in Gerlach). We also have to build, staff, and maintain a full compound on playa for them to use, complete with a 24 hour/day on-call chef. It's so fucking insane.
100% agree on the general criticism of non-profits. Burning Man isn't uniquely bad, but it's still a dog shit model for doing things.
Yes, lots of people are shitty and dump trash. It's also true that a lot of us give our time for free to pick that trash up all the way until October--both on playa and by the side of the road--though.
I knew both Bruno and Pat. RIP to both those legends indeed.