louison11

Yes but it’s a festival; with food vendors etc right? Very different from a city that builds itself from the ground.

Techies/wealthy people remain a minority, not a majority. In fact, if you tell someone you're in tech, expect to be booed/slightly shamed; as it's the type of people a lot of regular burners have a judgment against. But again, nobody's gonna ask you what you do at Burning Man. And if they do, just say "I'm alive." That's gonna fit the culture.

What I'll say is you'll definitely see an influx of more superficial/wealthy people coming for the last 3 days. Rich shallow people who don't care about the Burning Man spirit and just want to come for the final party, they don't bother to come for the whole week, they just rent an expensive RV for the last few days.

If you do go, go for the whole week, and you'll get to experience the real burning man in the first few days.

It's absolutely true. When you're there, there is no doubt it is absolutely the best place to be as far as party and creativity goes. That being said, it depends on what you're looking for in life. But the energy, time and investment that people put into this thing is absolutely mad. It doesn't compare to anything else that exists in the world, not even by a factor of 1:10. It's just insane.

And there are also honestly very few countries that 1/ would let this happen without intervening, 2/ even have such a wide open space to make this happen for 70k people with just desert everywhere in all directions.

This seems so… obvious? How can a company of this size, with its talent and expertise, not have standardized tests or specs preventing such a blatant flaw?

This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away. That was true at first… until it wasn’t. AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.

30 min a day or 3hrs a week in a gym is all you need. I’ve been working out for 10 years, and if I can pull 3 hours in 1 week, it’s a great week! And it’ll keep me real strong. Plus, makes you sleep better, which means you probably need to sleep less. Working out is almost always a “you get more than what you gave” kinda deal.

Nah it's still very easy. The logic is pretty simple. Europe could really use more talent... and the bar is quite low. Any developer/engineer of any grade will easily get a visa. Any retiree will also easily get a non-work long-term visa with just 1 year worth of minimum wage (around 20k in most of Western Europe) as savings to prove self-sufficiency. So it's extremely easy and almost a non-issue compared to the other side of the pond.

This is true, I have omitted this path because I am not so familiar with it. The trouble however is that this only works for employees, not for self-employed or startup founders. So in some way I guess they make it kind-of easier if you just get a job, versus try to create jobs... which is pretty strange?

You are correct, however the criteria are a lot more relaxed in Europe comparatively. Most positions in tech, engineering and healthcare are often exempt from labor market tests. Also, there are plenty of options for "entrepreneurs" and self-employed digital nomads, often requiring some savings to prove sufficiency. I live in Portugal, and I believe the amount required when we moved was about 12k. In France, I believe it is closer to 21k (which is basically minimum wage multiplied by 12). Still dramatically easier than 800k in the US.

The standard for employment-based permanent residency (green card) is extraordinarily high. As in, would likely place you in the top 1-5% of the most successful people in the country. That, or you have to invest $800k and create 10 jobs.

No other country in the world requires foreigners to be significantly more qualified than its own population. You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings. Impossible in the US. You have to be extraordinary (they literally call their criteria, "extraordinary abilities") or you have to make top 5% money (so if you work in tech, that would be at least $500k-1M/year in many cases).

The only other way is to get married. This means there is a massive discrepancy between the qualifications of self made immigrants, versus those simply lucky enough to fall in love. It's pretty unfair, but that's how it works. But that's also the reason so many immigrants are so successful in the US, the bar is so high, that it creates a massive motivation to succeed to become eligible for the criteria.

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!