03-20-2018, 06:32 AM
(03-19-2018, 11:06 PM)jordan2423 Wrote: As someone who was working on the ground with Laurier students that year - the problem with the tent party was that your ticket required you to show up at a certain time (8am/10am/1pm/4pm? or similar) , if you missed it your specific time your ticket was no longer valid, and once you left you were not permitted to re-enter.
If it had been run as any normal organized festival/tent party (security at gate, enter/exit as you please) it would have been much more popular. Many of the students I spoke to (several hundred, so this is not a small sample size) went but left because they got too cold and didn't bring a jacket, or they were hungry and wanted to go get food (or have a less expensive drink at home), not all of their friends could get tickets, or they lost track of time/got held up and missed their limited window for entry.
This is the kind of stuff that tempts me to become a Libertarian. It reminds me of the abortive Toronto program to have non-hotdog food carts. Instead of just revising the bylaws to allow them with reasonable regulation, they required people to sign up, buy a specific cart from the city, and operate under restrictive rules that would make McDonald’s executives blush. It seems that our city governments attract the wrong sort of person to work for them: people who think that what everybody else does needs to be regulated and controlled down to the smallest detail.
Whereas the right way to do it is to apply regulation with a light touch: identify real problems that are actually worth spending public resources addressing, and construct minimal interventions to do so.
Nothing wrong with running a tent party, but run it like a normal one. Thanks for passing along those details. When I heard about the sanctioned event I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. But a tent party can’t be run like the zoning department.