Sand Theft(en.wikipedia.org) |
Sand Theft(en.wikipedia.org) |
Bricks are used to build the bulk of walls, and concrete is used in floors and reinforcement of the walls and above/around doors and windows
In terms of embodied energy, brick veneer (composite of materials with a layer of exterior brick) typically have the best life-cycle ecological performance, 20%-60% better, compared to curtain wall (glass+steel) and precast concrete panels, across many climates and regions. Engineered wood for buildings is probably the better option in the long run. There's a lot of movement recently, construction is a very slow and conservative industry though. Probably need for results to be validated. A lot of claims are by industry publications. But intuitively it feels right.
Floors are usually made of thinner concrete, although sometimes a design of concrete mesh is used to save weight with the gaps filled with Styrofoam or light bricks, and then a thin layer of concrete is poured on it to serve as the foundation to the floor tiles.
The concrete floors also serve an important goal of supporting and delivering horizontal forces in the building.
This means that there is no technical limit to the height of bricks buildings, although there might be practical reasons not to use them.
Below is an example of how it looks [0]
In the not so distant past bricks used to carry the load of the building, and indeed that has limitations to how high buildings can be,
[0] https://globalist.in/tk-cement-interlock-brick-kuttippuram/b...
The impact is immediate. Rivers are drying up and water beds are going deeper down: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/sand...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BApuzIPVTi8
This is a channel run by the same guy from Wendover Productions, highly recommend subscribing. Especially if you're into obscure things such as sand theft, or … really, anything aviation related.
"During the 19th century, there was an increasing demand for the high quality Bagshot Sand, for use in building and iron foundry casts. In response to this demand ... Eight loads a day in 1814 rose to thirty loads a day in 1866. ... [By 1871] The whole space on the summit of the hill, to the right and the left of the high road ... has been ruthlessly dug up for gravel and sand; leaving a dreary, desert prospect of hideous pits and shapeless heaps as far as the view extends over the hill itself, with a few miserable furze bushes here and there, a ragged tuft of dusty ling; but without one square yard of verdant turf for a baby to roll on. The very body of the earth had been cut away to an amazing depth, with the entire surface of those parts of the heath which formed the brow and crown of the hill. Holes are scooped out close to the high road thirty feet or forty feet deep ..."[0]
[0] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/ha...
I made sure to read the cited source because this claim sounded way too similar to some past Wikipedia edit pranks.
https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/floridas-sand-gone-with-...
And there are some interesting legal ramifications w.r.t importing sand from foreign sources:
https://www.smh.com.au/world/sand-wars-singapores-growth-com...
Disclaimer: I worked at Trimble Nav Ltd. in the radio group.
In general, GPS errors could also be caused by:
- PRC MIL jamming non-military non-BeiDou positioning systems to prevent drone or cruise missile attacks
- US MIL increasing Selective Availability (SA) on or disabling the unencrypted signal for a region
- Physical obstructions: trees, buildings, etc.
You'd think huge ships would have laser ring gyro INS and GLONASS/Galileo/BeiDou as a backup? Depending on a locally-jammable, unencrypted data monoculture (GPS) for multiple critical systems is a SPOF and insane.
Care to share those? It's an interesting topic but I don't have the base knowledge to make out bogus/incomplete information.
Sand theft is common. It's normally stolen by illegally dredging rivers.
Singapore 'stealing' sand from Asian countries has been systematically going on for years.
It's the same as theft of wood. Everywhere where there are corrupt government officials, it's organised crime, sometimes people die over it, and it's easy to go watch while having a beer.
Beach theft, which the wiki currently predominantly talks about is different.
"However, from as early as the 1940s, the beach was also the site of commercial resource extraction. Because of this, by 1966, it had ceased to operate as a fully functional recreational site. Rapid and dramatic changes to its geomorphological formation, due to the large-scale removal of its sand and gravel, saw the gradual reduction of Silver Sands’ once ‘silvery’ crest, into a predominantly rocky shoal. Particularly between the latter half of the 1950s and the mid 1960s, but all the way until 1971, its material was being used for various government construction projects around the Halifax Regional Municipality.
"
I built a 6x6x2 foot sandbox for my son and was pleasantly surprised that it would cost me around $720 to fill it with play sand from home depot. Maybe there is a way to get 'play sand' in bulk that I am not aware of. Most bulk sand you can buy is construction sand and isn't actually sand but ground up rocks and is very bad for playing with.
The trouble unless you're tooled up for it, 1 tonne bags are near impossible to move, and double in price to have delivered, where they are still impossible for you to move except incrementally.
Interestingly the 1.5 tonne tray capacity on the Cybertruck would be appealing for exactly that reason - you'd actually have a vehicle which can actually carry that (ute I borrowed from my inlaws caps out at 750kgs).
“Erosion and rising sea levels have swallowed a foot of Waikiki Beach annually since 1985. This phenomenon, while accelerated in the last few decades, is nothing new. Reports from the 1920s and 1930s reveal that sand was brought in from Manhattan Beach, California, via ship and barge, to Waikiki Beach. Importation of sand into Hawaii ceased in the 1970s.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/the-great-sand-heist-...
India's Sand Mafia: The Dark Secrets of India's Construction Industry (2017, video) by Journeyman Pictures, and recommended by ABC Australia
Also, on a humorous note:
Geologists: 'We May Be Slowly Running Out Of Rocks'
https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...
https://www.theinertia.com/environment/stealing-sand-the-the...
Dubai import most of their sand despite being in a desert.
If 10% of people steal a shot-glass of sand as a momento from a beach 100 meters X 100 meters which has 1000 daily visitors, the sand goes down 1cm every hundred years, which is waay slower than sealevel rise.
If people start taking sackfulls home, the balance changes quickly though.
The majority of time is not a shot-glass, but more like a bottle.
Here some pictures:
https://www.ilmessaggero.it/photogallery_img/MED/31/07/44531... https://www.repstatic.it/content/nazionale/img/2019/04/26/11... https://filecdn.nonsprecare.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/FU... https://www.gelestatic.it/thimg/xdU2x4YwGfNp33fZp0ePMCBh38M=... https://trekking.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/copertina1-10...
A shot-glass is around the tolerable level because it's the amount of sand you find in your shorts when you are back home from the beach.
It's much easier to prevent it than to fix it by transporting tonnes of sands from africa to wherever the sand is needed. Being able to pay for something doesn't magically make it a good idea. Plus I'm not sure westerners coming to Africa to take sand for their beaches will be well received.
It's one of the ways I think widely available & cheap renewable energy would help solve most of the worlds resource shortages
The reality is that cheap GPS chips enable so much more capability then the risk of your enemy benefiting from a mapping system.
[1] https://www.darpa.mil/program/micro-technology-for-positioni...
Subsidence due to settlement of refuse over time is dealt with by well-known construction techniques for less-stable ground, such as deep piling. In some cases though it's simply more sensible to repurpose the land for amenity use, where subsidence is less of a concern than it would be for a residential area.
I guess there's nothing we can do - burn everything.
Then put up signs at beaches saying "Taking sand is illegal unless you do it in a government vial". Allow tourist sellers to resell the vials on the beaches.
Then at airports and ports, allow those vials to go out filled with sand. Ban the import of vials (probably no need to enforce, because filling tiny containers is unlikely worth it on a criminal scale).
It's a very low effort way to tax a product without requiring tax returns and paperwork.
