This means a lot of intelligent (and not so) folks who could do whatever they wanted chose tech to chase the money. Get a little lucky in life and maybe stock options and they get to do what they actually enjoy the latter half of their life.
Most of society can only dream of such capability. The ones who actually have the bravery to pull it off vs. grinding out their final days in a career they are not passionate about are incredibly inspirational to me at least!
- Programmer to farmer
- Programmer to musician
- Programmer to writer
and of course
- Programmer to landlord.
Then there is all kinds of specialty sands - say, when replacing the sand in our local athletics union long jump pits, I learned that one should use sand from river beds (as opposed to sand crushed at a plant) as the river sand is much less likely to cause abrasions, seeing as all the sharp edges have been worn away as the sand has been shifted back and forth by the river current...
Sand is not just sand.
Glad you made it out safe, with a story to boot.
That's pretty normal in general. Eg Germany both imports and exports a lot of cars.
One starts to question sanity of our consumption habits at times. I am no way environmentalist, but this sort of stuff just seems waste of energy inputs.
The (first and) last miles via truck can cost a lot more, but you can't guess those from whether there's Japanese writing on the label.
This seems to be a fairly common pattern where a citable source (Beiser's book and the UN article) makes a mistake, that then propagates everywhere as common knowledge even though it's incorrect. There are many well-researched blog articles like this out there, where the author has dug deep, done the hard research, and found mistakes at many levels, but because it's not in what academia or Wikipedia considers a "citable" source, the mistaken assertion continues to be propagated. Until someone manages to present it in an academically acceptable format, if that happens at all.
Solving the "what should be a citable source" problem is complicated, but in the interim, I hope we can at least find a way to transfer these well-researched findings and corrections from non-academic sources to citable forms regularly and easily.
Can at least confirm for German/English.
It gives me hope that teenagers are watching his videos and becoming inspired to go into infrastructure. More than anything, I appreciate his calm and reasoned perspectives that are so lacking in video content in this modern day and age.
He’s not exactly a traditional journalist, but this is what I want the future of journalism to be like. People with subject matter expertise explaining their thing simply and clearly.
Sadly, that was me ~10 years ago, but the lure of FAANG money was too strong and I went into EE/CS after 1 year as a civil engineering major. I wonder if one day we will really start feeling the affects of this talent reallocation, and civil engineering will become a higher paying profession.
> the crucibles used to create ingots of silicon which become microchips are made from an ultra-pure quartz sand -- and 70% of the world's supply comes from just one place in North Carolina [Spruce Pine]
A quick search seems to say there are more places available for getting that than North Carolina.
Is it possible that this specific mine just happens to be the cheapest available right now, but in case they for some reason disappear, there are alternatives everyone would switch to? Or is the situation that if that mine disappears, there is no other alternatives at all?
It's basic economics to exploit one source for as long as possible before feasibility changes, but that's a hard argument to make for anyone, even the most experienced personnel because it's all so site specific.
Of course jurisdictions with poor worker conditions can just use the less safe chemicals and externalize the human toll instead of using more complex safety procedures.
I think things will probably pan out okay, maybe a rough month or two as roads (even if rough cut new logging roads), utilities, and prioritized community services get fixed up. Synthetic option is available, apparently, just a bit costly.
It's quartz: literally the single most common crystal on the surface of the planet. Now, sure, I'm sure this particular mine had great stuff, but it's not like it's hard to find.
No, surely what we have here is a single source provider precisely because the material is so cheap to mine (and therefore unprofitable to try to compete with from scratch).
> A quick search seems to say there are more places available for getting that than North Carolina.
I mean, I deduced it straight from “70%”.
Sadly, given the insane amount of devastation in western NC, I'll get a chance to test my hypothesis. That is, despite Spruce Pine going offline, the overall impact to the global semiconductor industry will be relatively unnoticeable.
Thanks for the puns, too.
Firebrick works up to about 1000 C. A spinoff from MIT is using special nickel-doped chromium oxide (chromia) bricks, which can work up to 1800 C, about the temperature of a natural gas-air flame. These bricks are electrically conductive and can act as their own heating elements.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91129126/these-bricks-conduct-el...
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/03/texas-bitcoin-profit...
A company such as Riot also can profit by buying power at negotiated rates ahead of time — retail power companies allow big companies to lock in prices that way — then selling it back into the state market when energy prices soar during extreme heat or cold. In Riot’s case, when electricity prices soared during the summer heat wave, Riot sold power back to TXU, a Dallas-based electricity provider, which sold it back to the grid.
But if the value of Bitcoin is low and the cost of electricity is high, crypto companies can make more money selling power than mining Bitcoin. In August 2023, Riot reported selling 300 Bitcoins for a net proceeds of $8.6 million. Meanwhile, the company said it earned $24.2 million in credits to its electric bill for selling power back to the grid.
There’s also labor, wear on the machines and the lost opportunity of using your money to do something else. Building such crushing machines and only use them x% of the time (for, for now, fairly small values of x) may not be a good investment.
For firms with depreciating datacenter assets that are underutilized, a Research Coin like Grid Coin or an @home distributed computation project can offset costs
Datacenters scrap old compute - that there's hardly electronics recycling for - rather than keep it online due to relative cost in FLOPS/kWhr and the cost of conditioned space.
Doesn't electronics recycling recover the silica?
Can we make CPUs out of graphene made out of recycled plastic?
Can we make superconductive carbon computers that waste less electricity as heat?
Hopefully, Proof of Work miners that aren't operating on grants have an incentive to maximize energy efficiency with graphene ASICs and FPGAs and now TPUs
> The World in a Grain is the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with it--and sometimes, even kill for it. It's also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking readers on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, readers encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36950075-the-world-in-a-...
_Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization_ by Ed Conway
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world
>Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future
In fact, according to Wikipedia, concrete is the "second-most-used substance in the world after water" - I was on the Concrete Wikipedia article while I read this as I realised it was a thing I have never thought about despite its ubiquity. Amazing how that can happen.
Per tonne, twice as much concrete is used per year than all other building materials (including wood, plastic, metal) combined.
Add me to the long list of people who heard the bit about desert sand not being suitable for concrete and believed it. I'm happy to be corrected.
Cristobol and Hank's whole business strategy down the drain! (From Barry)
Manufactured sand has those rough edges, and is often a waste byproduct of rock crushing anyway. But also, in practice, you want more weathered sand for ease of handling, since too-rough sand is less strong given the same level of workability!
Huge respect or the "tldr: no" right at the start.
Crumbling means it was falling apart.
A paper book will explode in a press because it does not have any way to compress and release any of the force on it, until it releases all of it in one shot.
Stronger concrete requires more stress to cause it to fail, and as such it takes more force to break it. There is logically more energy because of the higher force, so more energy gets released.
One example:
If you normalise for the the same ratio of cement / water / gravel / sand then sharp-sand (crushed rocks) is stronger.
If you normalise for workability (i.e. the concrete flows and can be worked easily) you need to add additional water to sharp-sand, which means that the smooth-sand (e.g. river-rocks) end up stronger.
It's when you have complex forms, logistics considerations on site, curing considerations like heat, using pretensioned steel rods, etc. Then you start to run into these workability tradeoffs and "strongest == best" is no longer true.
https://theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running-out...
I’m not an engineer or an economist, does this sound like a fair summary?
We'll get there. You'll know it's over when you get "bailed in" and the treasury starting minting trillion dollar coins.
And then it suddenly explodes - more and more of the budget goes to interest payments instead of procurement.
At one point the government has to borrow to make payments on the debt, and then you’ve got a very bad spiral.
If you have in the first graf "so-and-so proposed a radical, and illegal, prosecution of a minority group" it's not burying the lede to make the reader get to the third graf to find out it's against left-handed people. Annoying, perhaps, but not technically burying the lede. :)
>'The Eagle Has Landed' – Two Men Walk on the Moon
That is the entire story, in the headline as it should be. I want to know more! The first sentence should add the most relevant added information.
It shouldn't be "As a child Neil Armstrong always dreamed about..." burying the next most important detail 2/3 through the article. The importance/relevance/interest should start high, end low. Inverted pyramid.
What bothers me more about these sites is how heavyweight they can feel even with ads stripped. I wonder if they all use a similar, bloated JS widget that my phone cannot run smoothly.
I have no connection to the app, aside from being a happy user
So that's what journalists are measured by these days apparently, how long a piece can keep the attention of a user.
Ironically she worked for what I would consider one of the best players in terms of not writing attention grabbing BS. (I won't mention which here)
In fact, prior to the 1980s, it was indeed spelled "bury the lead". Here for example is an excerpt from a book about newswriting from the 1970s which uses "lead" as the spelling:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=3IxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22bury+the+...
> One account of how the new band's name was chosen held that Moon and Entwistle had suggested that a supergroup with Page and Beck would go down like a "lead balloon", an idiom for being very unsuccessful or unpopular.[21] The group dropped the 'a' in lead at the suggestion of [manager] Peter Grant, so that those unfamiliar with the term would not pronounce it "leed".[22] The word "balloon" was replaced by "zeppelin", a word which, according to music journalist Keith Shadwick, brought "the perfect combination of heavy and light, combustibility and grace" to Page's mind.[21]
It certainly doesn't help that in a rock context, "lead guitar" is very much pronounced with a long e! And one could be forgiven for thinking that a formation of flying things would necessarily have one member in the lead position. I'm glad they had the foresight to keep us from being led astray!
Does it still count as misspelling when "lede" is in the dictionary (Merriam Websters & Cambridge & Oxford)?
Pretty sure it's just a word at that point, right?
> And we have engineered machines that can transform big rocks into small ones.
OK, so you solve a problem of decreasing resources by using additional energy, so more CO2 emissions...
Mining, crushing, and dumping rock are all something that we can do, and should be doable when electricity is cheap and green. It should be more efficient than pulling CO2 out of the air.
Most localities can’t produce sand good enough for semiconductors or optics because they contain impurities that are too hard to remove so most of it is used for concrete or glass.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-r...
The linked article demonstrates this to be false.
The grain size of desert (or most maritime) sand is already far too small, and if you blast it to pieces it will get even smaller - too small to be used for concrete.
Currently, we expend up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (depending on food) --- peak oil is still worrisome given how much of the input for fertilizers is from oil.
Sometime in the last century we crossed over from their being more weight in bony fish in the oceans than shipping tonnage to the latter predominating: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
We are already well into it unfortunately. I've seen enough anecdotal evidence from old fishermen that we have already depleted and disrupted the sea biomass so much that it is already changed forever.
- Old sushi chefs talking about how there are numerous fish they can no longer get at any price that were common when they were young.
- Old fishing photos show smaller and smaller "prize" catches over time.
- Old fisherman talking about how they used to fish by slapping oars at the bay then simply hand/net catching the fish types they wanted near shore.
- Old whalers talking about how they could simply go out and pick what type of large catch they wanted and bring it back. Now they can go days or weeks without a single catch of anything.
I worry that my parents lived in a time when commercial fishing was no longer feasible, but no one noticed and kept siphoning all the seafood anyway.
Which are then easily and economically converted to ammonia to power the largest single form of fertilizer used in the world - nitrogen fertilizer, in the form of ammonium nitrate and equivalents. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process]
10’s of millions of tons/year are produced right now.
That process alone is responsible for likely at least 50% of the human population increase since it was invented, literally billions of people.
It is much harder to get there with any other form of energy, albeit not impossible.
Hydrogen for ammonia production is very cheaply storable (underground, like natural gas is stored) and would provide a large dispatchable demand to ease integration of renewables into the economy, smoothing over long timescale intermittency.
In any case, because the energy used for agriculture is so relatively small, if the economy as a whole can get off fossil fuels, agriculture certainly can as well.
Even if electrical grid needs are 100% renewable, that is just a couple percent of most economies energy usage.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/more-than-98-percen...
2020 had the UK reaching 43%:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-mu...
Interesting point about electric being only a small part of overall usage --- I guess direct heating and things such as smelting/refining metals makes up the bulk of energy usage?
A similar effect (if not as dramatic) occurs when replacing a fuel-burning furnace with a heat pump. In the US, 2/3rds of industrial heat demand is below 300 C and could be addressed with industrial heat pumps of various kinds (especially if the process has a waste heat stream to recycle by feeding it into the heat pump.)
Since replacing them would consume energy too.
That is a less obvious piece of math, but if we’re talking carbon neutral it would matter doesn’t it?
If the global economy can't get off fossil fuels, we're incredibly fucked, so I suggest there's nothing to be lost by assuming the problem is solvable.
I’m pointing out that the scope and scale of the actual changes that need to happen is so large that it will require a lot of work to solve it, in practice. Without everyone (well, 90% probably) starving to death, anyway.
Should we be starting? Yes. But it will require actual concerted effort and significant tradeoffs. And a lot of time.
We’ve been working very hard to get to this point for a century now.
Of course a lot of work would be needed. The work, however, would be justified and very likely rewarded. There don't appear to be any showstoppers that would prevent it from succeeding.
The ultimate problem is one of collective action, internalizing costs that are now externalized. We've solved problems like this before, globally for example with the ban on CFCs. Here the costs and stakes are even higher.
Fossil fuel use will ultimately drive some countries near the equator to such levels of heating that life will become difficult or impossible. India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, so they (particularly India, which has hydrogen bombs and a much larger economy) can threaten to kick over the global card table if the problem is not effectively addressed.
Like India, Pakistan, many parts of China, Russia, etc.
So easy to say, hard to do. And it’s hard to say that threatening to nuke everyone is going to apply the right kind of leverage, if say India is already starting to drown. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone else then to take their nukes (or nuke them in advance) and let them drown?
Even if others haven’t gotten that far in their line of thinking, I’m guessing India sure has.
The CFC coalition was nothing compared to what will be required to deal with this situation - and notably, the CFC issue still isn’t really solved. Just mostly under control.
We’ll see how this plays out.
Cool, I just added a single grain of sand to a tonne of snow, now I have a tonne of sand. How convenient.
And vague comments about 'couldn't find the science behind river sand being less useful' (because it's rounded not jagged). That's no kind of science.
This guy is lauded but I"m not so sure he's someone to listen to. "I hit some rocks in my garage and made my own sand!" isn't any kind of interesting. At what cost? At what scale? It's all about money, baby. Anything that doesn't add up cost is just storytelling.
He explains that the whole 'more expensive' thing is really just noting the actual cost of sand versus ignoring the externalized costs of mining it. When you dig up a river bed there is a cost there that isn't necessarily reflected in the cost of the sand you mined from there, sometimes because that cost is passed on to someone else who has to remediate the site after you mined it (like taxpayers). He empirically points out that different sands need a different water/cement ratio and also points out that the papers on sand use in concrete understand that. The 'bug' seems to be that people just add 'x' water to the mix and if the sand changes they might get different results.
I was annoyed that he dropped the idea that smooth sand is not necessarily worse, because he couldn't find the paper on that. Not much of an argument.
Then he proceeded to make sand, and came out with what, 50%? stronger cement. Because, of course, it was new sand.
All sand is made by cracking larger stones. The moment it is made, it is as rough as it will ever be. All subsequent natural processes are smoothing, rounding, knocking the rough off the sand. His garage experiment supported exactly that point: 'old' weather-and-water smoothed sand is an inferior product as far as the resulting cement strength is concerned. When compared to virgin sand.
And yes, cracking your own sand is always going to be more expensive than just driving to where good sand is already lying and loading it up. The mining argument is subject to economies of scale, larger diggers and dredges make the cost of mining per pound negligible.
Where the energy cost of cracking your own totally doesn't scale. Every pound you make requires exactly the same exhorbitant energy cost, no matter a pound or a million pounds.
Definitely the cost structure of sand is changing, in future it will only be more expensive. The days of 'big cement' are changing forever. We may never see these days again.
I heard his comments on smooth sand differently; As I heard it he was saying "People say smooth sand is worse but I can't find any research that would back that up, and even the paper cited in support of that argument doesn't say smooth sand is worse." He then goes on to reason why people might think that (the slump test) but the slump test is really about ratio of water to cement and not the texture of the sand. When he adjusted his water for smooth vs non-smooth sand to achieve equivalent slump tests, he found that the smooth sand concrete was stronger in his experiments.
My summer job as the 'mud man' for the masons building walls in Las Vegas certainly didn't go into this aspect of cement but my brother-in-law who is a civil engineer has a similar reverence / amazement that Grady does for concrete and seemed to agree with Grady's points. He pointed out the 'problem' was getting folks using concrete to change their mix recipes depending on the type of sand, that was, in his opinion, the big stumbling block. He felt any concrete that was mixed with the wrong ratios would under perform and the guys doing the mixing would never admit to screwing it up. They would always blame the ingredients.