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One thing that surprised me when I started running a tugboat business: A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand. Sand of one type goes from the U.
by mcculley 2y ago
One thing that surprised me when I started running a tugboat business: A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand. Sand of one type goes from the U.S. to The Bahamas to be used in concrete. Sand of another type goes from The Bahamas to the U.S. to be used in aquariums. Specialty sands go to make regulation volleyball courts.
- lb1lf 2y agoIndeed! 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.
- blitzar 2y agoThe sand people have over 50 different words for sand.
- delichon 2y agoThe best night's sleep I ever had was on the sand of a turn in a dry creek bed, after a very long day's hike. It must have had a big rock underneath that caught the day's warmth and kept me toasty all night. And the sand itself felt like floating on a cloud. It was a magical place. And one of the stupidest I ever slept in due to the risk of flash floods.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dbetteridge 2y agoI was reading your first sentence with apprehension as my first thought was flash floods! Glad you made it out safe, with a story to boot.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- adra 2y agoOne of the best meals I ever ate was a store bought can of chiii cooked over a tiny camp burner after a long hiking through the Grand Canyon. Sometimes it's the simple things during the most exceptional situations that can cement such a strong memory... It did for me anyways.
- delichon 2y agoYes, but. I had some of the most memorably bad sleeps on the same trip. Like wrapped around a tree trunk on a slope in a blizzard. Not magical one bit.
- rangerelf 2y agoMagic can also be scary, so... the other kind of magical?
- amy-petrik-214 2y ago
- whartung 2y agoJust marveling as an old school computer programming geek that I happen to be in a forum that also includes someone in the tugboat business.
- junon 2y agoWe have the programmer to woodworker pipeline, programmer to runner pipeline... is there a programmer to tugboat operator pipeline I'm missing out on?
- senectus1 2y agoTradesman Baker to Systems Admin here :-P
- dsign 2y agoFrom what I remember from this particular code-base, there are also: - Programmer to farmer - Programmer to musician - Programmer to writer and of course - Programmer to landlord.
- CSSer 2y agoDon’t forget programmer to pilot. Every time an aeronautical post appears they come out of the woodwork and chat about equipment.
- Filligree 2y agoCan we just agree there's X to Y for every X and Y?
- barryrandall 2y agoThere is, but the size of the "to" and the dissimilarity of Y to X is what makes the pathway interesting.
- pletnes 2y ago
- beala 2y agoTrade is a technology that turns concrete sand into aquarium sand.
- dyauspitr 2y agoYeah but there is going to be a massive imbalance in the quantity of those two types of sand. I bet the sand required for aquariums is a rounding error on the amount of sand required for concrete.
- eru 2y agoYes, though the difference in value is probably not quite as stark as the difference in mass. (Ie aquarium sand is probably more expensive than concrete sand.)
- xbmcuser 2y agoWell not really Bermuda has population of 60000 only so the sand they import for construction might even be less than the sand US import from Bermuda for its aquariums
- Filligree 2y agoEspecially as many aquarium owners, these days, use a topsoil-clay mixture instead. Planted tanks take far less maintenance, need less filtering, can fit more (and happier) fish, and the plants grow better in soil.
- eru 2y ago> A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand. That's pretty normal in general. Eg Germany both imports and exports a lot of cars.
- oe 2y agoMy favorite example of this is trucks transporting Finnish bottled water to France and then bringing French bottled water back.
- Ekaros 2y agoReminds me of getting can of S.Pellegrino water with something in it. Looked at back of the can and wondered why is this in Japanese... So my guess is that it was first made in Italy, then shipped to Japan and then imported back to Finland... 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.
- eru 2y agoAs long as you can ship stuff on a boat over the ocean, and don't care too much how long it takes, shipping it even multiple times across the planet is fine. Barely costs anything, both in terms of money and in terms of resources. 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.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt's more that ocean shipping is extremely cheap. Meaning it uses very little labour and resources per mile.
- mcculley 2y agoIt is not surprising to me that products which have lots of differentiation are both imported and exported. It was surprising to me that something I thought of as a commodity goes in both directions.
- tnel77 2y agoWhile not sand, I remember reading about the state of Colorado importing specialty dirt from around the world while constructing I-70 through the Rockies. Various properties were required that couldn’t be found from local dirt.