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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available.

The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile nearby. Picking through those dumps can be really fascinating and a surprising amount of items are still in good shape. A simple heuristic for how old a glass bottle is is how thick it is. A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old.

Looking at old structures and tools really makes vivid how disposable many modern items are.

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Isn't the Southwest uniquely not harsh? The biggest enemy of most man-made structures is water.

The sun is brutal on anything that isn’t metal.

or rock ... or dirt ... or glass ...

And most of the rock in the Southwest US is sandstone which will fall apart if you look at it funny.

Depends on the material I'd say. Large temperature swings like common in the desert certainly don't help. Wind/sand abrasion could also be an issue. But in general you're right, desert climates can be good for preserving things. The only thing better would probably be a permanent ice cover.

If they are under cover away from UV and heat, they can be well preserved. Modern material tend to degrade in Phoenix sun, and 110° and sometimes 120° summer days.

Arizona will also get monsoons and flash floods.

Same thought. Where I grew up...if water didn't kill it, tornados would. The only barns that stood the test of time were made from the now nearly extinct chestnut. They turn grey and get knotty and twisty as they age but are nearly indestructible. Everything else rots away in the humidity.

One rather interesting memory...I remember my father rebuilding an old barnish structure with railroad ties for the frame. Apparently they soak those suckers in tar...out in the sun each day they'd start sweating some black tar stuff again that's nearly impossible to get off your hands. Those haven't aged a day in 20ish years. Makes me curious why more structural wood isn't treated this way.

Mostly because it is quite polluting if it gets into the groundwater or in your well.

So I had some experience similar to this with an awful substance called cosmoline. Russians used it to store old guns, and they did the same thing really by sweating some chemical every time they heat up.

After some reading and thinking, I decided just to bake the thing at 250. It sweated tons of that awful red jelly out, then never again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not for polluting the groundwater, but seems it can be mitigated with proper heat treating prior.

That probably won't work for railroad ties because they are usually in/on the ground and without that tar the bugs would eat them in a few years.

Well, the idea is to just heat them past any temperature they'd experience naturally such that they don't bleed anymore. The wood itself would still be saturated in awful chemicals.

For railroad ties specifically, I imagine it would be deemed way too much cost. But for say, house framing lumber... guaranteed termite free forever, I think people would pay for it.

Usually, tar-like substances still sweat out a range of volatile aromatic compounds which aren't good for your health. Yes, heat-treating them would get rid of 99% or more, but that's not good enough for housing.

I think this is one of the saddest aspects of the progression of our current expression of Civilization as we forge through time:

The lost knowledge and, even more importantly, the fundamental resource depletion/extinction caused by our activities which result in both the knowledge of *how* to do/accomplish/build/mend/heal, as well as the actual natural resources required to execute that knowledge in a meaningful or impactful way on your life...

--- However the Chestnut appears to be largely wiped out by two separate blights

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-bri...

Correct. They've had some success crossbreeding them with a Chinese variant, but the jury is seemingly still out if they'll actually repopulate and how good the wood will be. The wood from American Chestnuts is legendary, and I can personally attest to that. So much so that old barnwood can be sold for good money. Shame nothing else has replaced it properly.

Pressure treated wood is kinda like that (it uses something other than tar).

[1]: https://www.homedepot.com/c/ab/types-of-pressure-treated-woo...

Similarly, I have a hobby of restoring vintage and antique tools. Same observation regarding how disposable many modern items are.

As someone that does swing dancing and with quite a lot of people into vintage stuff there has been this talk of "survivor" bias whenever we talk about how stuff was made better back then.

Naturally the cheap stuff didn't tend to even remotely make it this far.

Curious what your opinion is as I haven't heard much about tools etc.

Just a thought:

There are a couple factors that would result in a longer lasting tool of Yore...

There were no plastics and other ephemeral materials, and so tool handles were wood, leather or metal.

There was no 'mass production at global scale' - effectively every tool was hand made, or made by machines that were made by hand to make the tools -- and all of which were done without aid of computational mathematical prowess-by-proxy...

So, smaller batches of potentially longer lasting product because everything was continually being crafted by hand and observed by human eye...

In terms of building I remember hearing how in the distant past (anything before the last 200 years or so) the buildings that survived to this day have just used way too much materials in a way that would seen as wasteful today (e.g. double as much stone as was needed because they couldn't calculate it as precisely as we can today).

Would you be willing to pay double for your new home to make it last 300 years instead of 100?

When answering that question, note how much effort is needed to retrofit to modern needs. Electric, running water, closets, all things modern humans demand that you would need to retrofit.

I think modern day goods are better at being just durable enough to serve their intended lifetime, but no more than that.

Also, I think every generation has products that last a really long time. My personal example is that 30 years ago I saved up my allowance to buy a casio keyboard, which after a few years moved into an unheated attic, and then some more years after that to a cold and damp basement. Recently I dug it up out of the basement, wiped off a thick layer of gunk, put in a fresh set of batteries, and aside from one status led not working it works as well as the day I bought it, and even the plastic hasn’t discolored much.

The transition to "everything plastic" definitely was a big jump in term of quality in general. If you look at cameras from example, "cheap" old (pre 1960s) cameras were just as reliable as expensive ones, if not more, they were just simpler in design and built with less tolerance. When they started building consumer grade cameras in the 80s they almost exclusively used cheap plastic and cheap electronics which inevitably die (LCD screens instead of mechanical displays, undersized rewind motors instead of manual advance levers, autofocus vs manual focus, &c.).

The transition from hand built to machine built and the general miniaturisation of most mechanical/electronic systems since the 80s also means it gets harder and harder to fix. I do believe stuff was made better in term of repairability and simplicity, simply because they didn't have any other ways.

That's why you can pick up virtually any pre 1960 camera and repair it but cameras from the late 80s early 90s are incredibly finicky. I just picked up a camera from 1950, opened it, cleaned its lens elements / shutter mechanism and it works just as good as when it came out of the factory. It took me an hour and two screw drivers to go from "unusable paperweight" to "fully functional", the most advanced pieces of machinery in there are metal gears and springs.

My great-great grandfather argued this exact point to my dad in the late '50s: the buildings in Switzerland (and, later, Indiana) that "stood the test of time" were built to a different (far more expensive) standard.

I don't see how you can call the climate "harsh" with a straight face since it never rarely get moist enough for long enough for water and bacteria to do much to wood and masonry.

There's a reason you pretty much never see 100yr old unmaintained wood and masonry structures in New England, midwest, the PNW, etc.

Yeah, the water is far worse than the sunlight.

Airlines and the military parks aircraft in the desert for storage because with a little bit of prep work at the beginning the aircraft will stay in good shape. Constant rain would be far worse.

The thing is desert structures still have to deal with water ingress.

It does rain, and when it rains it's often a blowy monsoon of doom, assaulting desiccated wood structures which more often than not have developed some leaks from the year-round wind/sandstorm/thermal/UV abuse and complacency promoted by deceptively always-dry conditions.

And when lumber that has been dry and 120F+ for half a year abruptly gets soaked in water, its dimensions quickly change in non-uniform ways; it twists, bends, splits, and softens. If any of this moistened wood juice finds its way down into the ground, subterranean termites discover the food source in a veritable food desert. I think you can guess what follows.

Every climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.

If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.

The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.

Big difference in the tree living vs being dead..

The desert is very harsh for life, but much more gentle on structures. Even when it does rain the arid environment evaporates it away quickly.

It's not even a close comparison, you find structures from the 1960s in the southeast that are far more deteriorated than ones from the 1860s in the southwest.

In fact the presence of life is negatively correlated with the survival of structures. One more thing to mess them up.

Plants need water to live. Man-made structures, however, are not plants.

>>nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.

Yes, and they are continuously maintained by the living tree's processes, building everything from new roots, bark, branches and leaves. The question you need to ask is how long a dead redwood stays standing in the Pacific Northwest? What is the proportion of standing live to standing dead trees? How long does a fallen redwood trunk last, even starting out 20 feet thick?

>>The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground

Yup, due to the same processes - the high heat and low humidity make very large transpiration loads, evaporating water very rapidly from the leaves, so tall structures with huge capillary capacity are unsustainable. It isn't because they wear out fast from the wind.

You seem to be mistaking attributes of biological growth processes for attributes of mechanical wear processes.

We can see the difference weather makes in the case of Cleopatra’s Needle, which in its short stay in New York has seen some weathering it avoided for thousands of years in Egypt.

> I don't see how you can call the climate "harsh" with a straight face since it never rarely get moist enough for long enough for water and bacteria to do much to wood and masonry.

Most modern products/methods/coatings deteriorate very quickly in the extreme temperature swings of the desert. If they're exposed to the sunlight, most things can't handle the UV in combination with the extreme temperatures.

I own a desert property and do a lot of DIY construction/maintenance. To argue it's not harsh is extremely uninformed.

Minnesota routinely sees 90 days in summer and -20 days winter. Water plus 110 degree temperature swings destroys a lot of things quickly. Plus vegetation, mold, animals

I never said nowhere else is harsh, I just strongly object to arguing the desert is not a harsh environment.

My parents are in the midwest which is where I lived into my 20s, and my dad did a lot of DIY maintenance on their house which I helped with. There was no comparison in terms of how quickly things deteriorated there vs. here in the Mojave where I have property. The "15-year" Behr brand exterior paint I put on a refinished shed ~2 years ago is already cracking and peeling off, simply because the substrate undergoes such extreme thermal expansion and contraction daily between the day-night cycle, with the UV quickly embrittling the skin.

The main problem we had back in IL was ice-heaving of roads and patios/sidewalks. But asphalt-shingled roofs easily lasted over a decade, barring some exceptional tornado-style event ripping them apart. Asphalt shingles quickly become embrittled in the desert, and the frequent gale-force winds break them off. It's why you find Terracotta/slate/metal roofs so common in the desert; the environment is too harsh for the cheaper asphalt shingle stuff you find across the country.

And it's not like deserts don't get freezing temps or snowfall. My last camping trip in Joshua Tree National Park concluded with my tent collapsing on me under a snow load.

Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing.

SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to vandalize places for no reason.

You’re in for a treat, it’s within a timescale of 200 years or so, but definitely. The climate, terrain, distances, ownership, and uselessness of most of the land involved really encourage preservation, albeit rotted out and rusting.

Rotted out and rusting is beautiful, I love it. Next best thing to getting a time machine and going back :)

It's incredible what's been left behind and still in decent shape. As you've found, any place with a lot of human traffic tends to get destroyed by vandals but fortunately the SW deserts are massive and hold a shocking amount of old mining roads that lead to well preserved locations. A spot that requires a modest amount of effort to reach tends to filter out the idiots.

Another favorite site I didn't mention are the old mining structures. Image search for something like "old mining headframe" to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. There are a lot of those structures still standing from many decades ago.

To put a different perspective on that: The remaining Native American ruins in the Southwest are roughly the same age as European castles.

This does even change vintage car prices, certain places out west (Arizona, Utah etc) vintage cars typically are less rare (and therefore cost less generally.) Whereas snow, the salt used to treat roads and rain will wreak havoc on the frames and bodies in other areas.

A lot of the old glass bottles were designed to be used again and again.

Aren't modern bottles designed for that too? Atleast here, you return them to the store, get some money back, and they wash and refill them

In Sweden we sort them by colored or translucent, they'll be smashed and reheated to be made into brand new bottles. Haven't seen used bottles in quite awhile, not sure if it's good or bad.

That's how its normally done in the USA as well.

Brown, Green, and Transparent glass gets sorted, smashed, and melted back down into new bottles.

I was collecting some bottles and after trying 5 grocery stores who all told me they don't accept bottle returns (happy to collect the "deposit fee" though!) I gave up and threw them away in the regular recycling bin.

In Germany you must accept returns and give back the deposit if you sell bottles or cans that have the deposit attached.

What a concept, maybe our legislators could do something useful for a change and make similar rules.

Germany has a bottle return scheme. It's common for your (glass) bottle of beer or sparkling water to have significant wear marks where it's been rubbing against neighbours in a crate.

We used to have it as well, I remember from when I was a kid. It says on Wikipedia that we replaced the glass bottles with PET mostly. So I guess we have the same scheme, but not on the same scale anymore (one bottle supposedly gets reused 40 times on average).

Though the rare ones I get I just throw in the glass recycling that'll be crushed, made into new bottles and insulation material.

I've seen super scratched up glass Loka bottles in cafeterias... I wonder if they were used.

In the US, the beverage companies hired people to conclude that washing bottles uses more energy/carbon/etc than disposable containers.

Walmart used this as an argument for styrofoam cups.

Which is just a scapegoat problem, shifting the mind away from the original problem - disposable containers creating large amounts of waste that mostly end up in landfills, or worse, scattered in nature.

The energy use of washing bottles was never a concern. The energy use of transporting heavy bottles was largely offset by globalizing beverage production.

> beverage companies hired people to conclude

Same people who concluded sodas are healthy I assume

> A modern beer bottle looks paper thin compared to one a century old.

I wonder if that is due to how much smoother transportation is now.

It may also be down to better sugar/carb content and fermentation control, and/or better temperature control during storage. If yeast remains active in the bottle, the CO2 buildup causes overly high internal pressure, as could high temperature - so either the top blows off or the bottle becomes a glass grenade.

Also the glass was more brittle.

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