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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Always struck me as utterly irrelevant. The world is big; a beach is huge. The very idea that kids taking a half-dozen pretty pebbles at a time can make a dent in it? An imagining of feeble-minded people with utterly no notion of the magnitudes involved.

And, one storm can take an entire beach away (or return it). Happens, repeatedly in some places. Makes the activity of beachgoers profoundly unimportant.

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I agree. There is no reason to start fining people for taking a handful of souvenir pebbles from the beach after their day at the seaside. The forces of nature are unimaginably huge in comparison. And my experience of growing up in such an area is that there's also an impactful amount of commercial (eg shingle mining) and, more recently, environmental activity around these places which, again, dwarf the effect of people picking up a few stones from the beach.

> And, one storm can take an entire beach away (or return it)

Oh, yes! The Great Storm of 1287 was a doozy! And, given climate change and its effects on weather patterns, we may yet see similar storms in our lifetimes.

- https://romneymarshhistory.co.uk/index.php?/storm1287

Some additional useful links for anyone looking to jump into some rabbit holes around shingle management this Sunday morning:

- Wikipedia article on Dungeness (the largest shingle expanse in Europe) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness

- The current Lydd Ranges Sea Defence Scheme - https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/ksles/lydd-ranges-...

- The local authority's current strategic plan for the Romney Marshes - https://www.folkestone-hythe.gov.uk/downloads/file/2241/91-s...

feeble-minded indeed. what are they criminalizing beach pebbles for? lot of that in the UK. I wonder if the cause is cultural, genetic or environmental. They just don't seem to be playing with a full deck over there. One non sequitur after the next. I would suggest widespread brain damage from covid, but this has been going on for decades. There's something seriously wrong in the common reasoning and logic.

Article mentions people were raiding beaches for free building materials like sand and stone for concrete, which would be a problem at a large volume. Enforcing the same rules on individual souvenir collectors seems excessive.

Excessive, but potentially necessary, since otherwise you need to draw an arbitrary line between an amount being taken away that is still acceptavle and one that is not, and how many times that can happen in what period of time and so on. From that point of view it can make sense to simply categorically forbid people to take things away from the beach.

Yup and that's where it gets silly.

It's trivial to say "all you can carry" and be done with it. Nobody can carry away a beach in their hands.

I think you underestimate the ingenuity of people who love to use free resources.

Laws are full of arbitrary drawn lines, it is hard to avoid them. If you don’t have an arbitrary line in the law then there will be arbitrary/selective enforcement which can be even worse.

> Always struck me as utterly irrelevant. The world is big; a beach is huge. The very idea that kids taking a half-dozen pretty pebbles at a time can make a dent in it?

I’m quite surprised this point has to be made, but the article made it so I’ll just quote directly:

> While one person taking a few pebbles from the beach may not significantly affect the berm or the overall beach volume, the cumulative effect of many people removing numerous pebbles may be more significant.

You continue:

> And, one storm can take an entire beach away (or return it).

Yeah. Or, you know, could maybe take out an entire coastal city. How about we don’t make that easy? Again from the article:

> Asking people not to take pebbles from the beach may appear trivial and insignificant, but it can help beaches play an effective role in protecting our coasts.

I think you should reread the “it all adds up” section. They’re trying to do research on ways to prevent disasters from climate change, and taking out those pebbles affect the research:

> Given the importance of retaining sediment in the system for flood and erosion protection, there is ongoing research to better understand how pebble beaches respond to waves and storms. This research is particularly important for assessing the effectiveness of artificially created cobble beaches at providing protection from coastal flooding and erosion risks.

It’s like we’re facing a massive forest fire and you’re complaining they’re fining people for throwing molotov cocktails into it because “what difference is it going to make, it’s all already burning”. Yeah, but we’re trying to study how it burns so we can combat it now and in the future, and you’re messing up the numbers.

And that's just plain false. All the people in all of Britain taking a handful of pebbles from a beach, and you wouldn't be able to tell it happened.

"It all adds up" is where they mistake magnitudes of events by many zeroes. That's exactly the point I was making: they're clueless.

The world is big, but England is a tiny irrelevant island. Even a single pebble makes a big dent over there

England isn’t an island, it shares a land border with Wales and Scotland.

... it does include over 100 smaller adjacent islands though.

and occassionally Sealand.

The Venn diagram of Britain, Great Britain, the four Lions of The United Kingdom, England, Wales and Scotland et al. ain't for the faint hearted.

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