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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Just marveling as an old school computer programming geek that I happen to be in a forum that also includes someone in the tugboat business.

We have the programmer to woodworker pipeline, programmer to runner pipeline... is there a programmer to tugboat operator pipeline I'm missing out on?

From 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.

Don’t forget programmer to pilot. Every time an aeronautical post appears they come out of the woodwork and chat about equipment.

Can we just agree there's X to Y for every X and Y?

There is, but the size of the "to" and the dissimilarity of Y to X is what makes the pathway interesting.

There is also literally anything to programmer. I didn’t use to be a programmer, but now I’m a programmer consultant.

Duck farmer specifically.

Tugboat pilot has always been my GOTO answer for "dream job".

Programming and in general tech work has been extremely highly compensated compared to most other industries the past few decades.

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!

Tradesman Baker to Systems Admin here :-P

I also became an old school computer programming geek (and still am) before ending up managing pirates.

Indeed!

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.

The sand people have over 50 different words for sand.

A few examples would be nice!

Trrru'uunqa! (Probably).

Coarse, irritating, gets-everywhere…

I don't like sand either.

They identify as and prefer to be called Tusken Raiders, thank you very much.

The 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.

I 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.

One 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.

Yes, 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.

Magic can also be scary, so... the other kind of magical?

One of the most romantic dalliances I ever did have was on the soft sand on the beaches of Italy, moonlight, red wine, the sand felt like velvet and silk rolled into one. I just think back on it and think to myself "let me brag about how great it was on the internet" 10/10 you missed out.

You should try sleeping on a fresh haystack. Most people will never experience this. But the haystack is made up of cut flowering meadow plants. So it's like sleeping in a bouquet of dried flowers. And the aromatic organic chemicals released all night can have a very calming effect. It's kind of wild to think about, but people used to get it on in haystack barns all the time.

I tried that and it was made of cut grasses. You know how grasses have foxtails that cling to animals to help distribute the seeds over a wider area? I was that animal that night and I didn't like it one bit.

> 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.

My favorite example of this is trucks transporting Finnish bottled water to France and then bringing French bottled water back.

Reminds 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.

As 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.

It's more that ocean shipping is extremely cheap. Meaning it uses very little labour and resources per mile.

It 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.

Trade is a technology that turns concrete sand into aquarium sand.

While 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.

Yeah 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.

Yes, 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.)

Well 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

Especially 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.

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