Beach theft | Hacker News Reader

Beach theft

en.wikipedia.org

50 pointsdionyziz23 comments

Growing up, I lived on an isolated 4 acre block, surrounded by forest. The only house nearby was an old house, built on stumps, a hundred meters or so away, with no-one living in it. One day a truck showed up, a team of workers put the house on the back of the truck, and took it away.

A year later detectives arrived at our house. They asked to speak to my mother, and told her that the house next door had actually been stolen, and the real owners were now looking for leads, hoping to find their stolen house.

That reminded me of something that happened to a guy I went to high school. Not quite as dramatic as your story but during the day when he was at school and his parents were at work some guys backed a moving truck up to the house and emptied the place.

This is in a city. The family in question weren't particularly friendly with their neighbors but at least one neighbor saw the guys playing with the family dog in the front yard and assumed all was well (as you probably would).

They apparently quickly got everything loaded up and were on their way. The family came home to an essentially empty house. It was very odd.

This happens every single day in Brazil.

Most of my friends had their whole houses wiped out on holidays. Once a year it happens to one of my friends that have houses on non closed streets at least.

was the dog OK?

The dog was fine. If anything I suspect it enjoyed the extra play time.

In Queensland in Australia there's a style of housing called an Old Queenslander - basically a house on stilts to help the occupants deal with the heat and humidity. As the whole house is up on stilts, this means you can move the house as a single item (no slab)... which means that you can have a 'used house lot', where you go and pick the house you want from the 'showroom' and have it shipped to wherever.

I was living in Brisbane, Queensland, at the time (in Ferny Hills, if you know it), and the house was a Queenslander. I imagine the house may well have been laundered through such a service.

OT but I don't care, as I love being reminded how small the world is...I lived in Arana Hills in the 90's/2000's and went to Ferny Hills primary. I can imagine this would be easily possible in that area :)

I'm sitting in an office about five minutes from Arana Hills right now (in Mitchelton)!

And I'm fifteen minutes away in the suburb of Virginia, wondering if anyone will ever steal Breaka Beach at Southbank?

Well, it has the added benefit that you can sell your house instead of just demolishing it, if you plan to build a new house.

I live in such a house, nearby in Kedron, and we're considering doing just that.

I would normally say that a valuable asset that goes a year without being used isn't really lost when it goes missing.

It's like a mining company buying a plot of land that they know has valuable minerals on it for the sake of sitting on it to make their other plots more valuable. It's the exact position I think governments should tax/seize to the point that it is inefficient to sit on.

Thankfully these situations are rarer and rarer with the sharing economy allowing illiquid assets to actually be used for their intended purpose when not used by their owner.

Cool logic... the money you have in your savings account that you haven't touched for two years should be given to charity. Thank you for your donation.

Mining companies often sit on mines, not because they're trying to manipulate the market, but because the mineral isn't economic to extract yet. You can, for example, buy a gold mine today where the cost to extract gold is $2000/oz, and wait until the price goes above that before starting operations.

This is a problem in my home city of Chennai, India too. Not only is this a monetary loss, people start building homes on these bodies killing off water supply. http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/Illegal-sand-...

>The bulk of the sand in the 0.5-hectare beach, of approximately 500 truckloads, was found missing in July 2008

10000 tons - an amount of sand that could have been brought by a midsize ship from a place like Morocco/Sahara (if we discard any other closer sources). At $20/mt that would be $200K - may be more expensive than real estate price of the beach, yet considering overall value of the beach for the society...

It's Jamaica, the beach's "value" is not shared with the greater Jamaican society. Maybe if it were the sand would still be there.

> It's Jamaica, the beach's "value" is not shared with the greater Jamaican society.

Can you please expand on this? I read it to mean that Jamaican beaches are often privatised and off-limits to the public. Is that correct?

There are two Jamaicas, one for the tourists (the Beach) and the rest which is often quite poor and destitute. They mix as much as oil and water do, and the natives are "discouraged" from interacting with the tourists other than in a service role.

This is from personal experience and from extensive contact with Jamaican service employees working in the US (worked for several months with imported hotel staff from Jamaica when I was younger). These were some of the hardest working folks I have ever met, working two or three jobs at the five-star hotel we were employed at and saving up every single bit they could before returning to Jamaica where their opportunities were even less.

> There are two Jamaicas, one for the tourists (the Beach) and the rest which is often quite poor and destitute. They mix as much as oil and water do, and the natives are "discouraged" from interacting with the tourists other than in a service role.

Man, that's sad, half the fun of travelling is the culture and people. Hell, that sounds pretty damned colonial in mindset.

Hallsands in Devon, England was washed away in 1917 after thousands of tons of gravel were dredged up offshore to build a Dockyard in Plymouth. The dredging caused the level of the beach to drop leaving it unprotected from winter storms. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallsands

Thought for sure this was going to be an article about Martin's Beach.

http://www.invw.org/article/benton-harbor-michigan-1280

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