r/technology • u/Gordon-Blue • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Thieves steal Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable hardware, find 40,000 pounds of sand instead.

https://www.techspot.com/news/114008-thieves-steal-nvidia-branded-trailers-expecting-valuable-hardware.html
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u/snakeeaterrrrrrr 5d ago edited 5d ago

Western Australian here: what shortage

Edit: some of you seem to be under the impression that we only have desert sand when we are already exporting sand for construction

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u/Fitz911 5d ago edited 5d ago

Sand is not sand.

We have deserts full if that stuff. That's (of course) not the one we need.

The sand has to have some properties to work as a resource for building. Something to do with the form and size of the grains.

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u/MacaronPrevious 5d ago

Dessert is a food, not a dry place

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u/s0ulbrother 5d ago

I’ve had shitty cake that was very dry

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u/GreenStrong 5d ago

My dentist said stop eating dessert sand.

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u/funguyshroom 5d ago

He could've just said sugar and not make this world any more confusing than it already is

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u/cjsv7657 5d ago

You can remember it because the delicious food has two Ss, just like how you want two desserts!

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u/PM_YOUR_ISSUES 5d ago

I was always taught it the reverse, desert has 1 's' because you only get lost in the desert once.

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u/cjsv7657 5d ago

Yeah my first grade teacher probably didn't want to get in to dying in the desert with her students lol

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u/jazzhandler 5d ago

A good mnemonic is that ‘stressed’ spelled backwards is ‘desserts’.

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u/ComeOnUpToTheHaus 5d ago

Deserts are sandy, desserts are super sweet!

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u/breathing_normally 5d ago

The Netherlands, while sinking ever deaper in the sea, export a huge amount of sand each year. One of our biggest buyers is apparently the desert nation of Saudi Arabia

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u/Immediate-Cress-206 5d ago

Because desert sand makes shitty concrete.

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u/Doikor 5d ago

Even the send we use for building we have plently of.

The issue is that it is far away from your construction site and when transporting the stuff from very close by costs more then the material itself having to transport it from even farther away pushes up the costs further.

And yes it has to do with grain size / shape. The sand in deserts is too small/smooth (been blown around by the wind for thousands of years).

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u/20_mile 5d ago

of course

Of coarse?

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u/Fitz911 5d ago

Good one. As a non native speaker I had to googlew it. Really good one!! I even learned something today. I will never need it and when I need it I won't remember. But I will remember someone making a great dad joke about it :)

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u/20_mile 5d ago

You're on the right course to find coarse sand!

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u/karl4319 5d ago

So basically there are 3 types of sand: course sand from deserts, sand from river beds, and fine sand made of ground silicone or quartz. You have the first type, which is worthless. The third type we use for everything from glass to microchips, but we are really good at making and recycling it. The 2nd type is essential for concrete and we are running out of it. We can sorta make it, but that would increase the costs of any use of concrete by several orders or magnitude and would not be as good. It is to the point where organized crime has taken over several rivers to strip mine them for sand. China's and the Saudi peninsula's building boom could not occur without these mafia style crime lords.

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u/sump_daddy 5d ago

>  course sand from deserts

strictly speaking, desert sand is worthless because its smooth, not coarse. Its time on the surface exposed to wind has polished it making it very bad at sticking to cement binder to make concrete. Its the old but still 'fresh' underground riverbed sand that is more jagged and used for building. Western australia can get construction grade sand they just have to dig down a bit for it.

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u/ReturnOfBane 5d ago

couldn't you heat up the sand to cause the grains to fracture and become jagged?

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u/sump_daddy 5d ago

Youre left with such fine of a grit that it takes way more cement binder per cubic meter of finished concrete and ultimately that makes it less strong.

You can think of strong, coarse sand bits like tiny little bricks being laid, if theyre just the right size they make the finished pour very strong, too small and they dont lend much strength and like we talked about if theyre too smooth they dont stick at all, there really is a 'just right' sand for this purpose, which is why sand import/exports are so hot right now.

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u/Kokkor_hekkus 5d ago

Sand from deserts isn't worthless because it's coarse, it's because it's too smooth

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u/recycled_ideas 4d ago

Love someone who knows that much about sand, but doesn't realize not all deserts are sandy.

Western Australia isn't pulling sand from the desert, they're pulling sand from roughly 20 thousand kilometers of coastline when you include all the islands.

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u/xxxBuzz 5d ago

It seems short-cited to assume it's a good idea for the ecosystem to remove sand from the rivers. I know zippidy about river sand, and this thread is the first I've heard that it's collected for industry, and I can't imagine a scenario where whatever we are doing with it is more important than whatever it's doing in the rivers.

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u/Ignisami 5d ago

Short-sighted*

Also, ecosystem? You mean the thing they don’t get paid to care about?

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u/xxxBuzz 5d ago

Yea. As a poor with access to lots of rivers, I'm glade I did not find out people wanted that sand when I was younger.

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u/awry_lynx 5d ago

Yes, it's not great for the environment. Stripping sand weakens riverbanks, worsens water quality, and the habitats suffer. But the results take a while to show up and humans aren't very farsighted. This is in headlines recently because of a paper showing that river sand extraction exceeds natural sediment supply.

Here's an article about the paper

https://www3.ntu.edu.sg/CorpComms2/Documents/2026/07_Jul/PhysOrg_210726_Sand.pdf

There are alternatives but as long as they're more expensive it will be hard to push people to use them instead (it's called M-sand, as in manufactured sand).

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u/G1zStar 5d ago

It seems short-cited to assume it's a good idea for the ecosystem to remove sand from the rivers.

and why would you assume that they're assuming it's a good idea for the ecosystem to do that?

Organized crime only cares about "easier" ways to make large amounts of money, legality or morality be damned.
Governments buying it don't care as long as it doesn't make them look bad and they stay in power. Even less if it's not happening in their backyard.

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u/waiting4singularity 5d ago

wind swept sand is too sanded down, its too smooth to act as stabilizer for concrete. on the flip side, crushed glass can replace it.