• Cyberwitch_7493@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    I just hope this doesn’t mean Big Tech is incentivized to buy up lots of beach sand from poor cities already dealing with hurricanes.

    Beach sand, if you didn’t know, is an important barrier between the land and oceans and greatly affects the size of waves that come crashing into the coast. Big rocks and other substrates just don’t calm waves like ocean-eroded sand can.

    • irdc@derp.foo
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      1 year ago

      The problem for chipmakers is not the sourcing of materials itself, but the purity of the sourced material. So don’t worry about public beaches disappearing into Intel’s hopper-feeder.

    • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      I really don’t think we have a shortage of sand. And you also have to consider how small computer chips are. Compare how much sand you need for a glass window versus a few CPUs.

      Besides that, they wouldn’t take sand from public beaches…

        • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          But that’s due to glass, concrete and so on. Building materials.

          Global sand consumption has reached 50 billion tonnes a year, or about 17 kilograms per person per day

          Even if every person in the world gets a glass CPU and GPU, that would only add a few grams of consumption. Once, not per day.

          It’s such a tiny amount that’s it’s entirely irrelevant.

      • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Funny you say that because we are running out of sand. We can produce it but it’ll just make things more expensive. Gangs have been stealing beaches