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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’m only going to do this very roughly, only for the transport and using US prices (as they’re easier to find), because the total cost of mining, transporting and dumping that much material is astronomical compared to the $70m budget. Even the transport cost alone are an order of magnitude higher.

    Soil has a density of between 1,200 and 1,700 kilograms or 2,645 and 3,747 pounds per cubic metre.

    I couldn’t easily find bulk rates for trunking soil, but bulk trucking rates for grain seem to be in the right area from what I can see. A truckload of up to 80,000lb costs somewhat over $6 per mile.

    Given the weight limit per truck, and taking a middling estimate of soil density of 3000lb/m^3 (rock would be heavier and so increase the cost), we can transport around 80000/3000=26m^3 per truck, at a cost of at least 615=$90, or $3.46 per m^3. Our budget for the whole operation was 75,000,000/(3,500,000100)=$0.20 per m^3.

    From those figures we can see that simply trucking the spoil fron the operation would be more than 15 times the cost of paying the landowners. That ignores all of the other costs. Local rates may be sonewhat cheaper, but probably not enough to make a serious difference, and you’d need to ship over 10 million truckloads of dirt, which would put massive strain on local infrastructure too.


  • If I read your measurements correctly, you’re talking about digging up over 350 million cubic metres of soil and rock, transporting them 15km and dumping them safely. Comparing that to the cost of paying the land owners gives you a budget of approximately $0.20 per cubic metre. Ignoring the digging costs, you’d have to check what your local rates for trucking bulk soil would be over that distance, but I suspect they’re more than that on their own.

    Then you have the rather signicicant issue of what to do with the literal mountain of soil and rock you need to dispose of. Just dumping it is going to cause pretty serious changes to the local environment, not least of which would be a new mountain.







  • It sucks that we need such an extensive amount of work put in to make devices private

    The issue is that, short of the extremes suggested in places like privacyguides, you’re not really making the device private. You could argue that you’re making it more private, but the counter-argument is that you’re still leaking so much data that you haven’t significantly improved your situation.

    Doing something probably is better than doing nothing, but it’s not going to satisfy those who seek actual privacy. If you’ve got a particular leak that you’re worried about it’s definitely worth looking to address it though.











  • That only gives you 364 daya per year and we need just fractionally less than 365.25. You end up needing an extra day every year, and if we want to keep midnight in the middle of the night, and extra full day every four years (except when we don’t). Adding those sorts of bodges onto an otherwise elegant system would be awful to work with.

    Instead, I propose we build giant rocket engines pointing straight up on the equator, and adjust the Earth’s orbit until one orbit around the sun takes exactly 364 days.