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Thread: The OT thread V1

  1. #3481
    Quote Originally Posted by ironyusa View Post
    I really can't discuss philosophy too much. For one, I am not wired to be able to deal in (most) abstractions in that way. Sitting down and trying to understand philosophy leads me religion. Call that the delusion I chose to accept or whatever, but for me that is a binary way to understand my purpose. I also don't believe that religion is about condemnation, but rather about self-growth which is why I'd never shove religion down anyone's throat. This internal conflict is why I changed my major away from psychology. I couldn't rectify my belief/ happiness with logic alone. I am at peace with that.

    Had the poly discussion been framed as one of purely philosophical nature, then I'd have only minor objections because I can't really tell people what to think. When there is proof to the contrary (science) that dispututes specific claims, however, that's when I take exception. Whether you chose to accept fact or not, doesn't affect reality. We can chose delusion for the sake of happiness as long as it doesn't harm others. Success rates of children, for instance, has categorical delineations that serve as good indicators for success. When you say something like "a polycule is a sufficient/ ideal/ whatever child-rearing environment," there is absolutely 0 proof to support that. It's complete BS. Not only is it BS, but it's not fair to gamble a kid's life in the complete unknown.
    Now i see religion as a form of philosophy. And with you coming from the other side, it would be an interesting and enlightening conversation would could hold. That is the kind of discussion that i do relish about the 2 or separately. Mind you a pure discussion. Not a shouting match, not talking down to each other, but a pure discussion of someone asking and answering, by the way they see, not regurgitation.

  2. #3482
    Quote Originally Posted by PBSteve View Post
    Well this thread went off the rails.



    I want to just state publicly that I've struggled with fairly severe anxiety and depression for nearly 20 years now, and it's not as simple as any of you are making it out to be. Especially with respect to relationships. God, what a thread full of shit. FWIW I've been doing better the last few years though, so that's nice.
    My fiancee suffers from depression and anxiety from her Tourette's. I can see it, mostly tell when the anxiety is getting to her, but overall as frustrating it is to deal from the outside, i can not imagine what is like to truly have it rule your life. I am glad you are on top of it. The only way to beat it is to stay ahead of it and that is not easy.

  3. #3483
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    Quote Originally Posted by ironyusa View Post
    Steve, you're not the only person that suffers from anxiety and depression. I would be more than happy to discuss things more openly with you privately via email. I'm done with the philosophy discussion though.


    I had no idea that permeable concrete was a bad idea. It just seems like most of the contaminants come from the surface and if you could maybe allow water, but not petroleum pass through then it'd be ok. I really don't see how you stop things like antifreeze out if the water stream.

    I guess what's interesting to me is that cement is a major pollution source. I heard some company was trying to inject co2 into the mix, but the crazy thing is that the industry as a whole seems content to remain the same. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like outsiders are looking for solutions without proper understanding of the mechanical requirements of concrete. Things like hempcrete and all that sound cool from a sequestering standpoint, but I remember you saying things like termites attack it. I don't know very much at all about civil/ construction engineering in general, but the after my sister got all her LEED certifications I realized there are some people trying do something new... Just doesn't seem to be any of the major incumbents.


    I'm well aware I'm not the only person who has struggled with anxiety and depression? That wasn't my intention.

    Just the production of concrete alone accounts for something like 10% of CO2 emissions per year.
    Last edited by PBSteve; 08-26-2018 at 05:40 AM.
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

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  4. #3484
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    Quote Originally Posted by PBSteve View Post
    Just the production of concrete alone accounts for something like 10% of CO2 emissions per year.
    If I'm not mistaken, it's the cement that is the biggest attributor to emissions. This article says cement is 7% of global CO2 emissions: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...co2-emissions/ From how I understanding it, it's the massive volume used and the heating process that's the reason for the emissions. The disturbing thing to me is that the producers seem to care-less. If I actually knew a way I'd use it, then I'd love to work on a LEED certification, mostly to learn the content.

    And my obligatory, Ajit Pai is an idiot.

  5. #3485
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    Correct, it's from making the clinker in a furnace/kiln which is the primary constituent of portland cement.

    Thing is, it's such a simple, known, and established process that even if someone did care, the cost of going to a new material would just be massive in comparison to concrete, not to mention incurring risk. Portland cement has been around for 150 years.

    As long as it's cheap to run the furnaces that's what'll be used. And when it's no longer cheap to run the furnces, construction will get a lot more expensive.

    That said this stuff is pretty cool:
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...asts-millennia
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

    I work for the company building the Paragon

  6. #3486
    I remember reading a different article on roman concrete used on some of their sea walls. The major pozzolan was pumice, if I am remembering correctly, which would react with the salt in the ocean and actually make the concrete harder through time. They had some excellent tricks and are the masters of using concrete as an actual structural element because now you would be crazy to make something important out of unreinforced concrete.

    Innovation is slow in the heavy construction industry for a number of reasons, in my experience.

    One of the major reasons why it is slow in the USA is bureaucracy, most of the large construction projects are publicly funded and are managed by state/city agencies.
    The reasons this is bad are the lack of reward and ability to innovate, the person who is managing a major project on the cities end does not build the project and does not make more or less money if the project is completed cheaper or not. So they lack the power to suggest innovation and the contractor, who is working for the city is the one that has to try and innovate, and when we do the city engineer in charge does not have a ton of motivation to try and push something through. Think about it like office space, if he busts his ass and helps the contractor by pushing an approval through for some new method, the contractor makes money, the city might save money, but he doesnt make a dime extra. Now if what he pushed for ends up failing he just gets ridiculed for it. No reward and all risk make it inefficient for innovation at the highest price level, and that stagnates the entire industry.

    Another major factor that hinders innovation is the unknown. Most anything that I have designed and/or built is intended to last well after I am dead and gone, so to know if a new method or material is actually good to build with can take generations to fully see the effect that using it has, look at lead based paint or asbestos as product examples of shit that took generations to figure out it was dangerous. This naturally leads to slower development in this industry.

    Ponying off of the unknown, it is also the unknown conditions that we deal with daily, that is another reason not to change things up too much. It is literally impossible to design a structure to work in an environment perfectly, because it is impossible to know what the ground is doing and how it will change in hundreds of years, also the weather, humans, nearly fucking anything can change given enough time and it will have an effect on whatever structure you put there. So the designs are usually over built to try and stave off estimated dangers that life can throw at a structure, then that gets hampered by construction costs for the redundancy.

    Another thing that has been happening is we do so much work to correct issues from previous materials an methods its not even funny. There is a great industry of private development which typically pushes innovation more because it needs to, but then there is all the failures of the past designs that fall on the local agencies to manage and correct. I work for a heavy construction company that only bids public works. We are not a huge company but there are 4 of us that bid over $1,500,000,000.00 worth of projects yearly, when we are not managing projects that are currently running, while the company has over $300,000,000.00 worth of work already back logged to be completed over the next few years. The point I am trying to make is there is so much work just playing catch up from our past problems, getting those to acceptable standards now will take long enough that once we are done none of those standards will probably be acceptable anymore and we will need to start over.

    The final point I will make on this is the costs of failure are so drastically high in this industry it forces people to stay with proven methods for fear of a failure. When you lose a building or a bridge it is a tragedy, there tends to be a large loss of life all at once and it will always become a national crisis as it really should. Infrastructure problems effect citizens daily and can even effect how your country is viewed in the grand scale so the implications of innovative processes going the wrong way tend to stack up unfortunately.



    On what you and Steve were discussing about cement, the long kiln process that Thomas Edison made out in Leigh Valley PA is still very similar to the modern process that most cement producers use, and it produces a shit ton of CO2 to kiln all the pozzolans. Some of the most useful research in cement, that is currently being implemented, has been using other byproducts as pozzolans, such as fly ash, slag, and silica fume, which was the cutting edge tech of the last generation. Now you are seeing the majority of research switching over to microcrack control in the concrete side of things. One professor I worked with for a little while got his PHD on self regenerating concrete that had bacteria introduced into it that will eat condensation that forms in the microscopic voids and it will basically poop out a pozzolan as a byproduct that will fill the voids and alleviate micro-cracking through time. The more standard research is in fiber reinforced concrete though, we are getting a ton better at using fibers to make strong concrete and in the private industry you are seeing it being accepted more and more, which will be a ton cheaper then having guys layout and tie rebar, I bet you will start seeing the fiber tech start breaking into the pre-stressed concrete world soon as well.

    On the void filling / non-structural side of concrete light weight aggregates has been an explosive industry over the last decade or so. There are so many different options of expanded glass spheres, to recycled plastics, expanded clays, the list goes on and on for light weight filler aggregates for things like sound panels an such. It is a very interesting field that innovation can be pushed because it is unlikely that it will end up killing a bunch of people if it fails like the structural elements will.


    One final thought, the cement industry has been going through a renaissance with admixtures, resins in particular, over the last few decades. There are so many cool cement products out there right now that do specialized things, we just bid a bridge joint replacement job last week, for example, where we were cutting out armored bridge joints to install an elastocrete style armorless joint that consisted of an epoxy mix that was replacing the steel cased joints for better longevity.

    A pretty cool thing to check out is the Concrete Canoe competition that the universities do every year. If a competition is near you it is worth seeing the boundaries that are being pushed by the students in the light weight concrete and admixture realm. We were down in Tyler Texas a few years ago for the national competition actually. It is one of those competitions that pushes the envelope of the materials that the industry is using. Seeing mixes work out with 4000% the recommended amount of super plasticizer, and water reducer, air entrainment, fly ash, silica fume, bonding agents, and with a water to cement ratio of like 4% (when it should be in the 40s range) and a density of 35 Lbs/ft^3 with compression strengths over 1000 psi really shows what can be achieved and can sort of show where the industry is heading.

  7. #3487
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    Whoa, lots of cool info in that post. The way you talked about some emerging tech got my google-fu going and I remember graphene kind of being a mechanical material that's supposed to be on the rise. Turns out there is some promising stuff from early this year using graphene reinforced concrete.

    On a slightly similar note, but I am finishing up replacing a floor that failed in my house due to high MVER. I learned more about the cure conditions and water ratios of concrete than I ever knew could matter.
    Last edited by ironyusa; 08-27-2018 at 01:38 AM.

  8. #3488
    Yea concrete is like cooking it is so hard to keep the materials consistent that there needs to be a large tolerance of acceptability. Water content of materials as well as starting temperatures of materials are big issues when trying to make consistent mixes through time.

    And inproper curing is typically the reason why concrete gets screwed up especially in the small scale building trade. Keeping concrete properly controlled with moisture and temperature is critical to prevent problems. Most concrete floors crack because of shrinkage, as the concrete dries it shrivels up like an organic material will when you dehydrate it, and this leads to the edges curling up like a piece of paper will with time, that then puts the slabs in a cantilevered configuration at the edges which then breaks, because concrete sucks in tension, and then you get a crack at the surface as the piece of slab falls back to the subbase.

    Another major issue is subbase prep, if the subbase isnt properly compacted or if water runs through the subbase and shifts the material you develope voids which put the slab in tension and again you get cracking.

  9. #3489
    3M has product that helps keep consistent moisture over concrete for hard-curing.
    social conservatism: the mortal fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.

  10. #3490
    Insider PBSteve's Avatar
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    Do you have any experience with it?
    Ever so many citizens of this republic think they ought to believe that the Universe is a monarchy, and therefore they are always at odds with the republic. -Alan Watts

    I work for the company building the Paragon

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