Shipping practices aside, was anyone else surprised by how readily and thoroughly the bricks shattered and crumbled?
I’m definitely not sufficiently familiar with comparative masonry to say for sure that these bricks are weaker or that bricks produced to some more humorless spec wouldn’t look similar if filmed under similar conditions; but if I were going to live in what they were building out of them I would strongly suspect that it wouldn’t be state oppression that’s most likely to crush me.
I have the sneaking suspicion that we might be seeing the ‘YOLO’ school of material handling here.
Not particularly. Now you have a better understanding of why buildings in poorly developed parts of the world perform so poorly in many natural disasters.
When I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Goma, eastern border) pretty much all building supplies were manufactured on site. Brick there was hand formed out of porous volcanic rock. Fine for smaller buildings but probably not so good for a larger projects.
I wondered if the recorder had noticed something on the previous unload, so obviously rather than warn somebody they fished their phone out.
Bricks are made out of clay, which is essentially sticky powdered rock dust. The dust is fine enough that the gaps between particles are very small, and there’s no easy path for air to flow between them to evaporate or drain contained moisture. It’s similar to sand, but the much finer particles lock each other in place better than big chunky grains of sand. Being rock, it’s plenty strong enough for a broad foot to stand on it, as long as the pile of dust is contained enough to not let the foot sink into it. So a brick is a cube-shaped pile of sticky mud that’s been dried and baked in a kiln. They’re not much more than tame clumps of dust.
Bricks are good for one thing: strength in compression. You can place heavy loads on top of them, and as long as they’re stacked on top of a flat surface, and the load is not all focused on a small point, they’ll bear a lot of weight. You can pile them up and they’re going to be strong enough to hold up a roof. But do not apply shear forces to them and expect the walls to remain standing. And don’t apply shocks to them and expect them to not crumble back to dust.
@Lanthade “There’s a reason why it costs more to do business in the USA (and I’m sure many other developed countries). It’s because we have regulations (don’t tell the libertarians) that prevent this sort of thing”
Absolutely. There is always screaming about how money regulations cost, but never any recognition at how much they save. Fewer accidents, fewer people physically incapacitated, fewer deaths. I don’t have a reference at hand, but I believe that in the 1890s and early 1900s the annual death rate in steel mills was 8-9%. Another more modern example, the safety eyes for garage door openers. Since they were made mandatory in the 1990s injuries and deaths to children by garage doors has dropped dramatically. Today, when something like that happens it’s because the safety eyes were not installed properly (i.e. just tape them together and toss them up by the opener).
Yep, it’s pretty remarkable how many little bits of modern design can be traced to somebody dying.
Not sure I like the course these brick puns are laying.
You know how those internet trowels are. Just the other day they were insulting my wife and mason on reddit.
Well, it’s a bonding thing, you know. But a bit of a stretcher to like them, I expect.
Did they call her a frog?
Time for this to perpend and put it to bed
What did you thing where half-bricks came from?
Increasingly in demand in the internet age.
I plumb forget what they said.
Well, I guess that puts a capstone on it. G’night. 
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