I made this page to contextualize 13 billion euros (or 14): an amount due to Ireland in an EU Apple tax case and all over the airwaves here this week. I use some pretty silly back-of-the-envelope type calculations (the same ones also repeated a lot in Ireland this week!).
These calculations aren't especially interesting, but at least they are present: you can see them, and you can change them. If you do - change the 13 billion to 14 billion for example, related numbers will flash with updates.
It's an example using calculang[1]: a language for calculations, and an example that focuses on a close connection between numbers that we read or share and formulas/workings behind those numbers.
I plan to do a separate Show HN about calculang perhaps when I have more docs and newer playground and gallery together, but Showing this page in case it's interesting, & happy if there is feedback!
Declan
[0] https://HowMuchIs13BillionEuros.com repo: https://github.com/declann/HowMuchIs13BillionEuros.com
[1] https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/2024-05/...
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/09/13/the-costs-of-s...
In total there are 18 new stations, digging under bodies of water (and quite deep through a lot of the blue line), total cost: around 5B€.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui...
> Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.
> The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete.
> At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants.
Certainly, the exact route of an electric train needs to be questioned - but it has been questioned for decades, all the while people are using planes spewing CO2 like there's no tomorrow, and all those environmentalists objecting to the train going through this parcel of land or that parcel of land are willing to keep delaying the project more and more, keep stopping there being a lower-impact way get between the two most common destinations in the state, causing more and more wildfires due to global warming. When does the madness end?
Any if the government only has a bare-bones staff, none of which are rail experts, they are going to get taken to the cleaners by everyone any anyone they consult or employ.
Also, it would help if they listened to bona-fide experts rather than pander to pork-barrel politicians:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-... (https://archive.is/iXgxH)
> SNCF, the French national railroad, [...] came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system. The company’s recommendations [...] were cast aside [and] the company pulled out in 2011. [...] “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.” Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
San Francisco can't even install a premade public toilet for less than 1.7 million dollars due to its bureaucracy and politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Valley_public_toilet
Meanwhile in New York City, they pay 900 people to do what they need 700 people for, and they don't even know why:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... (https://archive.is/O8O4V)
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there. [...] The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
> The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line to Hudson Yards also cost far above average, at $2.5 billion and $1.5 billion per mile, respectively.
Isle of Man is probably even richer in per capita money they've never seen.
The source of the money originally being taxed doesn't matter
1 km of high speed train line is 20-60 million so 216-650 km of high speed train
Ireland's healthcare spending was 22.3 Bn in 2023, so 13 Bn covers 7 months of healthcare for the country.
I see the OP included "In € 2.24Bn National Childrens Hospitals? 5.8 National Childrens Hospitals" so they're on the right track.
We're talking about state spending here so it's pointless to compare it to the price of a tablet IMO.
In America, that's how much it costs to build a 30km elevated train that goes ~45km/h (and it isn't going to be finished until ~25 years after work started):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyline_(Honolulu)#Revised_sch...
I am totally for trains, BTW, but I wish we'd hire EU and/or JP train builders to plan and build our trains.
Nor is the problem “bureaucracy” as a sibling comment said—actually the opposite is true, we need more “bureaucrats” with technical expertise to oversee contractors so the taxpayers don’t get our lunch eaten. We have gutted all technical expertise from government and now we often outsource the oversight to even more contractors (sometimes the same ones doing the designing and building!). Results are predictable.
We also have a huge problem with litigation and “regulation by litigation” as a replacement for actual “bureaucratic” oversight. Agencies conduct insanely expensive years-long public feedback programs and environmental studies (never mind that electric rail is innately good for the environment) for fear of lawsuits, which happen anyway and delay things even more. Instead of regulation by litigation, the government should step up and provide a clear set of achievable regulations, and if agencies/companies meet them, they can start building.
The countries that do rail infrastructure really well and really cheaply are not always the ones you expect—some are stereotyped as lazy and bureaucratic (Italy, Spain) and some are thought to be places where everything is expensive (Switzerland, Norway). We have a lot to learn, but often we tell ourselves that it just can’t apply to us because we’re so exceptional.
For details on the specific problems and solutions: https://transitcosts.com/
But as long as you travel insode only one country it's great.
In Italy trains work well and i heard that actually Trenitalia is so good that it's expanding to other countries
Edit:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrovie_dello_Stato_Italian...
Seems that trenitalia actually controls A LOT of companies across Europe, super interesting.
Why? They wouldn't end up being any cheaper or able to make the trains run on time.
The only thing I can point to referring to this example only is that there is a lot of Javascript in the page, but the calculations are (effectively Javascript also but:) described separately, and this is still useful I'll argue -
Separation of concerns means we can easily first of all point to calculation logic, connect it to numbers where they are used, give some structure to it, build tools to generally interact with that structure (much simpler than with Javascript). calculang code is pure and has no side-effects (*supposed to), which means tools can safely re-run code and expect predictable output. I use a tool taking advantage of some of this in [1] a video exploring a calculang model for a raycasting algorithm in order to understand it and fix a thing. So, I said a lot of buzzwords but I do use these properties to experiment with different DX that is far more challenging to develop for Javascript or a programming language generally.
The calculations in How much is 13 Bn euros are almost trivial - I normally don't put in these types of hardcodes for example - and it does happen to be valid Javascript here. An example to see some technical properties of calculang itself is this (also simple) one: https://new-layout-2--finding-calculang-foc.netlify.app/shop
There are a few tabs in the top left. The first (default) tab is showing calculang code: a few formulas and a few inputs (inputs are denoted by a convention). All are implemented like functions, and there are a lot of function calls - but those brackets have nothing in them. This is because calculang tracks how inputs are used and populates brackets for you - something I call input inference (or input threading). In the second tab you'll see the calculang output.
So it looks like calculang helps you to write pure-functional calculation code in a concise way; by threading inputs through all the function calls automatically.
calculang also supports modularity and effectively lets you re-use one calculation and "overriding" some component calculation/s. In other words: calculang formulas are flexible. And this is the real motivation for calculang taking care of all that input threading: flexibility means it should be done differently in different contexts (even sensible within the same model - for example - "I want this calc with this change, I want the same calc but with this other change or no change, and I want the difference between the two").
The compiler takes care of input threading through some pretty simple graph logic - everything related to compilation is <1k lines in total. Effective modularity, flexibility, and re-use of course is useful for maintainability.
A recycling logo in the calculang.dev examples [2] indicates models which use modularity in some form.
Sorry for the long post. That really is about all the technical details I can mention - but I think separation of concerns takes it very far also - in terms of its goals (that are stated on top of calculang.dev).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKVXRACCnqU
[2] https://calculang.dev/#examples
Being less facetious - Apple has $166Billion in cash so 13 billion euro is a good enough chunk of it - 10%.
https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...
(still a good chunk)
Deleted Comment
But clearly that can't be per person globally. I had to read the code to see it was specifically about Ireland. Actually, they're all about Ireland.
I know the first question mentions Ireland but it's not obvious that all the questions are also scoped to Ireland.
It's barely enough to pay for 5 days of the US defense budget, and they're not even fighting a war at the moment.