Show HN: How much is 13B euros? (opens in new tab)

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/09/13/the-costs-of-s...

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.

The source of the money originally being taxed doesn't matter

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.

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

(still a good chunk)

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.

So it's normal to have a string of errors and then everything works, but it should work in much less than 2s. I guess that can depend on a few things!

Please let me know if waiting a bit still fails!

Really, Ireland helped US companies evade tax, but the EU is just codifying this unfair advantage of Irish tax law as "state aid". The EU made Ireland close the "Double Irish" arrangement in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement), this 13 billion is how much tax Apple avoided paying Ireland by using that structure, compared to having a normal company structure (sales in other EU member states -> revenue banked in Ireland)

The EU didn't outlaw software/IP licensing! Until it does, Apple can still say that Apple Ireland licenses e.g. Final Cut Pro to Apple Germany for 298 EUR, and Apple Germany sells a German customer a copy for 299 EUR, banking 1 EUR revenue in Germany and 298 EUR revenue in Ireland. That's why other member states don't get the money.

This is because of an emphasis on flexibility. They're a constant here but in another calculang model I can call calculations from this same code while asking for specific pieces of the calculation to be different.

e.g. if I have a population growth assumption then in an exercise I can get all these numbers allowing for population growth - without myself touching these formulas. Population then depends on time and must be a function.

On calculang.dev I say that formulas (functions) are the building blocks of calculations, and they're the mechanism for flexibility (also transparency).

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

It’s in the post. You asked a shitty question. Don’t be rude.