Ivar Hesselager said:Den 24.12.2006 kl. 15:26 skrev [email hidden]
<[email hidden]>:
Quoted message said:
Anyone have a ballpark figure idea of how much it costs to build a
simple velodrome?
A new velodrome was built in Copenhagen Danmark in 2003 at the cost of 208
million Danish kroner, equaling 35 mill dollars.
For that much money you could buy 3,500,000 McDonald hamburgers in this
country, or - if you are not that hungy - pay 565 bricklayers to work for
one year.
Only 565 of them? Bricklayers in Denmark must cost a lot more than
bricklayers in China.
Lessee, I figure I'm currently reasonably well off middle class at a
lazy job making $750 US a month. Middle class starts around $125 US a
month. A bricklayer should probably be making around $50 a month, so
figure $550 a year because there will almost certainly be time that he
or she doesn't work (such as Spring Festival) plus graft and excuses
for a skimmed paycheck like being ten minutes late to work.
$550 a year means two bricklayers for $1100, twenty for 11,000, two
hundred for 110,000, two thousand for 1,100,000. twenty thousand for
11,000,000, or sixty thousand for 33,000,000.
I might be guessing a bit high on how much a bricklayer makes but I
figure if you have 35 million US you could easily employ 63,600 Chinese
bricklayers for one year.
What exactly you would _do_ with 63,600 Chinese bricklayers for one
year is beyond me.
(and don't any of you wise asses answer "build a velodrome" because if
you had that many bricklayers it would take substantially less than one
year to build...)
Anyways, cool as I think it would be to have some amazing world class
facility in one of my favorite cities in the world, I should hope that
my friend (while he does have quite a bit of clout) isn't thinking that
high because dreams that are dreamt that far beyond the pale of reality
tend to fall flat and not get accomplished (especially when those
dreams are being dreamt with other people's money).
When next I see him I'll pass on the links I've already gotten and see
where things go from there. If you'd told me this time last year that
Hainan was going to have a stage race I wouldn't have believed you, and
I definitely wouldn't have believed that I'd not merely get to see it
but get to work at it so I'm willing to stretch the limits of
reasonable thought when someone with authority says they're thinking
Haikou really needs a velodrome.
-M
