$36,000,000,000 is such an unfathomable amount of money. I know it's mostly done in debt/etc, but jesus, taking a second to think about the quantity itself is mind bottling.
Edit: 36B, not 360B, but still damn -- that's a lot of money.
Edit: 36B, not 360B, but still damn -- that's a lot of money.
China is building a world class railway system for a third of the cost of the budget overrun of a single fighter aircraft project.
The article says $36B, not $360B. I'm not sure if you misread or made a typo.
Or, consider that copper is around $4800 per tonne (1000 kg, or one Megagram). Copper is about 9 g/ml, and the aforementioned cubes are a million ml each, so that's 9 Megagrams per hot tub. You could cover a football pitch with hot tubs and only fill them about 1/9th full of copper for the money China is using to build this rail system, which suddenly makes it seem like a pretty good deal.
Also, I never knew just how vaguely defined football pitches were : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
" The two goal lines must be between 45 and 90 m (50 and 100 yd) and be the same length.[3] The two touch lines must also be of the same length, and be between 90 and 120 m "
You could have a field with over twice as much area as another and they'd both be legal.
Edit: I made a huge mathematical error thinking about the copper bit of the above. $36B buys 7.5 million tonnes of copper, which is about 750,000 hot tubs' worth. A football pitch holding 10,000 hot tubs (100x100) could be stacked with 75 layers of hot tubs of copper.
Really, I just need to think of a metal that costs $1 per ml.