From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phillip M. Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: Supercollider "For" or "Against"
Reply-To: hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: DESY ZEUS Central Data Acquisition
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 10:03:31 GMT





In article <01GMUWFKMPZK001FEW@utarlg.uta.edu>, B645ZAW@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
(Stephen Tice) writes:

|>In article <1992Jul26> hallam@zeus02.desy.de
|>|(Phillip M. Hallam-Baker) writes:
|>|
|>|   Perhaps Mr Tice might admit defeat in his attempts to inflate the
|>|   price of the SSC so that we might start a sensible discussion on
|>|   the basis for which such a seeminlg ludicrous sum as $5 to $10
|>|   billion should be spent?
|>
|>Not hardly. I'd rather watch you backpeddle some more =Doctor=
|>Hallam-Baker; your speculations have been most entertaining. It
|>should be quite interesting to see what you do with real facts, as
|>a "researcher" in the field, that is.

First off, your argument has a rather personal tone. Could it be sour
grapes, an attempt to get back at me for all the things I said about
Perot which turned out to be true and all the hero worship Mr Tice
engaged in which turned out to be false. Shurely shome mistake!

As for backpedaling, not that the figure for running costs has declined
from Mr Tice's original $1 billion to a third of that. Furthermore the
congressional hearings which he refers to are dealing with the normal
ecconomic cost of running such a facility, not how much it will actually
cost the taxpayer.

Most of the people who work at such institutes are foreigners. There are
Americans at every major collider in the world, just as there are Brits,
Canadians, French, Germans, Israelis etc. The whole point is that no one
country can possiby hope to have a monopoly of the necessary skills.
There is also a major benefit that these experiments are thought to
bring in diplomatic sort of peace and good will cooperation type terms.
Anyway the point is that the majority of the staff are going to be paid
by other countries anyway.


|>I wrote on 23 July...
|>}
|>}   What they aren't saying in the Dallas Morning News is that it
|>}   cost about $8 billion to construct the SSC over 8 years, that
|>}   it has about a 25 year projected lifespan and that it will
|>}   take about a billion dollars a year to run.
|>
|>PHB responded, in article <1992Jul24.081846.20002@dscomsf.desy.de>...
|>|
|>|   Thats because it's not true.


|>    Answer:     The estimated annual funding requirements for normal
|>                operation after completion of construction is $313.3
|>                million in FY 1991 dollars. The projected costs for
|>                laboratory operations, capital equipment, general
|>                plant projects and accelerator improvements are
|>                included.

So here we have the 300 million estimate. But look, this is not the cost
of running the SSC, it is the cost of improvements too.

This is the same old buget car type argument. We start off wanting to
buy a car, the base model costs (say) $5000, however for an extra $500
we can have a better stero, for another $200 we can have fancy seats,
for anothe $300 dollars a sun roof. The argument here is that after
buying the $5000 base model it is quite likely that the money for the
extras is also going to get found. However that dosen't sound like much
of an argument against buying the $5000 car but an argument against
buying the optional extras.


I'll deal with the technical points in anothe post.

Phill Hallam-Baker

Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc