closewith

However, there's opportunity here. As the cost of building and maintaining software products collapses, taste and carefully choosing what to build becomes a major differentiator.

I think it takes a wilful ignorance of the history of industrialised warfare to believe this.

No, the opposite has happened with this war. Adversaries globally have seen the ability of the US and Israel to operate with near-impunity over Iran, and it has destroyed confidence in non-Western defence systems.

The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.

You have the same issue with the conventional bombs and their guidance kits, which when delivered in contested areas are not usually cheaper.

The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.

The headline is inaccurate, as the article actually says that the US Army has used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles, referring to ATACMS and PCM.

First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.

Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.

> A new, fully equipped ambulance is about $150k.

This is definitely not true. A base model unequipped ambulance may be in that ballpark. A fully equipped ambulance will vary wildly in cost based on clinical level but will be about $250-500k in the US.

> Then you have liability, both for the vehicle and for the medical treatment; that's about $12k per year.

Maybe for BLS or non-emergency ambulances in a low-utilisation role? For ALS/Critical Care or higher in a busy jurisdiction it's going to be significantly higher.

I tried to find the asterisk there to see the details, but could not.

FWIW I think that HEMS cost is significantly under costed, as the London HEMS H135s run about £2,500 per flight hour on direct flight costs alone, so I suspect the £4,748 figure is referring to that alone.

I think a closer estimate is probably total annual operational costs divided by total shouts, (£18 MM / 2,000) or about £9,000 per shout.

Even that's an under costing, as the clinical personnel, equipment, and liability is shouldered by the NHS. A pure costing is probably closer to 2-3X that per clinical flight.

Still an order of magnitude less than the commercial US operators.

> Only a complete moron would think the answer to this is no. If there's no personal cost to using an extremely expensive service, every one is going to use it regardless of whether it's actually necessary. It will quickly turn into a free taxi service for anyone who wants to go anywhere near a hospital.

Okay, so why don't we see this behaviour more in other countries?

In my jurisdiction, the incentives are actually weighted towards pushing people to ambulances, as there is a €100 fee for self-referral to ED which is waived if you're transported, but while there are time wasters and frequent flyers, the service is actually less abused than US ambulances under EMTALA.

And overheid.nl is their government site for that reason.

Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk).

Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.

That's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.

Can you name one?

I wonder where you suggest researchers go that is both granting funding and not attaching similar or more stringent strings to the money?