> It did happened before, but not on this scale and speed.

Check out Meltwater Pulses 1a and 1b.

Trump pointed out that most countries didn't meet their obligations, and most of those countries ignored him. It was Putin who succeeded in getting these countries to up their budgets.

In 2014 only 3 nato members met the 2% target (USA, UK, Greece):
https://www.nato.int/content/d...

Any DNS service can return any IP address for a lookup, this is not an AWS specific feature.

Some services are managed through us-east-1 especially when the service itself is global, things like route53 and cloudfront.

This story is specifically about the UK, and their only open land border is between north and south Ireland, so it would be relatively easy for the two governments to work something out.
The only other routes to take vehicles in/out of the UK are by (or under) sea and include passport control checkpoints, so they know exactly what vehicles are transiting and it wouldnt be a huge effort to record mileage as vehicles enter or exit.

It's only for EVs because regular ICE vehicles already pay taxes on the fuel, whereas electricity is not taxed.

Electricity has too many other uses to make a tax on it practical, whereas gasoline and diesel are generally only used for transportation with very occasional lawnmower/generator use.

Taxing out of state vehicles is difficult, but if the other states have a similar system then it would balance out as those vehicles would still be paying the tax in their home state even for miles driven in another state, and vehicles would be going in both directions unless the tax rates are radically different.

The fuel tax system also addressed this quite conveniently as your driving in another state would be limited by the capacity of your fuel tank to make it there and back before you'd have to fill up in the state you were driving in and thus pay their local taxes.

Require domestic supplies to be at cost, only allow making a profit on foreign sales. Also require that domestic be prioritised so they have to supply the local military first before chasing profits.

Will the official contractors even be willing to carry out repairs in a warzone where they could come under attack at any moment? Probably not...

Absolutely, this could well end up being a life and death situation on the battlefield.

Look at the ad hoc repairs and mode both ukraine and russia are doing on a daily basis. A good proportion of the weapons in use on both sides were manufactured by the other side during soviet times so it's not like they can count on the manufacturer for support.

Any military should be demanding full specifications and manuals for any equipment they purchase.

The same untrained office worker can open a web interface in the same way...
With excel that untrained office worker can mess with the calculations and get invalid results, with a well designed web interface they cannot.

You don't want the untrained workers actually setting up the system, you want someone competent and experienced doing that to ensure that the calculations are accurate.

Typically excel is all the users are given and all they know, so they bodge things together with the available tools.
Most people never consider that there are better tools for what they're trying to do, nor do they have any experience of such tools.
If someone does, and asks for proper tooling they usually get pushback.

Cars already have odometers which record and show mileage, they already have annual inspections where the value from the odometer is checked and recorded and there are already legal penalties for tampering with the odometer. It would be trivial to pull that data out of the existing database and levy taxes on the vehicle owner based on that.

You don't need a GPS, cars already record how many miles they travel.

If you have a "diverse" group than an inherent part of diversity is that some of the group will disagree with diversity and even be hostile to the greater good of the group.
There are many who perceive countries that welcome immigrants to be gullible idiots that they can take advantage of, and will take advantage while it's beneficial to them and then quickly abandon that country if it's no longer to their advantage.

So you can only benefit from limited diversity, the members of the group must still have common goals and values otherwise they'll be detrimental to the group as a whole.

But it feels proudly like an American way of doing business :'(