Hacker News Reader

Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.

Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.

View on HN

Each Iron Dome interception cost many times more than the cost of the rockets. This will make it cheaper for other poorer nations to afford and operate.

Are you factoring in the cost in human lives?

Human lives are pretty cheap all things considered.

I was bored so I did the math and you are not correct. Even if you don't care about the people themselves, a normal citizen in an industrialized society like Israel has about 40 years of working life. Let's assume for simplicity that some rockets would hit children but others would hit retired people, on average hitting people when they're halfway through their career and would have 20 years of productive work left.

According to Wikipedia [1], Israel has an average GDP per capita of about 60 USD per hour worked, which at 40 hours per week, 50 weeks worked per year over 20 years comes to about 40000 hours of work and ~2.4 million USD of GDP generated. At an income tax of about 30% [2], that means an income for the state of about 800k USD equivalent. If the person dies due to rocket attack, the state would miss out on that. Iron dome interceptors are quite cheap compared to that and the laser intercepts should be an order of magnitude cheaper still.

This doesn't even take into account the sunk costs that industrialized nations incur by every citizen having to attend school for about the first two decades of their lives, mostly funded by the state. That represents a tremendous investment into human capital that would be lost if you let your citizens get shot up in preventable rocket attacks.

So no, human lives are not actually cheap when viewed through the lens of a country, even when completely excluding morals and only looking at it financially. They are in fact quite valuable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Israel#Income_tax

Thats a nice calculation, but the reality is that billions of people do not meet those criteria.

Life in the developing world is very cheap.

Those billions of people do not live in Israel.

Both sides are right. Life is cheap in many developing nations. My hope is that this tech could help governments in those regions to protect their citizens even when their GDP returns are significantly lower.

One life can cost as much as you calculated. However, if the attack will kill an unproductive (elderly, disabled or other) person then it could be a net gain instead of loss for the economy.

Perhaps but you while you can maybe predict where the rocket will fall, you cannot reliably predict who it might kill if it hits. People move around and even if you can see it will hit a house for the elderly, you cannot see how many (grand)children are currently visiting. Also the opposite is true: a rocket hitting a child care facility would cause double the economic damage. That is why I used an average in my previous post.

In any case, elderly and disabled are not as useless to the economy as you might suppose. There are many disabled who are economically productive. One of the most capable colleagues I've ever had was a blind programmer. Grandparents often provide things like babysitter services that don't show up in formal GDP measurements but are very valuable nonetheless. Don't count out the contribution of people to society just because they don't have a normal job.

Lets send some over to Ukraine.

And Putin gives a nuke to Iranians then it's game over since Iranians don't care about MAD doctrine. Anyways the risk of the tech falling into Russia's hands is too high. Ukrainians have the smarts to develop it themselves now that it is proven as a viable tech.

Why would Russia give nukes to Iran? The Russians themselves would be harmed by an open nuclear exchange.

No, Putin's threats to Biden and Trump were more along the lines of, 'See the Houthis shooting shipping, imagine that capability spread to rebels and terrorists worldwide'

iran has a religious rule against making nukes, to the same extent that it has religious decrees calling for an end to israel.

iranians arent gonna nuke anyone without first toppling their religious government

Iran has an active nuclear weapons program which the Israelis keep sabotaging.

Isn't there some kind of uprising in Iran just now?

Everyone cares about the MAD doctrine, although some people with power may pretend they do not, while others may pretend they believe that those people with power don't care.

Unhinged take. What’s next? Giving NLAWS to Ukraine will result in Russia giving nukes to Cuba?

Disagree--most rockets are determined to fall into unimportant locations and are not engaged. Israel only shoots at the ones that are going to fall on something.

(Although, notably, Israel destroyed one that was going to fall on The Dome, the very location that Islam is supposedly trying to protect from the Jews.)

It resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered as it's stopping the Palestinians from being able to defend themselves. It's literally enabled genocide (along with US support).

Hopefully victims of fundamentalist groups like Israel will get this kind of technology too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com