No actually, it's not a "win" if everything is formally illegal, and everyone lives in fear that if they don't keep appeasing the faceless unaccountable bureaucrat, they will be prosecuted tomorrow.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
There's a distinction between 911 emergency ambulance service (respond to people calling 911) and interfacility transfer service (transfer stable patients between hospitals and medical facilities).
When you are an ordinary person calling 911, you can't meaningfully shop around in that emergency situation. The competition that exists is between the possible organizations you local government could contract to run the system. The safety regulations and medical standards they set are part of them choosing what they feel is the best "deal" for their population. (In some places, all 911 calls are run by public fire departments; in others, the government contracts with private companies.)
At the IFT level, again it's not generally possible for patients to choose their service, because (as explained in the article) ambulance services inherently need extensive infrastructure with large fixed costs at every location they serve. You're not going to fit 20 ambulances from 20 competing companies in one hospital's ambulance bay, and those 20 competitors aren't going to be able to afford to pay employees to sit around for hours at that hospital on the off chance that maybe today patients will pick them and not the other guy. The costs for the ambulance company are not primarily per-call, most of the expense is to stand ready for a call whether it happens or not. Instead, competition generally happens when the hospital chooses which ambulance service(s) to contract with.
If you are using plain text and don't have access to HTML or CSS markup, you can follow the RTL character with U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK to achieve the same effect. And even if you do have access to those things, using U+200E ensures that operations that strip markup (like copy-paste) don't break your text.
Again, if you are busy dying, you (or, more likely, the bystander who calls EMS on your behalf) do not have time to check how much the bill will be, or who has the best response time to your location at that moment, or the best equipment, or the best training.
I think the current leadership in Tehran is pragmatic enough to want to avoid that. Of course, the longer this drags on, the more likely they are to be replaced by hard-liners
> In most languages (Java, Go, C#, Rust, Zig, OCaml, etc.) the process is reversed: you take a profiler to try and find allocations (usually in loops that happen millions of times). Then you go and eliminate or minimize the allocations.
This isn't fully correct. In Zig, the common pattern is that any function which allocates accepts an explicit allocator parameter; if you don't pass one explicitly, you don't get any heap allocations.
Rust doesn't make things quite that visible. But, if you restrict yourself to the standard library and crates designed with this in mind, allocations are usually not too hard to find. And you can always use `#![no_std]` without `alloc` if you want to be sure. Neither language is ever going to insert a heap allocation if it's not somewhere in the source.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."