For healthcare if you get an IT salary you can either move to private insurance, or buy additional insurance, or just pay a consultation yourself for a fee that US people won’t believe.

Open source is different in exactly that, no procurement.

Finance makes procurement annoying so people are not motivated to go through it.

A non coding topic, but recently I had difficulty articulating a summarized state of a complex project, so I spoke 2 min in the microphone and it gave me a pretty good list of accomplishments, todos and open points.

Some colleagues have found them useful for modernizing dependencies of micro services or to help getting a head start on unit test coverage for web apps. All kinds of grunt work that’s not really complex but just really moves quite some text.

I agree it’s not life changing, but a nice help when needed.

But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.

High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).