HN Reader

I used to believe strongly in financial sanctions over war but I'm becoming more skeptical. Markets and industry are a very hard thing to constrain at a global scale. To do it effectively you basically encourage a giant financial surveillance state and need put huge pressure on partner countries - who often don't even implement it meaningfully. You make business harder for everyone and create lucrative black market organize crime business.

Military action is appearing more preferable to that.

For example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxk454kxz8o

> In the wake of the February 2022 invasion, Ukraine's allies imposed sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. The US and UK banned Russian oil and gas, while the EU banned Russian seaborne crude imports, but not gas.

> Despite this, by 29 May, Russia had made more than €883bn ($973bn; £740bn) in revenue from fossil fuel exports since the start of the full-scale invasion, including €228bn from the sanctioning countries, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

> The lion's share of that amount, €209bn, came from EU member states.

Meaning 3 years into the war Europe is still sending more $$ to Russia for gas than they send Ukraine in aid

I'm doubly baffled by this story.

First, when I buy mandatory car insurance, police can check its validity in seconds. I'd expect international shipping to be at least at that level of strictness.

Second, how insurance can help avoid sanctions? The enforcement should look at the goods source and destination, not on who insured them, right?

This is how we will lose this war. 'Everyone knows it is fake', probably the authorities too. But dealing with it in modern bureaucracy will take years, by which time another fake insurer is up and running.

The URL and HTML title element have the current HN title, "Over 100 ships have sailed with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine." But FWIW, the Open Graph title meta element is "NRK reveals: Russian used Norwegian company to fool the West."

"All ships must have insurance". Says fucking who?

It’s crazy how modern and complex company structures became impossible to govern.

There are so many cases in which criminals just open a ton of new companies, to overload the authorities. Until the authorities shut something down, they moved on three times already.

For some context, I strongly encourage you to read "90% of everything" by Rose George. It is a brilliant expose of the shipping industry, and it's a really bad industry. Flags of convenience, forcing people to work on ships, not paying them, not even really caring if they fall overboard. The international shipping industry is damn near a hate crime.