271–280 of 305 posts
If you are outsourcing over the entire globe things like this tend to happen. There is very little you can actually do to verify how the work you require really gets done, especially if the format is purely digital and there is no physical process you could monitor. Companies building things in China have been caught in that trap multiple times and somewhere down the line the work was allegedly done by highly mistrea…
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Classic 'two steps removed' syndrome. "I told X to get it done. What X did to get it done is not my fault/responsibility."
If it's possible to accidentally pay north Korea that should be the fault of whatever financial institution (which is held to far more KYC and AML than animators) caused that to happen, presuming it went through the financial system. HBO likely had no mens rea beyond cash flow out animation flow in. If I can't trust the bank to know more about the UBO of some rando after KYC what the hell are we doing this for?
A good outcome of this would be more restrictions on outsourcing to China since it’s been repeatedly shown that they will not maintain meaningful restrictions on North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc.:
> All three cities are known to have many North Korean-operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas.
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Let's game it out. You go there to work remotely. Food/labor/rest are super cheap. Everyone is starving to death there, to the point where meth is casually used by most people to stave off hunger pangs. Not to mention, if they decide they may just get some fun leverage out of a foreign hostage, they may just decide to claim you committed a crime and beat you half (or 3/4's) to death. This is just the news stories I c…
Do you really believe that everyone over there is starving?
The food supply is prioritized for the military. Food insecurity is frequent for civilians.
A pattern we have seen play out many times: NK makes a threat of some sort. The West and its allies try to talk them down. As part of negotiations they demand food. Sometimes they get it.
If a nation demanding food not to blow up its neighbor is not dealing with food insecurity in its society at large I will eat my hat.
The few times I was involved in some outsourcing the outsourcing company was contractually obliged to actually be the one doing the work. Not that folks might not cheat and get away with it, but there were financial implications and a somewhat close working relationship that meant that ... it would have been hard to fake. In this case does the original company just not care at all?
I would be surprised if the same wasn't the case here. Any half competent legal department would at least have it be part of their contract that the subcontractor can't outsource to parties with whom the contracting party is not allowed to cooperate. But how do you verify who does the work? Contracts are nice and all, but how do you make sure they are followed?
If you are outsourcing over the entire globe things like this tend to happen. There is very little you can actually do to verify how the work you require really gets done, especially if the format is purely digital and there is no physical process you could monitor. Companies building things in China have been caught in that trap multiple times and somewhere down the line the work was allegedly done by highly mistrea…
There’s very little you can do at minimal cost. They could have on-site auditors or collocated employees, but that cuts into the margins. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing: each poorly-monitored subcontractor is a security risk and likely hiding labor law or environmental violations so an outcome of less outsourcing to China would be a net-win.
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> How guilty you are is a function of how good a job the state department thinks you're doing trying to avoid sanctions violations. Is the standard for this codified in clear language anywhere, or is it merely based on the whims of some federal prosecutor/judge? If I make digital watches, and I buy coin cell batteries from a supplier who buys battery precursors from a supplier who buys LiCoO2 from a manufacturer who…
Feds have 99+% conviction rate and infinite money and time, meanwhile you sit in cage and deal with frozen accounts while trying to pay your attorney. They imprisoned weev for doing arithmetic on wget'ing a public website. Worst sin is angering the gods. I would imagine most the time theyll probably just ask nicely for you to stop, then bury you if you don't, but for political or convenient targets they seem fine goi…
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/01/goatse-security-trol...
They were too bumbling to actually do anything that serious but being too broke to run a stock scam isn’t exactly a great character testimonial, and all of that is well outside of professional ethical boundaries in the infosec community.
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Feds have 99+% conviction rate and infinite money and time, meanwhile you sit in cage and deal with frozen accounts while trying to pay your attorney. They imprisoned weev for doing arithmetic on wget'ing a public website. Worst sin is angering the gods. I would imagine most the time theyll probably just ask nicely for you to stop, then bury you if you don't, but for political or convenient targets they seem fine goi…
The hyperbole isn’t helping your argument here. Weev spent time brute-forcing collection of personal information which they discussed using for phishing, manipulating AT&T’s stock price, and potentially shorting the stock: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/01/goatse-security-trol... They were too bumbling to actually do anything that serious but being too broke to run a stock scam isn’t exactly a great character t…
Isn't North Korea working on something like cartoon animation, a good thing?
Maybe, but what if it’s basically slave labor and the money goes to the regime?
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It's also wild that it somehow makes financial sense to outsource a core input into your product. A company that makes animations outsourcing animation makes as much sense to me as a software company outsourcing engineering. Though we do have a plane company that outsources making planes, but that's going some sort of way right now...
Oooh I can try tackling a bit of this (I'll try not to ramble... ) But anyway studios have been outsourcing animation work to Asian countries for a while now. You might have seen some of the work product from one of the larger Japanese animation studios: TMS Enterainment who has worked on things like Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures in addition to shows like Tiny Toon Adventures a…
https://www.awn.com/animationworld/tom-jerry-produced-prague
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> The further away Yeah, I agree that this is definitely a weighting factor. But neither do I think it is good to return to isolationism. Globalism, despite its many flaws, has clearly contributed to the long peace. Encourages negotiations at the table rather than on the battlefield given that in the end, wars are primarily economically driven. Better to destroy economies than people, even if the former can indirectl…
What direct evidence exists to say that globalism clearly contribute to long peace? As far as I know, there is only proof of globalism failing to contribute to peace, where invading nations continue their invasions even after heavy sanctions.
But given your response I think there maybe confusion as to what is being referred to when discussing "Long Peace." It is not the absence of war, it is the absence of __direct__ war between __major powers__. This may not be clear since being born into long peace (as presumably you are While sanctions certainly aren't absolutely effective, that's not entirely the point either. The point is to make these actions more resource intensive, not impossible. Even our direct discussion about NK is illustrative of this, as they have to spend resources to be covert and it is clear that this sub-sub-...-contracting would be more economically fruitful were they not have to operate though these sidechannels and could operate directly. I mentioned in another comment about how society operates in unstable equilibria and how this is why there's a clear imbalance between red teams and blue teams, where the blue team has a much harder job. The same is true here too. Just because they can bypass sanctions also doesn't mean they are ineffective. It is important to not binarize things.
And to clarify, globalism isn't necessarily American dominance, but rather that countries are negotiating on the economic table. While described by Pax Americana there have also been Pax Britannica, Pax Romana, and others which saw similar trajectories but never before at the global scale as the world was not operating globally previously. In that sense it is often explained how this trend has happened through human history and correlates heavily with globalization.
If you're going to make an argument I'd suggest one about delay, as (in my opinion) one can more easily create a stronger argument about how the proposed explanations of long peace (note that there is not a singular one, and no serious person believes a singular factor is the cause, as should be apparent by the initial lines in my comment), rather displace the inevitable wars and death. That these result in growing tensions where the pressures accumulate and result in large scale and more horrible war. But we must also explain the much longer historical trend and it isn't unreasonable to believe that issues like these are more akin to a damped oscillator rather than a clear monotonic decay (which is measured to not be true but also confounded with the suggested argument).