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Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

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Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#71

Post by xienze »

onpointed wrote: post #59
dmix wrote: post #32

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 o…

Or encourage buying from alternative hydrocarbon suppliers, like Canada, Australia and the U.S.

Russia is the third largest oil producing country, this plan was never going to work because oil is a fungible resource. Sure you can stop buying from Russia and buy from someone else, but that just kicks off a game of musical chairs where everyone is backfilling from someone else and eventually _someone_ is buying from Russia to make everything whole. If Russia was some insignificant player the world could have frozen them out entirely but they simply produce too much oil for the world to absorb the loss of all of it.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#72

Post by mindslight »

jltsiren wrote: post #68
mindslight wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine. (I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)

Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough. Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was. Now it's mostly Hungary and Slovakia buying Russian energy, as well as some LNG imports. Those two countries are not too keen on sanctioning Russia, especially in ways that would hurt their economy. Any attempts to impose tariffs on energy imp…

> Europe kept buying Russian oil and gas, because other sources could not come online quickly enough

They did do sanctions, so I don't know what you're trying to argue.

> Tariffs would have only made energy even more expensive than it already was.

Not as expensive as outright sanctions, of course.

As I said - sanctions are discrete (yes or no), whereas tariffs are a continuous knob.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#73

Post by SpicyUme »

mandevil wrote: post #66
dmix wrote: post #32

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 o…

25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…

Yeah, it seems hard to say military intervention is preferable to increased accounting and recordkeeping requirements. Or maybe sheltered is a better way to put. Which is a good thing! For most people alive on Earth right now haven't had to deal with wars of territorial expansion. Yes wars exist, and yes territorial expansion by military might conitnues, and military occupations from the US certainly don't help. But overall we're in a point of relative stability.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#74

Post by andix »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #50
andix wrote: post #29

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.

Only because punishment isn't harsh and quick enough for the initial offenders. The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity. With all the broadband communications and high definition video and audio, it should have been trivial to prove the fraud and disincentivize committing it by sufficiently punishing it.

Punishment often doesn't matter. Until someone notices, it's finished already for a long time. People are disposable, and some just take the risk to go to prison for a lot of money. It's often possible to disappear into another country, before the authorities start to figure out what's happening.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#75

Post by username332211 »

mandevil wrote: post #66
dmix wrote: post #32

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 o…

25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…

The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.

I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?

Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.

Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#76

Post by mandevil »

NoahZuniga wrote: post #31
andix wrote: post #29

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.

That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.

Which Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult.

Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#77

Post by [deleted] »

mandevil wrote: post #66
dmix wrote: post #32

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 o…

25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…

[deleted]

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#79

Post by csomar »

mandevil wrote: post #76
NoahZuniga wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.

Which Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult. Getting ports around the worl…

We have the tech to solve most of this (digital signatures, digitally signed public DBs -aka Blockchain) but the state bureaucracy apparatus can't figure that out for various reasons.

Re: Ships are sailing with fake insurance from the Norwegian Ro Marine

#80

Post by notmyjob »

mandevil wrote: post #66
dmix wrote: post #32

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 o…

25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like. He recently revisited that in FP magazine ( https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/10/sanctions-paradox-russi... ) arguing for…

The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?
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