Is this really a surprise to anyone? If there’s anything you can rely on Western capitalism for, it’s unbridled, greed and corruption. Of course they’re gonna sell their top secret technology to the enemy. They need their 875th yacht! In fact, it’s actually seen as a fatal weakness. If you don’t leverage your access for as much corrupt profiteering privilege as you possibly can in the time you have it.
The dismantling of democracy and the widespread economic vampirism towards the middle and lower class is simply the lubricant they use to masturbate themselves into whatever the hell they think they’re gonna get from all of this.
It’s also difficult to keep third parties from reselling parts to a sanctioned country.
Yeah there was a big hullabaloo after parts from some tiny Irish lawnmower engine manufacturer were found in a Russian drone. Government take the sanctions seriously here. Big investigation and it turned out to be exactly that.
Yeah, this is what’s primarily happening. A third-party imports the chips to a random country for [perfectly valid use], then resells them to Russia at a markup. It’s one of the reasons you see more and more sanctions packages. Some of those are sanctioning perpetrators of industrial level sanctions evasion as described here.
And while you can never stop it, driving up the price and reducing supply to Russia is helpful. Particularly when paired with lethal aid to Ukraine.
And modern high tech parts are actually pretty traceable. Everything has a serial number and a digital trail.
People compare sanctions to the War on (some) Drugs but really nobody grows custom CMOS chips in their basement
@floo @Sunshine You know, it strikes me as being extraordinarily naive in a sense to even try to impose sanctions on these things. It is impossible to regulate this kind of commerce in world trade any longer. People just do not pay attention to those restrictions, or if they do, it is only to devise methods by which to evade them. It doesn’t seem to be worth doing in many respects. Unless you could make them inoperable by specified entities or in certain applications, I don’t have an answer.
Wasn’t there a picture of a russian pilot flying with a garman or tomtom gps? I’m pretty sure this was taken during this war.
I believe it was an Mi 24 helicopter, IIRC. Very funny.
whenever anything bad happens anywhere there’s like a similar 67% chance it was manufactured in the US slave colonies
