I like the Tom Clancy vibes of this. There’s a Sum of All Fears in there somewhere.
On a more serious note this reminds me of the crime occurring in Canada. They have a car theft pipeline in place with paperwork at the MOT level. The cars end up being shipped to Africa in less time than you might think - this is one outcome, but there are others. Nobody really “cares” enough even though one of the mayors stated everyone they know in their neighborhood has had their car stolen.
The war was already lost, at home and abroad.
Canada also recommended to leave residential doors unlocked with the car keys in plain sight to reduce the chances of property damage and personal harm when the thieves come for your car, so Canada can get stuffed.
I thought this was made up nonsense, but for those who are thinking the same thing as me, a Toronto police officer really recommended doing exactly this [0].
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/10359055/leave-car-keys-the-front...
It's good advice. Losing a car is much less worse than personal injury or worse. Everybody's a toughguy until a methhead who can't feel pain stabs you 15 times. Should the police crack down? Sure, but they aren't magicians, crime isn't gonna magically dissolve tomorrow. In the mean time, keep yourself safe by not inviting harm.
This attitude is exactly the problem. It only takes a small fraction of people to fight the meth head for the meth head to choose a different crime.
It's like the "we don't pay ransoms" logic only the math is infinitely more favorable to victims.
Yeah and you can probably get insurance against theft right?
If the culture was "if a methhead tries to stab you, you can and should use any force necessary to stop them" that might be different
But no, the culture in Canada is "Check your privilege and let the poor methhead stab you"
No joke, people in Canada genuinely do not think they can or should use force to protect themselves from dangerous threats
I'm living in a third-world country and I think this is madness. It's unimaginable here, to be afraid of "methheads" so much and giving up on your own property. I never saw "methhead" in my life, but I sure would stab anyone who would attempt steal my car 50 times myself. Stop being a victim. Get your life in control. Why do you even live if you don't want to protect yourself, your property and your woman. You're not free man.
Yeah Canadian government is crazy. They made drugs legal, and they also let criminals go after they get caught.
Recently a man was shot and killed in a home invasion defending his family (also in Ontario). The police first claimed it was a targeted killing (implying the man was a gang member), then when that turned out false, the police said you should comply with home invaders instead of resisting...
https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-top-cop-wa...
So.. I live in Ontario. And I actually agree with that statement. Why would you resist and risk your life instead of just complying? Material things aren't worth actually getting hurt over.
The implication that "the police say this because they can't stop the crime" is IMO not the right take-away. The correct take-away is that a certain level of crime is unavoidable in practice, and you should prioritize your life over your property.
Armed intruders can demand something one minute and something else the next. They may be mentally deranged, they may be sexually devious, there's a good chance they don't have a lot of moral limitations. The issue is not material things. That there's an optimal approach to dealing with them, when you're unarmed, is just not true. You must do what seems best given the situation.
The entire point is that in a home invasion, you have no guarantee the criminal is only interested in your property. If someone deliberately busts into an occupied house, there is a nonzero chance they are also interested in killing or assaulting (sexually or otherwise) the occupants.
Are you able to unpack that more? Are people not proud of themselves and their culture? Do they not want to prioritize the safety of themselves and their possessions?
Just use public transit, it's good for environment
Maybe people would if transit stations weren't de-facto homeless shelters and if it were safer to do so...
Yah I wouldn't recommend public transport in Toronto to anyone lol.
Yeah one time there was maintenance in the subway and they ran substitute buses, and it was also a super rainy day, and I got into the bus, sat down, looked to my right and there was a guy sleeping on the back seat, but you couldn't see him unless you were actually up close, so people kept coming up trying to sit, but then they saw (and smelled) the guy sleeping there and made funny faces lol.
This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...
I don't know, as European resident it's serious and working solution.
When the government can't succeed in making public transit appealing, I guess they fall back on letting thieves steal everybody's cars so people have no other choice, Lmao.
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Thieves are good for the economy. They force consumers to consume more.
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
The only other options are psychological or kinetic.
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.
It’s important to follow due process. We need more checks and balances, not fewer. Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
We need to follow the process. And the process should be extensive. This is a problem of not enough process. Ideally, we could have more.
> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.
Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)
Haha, I was explaining how it should be. Not how it is.
Due process needs to be a lot faster and it could be. Things which warrant immediate action are delayed by months, years, or decades by wildly inefficient and slow processes that have nothing to do with someone's right to fair judgement.
We shouldn’t rush to judgment. A few years sounds like a good period of time for things that could affect someone’s life. One could argue it should take a century or more to convict people of such crimes. How can we be sure it’s not politically motivated? Only way is to ensure that we wait for political change and see if the crime is still to be prosecuted.
"Justice delayed is justice denied".
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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."
NRK is very aggressive on a/b testing headlines - presumably optimizing for click through rates.
Almost invariably if I read a story in the morning - the title will be different after noon.
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.
That's why you usually need a permit to sell insurance.
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.
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The second sentence of the article answers the fake insurance bit; "did not have permission to sell insurance but did it anyway".
If you click the (helpfully underlined) first use of "shadow fleet" in the article it defines it for you. (Or ask Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_fleet)
I feel like TFA answers the fake insurance question pretty well. The company sold "insurance" which was not actually insurance. They were providing a cover for ships selling from a sanctioned country. Those ships were required to have insurance, and no legitimate business would insure them.
> What is “fake insurance?”
Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?
You can literally press on it in the article and a definition pops up.
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Anything not validated by NATO/ USA is fake, rest of the world should adhere to their terms and definitions as the high seas are owned by them
Definitely no. The "fake" here is about certainty that no insurance payout would occur in case of issue, meaning for example an oil tanker accidently dumping tons of black goo onto some english seaside resort, no compensation would come out of anywhere.
How reliable is liability insurance for that sort of thing, generally speaking?
Quite. The real insurers are large, old, and have long made a name for themselves in this regard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London
They were not truly insured.