alt Hacker News> It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.
Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?
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Hmm, the way I read “bandit” here was to be implying illegality not necessarily immorality.
It's the moral imperative of every country to optimize for its citizens' economic prospects.
The CIA (and every other intelligence org.) is literally a weapon designed to operate in the grey area to fit the mandate of the policy makers and elected leadership. Many of the things they do are questionable or worse. In the case of the DoD, they do these things at the behest of democratically elected leadership.
Of course US and China will operate in their own best interests. Of course they will both play chess, both name call, both sanction and impede. When it's not a hot war, it is still a never-ending battle for each country's total economic, soft, and hard power market share.
This is every country.
It's geopolitics.
Smuggling or buying from a smuggler is on the "banditry" side whether you think it's moral or not.
Yes. The bans are export controls. They are not banned in china. They are just banned from export in the US. Using them in china is legal in china.