Hacker News Reader

Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

The question is whether paying contractors in Russia is ethically any better than paying illegal drugs.

Not that the contractors would all be bad people. But sanctions are there to force change. The easier it is to make sanctions ineffective the longer change will take.

View on HN

US imports of Russian enriched uranium, platina, cobalt... are now highest in history. Please leave empty moralising out of this.

I am paying for programming services. Traditional banking system is unreliable, so I use crypto. Nothing illegal or unethical!

If the unreliability of the traditional banking system is due to sanctions, then that would suggest that what you are doing is circumventing sanctions and thus quite likely illegal.

Lots of caveats as I don't have enough information, happy to be corrected though.

Not sure whether it is illegal. I certainly don't like the imperialistic US view that their sanctions are globally binding. Citizens and businesses from other countries should not be bound by US laws while not being on US ground.

But I think that these sanctions against Russia are ethically justified. So circumventing them is unethical for me, whether illegal or not.

Edit: Saying that these sanctions are ethically justified does not imply that they would be the most efficient or effective way to stop the war.

A currency exchange recently got a substantial fine for allowing users to circumvent sanctions.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/crypto-exchange-bit...

Unless they are dead set on specifically sending money to the 7 sanctioned institutions, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unstable about this. Source: me wiring modest amounts regularly to my own accounts there to pay local taxes and other things from my regular US bank accounts.

> Traditional banking system is unreliable

Chase lets you send wires online for 40 bucks still to all but half a dozen banks there. There might be cheaper ways to wire, too. Not sure what's so unreliable about that, worked all of this year so far.

My experience is opposite, but never tried Chase, will look thx.

need to make sure it's not one of the 7 sanctioned recepient banks. So e.g. Sber obviously won't work, but e.g. Raiffeisen works well for me.

I claim even driving a car is unethical. Russia earns more money from energy imports now than before the war. Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply is difficult to change and certainly not in an ethical way. So everone maintaining demand supports the war, whether they want or not.

An action does not get ethical because others are worse. It's good for your conscience noting others are worse, I don't deny that.

(And I did not say that I don't do the same. I recently had to take a plane. It was unethical to make Russia's war budget grow a tiny bit by doing so, but I thought staying at home would have had other morally unpleasant consequences.)

That’s why we’ve parked the car for all trips that are even theoretically possible with transit and keep the house at 17-18 C (about 64 Freedom Degrees), aside from the toddler’s room.

Sanctioning a government fighting a war is very different from sanctioning people who want to engage in the economy without violence.

I would argue the more the economic exchange to violence ratio is between two groups, the better it is for both groups (maybe not the leaders)

Except the government fighting a war is getting taxes from those people that just want to engage in the economy to fund its war effort. Sanctions are not perfect but they're a better tool than a shooting war.

Not only directly supporting the government by paying taxes, but also implicitly keeping the current dictator in power. I don't say everyone should be active opposition, it's dangerous in that morally rotten state with its criminal government.

But there is a tipping poing when a dictator and his elite falls. Nobody thought the Soviet Union or the GDR would fall in 1989/90. But they did, at some point the lying just did not work anymore. As long as average peaceful people can make a good living this is much less likely to happen.

The more corrupt a government is, the less people are likely to justify paying taxes to them.

Many Russians that get cryptocurrencies from other countries used it to buy plane tickets to fly away (or other means to get out of the country), and they are definately not want to pay taxes, but are contributing the brain drain that is likely happening right now.

So you close Putin's and a couple of other credit cards and let everyone else continue a normal life? Maybe fairer to some individuals (like those already acting in opposition), but certainly a completely ineffective sanction.

This is the first time in the history of humanity that the country leaders can be bypassed and money could be sent peer-to-peer between geographies. There is just no precedent to this (you can't send gold / USD bills on the borders, and when there are banks involved, the leaders could always stop it).

> This is the first time in the history of humanity that the country leaders can be bypassed and money could be sent peer-to-peer between geographies. There is just no precedent to this [...]

"Hawala as a legal concept came to be described as early as 1327, according to Schramm and Taube,[5][6] though the actual practice has existed since the 8th century [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

Looks cool, it's interesting that it's still a working system.

This might be a nice property in some cases.

However, the massive speculation and pollution caused by crypto make the overall balance look strongly negative to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com