Hetzner Connectivity Issues Due to Sanction Busting Activities
blog.cloud66.com
blog.cloud66.com
I do expect that sanctions make inroads toward their stated goals. Sure, less money means less weapons, probably, and the choice of suppliers becomes more limited, meaning costs are higher, and quality might suffer.
But Iranian sanctions have been in place for decades, with little to no changes in their government that the West would consider favorable. Cuban sanctions didn't do much "good". Russian sanctions haven't ended their war in Ukraine.
Sure, sanctions can serve to contain adversaries to some degree, and slow things down, but they don't seem to really do much positive. And their negative effect on goodwill and relations really sours longer-term diplomatic efforts. I do tend to feel like they have a net negative effect, most of the time.
I mean, the US weapons companies could probably profit (massively?) from the removal of sanctions, but then the US essentially becomes complicit in those activities.
Sanctions allow for passive involvement; making the message clear without breaking sovereign borders.
> how wildly ineffective they are most of the time
I'm not sure it's possible to judge the effectiveness since we can't see both scenarios at once in order to compare. I have the gut feel that, considering what I wrote above, there's a fair level of visceral effectiveness in the reduction of growth of quality of life in those places. There's also the effectiveness of the population of "country applying the sanctions" knowing their government are on the "right" side of a right vs wrong fight - that's a kind of soft benefit, but there's a slight warm-fuzzy that the patriots get that's internally politically useful, and therefore effective in a certain way.
Making something difficult to acquire certainly doesn't stop the things from being acquired, but it staunches the flow, and that most definitely has an effect (and, separately, can flush out those facilitating sanctions evasion).
As an aside, and maybe on your side of the argument, is the sanctions on Russian oil/gas, and how we're still not entirely sure who blew up that pipeline because there seem to be valid arguments for it being done by either side (the US or Russia).
Lastly and more to your point than mine, sanctions on (Nvidia/)China for the export of GPU's over a certain 'power' seem laughably based on fear-of-fading-into-economic-obscurity; the late realisation of having lost a fight they organised and then didn't show up for.
We cannot have a conflict with china because we are too dependent on them.
will you destroy the Russian chip sector by flooding them with cheap western components (that they can use to make weapons)?
Once that is the case, war becomes impossible, since war nowadays is essential a struggle of industrial production.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
They were severely understaffed, and essentially were forced to do a half-assed job because of a storm. Reading the article, it feels as if they didn't even know if the explosives were going to destroy 1,2,3 or all pipelines. They were just 6, with only 4 divers, one of which was a 30yo woman.
They didn't have a large enough time window, they didn't have enough funds, so they did something halfway.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585249
Original article: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/8...
My customer contacted Zscaler, and after a few days they unblocked it.