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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge difference between smugglers and spies though. Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else, you definitely don’t need a handler in zhongnanhai.

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> Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else

What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.

When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.

So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.

This is a hypothetical anyways.

The core competency of smugglers is getting the goods delivered. Some smugglers are motivated beyond profit or avoiding jail.

Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling especially the smuggling of drugs to certain Global South nation states where the capital acquired from those operations end up funding pro-American paramilitaries who topple their local government. That would be totally bananas for any kind of republic.

Contra-ry to common conspiracy theories, I'm certain any government-led self-investigation into culpability in this vein was all very aboveboard and well-substantiated, and such incidents never ever happened.

> Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling

North Korea has entered the chat ...

They are talking about the USA

USA, which is famous for engaging in several smuggling operations, like the Iran-Contra affair or the many cases when CIA was allegedly involved in drug trafficking.

I thought including 'bananas [...] republic' and 'Contra-ry' would be obvious enough of hints that I was being deeply sarcastic but alas

Sarcasm is a subtle art, my friend, and sometimes the audience misses the point. I did too, and re-read your comment and now see where you were going. <soft golf clap....>

The Chinese government definitely has better sticks to threaten Chinese nationals with than ratting them out to the US.

She is a CEO in Singapore, she avoids going to jail by obeying Singaporean law. I don’t know how American law would even apply to her, they definitely apply to Jensen though.

American law, procedures and formalities or not, can potentially apply to anyone.

Nothing is beyond our reach.

Iran appears to be.

  19 April 1939 - 28 February 2026

How are those Strait of Hormuz transit costs?

How much can keeping multiple carrier strike groups in the water cost?

Not only does it cost more in dollars than some countries have a GDP, multiply those costs by 4x or 8x or 10x because they are spent inefficiently.

Money printer go brrrr, and no matter how much, it will never bring him back to life.

And by dictionary definition once someone has been established as a smuggler, there’s technically no way they can also be labelled as spies, or engaging in espionage. Also, spies never smuggle, never. Spy’s honour! Yeah, that makes total sense.

Smugglers can be spies actually, it’s not an uncommon trope. Just not all smugglers are spies. Or were you just trying to setup some sort of straw man to knock down?

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