Lao Mein's Shortform

Lao Mein

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Apparently a lot of H200s were stuck in Chinese customs for a while, spawning conspiracies about top-down directives.

People who don't regularly deal with Chinese customs may not realize that they are genuinely the single most corrupt, incompetent, and evil section of the Chinese government. Over the past 5 years, I have literally never heard about anything bribe-related that wasn't about Customs. They lost 4 seperate copies of my diploma during COVID. They will sometimes "lose" biological samples if not paid a bribe.

All a foreign adversary would need to do to delay hardware shipments to Chinese firms is to pay $500 over WeChat to some mid-level bureaucrat at Customs. Maybe that's what actually happened.

I've never actually bribed a Customs official, so I don't know the exact process. I think they can initiate extra inspections, which can't be cancelled, but can be sped up?

12mako yass9mo

Perhaps customs notices that both parties have deep pockets, and it's become a negotiation, further slowed by the fact that the negotiation has to happen entirely under the table.

5MondSemmel9mo

Maybe the idea is that if a spanner is thrown in the works, you can't necessarily have someone else unthrow that spanner?