Reminds me of that scene from the movie "Lord of War" where they re-paint quickly over the original name of the ship and put a new flag on the ship in 10 minutes.

Western nations (US, EU, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, etc) have a lot of differences especially as of late, but it's important to step back and remember that there's too much in common to give up, particularly with respect to rule of law, human rights, value of individual human life, and democracy.

China is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, where cheating is the way of life for regular people as well as the government. If you don't trick somebody you are stupid. Winners are those who outmaneuver the "rules". Bringing the old glory to Han race (not nation) is core operating principle for the Party. I'm saying this as somebody who lived in China as well as EU and the US.

IMO it is important to step back and think critically about the fundamental liberal values currently under assault, with plenty of authoritarian propaganda at work. Trump will be gone relatively soon, and it's important to looks past the superficial differences he's highlighting, and to try and maintain alliance around rule of law and other liberal principles that brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to billions of people. We already had plenty of authoritarian master race driven powerful states in the past and it always ends the same way.

This has so many layers mental gymnastics and fiction applied it's hard to know where to start.

The US overthrows the Iranian democratically elected government to maintain BP's regional dominance because the government threatened to use their country's natural resources' profits to benefit its people. Installs puppet and helps the puppet plan to build 23 nuclear reactors (and the secret police Savak among other things). Puppet gets overthrown by the people and now Iran has 'nuclear ambitions'. And that's after getting the other puppet Saddam to go to war with Iran and then getting rid of the other puppet because now he's US armed like ISIS. And now Iran has a sanction and the sanction is used against other geopolitical rivals.

This is a pyramid scheme of imperialism laid upon stacks and stacks of dead bodies but China cheats because they changed the name of a ship?

>But both the Latin Venture and the Pacific Bravo transmitted the same unique identification number, IMO9206035

You'd think that they'd bother to change that along with the name...

If it’s a number issued by the International Maritime Organization for life, how would you do that? You can’t make up a number, and if you use a number used by another ship you’d have to make sure that your ship matches exactly the ship registered under that number so that you can fool anyone checking - and even then, that’d probably buy you a short amount of time but you’d still get caught.

How do you get a number assigned in the first place? I'd assume you'd have a shipwright just go through that process for a hypothetical ship they have "under construction" exactly matching your ship, then never build that ship, but instead assign its number to your ship.

IMO is assigned to the hull and can't be changed.

MMSI (a different identifier) can be changed when the vessel is sold or re-flagged

For someone who hates China conversations, it's strange that China is all you comment about.