Not Cheating Unless You Get Caught: Difference between revisions

** Japan was also building 8-inch gun turrets that didn't have ships to go with them, ostensibly as spare parts for their heavy cruisers. In actuality, those 15-gun light cruisers were always intended to have their 6-inchers replaced by 8-inchers as soon as Japan could get away with it. And those cruisers were ''also'' already weighing in at 12,500 tons rather than the official 10,000.

** Similarly, the Italians relied heavily on outright cheating to bypass the treaty, but turned out to just not be as good at it as the Japanese. Prior to [[World War II]], other nations' naval officials were astonished at how Italy managed to built cruisers that were a good 50% faster than comparable ships of other nations. It turned out, the way Italy managed that was to send the ships on their shakedown cruises without carrying such minor items as gun turrets, thus making them come in (barely) below the 10,000 ton limit. In actual combat conditions, the added weight from actually carrying weapons meant that Italy's ships, far from the speed demons they seemed to be pre-war, were actually ''slower'' than their British and American counterparts.

* Rules and laws in general are meaningless unless enforced. Breaking a rule, leaving no evidence that a rule was broken, and not getting caught in the act is as good as obeying that rule (unless, of course, the rule/law was put in place because of the long term concequences of breaking it. [[Too Dumb to Live|Or for your own safety.]]).

** Examples are Third World countries where laws are often similar to those in developed nations, but since law enforcement tends to be weak/corrupt only a minority of offenders is arrested, sometimes selectively.