I think these attempts will simply point out that math is a higher power than law. If something becomes possible, and becomes easy, there is nothing law can do to stop it.

Just look at the attempts to stop drugs in North West Europe. Huge sentences (so huge they are in fact never fully carried out), tens of dead police officers on a yearly basis, triple that in civilian victims and drugs are easier to get than ever before.

> tens of dead police officers on a yearly basis

What are you talking about? This does not happen in North West Europe.

The aim is to stop it from becoming easy.

The drug war would look very different if good cocaine was only produced in one country with extremely costly chemistry machines from one company.

If good cocaine was only produced in one country with extremely costly machines, a good-enough alternative would appear almost immediately. This has happened millions of times in the history of humanity, I refuse to believe that people haven't learned this lesson.

> I refuse to believe that people haven't learned this lesson

Oh, I believe they absolutely haven't, when not having learnt it buys them money and influence. As for the bulk of the population, they will accept whatever the corporate media tell them to.

And yet, it doesn't seem to be that easy with chips.

Yet China and Russia are still getting their chips, by smuggling if need be. So much for the power of blocking access.

China sure, to a degree (though they also make a lot of the phones and therefore just get shipped tons of chips), but wasn't Russia so short they stole washing machines for the chips? Or was that just war propaganda?

It was a meme. You can buy the kind of chips that go into washing machines completely legally and unrestricted from multiple vendors anywhere in the world, and transporting them into russia isn't an issue.

I also remember hearing American companies were doing the same thing with washing machines just to get the chips for higher value products in the chip shortage.

My recollection is that Russian troops/mercenaries/gunmen/whatever stole washing machines and dishwashers, but it was (presumably) just for regular theft/looting/pillagine purposes.

Separately, during the pandemic, various companies bought various products, including washing machines, to extract the chips within, because the chips were the supply chain bottleneck, so it made economic sense to purchase them at even 10x or 20x the "normal" price.

That's the first I've heard of it being done during the pandemic. I would also be surprised that this would be only x10-x20 the price, rather than x100.

For sure; I mean, mine (a fairly modern, drum washer/dryer thing) cost like $2000 and the extremely basic functionality suggests the chip/SoC should be $20 or less.

But, I assume any company doing that in any kind of serious volume has some strategy for monetizing the "washing machine with chip excised" (?).

Also, my bike is VanMoof and they just went bankrupt, and it seems like "having inventory of almost-finished hipster e-bikes — EXCEPT those 1 or 2 key parts" was part of their fatal situation.

So I can imagine scenarios where you buy washing machines to extract chips to lose less money than you would otherwise.

Yeap my recollection is that the Russian troops were stealing the white goods to ship home for their families.

They even stole tractors etc, https://www.itworldcanada.com/post/tractors-stolen-in-ukrain...

Washing machines etc could be on the sanctions list because they contain dual use chips, making them even more expensive to buy in Russia, but the troops are from regions where even the pre-war prices were prohitative.

That's how North Korea got nuclear weapons. It's fascinating that people don't understand this.

More because with chips it's still an exponential race. Others will be able to catch up once the race slows down enough.

People seem to have very small imaginations when it comes to thinking about how they might circumvent the restrictions they are proposing. I don't know of it's just wishful thinking, desperation, or what.

For example if OpenAI et al were reduced to using consumer gpus to run their training loads it would increase costs, but not by an order of magnitude. It would just be one more hurdle to overcome. And there are still so many applications of AI that would incentivize overcoming that hurdle.

As someone who works in medical research, I'm pretty sure it's possible to create a GM bacterial version of poppy's, just like we've got that for insulin, that would end the drug wars, by enabling hundreds of grams of the stuff to be produced in a single bottle that can be kept virtually anywhere (it has to be kept heated, and shaken from time to time).

Such a bottle's contents can be trivially duplicated and the whole process is essentially the same as the first steps in brewing beer.

Doing it for cocaine is simpler than doing it for insulin, which is in one university a second-year exercise. I don't think it'll be that long before this happens.

The drug wars are not because we can't produce enough drugs. I'm pretty sure we can grow enough poppies to kill all of humanity a few times over and at an insanely cheap price.

Carfentanil is a decent example of this. It's insanely potent and even a small amount smuggled in goes a long way.