| ▲ | codedokode 3 days ago |
| Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything. Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident. |
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| ▲ | littlecranky67 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs. |
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| ▲ | rchaud 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The illegality of something and the enforcement of that illegality can be mutually exclusive. Iran had sanctions placed on them after the 1979 revolution, but the US funneled arms to them anyway to raise money to ovethrow the Nicaraguan government [0]. Cocaine is illegal but the CIA trafficked it anyway to again raise money to topple the Sandinistas [1]. [0] https://www.history.com/articles/iran-contra-affair#Oliver-N... [1] https://www.cnn.com/US/9811/03/cia.drugs/ | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it. | | |
| ▲ | cj 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t think the root problem is political corruption or donors. If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips. The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite. > should we investigate? Nah, our donors […] The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company. The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt. Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later. | |
| ▲ | dlisboa 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else. | | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You can investigate buyers who have anomalous purchase patterns for sanction violations and convict them. DEA commonly looks at narcotic purchases by legal buyers for indications they might be funneling it to illegal market and investigates. NVidia could report "Hey, we are seeing massive purchases from entities we didn't expect so you might want to look into that" |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | codedokode 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe criminal cartels should switch to GPU trafficking? | | |
| ▲ | sofixa 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Mexican cartels were branching out into the avocado trade, so why not. | | |
| ▲ | zipy124 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Cartels, mafias and other criminal organisations have been involved in other industries for many generations now. Money laundering requires legitimate businesses and if that business happens to turn a profit. That's even better. Just look at the construction industry in new York or Italy many decades ago. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | bad_haircut72 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | By now most Mafias of the world are probably trying to train their own models |
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| ▲ | nyolfen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | great thinking, that must be why the ccp doesn't care about this policy |
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| ▲ | mcdow 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM). Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be. |
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| ▲ | whimsicalism 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A few things: In tourist areas they will feel comfortable talking about the protests/reprisal because they get inundated by American tourists wanting to ask them about it. "It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for" -> Right, Tiananmen square has no stigma at all, but that is different from the 1989 incident. If you post about the 1989 incident on Weibo, it will absolutely get removed and you might get the local police visiting you -- depending on how much time they have on their hands and how incendiary your post was. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > many people speak negatively of the CCP Probably true. Right up to the point where they attract a little too much attention, or annoy the wrong party official. Then all that they said becomes evidence of their crimes. |
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| ▲ | kspacewalk2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that. |
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| ▲ | codedokode 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Increased costs might be a factor in a competing commercial market, but for military purposes, you buy the components no matter the price or search for an alternative (China is now making lot of components - for example, resistors, transistors, logic chips - I have several 74HC chips of Chinese origin, and they are very cheap). Also, there are thousands ships and no legal basis for "policing" them in open sea. |
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| ▲ | amarant 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Imagine the correct answer being "what incident?" |
