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Fair points. Although if computers become more expensive the overall result is everyone becomes poorer. Also, the energy transition towards decarbonization ent

Fair points. Although if computers become more expensive the overall result is everyone becomes poorer. Also, the energy transition towards decarbonization entails smart grids and intense use of computers for design, deployment and operation of a more diverse fleet of energy generating and storage assets. People with the right skills might be better off, that's true.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>if computers become more expensive the overall result is everyone becomes poorer How so? This might have been the case in the '90's and '00's when computers were still in adoption for home users, but nowadays, almost everyone already has a usable PC and a smartphone, even in developing nations in Africa. Them being more expensive will mean only businesses and rich kids will get to play with the latest shiny, while Average Joes will have to stick to older tech and focus on sustainability and repairability instead of upgrading every 2-3 years. I could be wrong, but I see this generating more HW repair jobs for technicians in every community like TV repair shops in the old days, and even more SW jobs needed to improve SW to run on older HW in order to target more consumers. I don't see how this makes everyone poorer, other than execs at companies making a living selling a new HW widget with 2% improvement every year while abandoning SW support for last year's widget to force everyone to throw their old widget away, cough, Quallcomm, cough.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Or people have to get by with old hardware running no longer supported or patched software.
- namaria 3y ago
  If things are more expensive, people can have less things and are thus worse off. This is circular, poor = less able to acquire = things are relatively more expensive.