| Wow, I have to say I strongly disagree with every single thing you said. Video games are a small niche in the universe of technology products. To use them as a justification for classifying all tech as luxury seems, well, extremely stupid and misguided. I’m surprised you don’t know, but the vast majority of businesses are small businesses with low profits, to act like they have plenty of extra money to spend on heavily taxed goods is ignorant at best. Tech is a productivity multiplier for many businesses, this is not really an arguable point as it is well studied. By the way, no one is forced to buy tech enabled products (despite the implication in your “crazy show”). People buy tech enabled products over others because they solve their problems better. And tech products are very low on the list of environmental issues in the world. If the tax was actually structured to promote eco friendly behavior in these countries it’d look wildly different. You seem to have an axe to grind here but nothing you claim really holds up to a bit of critical thinking. Not sure why an extreme tech pessimist is on HN anyways :) |
Sure it's a niche but not a small one. Just like cryptocurrency mining, it certainly drives shortages and high prices. My point is that only such specific applications require brand new hardware: for other usecases the second-hand market (which is dominant in the Global South due to tons of containers shipped full of 2nd-hand equipment leaving Global North shores) is more than enough. So in that sense it makes sense to tax the new hardware.
Even without considering the actual applications, taxing new products is a good incentive to keep existing hardware running, which is much better for the environment (most pollution and energy used in the lifecycle of IT is in production).
> By the way, no one is forced to buy tech enabled products
That's definitely not true. Most people who want a car/truck/tractor want a reliable mechanical device, not a random piece of electronic junk with literally hundreds of microcontrollers who can all fail in mysterious ways and are hard to repair (if possible at all). The movement for the right to repair, which is strong amongst agriculture workers, would explain it better than me.
Also, there's plenty of situations where people are forced into owning IT devices. In raising livestock at least here in France, there's mandatory regulations for chipping all animals and equipping your farm with high-tech. Many public services will not talk to you anymore unless you have an email and cell phone to give them. There's probably plenty of other examples from specific fields: i recall friends working in libraries and hospitals mentioning how their IT tools (imposed on them) are driving them crazy and degrading their quality of work.
> And tech products are very low on the list of environmental issues in the world.
That's definitely not true. Please take a look at the stats before making such a claim. If only by CO2 emissions, IT is a great contributor. If you add industrial pollution, IT is one of the worst industries you can think of due to requiring complex multinational supply chains for mining, refining, assembling hundreds of different materials, and failing to recycle billions of devices.
> Not sure why an extreme tech pessimist is on HN anyways :)
Oh i'm not a pessimist. I just think we should not obscure the dark side in what we do. I hope IT can become a field of human emancipation again (helping people accomplish tasks, instead of controlling them) and we can build 100%-recyclable computers as a priority (instead of aiming for more DPI or more GHz). I'm just really sad about the current state of our trade and how computing is used to both destroy the planet and ruin many people's lives :)