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A comment on Banks, QE, and Money-Printing. Parent comment

Re:Banks, QE, and Money-Printing by atmosx on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @08:10AM (#24979280)
You mean intellectual growth then?

Because for everything else someone somewhere will need very tangible resources e.g. raw materials to build that phone you are using do X or Y.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Banks, QE, and Money-Printing by goatinaboat on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @09:00AM (#24979695)
Because for everything else someone somewhere will need very tangible resources e.g. raw materials to build that phone you are using do X or Y.

The price of a CPU is unrelated to the price of sand. CPUs are 10000x faster over the last couple of decades. So there’s little or no correlation required between raw materials consumption and growth.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Banks, QE, and Money-Printing by atmosx on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:11PM (#24984595)
A CPU is one of the few dozens of components that you need to get a tangible result out of a CPU. You need hard disks, screens, antennas, batteries and so on and so forth. So you need, copper, lithium and God knows what else. All these materials get transformed and many of them in the process get transformed to toxic material for humans.

Do you really believe that computing comes cheap and is unrelated to climate change? I find that line of thinking extremely naive.

Let me share a few links:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/30/cloud-co...

etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Banks, QE, and Money-Printing by goatinaboat on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:21PM (#24984693)
Do you really believe that computing comes cheap and is unrelated to climate change? I find that line of thinking extremely naive.

No I believe something more subtle than that: that the same raw materials that make a computer of speed X can be used to make a computer of speed 1000X with the input of better design. So we have economic growth there purely through intellect with no correlation to raw materials consumed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Banks, QE, and Money-Printing by atmosx on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @05:48PM (#24984933)
Sorry, I misunderstood. Now makes sense to me.
[ Parent | on HN ]