Shit gets EXPENSIVE out this way for electronics. I mean I can get my groceries extremely cheap and rent hasn't ever been more than 200$/mo, but electronics are all manufactured out of Asia and the supply lines and/or taxes on specifically that just add all this extra cost that's hard to justify in certain cases. We're talking like 50%+ of the cost you'll find in the USA.

I learned programming specifically because my shitty computer from 1999 wasn't good enough to waste all my time playing world of warcraft like my peers, who were too busy playing video games in high school and being well-off to get into programming or getting their dicks sucked. Now they ask me how to get girls or what they need to do to learn programming. It's extremely different here.

If you live in more humid areas you're forced to replace your electronics a lot faster just because they rust like that. There's computers in plywood boxes with an incandescent lightbulb in there just to prevent the humidity from wrecking it kind of level.

As for the import taxes, i would guess because electronics are a luxury commodity in many places they are taxed as such. When not used as a luxury good for rich kids to play video games, they're used by industry which makes a lot of money so taxing them makes sense.

Remember many places around the world still don't have reliable electricity (if any at all) or internet infrastructure. Some regions don't even want it as they'd rather preserve their eco-friendly way of life than contribute to the crazy show we've been offering them: first invent new problems (eg. electronics in cars or in agriculture) then sell solutions that will create more problems (eg. mining/refining/factory/landfill pollution).

Most times low-tech is the best answer, and i personally would argue the world and the environment would be much better off if IT/electronics industry were highly regulated and taxed, and had strong obligations to make everything 100% recyclable and actually recycled (also: interoperable, repairable, etc).

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 :)

The prices for state of the art graphics cards which are only required for mining or gaming are high, but these products actually -subsidize- or lower prices of more generally useful, simpler tech. Please look into the price history of RAM, simple graphics cards (now builtin to many CPUs, which is very economical!) or any other basic computing components.

> Most people who want a car/truck/tractor want a reliable mechanical device

Please find me any source or other evidence that tractors or cars have gotten any less reliable. All studies done indicate the exact opposite of what you are saying. This sounds like a made-up narrative that you happen to want to be true. See: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/cars-reliability-higher-jd-powe...

And I think you are losing track of the original claims you were making about taxes here. For example:

Do the countries in question actually only tax new products, or ALL tech products?

Tech may be a polluter, but again, your claim was that this is what drives the tax policy. Tell me, do these countries tax oil by the same or a greater amount? It's obviously true that environmental concerns _do not_ drive these tax policies.

Are you going to provide an example of tech hardware being used to "control" people? Would love to see some evidence of this outrageous claim.

And I'm really begging you, when you are about to advocate for very high taxes in this area, to consider the effect it has on small businesses.

My understanding from friends who work in that industry is that the mechanical parts have gotten more reliable, but cars have gotten less reliable overall due to relying on many micro-controllers and their firmware. I don't find source right now for statistics but i remember reading electronics were ~30% of the price of a new car, and represented the reason for >50% of recalls in the past years in the USA. (I will update with a link when i find the source again)

As for tractors, it's a well-known problem that's been widely discussed on HN regarding John Deere in particular. There's a growing right to repair movement due to the fact manufacturers intentionally make the tractors harder to repair with electronics: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farm...

> Do the countries in question actually only tax new products, or ALL tech products?

Fair question, it would require to take a look at a specific example. In general, i assume taxes mostly apply to new products as the second hand market tends to be undeclared hand-to-hand transactions. For example in France the copyright mafia has imposed private copy "taxes" (technically not a tax, we call it a "redevance" in french) on every second-hand device, but only second-hand shops (eg. backmarket) apply it and >90% of second-hand transactions on markets and platforms like leboncoin are totally unaffected.

> Tell me, do these countries tax oil by the same or a greater amount? It's obviously true that environmental concerns _do not_ drive these tax policies.

I'm not saying that's the reason these taxes exist; i'm saying that's a compelling reason to consider such taxes. As you may know, producing electronics requires tons of coal/oil along the whole industrial process. Also, oil is highly taxed in many countries (including in France where spiking taxes have birthed the gilets jaunes insurrection).

> Are you going to provide an example of tech hardware being used to "control" people?

The NSA/Palantir infrastructure (among others) come to mind. The whole CCTV, facial recognition, and marketing/analytics industry come to mind. Also, bossware solutions whether on your own laptop or dictating work like in Amazon centers. When a facial recognition algorithm gets you to jail, or a bossware algorithm prevents you from peeing on the job because you have to hold the cadence, i'd call that social control without a doubt.

> when you are about to advocate for very high taxes

I'm not advocating for or against taxes. Hell, i'm against money and private property to begin with. I'm simply pointing out that most problems we face today can be solved with less tech not more (lowtech vs bloat), and that tech intended to solve human problems (eg. cars) often end up becoming a radical monopoly doing the exact opposite (see for example Ivan Illich's calculations on cars). I can't help but cringe every time i see a thread about a startup that wants to build automated farms... i really don't to produce more electronics waste just for food, and i certainly don't want electronics garbage seeping into our soils. That's a typical example of an industry trying to invent a problem that's been solved for decades with modern, science-based permaculture techniques.

The automation thing makes a lot of sense for food if you aren't growing in soil. Farming is HARD work but if we could grow more with less water (even vapor!) in drought stricken areas I fail to see the drawbacks.

As someone who dwells in the jungle I love permaculture and I think it is pretty cool but I also like the idea of solving mass starvation on a large scale. I don't see what is done here with permaculture feeding the world any time soon, but I also don't even buy bananas because I'm sick of seeing the infinite banana tree fields

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_substitution_industrial...

1) Reduce the current account deficit (roughly defined as exports revenue minus import costs)

2) Incentivize multinationals to open local factories

3) Incentivize consumers to purchase from local brands instead of foreign competitors

4) Conserve foreign currency reserves for essential operations such as purchasing fuel, materials, or managing the currency value on foreign exchange markets

Famously in Brazil they had a very inward facing economy (propped up mainly by the socialist candidate Lula, who was later arrested on fraud charges). But one of the things they did was build a Blackberry factory which was a big deal at the time, however the phones were always years out of date and generally terrible

- Brazilian Supreme Federal Court annulled all the cases brought against Lula because the judge overseeing those cases (Moro) was found to be biased and have violated due process [1][2][3]. Leaked conversations from Telegram revealed that the judge and the prosecution were actually working together and conspired with the explicit goal to put Lula in jail.

- UN human rights commission also concluded that due process was violated [4].

- Lula was found guilty and arrested before the 2018 election. He was either leading the polls or a close 2nd. Judge Moro responsible for the sentence that blocked him from running and removed the main adversary for Bolsonaro was later offered the position of Minister of Justice for the Bolsonaro administration, which he accepted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luiz_In%C3%A1cio_Lula_da_Silva... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-supreme-court-... [3] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210625-brazil-judge-... [4] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...

- The law is from 1984

- Military dictatorship ended in 1985

- First election post-dictatorship happened in 1989

- Lula, the first left-wing president post-dictatorship, was elected for the first time in 2002

But... the worthwhile upgrade cycle has become ever longer. Back in the early 90s it always felt that last years CPU was unimaginably slow. But over the last decade and more, there's hardly a convincing reason to upgrade very often other than marketing or perhaps cutting-edge gaming (don't know much about gaming).

My primary server at home I built in 2010. It runs my zfs file server, many VMs for assorted things and all odds and ends to run the house. I've upgraded a few drives and added some RAM, but still the same hardware mostly. I get the urge to upgrade every now and then, but objectively I can't justify it. It works great and does everything it needs still fast enough.

My personal laptop is a Toshiba I bought also in 2010 but it was used, so I think it might be 2008 or 2009. Dual boot Linux (primary use) and Windows (for some exercise and astrophotography tools). Still runs perfectly fine, zero urge to ugprade it.

My desktop is my newest machine, a 2014 Mac Mini. No urge to upgrade either, it works perfectly.

And in comparison, my work 2020 MacBookPro is a far inferior machine. Fan runs constantly, always overheating. I'm glad that junk machine is not mine, just have to tolerate it for work. I'd feel sick if I'd bought it with my money, so I'm glad I keep my trusty 2014 Mac.

So the left-side ports are all that remain in working condition.

This machine is to me the depth of how low Apple quality has fallen.

By that I mean that always keeping up with the latest and greatest can be overrated, [0] and actually be quite a huge time sink to keep looking for a new computer and / or new parts, compare them, etc. Sure, if you only buy the latest MBP that's easy, since there's not much to choose from. But it is expensive, and it's not always worth it.

I'd been working all through the pandemic lockdowns on an i5-6500 I had saved from the bin at work. Old SATA SSD from ~2012, 16 then 32 GB RAM. Integrated HD graphics (not the newer UHD).

I never felt held back by it, it would chug along nicely through pretty much everything I threw at it. The only thing for which I had to wait around a bit was Rust compilation.

Then at the end of last year, my work laptop was up for renewal. So I spent around a week comparing models, looking up on intel vs amd, etc. In the end, I ended up with a zen 3 model. While the CPU is fast, in my day-to-day I see no difference compared to the old one. It compiles some of my Rust projects almost twice as fast, but it's still not instant, and I don't wait around for full compiles anyway. [1]

Aside from that, Teams, web pages, etc, there's absolutely no difference in perceived performance.

I get that this is less extreme than OP's situation, but I guess the point is that they maybe shouldn't go to the other extreme and upgrade with each new CPU that comes out. I also realize that up until last year or so Intel CPU upgrades didn't bump performance all that much.

---

[0] Yes, some people absolutely need the last drop of performance they can squeeze, by even among HN readers, I think those people are not the majority.

[1] Incremental Rust compiles were still somewhat slow on the AMD, but in the meantime I've found out about mold, which speeds things up nicely even on the old machine.

For some people, buying the best tools is out of question; if they need to choose between feed the family or buy the latest Apple M2 processor, they're choosing to feed the family. For some, the allegedly saved lifetime does not pay the bills.

Of course, you said "buy the best tools you can". It is not wrong, because for some folks the best tool they can buy is none.

I am also brazilian, and we are living a hell of time. Economy is ruined, inflation is getting high, food cost is sky rocketting, and a lot of people are starving (for real). Getting the best tools is clearly way down in the list of priorities in this country.

Remember not everybody have the same conditions than yourself.

No wonder why we are in such a bad situation now.

But there still is a lot of electronic waste in junkyards. Thinking about this always makes me feel like a loser -- because I have neither the skills nor the time (nor even the need, considering that I already have all the necessary gear for daily life!) to repair as much of that stuff as I could. Junk is nasty and embarrassing. We have a lot of junk.

An advantage to buying better hardware in the first place: it will still be worth enough for someone else to buy it from me.

I sometimes also donate my stuff and repairing issues before. Like my two last laptops

Yep, a great source of inspiration for this line of thinking: https://forum.thinkpads.com/

I do a lot of things which just wouldn't be possible on his setup at all.

I want a new computer, but I go shopping and here's what I see:

They don't have any more RAM than they did... 10 years ago. Maybe it's marginally faster RAM on paper.

They run software that used to run in 0.9ms in 0.72ms and no one cares. It's all instant to me.

The graphics got better, but not hugely so. 2015 GPUs still run... everything, unless you have some particular need for VR or something.

I could buy a new computer tonight, but why? To do the same stuff at the same speed?

I'll buy a new computer when they do something new, or something substantially better. I keep thinking that's a few months away, but it never happens.

What do you mean? Today, building a desktop PC with 64GB or even 128GB of RAM on board is affordable. 10 years ago it was 8GB or 16GB at most.

> They run software that used to run in 0.9ms in 0.72ms and no one cares. It's all instant to me.

Maybe that's true for single-core performance, but nowadays you can get a 16-core CPU at home which I think is mindblowing. It's very beneficial for tasks such as compilation or rendering and can save you minutes (and it adds up).

> The graphics got better, but not hugely so. 2015 GPUs still run... everything

In my opinion, the difference between 2015 and 2022 is quite drastic. You can buy a display with an 8K resolution, 4K + 144hz, QD-OLED. All of these make a huge difference and they weren't available or affordable back in 2015. That's only speaking of productivity; for graphics in games, have you seen Unreal Engine 5 demos? And that's just a start of the next generation!

Without the investment of early adopters the hardware would not be as cheap or as good as it is right now.

Also no one throws older hardware away.

I wish people didn't throw working hardware in the bin, but in my country (France) and social circles (middle class), people definitely do.

I really like this line. It resonates with me as this quote from Henri Bergson (from memory, can't find exact quote) ~ "tools we use become a burden when the environment that we used them within, no longer exists"

Apart from specific needs like gaming and video editing you don't need newer components. What may slow your computer is crappy corporate software, dozens of greedy tabs open, fancy animations on your 4k screen.

But you know what? All this is gone when you use an OS that's does not make high-end components assumptions (i.e. linux). Yeah, you don't need macOS or windows to be a productive programmer.

Edit: added some punctuation

Often times I found that the cheap option is perfectly reasonable (e.g. a 500€ cordless screwdriver is not 5x as good as a 100€ one), saving me money in the long run. Other times I quickly outgrow the cheap option, but the experience on the cheap model makes me appreciate the expensive option more (e.g. going from a 150€ Ender 3 to a 2000€ Voron 2.1).

Buy twice, once cheap, then good ... I'll just repeat this advice here :-)

On the other hand, have you consider that maybe it's not the hardware is slow; it's just that the software you are using is just plain bad? Before I had my current desktop which I assembled ~2 years ago, my desktop was a 4790K with 16GB DDR3, which was cutting edge at its time. However it booted up Windows really slowly. After I uninstall the Adobe suite, the boot up time improved by 5 minutes. I haven't been using any Adobe software ever since.

In a similar fashion, when I had my 2011 MBP 15 inch, I once tried PyCharm on it. Guess what, after I fired it up (and waited for the UI to be stable), it needed 30 seconds to react to my first key press.

Of course now most 1st world people have SSDs, but bad software is still a waste of energy (ahem nodejs).

For all we know the attachment this has created for this machine may well have enriched its user's life instead, with no practical hindrance for their work and enjoyment of the machine.

If anything, this person felt proud enough of this little triumph that they felt the need to share on HN. (it didn't sound like an "I hate me shitty 15-yo machine" rant to me ... quite the opposite)

People used to write their own Haskell compilers, now they buy stagnant/slow computers as an upgrade.