You are casually transitioning between something that is pretty well understood through the history of online commercial computing (i.e. 1970s): 1) owned hardware versus leased/timeshared/rented hardware or services and 2) concepts of financial instruments that many readers here are probably not intimately familiar with.

If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy futures instead, we'd be having a silly discussion. Whether it makes sense for me to rent or buy the generator has more to do with governments, [,tax ]laws, and risks that ultimately manifest as cashflow decisions. You have some valid thread you are pulling on for what are the economics of general purpose compute and to whom, but your argument needs a lot more care to carefully define and make your case and why it is okay to dismiss the outlier cases for instance.

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steveklabnik 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If I needed a generator to run a remote mining operation, and you just told me to just buy energy futures instead, we'd be having a silly discussion.

Exactly. Just because they are similar in some senses doesn't mean that they're fungible. Generator manufacturers still have a business even though you can purchase energy futures.

	▲	doctorpangloss 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		okay well this is an interesting and engaging conversation, if you guys someday make something in the $1,000 range you have a customer.

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doctorpangloss 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be like if you needed to buy a generator versus, I will give you a giant cable that has all the same economics as buying a generator. In that case yeah, if I am giving you all the same economics as buying your own generator, but cheaper, you would be stupid not to take my deal. It’s got nothing to do with energy futures. My suggestion is to copy what I am saying to a chatbot, and ask it what “looks like a duck, quacks like a duck” means, and what’s going on here.

	▲	kev009 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		"giant cable" -- this kind of thing does obviously happen, rural electrification is heavily subsidized by governments (see the rest of my comment..). But it is also not a realistic option in plenty of cases as such and therefore industrial companies like Cat and Cummins are happy to sell multi-million dollar generators. If your approach to the subject is to copy it into a chatbot it might explain why this discussion is ultimately specious, because a casual and even jocular approach to this is not really adequate to make any point.