About the power bills, no one will notice the power their CPU would use running at 100% when they're not using the system. It's just not enough to raise eyebrows, unless your power is stupid expensive. So no, they won't have an incentive to clean up their computers, because if done properly, they will never know their computers need to be cleaned.
You're looking at the microscopic picture. The bigger picture will be that people will come to learn (not necessarily through their own personal experience) that upgrading their computer or installing better malware protection as something that often saves money on power bills, or that more secure computers "use less power" (even if it isn't clear why), or that shutting down their computers really saves a lot on power in practice (when in theory it shouldn't) or some other such emergent economic effects that are hard to know in advance. Costs that accrue to the person responsible for and able to correct the problem can't really be such a bad thing in economic terms. It is certainly better than costs accruing to others.
Let's not go back and forth on the Monero thread though. Monero is a CPU coin for now, for better or worse, and that isn't going to change by design. It might change if people develop a good GPU miner for it or if it becomes successful enough for ASICs to be feasible. The CryptoNote designers intended for this not to happen. Whether they succeed or fail only time will tell.
Hmm... I doubt that people will come to learn anything of the sort, but I do think that they will grow old and die, replaced by a more tech-savvy generation. So perhaps you are right.
Yes that is definitely part of it, but even the actual old fogeys become somewhat more tech savvy over time (meaning decades). I'm old enough to remember when grandma literally could not turn on a computer, now she is at least on Facebook.
