What happens to the electricity dumped into an appliance, like a computer? Say I'm drawing 1000 watts from a PC, it's all solid state and there's no light emitted from the case (and if there is light emitted, it's absorbed before leaving the case). Does that mean that 1000 watts of heat is produced from a computer, if it's drawing 1000 watts from the wall? I mean, the power can't be going anywhere else, right? Would it be the same for a light bulb, if the light is fully contained within your house? So a 23 watt bulb ultimately becomes 23 watts of thermal energy?

From there, why would people preferentially use a space heater, rather than some device which can perform work. Like, why not have a bank of processors selling calculations to the cloud, or cryptocurrency, or protein folding, and at least have a meaningful output rather than dumping electricity into a resistor to warm your house in the winter?