With pools of GPU- and FPGA- and ASIC-miners in play in a blockchain, raising the block difficulty, any individual user just doing CPU mining has a negligible chance of ever generating any money for themselves; and will only make negligible amounts by being a member of a mining pool.
These mining scripts are worth money to their owners only because they get to make all the dividends from the covert mining pool they've created.
There is a reason that "immediately join a Bitcoin mining pool" isn't commonly-heard advice; that it's not something everyone does for their aunt. The average computer just isn't going to make enough money to be worth it—even just to pay for microtransactions.
Not at all. First, electricity is much more expensive than the price they put in their estimate. Second, a computer running at 100% CPU uses much more electricity than what they accounted for.
Let us not tunnelvision with US/USD PoV only. There are other countries and currencies in the world; both places where electricity is cheaper and more expensive.
These mining scripts are worth money to their owners only because they get to make all the dividends from the covert mining pool they've created.
There is a reason that "immediately join a Bitcoin mining pool" isn't commonly-heard advice; that it's not something everyone does for their aunt. The average computer just isn't going to make enough money to be worth it—even just to pay for microtransactions.