Ask HN: Spectre/Meltdown/IME need to replace my desktop and laptop PCs? With What?

What should I be doing in regard to these vulnerabilities? What time frame?

And finally, from the depths of the paranoid part of my mind, might this all be just a way for government 3-letter agencies to motivate everyone to buy new PCs with the latest and greatest spyware already installed in the firmware? It appears that generations of hardware have been, all at once, obsolesced. The investment base is huge and chip makers appear to be set to reap a fortune from this "mistake".