Comment by ErigmolCt

Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.

I think you might be in agreement with me in the main, just quibbling on the timing?

The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.

This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.

lol, you have no idea just how hard it is to make something as mammoth size financially viable or even sustainable as a business, due to sheer technological bottlenecks in video streaming, encoding/decoding videos at that scale, and everything else.

It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.

It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.

Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.

And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.

It is a miracle, in every shape and form.

It's an amazing repository of how-to videos on every subject imaginable.

It's also a massive attention sink that burns both copious amounts of energy and the world's attention span to earn some clicks and ad dollars.

It's a mixed bag.