I didnt specify it but this was my source: https://adfreecities.org.uk/2019/11/the-electricity-cost-of-digital-adverts/
That might be on the higher end but I guess they dont use the lowest brightness tubes as they need to shine through the poster and also it accounts for the double sided-ness (at least in my area they are always double sided).
An ad like this uses about 1920W constantly, your phone uses about 10W when active and in use. Lets say your city has 100k inhabitants and all use their phone right now than thats 1MW or about a 1/5 wind turbine. So you break even with 521 of these adverts. While I can only see how they run ~100 of these ads for a city that size, we can also roughly estimate that people “only” have a screen on time that matches this figure. So yeah, they are roughly using the same amount of energy to display the ads compared to the problem they are trying to solve.
In a sane world they would use all the effort to build a single wind turbine and then shut the fuck up.
This. As a chemist I just need to do rather simple calculations, plots and sometimes use a package or two. My total yearly compute time is like 1 hour in python. Spending 5 years learning c, assembly, data science and what not just to reduce that to 1 minute is not really worth it.