A toy example: NeoCloud Inc builds a new datacenter full of the new H800 GPUs. It rents out a rack of them for $10/minute while paying $6/minute for electricity, interest, loan repayment, rent and staff.
Two years later, H900 is released for a similar price but it performs twice as many TFlOps/Watt. Now any datacenter using H900 can offer the same performance as NeoCloud Inc at $5/month, taking all their customers.
You simply cannot compare the experience of being conquered in a pre-modern society to being conquered by the PRC.
Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression and exploitation that is possible today. They usually just replaced the upper layers of the old hierarchy, put some small garrisons in a few places and left most local elites in charge, often with their local armies. If there was an organized rebellion, there would usually be a a few skirmishes and then a re-negotiation of the terms.
Today even Morocco could afford to turn Western Sahara into a territory with total surveillance, checkpoints everywhere and an impenetrable wall in the desert while slowly ethnically cleansing the native population.
Look for a broad-strokes summary of environmental laws in China [0]. Note the following paragraph:
> The standards detailed in the action plan focus on several harmful substances, including particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Each of these pollutants has defined permissible levels, which are critical in guiding both regulatory authorities and industries in their compliance efforts. Over the years, the Chinese government has intensified its efforts to monitor real-time air quality and ensure adherence to these standards
Now try to reconcile this with the actual air quality [1] [2]. Note that September is far from the peak, when it gets cold and dark the air quality in many megacities becomes off-the-charts toxic.
This leaves two possibilities: either the state is too weak or too corrupt to enforce these laws. Since the PRC is far from weak and its organs are very powerful, this only leaves one possibility.
The situation in China is actually even worse. There are environmental regulations, but enforcement is easily evaded through bribes or CCP connections.
Every so often there is a disaster that forces the government to start a much-publicized campaign. A few of the worst or least connected offenders get punished and then it's back to business as usual.
So really, if you're just anybody and start polluting, you'll quickly be stopped. Meanwhile the state-owned steel mill next door has been blasting out unfiltered coal exhaust for decades.
I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good as OLEDs they would have had to find something else than phosphor as the inner coating.
For response times, CRT will always remain the king of dark-to-light response times, but afterglow for bright-to-dark would always be a factor unless a different coating was developed. OLEDs have no such issues. Subjectively, the claimed < 0.1 ms response times are real and there are zero artifacts, no afterglow, no ghosts, just extremely sharp and defined motion.
Two years later, H900 is released for a similar price but it performs twice as many TFlOps/Watt. Now any datacenter using H900 can offer the same performance as NeoCloud Inc at $5/month, taking all their customers.
[all costs reduced to $/minute to make a point]