That's the point of them. When the electricity is stolen from someone else and the generated coins go to you then all generated coins are profit. If they could generate one cent of cryptocurrency for less than one cent of electricity they'd just mine regularly.

You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

I wonder if the miners get a better $/KWh than auto-playing video adverts?

It will if you use it to reward yourself as you build your own auto-playing video advertisement platform and crowdsource a rating system aimed at media moguls with high-end machines. You may even earn enough to one day party your electric bill.

And advertisements steal dollars worth of my time for fractions of a cent. I personally find this more justifiable.

He gets it.

The proof of work's intent is thus. For the most part, anyways. At equilibrium, the optimistic miners seem to always drive up difficulty beyond a neutral investment.

The ratio is probably far worse than that.

Capitalism is the most efficient economic system.

It's so efficient it consumes everything, even itself and the structure that keeps it in place.

...which does not imply being optimal at every single level of analysis.