Historically, carrier pigeons (or homing pigeons) have been used to deliver messages over long distances. There's even a humorous and real experiment where a carrier pigeon carrying a USB stick was faster in transmitting data than an ADSL connection: the "Pigeon vs. Internet" race.

But in all seriousness, the point you're making is valid. Bandwidth is not free, and the resources required to maintain and expand the internet's infrastructure are significant. It's easy to forget about the underlying systems when we use everyday services. Just like water and electricity, the convenience of modern technology can make it easy to overlook the complexity and cost of the infrastructure that makes it possible.

So, while we don't have to feed and care for digital pigeons, it's always a good reminder to be appreciative and conscientious of the resources we use.

    brew install yt-dlp

    alias vget=yt-dlp
    aget='vget --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 4'

    # https://opencollective.com/homebrew
    # https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Collaborators.md#collaborators

Of course, up to you, but most youtube videos are actually an AAC (m4a) codec and thus by asking for mp3 you're going to get a transcoding ffmpeg subprocess in between the bytes and the file in your directory. I would be stunned if whatever your ultimate consuming player is doesn't support aac/m4a/mp4 playback

    $ yt-dlp -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k...
    139 m4a   audio only      2 |     1.47MiB   49k https | audio only          mp4a.40.5   49k 22k low, IOS, m4a_dash
    140 m4a   audio only      2 |     3.90MiB  129k https | audio only          mp4a.40.2  129k 44k medium, IOS, m4a_dash
    249 webm  audio only      2 |     1.54MiB   51k https | audio only          opus        51k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash
    250 webm  audio only      2 |     2.02MiB   67k https | audio only          opus        67k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash
    251 webm  audio only      2 |     3.95MiB  131k https | audio only          opus       131k 48k medium, ANDR, webm_dash
    599 m4a   audio only      2 |   950.46KiB   31k https | audio only          mp4a.40.5   31k 22k ultralow, ANDR, m4a_dash
    600 webm  audio only      2 |     1.06MiB   35k https | audio only          opus        35k 48k ultralow, ANDR, webm_dash

thanks for the tip

    function sideload() {
      mv $1 "$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~co~supertop~castro/Documents/Sideloads/"
      echo "Sideloaded $1 to Castro; should be available soon."
    }

I would support a political party that intends to change this, but I don't think any party I vote for actually cares about it.