TIL that the scp command does not, by default, compress files it transfers, and that you need to add the -C flag to make it do that, and by doing that I have sped up my transfer speed about 40x, and without this knowledge I have probably wasted literally days of my life waiting for things in the past.
Some may say "why are you using scp rather than rsync" and to that I say, rsync has even more ridiculously complicated flags to learn.
@jimbob Never knew that scp did compression. I would have bzip2 first, or used rsync. -azv