Giving it away for free, but making up for it in volume. That's not a very good business plan.

The manufacture of solar cells and LFP batteries is not a carbon-neutral process. You would need to plant a lot of trees to make up for the coal and oil that was burnt to make your home energy-efficient.

We also have finite resources. It might cost you $10,000 today, but there is almost no demand for household solar. The real marginal cost of solar power adoption would be much higher than that.

If the human race were truly carbon neutral (instead of just fudging it by buying carbon offsets from the flooded European market,) you'd be dead, so I guess you probably don't care about how much it would cost.

I think what you should really be asking is why 'austerity' is the word of the day.

Fiscal policy is an effective way to stabilize the economy. The basic idea is that government spending increases relative to real GDP during contractions, while taxation decreases or remains stable. The idea is for fiscal policy to smooth out the business cycle. Liberals and conservatives, in all countries, understand this idea very well*. That's why you only see them talking about austerity measures when they're talking about getting rid of something they personally dislike. Actually applying it across the board would be economic seppuku (other than hopeless cases like Greece.)

(* Like most intelligent and educated people, I am ignoring the Libertarians.)

Google doesn't have customers to gather requirements from. They make up random stuff that sounds okay, and then use A/B testing to see if people like it.

Keep in mind, Google is not a software company. Popularity is not a way to choose features. Popularity is a way to sell advertisements.

"Not only does God play dice, but he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen."

Market cap doesn't matter so much; it's just the sum market value of all of the outstanding public shares. It's a convenient heuristic but estimating the actual price is much more complicated.

For example, Sony owns controlling interests in Sony Pictures and Sony Music. Owning both of these businesses means they can control the direction of the industry, so their stake is much more valuable to Sony than the market value.

Market cap matters more when you're talking about a hostile takeover, because it can be used to directly estimate the amount of money you would need to spend. Hostile takeovers aren't normally possible, though. Corporations are allowed to issue classes of shares with different rights, and the publicly-traded class normally has fewer (or no) voting rights. Normally, if the company has a remotely competent board and CFO, a single person could buy every single public share and still not control the company.

To be totally fair, EA doesn't do this stuff out of malice. EA's acquisitions fail because their executives are miserably incompetent.

Basically this is what happens: some manager plays a game made by a beloved studio or minor competitor, and they get all starry-eyed about the amazing things the studio could do with some extra money. EA buys them, and it works fine for a little while. Then, some executive realizes that their subsidiary's games are really profitable, so they order the subsidiary to expand and work on more games. Other executives order rolling staffing changes based on whatever project sounds popular at the time. Quality slips as team members are overworked and no longer emotionally invested. Meanwhile the key staff, usually the founders, are used to dealing with small teams and small budgets. They allow themselves to be divided across too many projects to be effective managers. No longer constrained by small budgets, their ambitions explode and runaway projects become a major problem. EA's managers try to put the studio back on track by setting firm deadlines, but due to an institutional lack of effective project management or engineering experience, their deadlines are physically impossible. EA publishes a steaming turd in time for Christmas, decides the unit has lost its magic, and shuts it down. EA's accountants use the ordinary/capital losses to offset their gains from sports, and all of the executives take home a fat bonus.

Sorry to ruin your day, but our base-10 numeral system is literally the only thing us "metric-system folks" think is special about 10. At the very least, it's a damn sight more convenient than the base "width of thumb" and base "length of foot" that's prized by the knuckledraggers and mouthbreathers.

What? No, the problem is with the cards. The "reader" already is just an electrical connector: a surface mount socket with spring-loaded pins. The reason they can't make the connector smaller is because the contact layout on the card is huge.

Because the current media prices are almost certainly above the market clearing price (evidenced by market research, retailers' complaints, and the basic fact that the film/music studios are willing to produce more content at the current price level than households are willing to consume.) A competent CEO would lower their prices to make more money.

Adding taxes increases the price of a good. Increasing price causes a decrease of demand. In order to return to a profit-maximizing price, firms must then decrease the prices of goods (and reduce output*.) The firm's share of the tax is the amount they need to lower the price. The household's share of the tax is the cost of the tax, minus the price decrease.

Households never pay the entire amount of any sales tax, because demand always responds to price. Arguably, households don't even pay the entire amount of income taxes either, because the supply of labour responds in a similar way.

(* An astute reader will note that, due to the reduction of supply and demand, the total cost of the tax to the economy is greater than the amount which is actually paid to the government.)

A Brit invented HTTP. I wish you'd stop stealing it.

(by which I mean I wish you would stop posting.)

I read the full article and I still can't tell what the efficiency is.

From a macroeconomic perspective? In an article about one company's decisions about inputs and savings? Oh, really?