I don't think most people are under a false belief that big cars are necessarily less fuel efficient. Math points out that they are correct in that assumption.

I am thinking back to something I learned in statics class... If a car gets bigger, it will have a greater distance between the supports, frame, etc. Therefore we need to account for that Force applied will be the same, but the magnitude of that moment will be higher, aka: M=Fd Therefore, an Engineer would have to account for that moment to meet safety standards and would do so by increasing the mass of the supports, frame, etc to counteract the moment. This in turn, makes a car inherently heavier.

Sounds like the content providers are starting to work as an oligopoly and extracting the maximum cash out of Netflix, either that or Netfix is starting to cash in on the growing customer base.

Another thought just popped into my head, and that might be that Netflix is trying to actively fracture their customer base to beat on their chest to the content providers that streaming or on demand content is the only means people will access media, or it could be that they are going to sell off the DVD distribution side and focus on the lower costs associated without having to warehouse, sort, ship, receive, and resort DVDs.

What?

Seriously, how does a person make the leap from either making the economic decision of, "If I buy this game, I will have to play it through and it has no resale value nor can I restart where I left off. If I don't buy this game I will have the $50 in my pocket to buy another game without those features" to "Screw this, I am now going to spend $50 on the game and use $400 of my time to learn C, become proficient, start spending $700 of my time to reverse engineering how the memory works in the console, and finally use another $800 of my time to break the encryption systems, etc. that store the key codes for the game status, etc."?

I don't think your scenario is reality for 99.999% of the game purchasing public, most people don't want to spend $1600 in their own time to become a hacker, just to break the encryption on a $50 game . I think the choice much simpler: Buy the game or don't buy the game based on the opportunity costs associated with not being able to resell or restart the game.

I'm going to lose the ability to mod...

I doubt that you have studied dolphin behavior nor could you be a marine biologist or even properly studied, researching biologist.

The above quote is from you, today at 11:27 AM and now at 4:22 PM, you post being the know all of behavior and animal psychology. Maybe you are a nanotechnology research specialist who develops and then implants chips into the brains of dolphins based on your personality studies measuring and recognizing "personhood" with the added bonus of statistically noting the externalities of increasing your karma/or slashdotness based on this research, but I doubt that too!

I don't know how the above was modded Insightful.

The batteries are a variable cost, much like the steel to make the car, the tires on the car, the labor that is used to build each car, etc. The cost is associated with each car built. Constant costs are fixed costs. These would be the costs associated with the plant the cars are built in, the robotics used to build the cars, the building maintenance of the plant, etc.

Let's think of it another way: If the Chevy was to make 10,001 Volts, they would have to purchase 1 more battery pack to go in that extra car (technically, although it does run on gas only).

I think you are mistaking marginal costs and constant costs. Marginal costs are costs associated with making extra units or adding production. A great example is if Chevy took the same plant and decided to make 12,000 Volts. This likely means that they would have to pay overtime and/or add another shift to the plant. This is the additional marginal costs. Marginal costs are often associated with labor because there is only so much work a person can do before they have diminishing returns (get tired and do less work). That being said, goal of every profit driven company is to match its marginal costs with its marginal revenue (i.e. for the additional cost of adding one more unit equals the additional $ in profit of making that exact unit~). This is the point when a company has reached maximum profitability, after this it makes sense to add capacity usually via additional fixed costs, which creates a new average total cost, a new average variable cost, and a new average marginal costs. Marginal costs are hard to conceptualize because they exist in reality but we look at them abstractly and only exist for an exact set of parameters; most companies and people don't think along these lines, they think of adding production capacity, when we can't squeeze any more production out the existing facilities and labor.

Thanks for taking me back to college! It is nice to finally use my econ degree for something!

http://tutor2u.net/economics/revision-notes/a2-micro-supply-shortrun-costs.html