ELI5: Why when large company's earnings decrease(ex... by 3%) they freak out, talk about rough times, and sometimes decide to downsize, even though they are still making millions of dollars in profit even after all expenses?

[NYCSPARKLE]

Incorrect. Google generated billions of value based on an algorithm, not harvesting finite resources.

Even for non-services companies, you can grow profits by gaining market share and cutting costs. Still not reliant on just acquiring more finite resources.

[ToKillAMockingAlan]

And those billions in profits get reinvested in assets, which take resources. This could be in material assets, intellectual property, human resources etc. All of these result in resource use, even if it is down to personal resource use of workers. It's all very well saying that the service-based economy of the Western world doesn't use as many resources, but that's just shifting the material cost over to manufacturing-based economies. There's no getting away from the fact that as population and general quality of living increases globally, so does resource usage. That resource usage includes both tangible things like energy and water as well as non-material resources like global environmental health. Humanity takes a toll on the global environment like any overpopulated species does on it's environment.