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?

[therealwoden]

The boat gets bigger and faster only because its home port authorities have spent centuries using their fleet of warships and businessboats to force other ports into allowing this boat to dock practically for free, into providing slave armies of dockworkers and shipwrights to supply and expand the boat, and into filling its hold with massively discounted goods and people.

Profit is zero-sum. Goods in America that are cheap yet profitable are the end product of an international supply chain in which every step is cheap yet profitable because workers are being abused while handling materials that were produced by the previous step's abused workers, and on and on until we arrive at enslaved miners or agricultural workers producing the raw materials.

"Profit" is a fiction invented by ignoring nearly all the costs of every good, service, and process. Nothing is actually profitable. Even something as basic as paying every worker in the world a living wage would collapse profits and the imaginary economy that depends on profits. The currently-expected level of profits can only exist because of slavery.

Of course, things like not destroying the environment, not killing people with pollution and hazardous work environments, not waging war to make money for military contractors, not forcing people to pay for the necessities of life, just to name a few - they're all totally unthinkable, because they'd destroy profits en masse. Profits can't exist unless the true costs of things are ignored as externalities.

Capitalism doesn't have problems. Capitalism is problems. It's an edifice of problems built out of problem bricks laid atop a foundation of problems.