Burning money on the risque projects should be the industry standard. No matter what would happen here, either of outcomes are positive. Dying of facebook or making cool vr toys are no things to be mad about. People are simultaneously defending stale tech companies to keep their cushy jobs and criticizing them when they are in the R&D phase burning piles of cash, which is the necessity.
As the web business model is based on ads user experience isn't that important. I'm curious on the monetization model of new prompt based search engines. Ads dominating first pages of search won't be possible anymore. The adoption of new engines also wouldn't be as fast as many think, people habits die slow. So they still have time to think of a way to make money. Alphabet needs some competition. They became stale in the last 10 years.
It's hard to evaluate performance in the industries adjacent to arts/entertainment which the gaming industry definitely is.Typical software practices won't work in the every industry.
Falling birthrates are inevitable consequences of development of the world. Children in the past were more of an economic choice when majority of families have farms as their local businesses.Children have been a free labor until adulthood when they would be expected to take over the farm from old parents.Simply put,employees were just children in many families.
It's a dangerous trend to our entire economic system,which is based on the ever growing pool of people to consume and keep paying pensions.Political solutions probably won't work as the consumption number needs to grow to keep the economic system running.So we need to figure out robotics and automation as a whole.
Base on moon is simply put much more rational choice. It would be just antarctica on steroids with possible resupply and relative proximity. Colony on mars needs to be entirely self-sustaining and we don't have any working equivalent here on earth. Putting material on the surface is one thing, but to actually have the infrastructure there to survive is much harder beast.
Nothing new, there are plenty of similar planets discovered around red dwarfs. Unfortunately, there are none found around the g-type stars and that's where the copy of earth ultimately should be possible.