Eh, the difference is that DoorDash is a logistics company performing a service that restaurants do not like running (delivery). It’s not a middleman providing no value
The problem is they use exploitative labor practices (as we're seeing here) and price-dumping funded by infinite amounts of venture capital. It sets customer expectations to unsustainably low pricing and it forces restaurants to either heavily subsidise their own delivery drivers to keep customer prices low or, because barely anyone can sustain that, to shut down their own delivery service and use <gig company> instead.
And that in turn gives doordash, uber eats and whatnot access to a lot of data - who orders what and lives where or which restaurant is doing good and which is struggling - that can be sold to third parties. Governments (ICE and other agencies have been caught to just buy data from aggregators), advertisers, credit reporting agencies, political parties, you name it.
Sure. As a customer the value that doordash et al provide is hard to understate. A single point of contact, a single set of credentials, a unified UI compared to what used to be a ton of never-updated garbage wordpress installs, reliable tracking... but as a whole, we all lose.
Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures”
Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.
Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.
Why is it 'of course impossible'? Couldn't we someday have nanobots or other tech that could screen all your cells and be able to indicate whether any cancerous cells remain?
If we were able to find cancer cells with a precision down to 1 cell, killing them would be trivial. There are lots of cells in a person. It's possible we will get there someday. I think bioengineering is the most likely route. I.e., design a virus to specifically target the type of cancer cell you mean to eradicate.
Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.
No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)
I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years.
With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.
Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.
I use ride share singularly for the convenience. I don’t really think about the cost all that much if it’s “reasonable” and no financial incentive they could provide to link multiple forms of transportation would be enough to overcome that single convenience.
For better or worse it won’t be long until we get private exploration for minerals and water on the Moon and nearby planets, at a relatively decent scale (in comparative terms)
What could possibly fund the private exploration of minerals or water on the Moon or planets?
Which of the 180ish elements would possibly be found on a foreign body in enough scale that couldn't possibly be found, made, or replaced by cheaper means here on earth?
Space mining doesn't make sense! We can't even justify exploiting all known resources here on earth itself because they aren't profitable, how do you work those numbers when, instead of literal slave labor, you have to pay the energy cost of going up and then back down for every kilo of matter?
If it's often not worth it to mine literal gold here on earth because it can't be profitably extracted, the core limit on gold mines as an investment and business venture, why would it be profitable to, for example, mine that gold on Mars and try to bring it home?
The point of exploiting ressources in space is not to bring them back to earth (to the ground, specifically), but to use them in space.
The ability to manufacture in space, when the price to orbit is about 3000 $/kg can be very lucrative.
Just refuelling in orbit for long-range missions, with the fuel coming from the moon (aluminium-oxygen for exemple) would be a game-changer, and the ressources to make it happen are not that out of reach.
reply