The (very weak) Caesar cipher was used in ancient Rome though and cryptography in general way before. It could be a silent nod to how far our achievements have gone and that encryption is a basic human desire since millennia.
I somehow doubt they're going to destroy Amazon anytime soon. The market they're in reminds me more of Blue Apron/Hellofresh than Uber/Lyft. May as well take advantage their funders' bad bet before the river.
Don't need to "destroy" Amazon to be successful. Just need a few percent of sales.
What I've noticed from Aliexpress reviews is that a lot of reviews are from places that don't have much of an Amazon footprint (e.g. Russia, E. Europe, Mid east).
The other thing is that ship-from-China circumvents a lot of duties that can be hefty on some goods. And sometimes sales taxes (not in USA anymore, but still true elsewhere).
Have you looked up small, light items on Amazon and seen that they pack them up packs of large N? They do that to hide the fact that delivery is actually a very large fraction of cost on such items. Food delivery, as mentioned in the OP, is another example.
Exactly - rule of thumb is that about $4 of any small item on Amazon goes to Amazon. That seven dollar cable is really at best a $3 cable, including costs to get the item to Amazon in the first place.
I wonder whether they've considered the possibility of open-sourcing their apps and backend. Perhaps this is just Pollyannaism, but I tend to believe that workers' rights and open-source are the perfect match in a market like ridesharing. "Just goodenough" open source solutions have difficulty breaking through in consumer software (e.g. the mythical "year of the linux desktop"), but in a market like ridesharing, worker coordination could easily provide the push to critical mass.
Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.
But the universe is big and there are billions of billions of other planets which could very well have similar conditions, that also exist for billions of years
The question isn't about what's easier to believe, it's about what the evidence supports. The probability for life (or multicellular life or intelligent life or technological life) to evolve on any given planet is strictly between 0 and 1. You can believe what you want, but the facts don't support any stronger statement than that.
