and HELL NO! We DON'T need more Silly Valley-type incursions into government. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. People whose working lives are centred on technology tend to think technology has or is the solution to all problems. The sorry fact is that technology is the rampant source of many of our problems. Facebook, Google and the like need to be controlled and brought to heel, not egged on by tech-savvy fanbois who gain legislative power and try to realize their juvenile tech-topian visions. And AFAICT the tech sector has jack shit of relevance to say about the challenges we face as a result of increasing automation and the advent of true AI. That's a whole other discipline (or set of disciplines) that needs to be developed - tech definitely needs to be at that able, but they sure as shit shouldn't be anywhere close to running the show.
I'd be really interested to read what Cory Doctorow says if he decides to weigh in on this.
How much of their own attention do business leaders at the top of the food chain allow to take part in the Attention Economy? Beyond a certain point, doesn't spending loads of time binge-watching, playing games, etc, make one less likely to be creative, to innovate, and to successfully strategize in business and in personal endeavours? OTOH, it seems to me that overloading the mental processing power of the plebs with trivialities makes them more pliable and, (perhaps paradoxically), less likely to inquire deeply into the activities of the point-one-percenters. The attention economy is all about fleecing average people while undermining their ability to rise above the average and make full use of their capabilities.
I don't even have to posit a conspiracy to make this argument work - it's possible that things either evolved this way or we ended up here largely by chance. However, there is ample evidence of such a conspiracy in our education system dating back more than a century. For more on the characteristics and consequences of the education system that was created by the Robber Barons for their own purposes, see John Taylor Gatto's book. (PDF).
Wow! Even when I assume that you're posting in good faith and not shilling, I still find it hard to know where to begin. Given your relatively low UID and the reasonably high coherence of your writing, it seems unlikely that you are unaware of the implications of all this data gathering. Facebook has already been outed for experimenting on its users by manipulating their news feeds and gauging their responses. Was this innocent psychological research in the name of furthering human knowledge? No, it was testing the feasibility of using the data they gather to manipulate users' emotions and behaviour toward a desired end. Can you not see that all of this data collection and profiling is leading to a state where powerful forces that are pretty much answerable to nobody, know more about us than we know about ourselves? And that's not just a figure of speech - I mean quite literally that Facebook, Google, and the like can predict their users' behaviour better than the users themselves can. It's clear to anyone who's not in denial, that their end game is to be able to influence people even more consistently and effectively than their own close friends and family members might. I'm quite sure Big Data can do that to a large number of their users right now; but even if I'm wrong in that, do you honestly believe they won't succeed in doing it in the very near term?
On the other hand, if you really believe that they aren't using the data they gather to manipulate people without their knowledge and informed consent; or if you believe that their efforts are harmless or ineffectual; or if you think that people who fall prey to that manipulation are weak or stupid, or are lacking in character or personal responsibility; then all I can say to you is "stop drinking their Kool-Aid, give your head a shake, and get a clue".
As for "falling for a socialist narrative", I started to gain a deep distrust of online data gathering back in the Classmates days - that was before both Facebook and Google. The only narrative involved is mine - it's based on a lifetime of observations of corporate behaviour.
In Silicon Valley technological determinism is rampant. It's the simpler of the two stories, the more attractive one.
Calling it the 'more simplistic of the two stories' might be more accurate. But I think its attractiveness has more to do with its implied confirmation of the power and rightness that people in Big Tech tend to feel - there's an air of Manifest Destiny about their whole attitude.
If technology is the dominant influencer, then there's no need to understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'.
If technology is the dominant influencer, then you think you already understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'. There is a HUGE amount of know-it-all hubris in Big Tech, especially in the higher echelons.
Narratives around blockchain/VR/singularity/etc also happily align with the "new tech is inevitable" part, because it implies any attempt to regulate it is wasted effort.
I totally agree. For me it's yet another example of the Manifest Destiny attitude.
China's leaders seem to care little for the privacy, or the freedom, of millions of its citizens.
There's no "seem" about it - they don't care, and everybody and his dog knows it. I'm sure even the most naive of Chinese citizens are under no illusion that their government gives a rat's ass about their welfare at all, much less their privacy or freedom.
This news should have people all over the world protesting in the streets against corporate interference in governance, and Facebook should wake up tomorrow to find at least 90% of their user base simply gone. If people had any sense, knew what was good for them, and had the will to act on the knowledge, Facebook would be a fucking ghost town within a month and entirely dead within a year.
What's almost certain to happen instead is two or three news cycles of feigned outrage on the part of governments, a similar period of feigned contrition on the part of Facebook, people swearing off Facebook for a week, and then... nothing. Business as usual will continue; what should be a brick wall that stops Mark Fuckerberg dead in his tracks, will be a minor speed bump on the road to complete abolition of personal privacy.
Like why was the control panel - a nice, central repository of system settings and related items - gutted and the relevant controls spread randomly about the place with no obvious underlying logic?
I'm only half joking when I say that it was done in order to give people less control over their computers and less confidence in exercising that control. It plays into the 'software as a service' flavour of the rent-seeking model that ALL corporations are trying to establish as the immutable new order of things.
Come to think of it... no, I'm not half joking - I'm not joking at all. I really do believe that's what they're up to.
Try explaining to an elderly person who's used to 95/XP/7 how to get around Win10. Everything's hidden, icons that are confusing, and the modern desktop UI just baffles them to the point where they just give up..
Don't bother explaining - just nuke Win10, install Xubuntu, give them a short tutorial, and be done. Seriously, non-power-users who are comfortable with earlier, saner generations of Windows represent a perfect use case for the friendlier Linux distros and DE's. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up XFCE under Ubuntu so that it's WAY more like XP than Win10 could ever be.
Imagine a slave plantation without chains, without a foreman, without whips, without fences.
Sooner or later I start to think that maybe it's not a slave plantation since the "slaves" are completely free to leave any time they want and they stay there because they want to. Sooner or later I cease to have sympathy for them because they're actually doing it to themselves.
If you're still on Windows then it's your fault this stuff keeps happening to you.
That analysis doesn't apply to programmers and IT people who are stuck with using Windows at their jobs. SOME of them could find other jobs at companies that use Linux or Mac - but that's a really small percentage. In other industries, folks require the ability to use software that's only available for Windows. LibreOffice is remarkable, but its compatibility with MS Office still has some serious failings. And GIMP + Inkscape + Scribus often can't replace the Adobe suite. There are lots more examples. The 'slaves' need to form a union and go on strike. But that ain't gonna happen. Citizens can't even organize sufficiently to get decent government - they sure as hell won't get organized to fight for a decent computer OS.
Here's the evidence that these people are nothing but a bunch of narcissistic psychopaths. Collecting information on unrelated people, invading their privacy at your own convenience at any time with out a thought or care...The mental disconnect of these people are unfathomable.
The real mental disconnect here is that Gates will most likely succeed in getting email addresses for almost every teacher on the planet. A sufficient percentage of his followers will comply with his request - either unthinkingly or with full knowledge of the implications, and frankly I'm not sure which is worse.
We as a society are selling out each other's privacy, and making ourselves available to brainwashing programs, at an astonishing rate and with hardly ever a second thought. What we're allowing the tech sector to do to us is the important consideration here - the voracious psychopathy of tech corporations, and corporations in general, hasn't been news for a very long time.
the developed world is officially fiddling while Earth burns. Really, why do we need all this new gee-whiz shit, other than to one-up each other while we anesthetize ourselves against the failure of the old gee-whiz shit to give our lives meaning and purpose?
would be to mandate that all connected devices have a user-configurable firewall that enjoys root permissions and is the ultimate boss of whatever data is sent or received by any app. We all know that will never happen, and we also know that the majority of users would never configure it.
But just imagine it for a moment - those of us who actually care about our privacy, (but who don't know what to do, or who get stuck with unrootable devices), would be able to force the data miners to fuck off. And a lot of formerly-clueless people who suddenly DO care about their privacy when they read news stories like this wouldn't be so helpless. They could ask their geek friends what to do and NOT hear something like "buy a new phone, root it, install this app, blah blah blah".
As a life-long Ontario resident I can tell you that with the Conservative party in power here and enjoying a solid majority, this bill has precisely zero chance of becoming law. Especially given the knuckle-dragging fuckwit we have as our provincial Premier. After all, Doug Ford is the guy who cut funding to student unions and justified it by saying "I think we all know what kind of crazy Marxist nonsense student unions get up to".
If actual study of history is going to be replaced by what is convenient to search on Google, then we are limiting ourselves to a "history" that starts in the 20th century. Maybe this is just the way things will be in the future.
That is probably the most insightful observation I've read here so far, and it's certainly the scariest. I'm thinking not only of the millennia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom that we stand to lose, but also the mistakes we're more likely to repeat. We could be looking at the modern-day equivalent of the Dark Ages falling upon us over the next century.
Maybe master writing intelligible sentences before worrying about entomology.... "How badly broken is... " reads way better than "How badly is... broken" . Holy crap. I am a native english speaker and this whole article was tedious to read.
Oh, the irony! I stumbled over your first sentence and had to read it three times before I figured out what you were trying to say. Maybe (you should) master writing intelligible sentences before worrying about... the study of insects? Perhaps you should also learn the difference between 'etymology' and 'entomology' while you're on your own quest for intelligible English, (not "english"), self-expression.
It is really sad what people think is actually doing research these days. God forbid someone should get off their ass and do real research. What's next? Mistaking Wikipedia for peer-reviewed research? Millennials are so lazy!
Sure Grandpa, I'll get off your lawn now. It's looking kind of brown anyway, and those garden gnomes and pink flamingos give your house zero curb appeal. BTW, there's a good chance I'm older in years than you are, but it seems you're farther into senility than I am...
Google is a good search tool, but it isn't a research tool.
I disagree that Google is a good search tool - it has become pretty mediocre. I also disagree that it isn't a research tool. It's only ONE tool in a researcher's toolbox, but it can be a very powerful one if it's well made and properly used. Unfortunately, Google has regressed from Snap-On wrench set to cheap dollar-store adjustable POS. Consequently it's getting harder and harder to use properly, as it rounds off corners by design and breaks easily.
Google WAS a good search tool. Nowadays it's damn bad.
I totally agree.
My most hated anti-feature right now is the impossibility to force a word to appear on the results. Back in the day you only needed to add a '+' in front of it, but it no longer honors it...
I never used that. I've always put "allintext:" in front of search terms that I insist on, and I put double quotes around words and phrases that I want exact matches for. Although the effectiveness of both of these has diminished over time as Google has dumbed itself down, it sounds as though they're still much more effective than the plus sign you're currently using.
FTS: "In the past year or so, the engagement has been combative, with abrupt, disruptive policy changes that are being held without consultation, and, unusually, with absolutely no room for negotiation or even deadline extensions"
Except for the word 'unusually', isn't the above paragraph a pretty accurate description of how most big tech companies treat their users / customers / 'products of the human variety'?
and the patent looks like another example of stringing existing tech together for it's exact intended purpose... I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
FTA: "Even early on, the Postal Service expressed interest in Return Mail’s invention, Hungerpiller said. By 2006, the government and Return Mail were talking about licensing options and a formal pilot program."
The Post Office was negotiating with Hungerpiller before they went and violated his patent, so presumably they thought there was "novelty or newness". I'm reminded of another patentability test - the "obvious to a person skilled in the art" criterion. The problem with both criteria is that things become obvious in hindsight, and we tend to forget they really weren't so obvious before the fact. If the idea / process / procedure hadn't been implemented yet, in spite of the tech required having been available for quite some time, then was it really obvious? And AFAIC, if it isn't obvious, then it's new or novel pretty much by definition.
In addition to less access to healthcare, I suspect that people in lower-income groups have additional risk factors. Blue-collar workers and the casually employed are probably more likely to be exposed to higher levels of carcinogens in their workplaces. I would guess that they also, on the average, eat a higher percentage of processed foods such as nitrate-laden meats. And I bet they're less likely to have the same kind of access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Plus, quality and level of education are a factor in the healthfulness of dietary choices.
In our society all of these factors are fairly-well correlated with economic prosperity. The healthcare gap is important to note and to address, but it shouldn't blind us to other factors in the discrepancy in cancer rates between rich and poor. That's especially so if some of these other factors turn out to be more easily and quickly corrected for.
Slashdot Mirror
and HELL NO! We DON'T need more Silly Valley-type incursions into government. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. People whose working lives are centred on technology tend to think technology has or is the solution to all problems. The sorry fact is that technology is the rampant source of many of our problems. Facebook, Google and the like need to be controlled and brought to heel, not egged on by tech-savvy fanbois who gain legislative power and try to realize their juvenile tech-topian visions. And AFAICT the tech sector has jack shit of relevance to say about the challenges we face as a result of increasing automation and the advent of true AI. That's a whole other discipline (or set of disciplines) that needs to be developed - tech definitely needs to be at that able, but they sure as shit shouldn't be anywhere close to running the show.
I'd be really interested to read what Cory Doctorow says if he decides to weigh in on this.
How much of their own attention do business leaders at the top of the food chain allow to take part in the Attention Economy? Beyond a certain point, doesn't spending loads of time binge-watching, playing games, etc, make one less likely to be creative, to innovate, and to successfully strategize in business and in personal endeavours? OTOH, it seems to me that overloading the mental processing power of the plebs with trivialities makes them more pliable and, (perhaps paradoxically), less likely to inquire deeply into the activities of the point-one-percenters. The attention economy is all about fleecing average people while undermining their ability to rise above the average and make full use of their capabilities.
I don't even have to posit a conspiracy to make this argument work - it's possible that things either evolved this way or we ended up here largely by chance. However, there is ample evidence of such a conspiracy in our education system dating back more than a century. For more on the characteristics and consequences of the education system that was created by the Robber Barons for their own purposes, see John Taylor Gatto's book. (PDF).
Wow! Even when I assume that you're posting in good faith and not shilling, I still find it hard to know where to begin. Given your relatively low UID and the reasonably high coherence of your writing, it seems unlikely that you are unaware of the implications of all this data gathering. Facebook has already been outed for experimenting on its users by manipulating their news feeds and gauging their responses. Was this innocent psychological research in the name of furthering human knowledge? No, it was testing the feasibility of using the data they gather to manipulate users' emotions and behaviour toward a desired end. Can you not see that all of this data collection and profiling is leading to a state where powerful forces that are pretty much answerable to nobody, know more about us than we know about ourselves? And that's not just a figure of speech - I mean quite literally that Facebook, Google, and the like can predict their users' behaviour better than the users themselves can. It's clear to anyone who's not in denial, that their end game is to be able to influence people even more consistently and effectively than their own close friends and family members might. I'm quite sure Big Data can do that to a large number of their users right now; but even if I'm wrong in that, do you honestly believe they won't succeed in doing it in the very near term?
On the other hand, if you really believe that they aren't using the data they gather to manipulate people without their knowledge and informed consent; or if you believe that their efforts are harmless or ineffectual; or if you think that people who fall prey to that manipulation are weak or stupid, or are lacking in character or personal responsibility; then all I can say to you is "stop drinking their Kool-Aid, give your head a shake, and get a clue".
As for "falling for a socialist narrative", I started to gain a deep distrust of online data gathering back in the Classmates days - that was before both Facebook and Google. The only narrative involved is mine - it's based on a lifetime of observations of corporate behaviour.
In Silicon Valley technological determinism is rampant. It's the simpler of the two stories, the more attractive one.
Calling it the 'more simplistic of the two stories' might be more accurate. But I think its attractiveness has more to do with its implied confirmation of the power and rightness that people in Big Tech tend to feel - there's an air of Manifest Destiny about their whole attitude.
If technology is the dominant influencer, then there's no need to understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'.
If technology is the dominant influencer, then you think you already understand the complexities and ethics of the situations you're 'disrupting'. There is a HUGE amount of know-it-all hubris in Big Tech, especially in the higher echelons.
Narratives around blockchain/VR/singularity/etc also happily align with the "new tech is inevitable" part, because it implies any attempt to regulate it is wasted effort.
I totally agree. For me it's yet another example of the Manifest Destiny attitude.
China's leaders seem to care little for the privacy, or the freedom, of millions of its citizens.
There's no "seem" about it - they don't care, and everybody and his dog knows it. I'm sure even the most naive of Chinese citizens are under no illusion that their government gives a rat's ass about their welfare at all, much less their privacy or freedom.
This news should have people all over the world protesting in the streets against corporate interference in governance, and Facebook should wake up tomorrow to find at least 90% of their user base simply gone. If people had any sense, knew what was good for them, and had the will to act on the knowledge, Facebook would be a fucking ghost town within a month and entirely dead within a year.
What's almost certain to happen instead is two or three news cycles of feigned outrage on the part of governments, a similar period of feigned contrition on the part of Facebook, people swearing off Facebook for a week, and then... nothing. Business as usual will continue; what should be a brick wall that stops Mark Fuckerberg dead in his tracks, will be a minor speed bump on the road to complete abolition of personal privacy.
Windows error codes might as well be replaced with a frown emoji.
Thanks for that! Made my night - I'm still laughing...
Like why was the control panel - a nice, central repository of system settings and related items - gutted and the relevant controls spread randomly about the place with no obvious underlying logic?
I'm only half joking when I say that it was done in order to give people less control over their computers and less confidence in exercising that control. It plays into the 'software as a service' flavour of the rent-seeking model that ALL corporations are trying to establish as the immutable new order of things.
Come to think of it... no, I'm not half joking - I'm not joking at all. I really do believe that's what they're up to.
Try explaining to an elderly person who's used to 95/XP/7 how to get around Win10. Everything's hidden, icons that are confusing, and the modern desktop UI just baffles them to the point where they just give up..
Don't bother explaining - just nuke Win10, install Xubuntu, give them a short tutorial, and be done. Seriously, non-power-users who are comfortable with earlier, saner generations of Windows represent a perfect use case for the friendlier Linux distros and DE's. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up XFCE under Ubuntu so that it's WAY more like XP than Win10 could ever be.
Imagine a slave plantation without chains, without a foreman, without whips, without fences. Sooner or later I start to think that maybe it's not a slave plantation since the "slaves" are completely free to leave any time they want and they stay there because they want to. Sooner or later I cease to have sympathy for them because they're actually doing it to themselves.
If you're still on Windows then it's your fault this stuff keeps happening to you.
That analysis doesn't apply to programmers and IT people who are stuck with using Windows at their jobs. SOME of them could find other jobs at companies that use Linux or Mac - but that's a really small percentage. In other industries, folks require the ability to use software that's only available for Windows. LibreOffice is remarkable, but its compatibility with MS Office still has some serious failings. And GIMP + Inkscape + Scribus often can't replace the Adobe suite. There are lots more examples. The 'slaves' need to form a union and go on strike. But that ain't gonna happen. Citizens can't even organize sufficiently to get decent government - they sure as hell won't get organized to fight for a decent computer OS.
Here's the evidence that these people are nothing but a bunch of narcissistic psychopaths. Collecting information on unrelated people, invading their privacy at your own convenience at any time with out a thought or care ...The mental disconnect of these people are unfathomable.
The real mental disconnect here is that Gates will most likely succeed in getting email addresses for almost every teacher on the planet. A sufficient percentage of his followers will comply with his request - either unthinkingly or with full knowledge of the implications, and frankly I'm not sure which is worse.
We as a society are selling out each other's privacy, and making ourselves available to brainwashing programs, at an astonishing rate and with hardly ever a second thought. What we're allowing the tech sector to do to us is the important consideration here - the voracious psychopathy of tech corporations, and corporations in general, hasn't been news for a very long time.
the developed world is officially fiddling while Earth burns. Really, why do we need all this new gee-whiz shit, other than to one-up each other while we anesthetize ourselves against the failure of the old gee-whiz shit to give our lives meaning and purpose?
Posting to reverse an inadvertent down mod - I meant to upmod as Insightful,
would be to mandate that all connected devices have a user-configurable firewall that enjoys root permissions and is the ultimate boss of whatever data is sent or received by any app. We all know that will never happen, and we also know that the majority of users would never configure it.
But just imagine it for a moment - those of us who actually care about our privacy, (but who don't know what to do, or who get stuck with unrootable devices), would be able to force the data miners to fuck off. And a lot of formerly-clueless people who suddenly DO care about their privacy when they read news stories like this wouldn't be so helpless. They could ask their geek friends what to do and NOT hear something like "buy a new phone, root it, install this app, blah blah blah".
It's nice to dream sometimes.
As a life-long Ontario resident I can tell you that with the Conservative party in power here and enjoying a solid majority, this bill has precisely zero chance of becoming law. Especially given the knuckle-dragging fuckwit we have as our provincial Premier. After all, Doug Ford is the guy who cut funding to student unions and justified it by saying "I think we all know what kind of crazy Marxist nonsense student unions get up to".
You must be new here.
You must be news here. Oh, wait...
If actual study of history is going to be replaced by what is convenient to search on Google, then we are limiting ourselves to a "history" that starts in the 20th century. Maybe this is just the way things will be in the future.
That is probably the most insightful observation I've read here so far, and it's certainly the scariest. I'm thinking not only of the millennia of accumulated knowledge and wisdom that we stand to lose, but also the mistakes we're more likely to repeat. We could be looking at the modern-day equivalent of the Dark Ages falling upon us over the next century.
Maybe master writing intelligible sentences before worrying about entomology. ... "How badly broken is... " reads way better than "How badly is ... broken" . Holy crap. I am a native english speaker and this whole article was tedious to read.
Oh, the irony! I stumbled over your first sentence and had to read it three times before I figured out what you were trying to say. Maybe (you should) master writing intelligible sentences before worrying about... the study of insects? Perhaps you should also learn the difference between 'etymology' and 'entomology' while you're on your own quest for intelligible English, (not "english"), self-expression.
...out of print books cannot be monetized, it would seem and thus are of no interest to Alphabet...
The Alphabet has no interest in books? Who'd 've thunk it? :)
It is really sad what people think is actually doing research these days. God forbid someone should get off their ass and do real research. What's next? Mistaking Wikipedia for peer-reviewed research? Millennials are so lazy!
Sure Grandpa, I'll get off your lawn now. It's looking kind of brown anyway, and those garden gnomes and pink flamingos give your house zero curb appeal. BTW, there's a good chance I'm older in years than you are, but it seems you're farther into senility than I am...
Google is a good search tool, but it isn't a research tool.
I disagree that Google is a good search tool - it has become pretty mediocre. I also disagree that it isn't a research tool. It's only ONE tool in a researcher's toolbox, but it can be a very powerful one if it's well made and properly used. Unfortunately, Google has regressed from Snap-On wrench set to cheap dollar-store adjustable POS. Consequently it's getting harder and harder to use properly, as it rounds off corners by design and breaks easily.
Google WAS a good search tool. Nowadays it's damn bad.
I totally agree.
My most hated anti-feature right now is the impossibility to force a word to appear on the results. Back in the day you only needed to add a '+' in front of it, but it no longer honors it...
I never used that. I've always put "allintext:" in front of search terms that I insist on, and I put double quotes around words and phrases that I want exact matches for. Although the effectiveness of both of these has diminished over time as Google has dumbed itself down, it sounds as though they're still much more effective than the plus sign you're currently using.
FTS: "In the past year or so, the engagement has been combative, with abrupt, disruptive policy changes that are being held without consultation, and, unusually, with absolutely no room for negotiation or even deadline extensions"
Except for the word 'unusually', isn't the above paragraph a pretty accurate description of how most big tech companies treat their users / customers / 'products of the human variety'?
and the patent looks like another example of stringing existing tech together for it's exact intended purpose... I think it would fail any test of novelty or newness.
FTA: "Even early on, the Postal Service expressed interest in Return Mail’s invention, Hungerpiller said. By 2006, the government and Return Mail were talking about licensing options and a formal pilot program."
The Post Office was negotiating with Hungerpiller before they went and violated his patent, so presumably they thought there was "novelty or newness". I'm reminded of another patentability test - the "obvious to a person skilled in the art" criterion. The problem with both criteria is that things become obvious in hindsight, and we tend to forget they really weren't so obvious before the fact. If the idea / process / procedure hadn't been implemented yet, in spite of the tech required having been available for quite some time, then was it really obvious? And AFAIC, if it isn't obvious, then it's new or novel pretty much by definition.
In addition to less access to healthcare, I suspect that people in lower-income groups have additional risk factors. Blue-collar workers and the casually employed are probably more likely to be exposed to higher levels of carcinogens in their workplaces. I would guess that they also, on the average, eat a higher percentage of processed foods such as nitrate-laden meats. And I bet they're less likely to have the same kind of access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Plus, quality and level of education are a factor in the healthfulness of dietary choices.
In our society all of these factors are fairly-well correlated with economic prosperity. The healthcare gap is important to note and to address, but it shouldn't blind us to other factors in the discrepancy in cancer rates between rich and poor. That's especially so if some of these other factors turn out to be more easily and quickly corrected for.