It's worth a read, even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title.
"To get the actual data, you need to go through a website maintained by the US Trade Commission. This website has good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it’s slow and clunky and confusing and often randomly fails to deliver any results. On the other hand, when you re-submit, it clears your query and then blocks you for submitting too many requests, which is nice."
> even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title
Tangent, but: I wish Hacker News was a bit less dogmatic about preferring the original site's title over any better semantic summary the submitter might offer. Blog posts and news headlines have a strong incentive to be clickbait-ey or just plain catchy, which often makes them less informative and in turn makes the HN homepage harder to scan for interesting posts.
It also feels like an arbitrary dividing line where if the original title is too long to fit HN's max limit, the submitter edits it and their take on what's a good summary stands. But if the original title could fit, the submitter's headline is often overwritten with the article title by mods even if it's less useful.
Agreed. I feel awkward sharing my blog here, because I title my posts to appeal to a hypothetical regular audience, but I'm trying to build a regular audience by showing it to non-regulars who lack the context to interpret the title. (Or rather: I want the title to be sensible and entertaining in hindsight.)
Could you title your posts in a HN-friendly style and subtitle them with your actual preferred title? And then (if this wouldn’t be considered Poor Form) swap back to the original title once it’s dropped off the front page?
On a vaguely related note, I hacked together a WayBack machine type thing on top of Common Crawl in like 50 lines of Python. So it transparently lets you load any page directly from the dumps (it loads only those few bytes from the crawl dumps, and gunzips them).
It was really easy, and I was surprised it apparently hadn't been done before.
The only problem is the index IP blocks you if you query it too often, and it gets queried once for every resource on the page.
I've been informed that there are ways around this (download an index?), does anyone know more about that?
Thanks. I meant that light usage from a single user was already enough to get banned. (Though if you rewrite the HTML so there's no resources to fetch, it should be OK...)
Also, it's just a proxy, there's no front-end. (Being a 50 line Python script with one dependency (Flask), the idea is that the end user would run it.) It's just http://localhost/URL, and it loads it from the hardcoded snapshot. I guess https://localhost/snapshot/url might work better.
I'd also like to see how many lines it ends up being if you remove the one dependency. I've done this for other projects and the answer is "not much more" and "also runs way faster for some reason."
I see, thanks for the extra details. I'm pretty sure you can forgo Flask in favour of directly using the underlying WSGI protocol, while keeping the the Web server you are already using (Gunicorn, probably). The Web server would still be a dependency though.
First — 0.69% of total exports is blood still is surprisingly high! Remember, you can get blood from humans in your own country, and prepare it there. So, why do you need it from the US?
Second — it’s amazing the detail that you can achieve from public data.
Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.
The reason the US exports blood products is because it is one of 5 countries that allow commercial blood product harvesting. Well, at least plasma. I don't remember which organization it is, but there is an international organization that tries to get countries to be "self-sufficient" in blood products so that they are not internationally traded (the organization is something like WHO, UN, or Red Cross). Only those 5 countries that allow some level of commercialization actually meet their goals of being self sufficient (and export as on top of that).
Source: A guest lecture at my university by Al Roth, Nobel prize-winner in economics, who is currently focusing his work on these type of markets. Most of his work is on kidney exchanges right now.
Cognitive dissonance really is required to keep our “warm fuzzy empathic friendly” self image while simultaneously being ruthlessly pragmatic cold blooded killers when it suits us.
Just wait till these robot maximalists figure out that a pile of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen is much cheaper than robots made out of steel and carbon fiber.
I mean, they haven't glommed onto the daily experience of giving a kid a snickers bar and asking them a question is cheaper than building a nuclear reactor to power GPT4o levels of LLM...
If we could directly convert the food energy of a Snickers bar to electricity we could easily power AI. A Snickers bar has 250 kcal, which is 1000 kJ or about 250 grams of TNT.[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=250+kcal+in+joule] chatgpt-4 uses 3.6 kJ to 36 kJ per query so you could get potentially hundreds of queries on a single Snickers bar.
We only need a way to harness the power of the human body. Maybe we put people in VR for fun while using their body heat to power the AI.
TNT and other explosives have relatively little energy per kg compared to eg petrol or snickers.
That's explosives are chemicals selected / designed to be able to release their chemical energy really quickly and without needing any external oxidizer (because harvesting atmospheric oxygen would be too slow). That focus obviously leads to compromises in other areas, like energy density.
Temporarily, on the margin. A human would need multiple Snickers bars per day to survive, and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.
Also no human is anywhere close to being as knowledgeable and skilled as LLMs at all the things at the same time, so it hardly even compares.
How much vitamin C is in a snickers bar? I think you'd get scurvy within a month or two if that's all you had.
How much vitamin A? Night blindness. Vitamin B? Neurological issues, confusion.
That's the thing with mono-diets, your body needs a diverse range of things that it can't synthesise itself.
But to the core point, in cases where the output of an LLM is good enough, many already have much lower energy requirements than humans: o4-mini is currently priced at $1.1 per million tokens of input and $4.4/million tokens of output; if that's all being spent on electricity at $0.1/kWh, that's a max of 11 kWh/million tokens in and 44 kWh/million tokens out — how many calories would a human have to burn to read, write, hear, speak, and internally monologue the equivalent of a million tokens?
Only if you also ate some random other stuff you found lying around. Doesn't even have to provide much in the way of energy, just enough 'dirt' to round out your diet with whatever other essentials you need.
Human bodies have evolved to survive for a long time on relatively little, yes. But not to evolve for a very long time on a single source of very 'clean' food like snickers bars. 'Clean' in the sense that chemically snickers has relatively well defined inputs, whereas hungry humans would eat just about anything, including insects and grass and bark or leather.
This isn’t true. There are countless cases of people surviving for months on nearly no food at all.
I’m not talking about what it takes to stay alive for long term periods. I was refuting the silly idea that you would die after a couple of days/weeks of snickers.
They're fully aware of the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans at scale in general, and this includes power efficiency too. Meanwhile, what is not getting comparably better is robotics. This leads to obvious conclusion about natural order of things and division of labor: computers are for thinking, humans are for doing manual labor.
> the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans
I wanted to say that you were wrong, that LLMs can't reason and so it certainly isn't an obvious truth that they do it better than humans, but when I asked AI if LLMs can reason it told me that they can't which (while still not being reasoned by the LLM) seems to support the spirit of your claim since it gave a correct answer while you (a presumed human that can reason) got it wrong.
We might be elevating the importance of reasoning too much because us humans need to use it to solve many difficult problems. But if intuition was stronger, conscious/explicit/logical reasoning might not be needed. Didn't the famous mathemetician Ramanujan say that God gave him his answers in his dreams? That sounds like really powerful intuition like an LLM. Us humans can already solve a lot of incredibly complex problems intuitively, but they're quite domain-specific, like for spatial navigation and social interaction.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson predicted we'll know machines are conscious when we ask a question and the computer responds, "That reminds me of a story."
That seems to be the hangup. I have to use a definition that would put it on equal footing to what we do as humans since that's the comparison being made.
Computers and software can be said to "understand", "think", and "reason" in their own way and informally people have always used those words in that context. Recently, software which has been trained on human-reasoned output is producing text that mimics reasoning well enough that it can be confused for the real thing, but nobody has been able to show that any reasoning (as a human reasons) is what's occurring.
If the output it produces is as useful to me as the output produced by a human with the magical and expensive capability to 'reason', why should I care?
There are several that would apply. Let's use this one as an example: Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth.
I don't think you need consciousness to reason. I don't see why repeated application of rewrite rules to extrapolate logical conclusions from antecedents shouldn't be considered reasoning. LLMs are perfectly able to match and apply rewrite rules, while using fuzzy concepts rather than being bound to crisp ontologies that make symbolic reasoning impractical to scale up. And for better or worse, LLMs can also apply simplified heuristics and rules of thumb, and end up making the same mistakes that humans make.
If you think "consciously" is a loaded term, wait until you get to "truth"!
Maybe it'd be easier to try another definition:
2
a(1)
: the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence
The same source defined intelligence as:
a(1)
: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason
also : the skilled use of reason
And here we get the core of the issue. AI doesn't "think". It doesn't comprehend or understand what it does. There is no actual "I" in AI that didn't come from the people whose works were used to train it. At least not yet. I question if LLMs will ever be capable of anything more than producing a convincing affectation of the process used to produce the material it was trained on. I suspect that AGI will have to come from elsewhere. That doesn't mean that what passes for AI these days can't be useful, but I don't think it's capable of reason and as far as I know, nobody has proved otherwise.
Comprehend, from com- ("together" or "with") and prehendere ("to seize" or "grasp"). To take a hold of.
Can a calculator comprehend arithmetic? Can it take a hold of a number (in a register, for example), and a second number, and add them together to get a hold of the result?
What is computation, really? When we design machines to do arithmetic, do the machines actually do arithmetic, or do they just coincidentally come up with states that we humans can interpret as a correspondence with arithmetic?
More importantly, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
If you put a problem into text, and give it to an LLM, and an LLM applied a series of higher order pattern matching to it to produce more text, and you read the resulting text and interpret it as reasoning about the solution to a problem, has the LLM reasoned? Does the calculator calculate? Or does it really matter?
To all of you complaining about LLMs hallucinating, do try to give the same prompt to a kid on a sugar rush and let me know if you're getting more reliable responses.
The US also has a lot of people and those donation centers like to be around poor people and junkies which sacrifice their bodies for a couple of bucks. All the money they get are compensations for the time being attached to the machine, because you can’t get paid for anything which comes from your body.
But then the donation center sells your plasma and various other parts of your donation for top dollar to pharma which sells it again.
The machines are not excellent , spills and abrasion products can enter, and you might infect yourself with diseases which you sign a form for. The only safe way to donate blood would be full-blood donations without machines, but they will still separate your plasma and sell it to pharma.
Awful system from my perspective. Separating blood from organ trade would be appropriate. A blood donation foundation or something where value is distributed down to the donor would be an idea.
People with more connections can already get faster access to donor kidneys.
And a poor person with one kidney less but extra health checkups can probably get better health outcomes than a poor person with two kidneys but extra health checkups. (This assumes that the kidney sale comes with some mandatory regular health checkups. Just like kidney donations do.)
In Iran, there is no tracking of donors and most donors don't want to be associated with the donation long-term, as it's connected to their poverty and the shame of their poverty. In the limited surveys that have been done many also noted that they haven't been properly informed about the risks of a donation.
The time is gone anyway, and barring industrial accident you still have your entire body to sell again afterwards. That is not true of kidney donation — you can't donate a second time¹ and if your remaining one fails you are up shit creak because if you were in the position of being willing to sell one back then you are unlikely to be in the position to buy one now.
Donation of blood and other replenishables is a bit different of course, but allowing open sale opens some bad avenues in terms of people effectively being forced to (which could carry risks they wouldn't normally want to take).
> Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis.
Note that this analysis was performed by Dynonight, a rather bright blogger whose articles appeared several times on the HN front page. The vast majority of humans (I include myself here) probably wouldn't be able to achieve a result of comparable quality, even if it doesn't look that hard in retrospect.
LLM Deep Research can already exceed the performance of not-so-bright humans, but it is a quite different matter to outperform smart people like Dynomight. (I guess "research experts" isn't quite the right term here. The mentioned journalist from The Economist apparently was unable to research the topic to a similar degree, even though research is a main part of his/her job.)
>Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.
In the searches I have done Google's "Deep Research" has been better at providing primary data (or very convincingly fabricating).
OpenAI's version seems to more likely to give the answer that everybody thinks is true. For the blood example I could see it finding many sources that repeat the 2% claim, and accept that because everyone seems to agree, then it must be right. That's a mixed blessing in that maybe most casual users might want the commonly accepted answer, but when I have used the deep research tools, it has almost always because I know the answer everybody gives for a particular question, but I suspect it might not be based in reality. This makes my reason for wanting an automated deep research tool coinciding with the weakest area of the tool itself.
It's also been a bit eye opening how often commonly repeated but poorly founded claims, seem to turn up the same names of individuals, (or organisations, or individuals pretending to be organisations) as you trace them back.
> Remember, you can get blood from humans in your own country, and prepare it there. So, why do you need it from the US?
Random hypothesis:
• equipment needs for uranium enrichment for Manhattan project in 1940s
=> US cornering the market on centrifuges (in both a "we buy them all" sense and a "we won't let companies sell them to other state actors in quantity" sense) for decades
=> US biomedical manufacturing of anything requiring centrifuging as a step, quickly outstripping that of all other countries
=> eventual global logistical dependence on US-based suppliers for such products
In reality simply that the US lets you pay people for blood plasma, an the market does the rest.
There are similar arguments made for kidney donation. Paying people a set amount kidneys is exploiting the poor, but most those who need kidneys are not well off and there is an enormous shortage causing massive shortages, so some argue that we should pay since society would be net better off.
The centrifuges needed for biology (or medicine) are very different beasts from those you need for uranium enrichment.
Miele and Bosch makes great centrifuges for their washing machines. That technology is probably closer to what you need for blood, than the uranium enrichment equipment would be.
Funny, because it is illegal to pay donors here. I used to be a donor, but the energy and effort it takes were too much for me at the time. And plasma donors have to 'free up' a lot more time.
Not to mention how i get a cookie and the semi-goverment organisation charges >600€ for a baggie to hospitals. Someone needs to pay for that CEO's third house and car collection!
I used to operate a database for a large North American alcohol retailer. We had a problem with our data that said that 30% of the ring from a particular store saw the name "A GIFT FOR YOU" on the CC stripe. After months of bitter accusations of my database being incorrect, we flew someone out to investigate.
We found that a block away from the store was a plasma "donation" facility. In order to skirt various laws, when you "donate", you are given a prepaid credit card. The name on the card is "A GIFT FOR YOU". Donators then took that card directly to the alcohol store.
All of the data was correct; 30% of the ring from one store was paid by credit cards from the plasma "donation" facility with "A GIFT FOR YOU" on the card. A large reputational battle then commenced as the retailer thought of themselves as a high-end "wine and craft beer" store, when ultimately it turns out Budweiser pays the bills.
There's an industry piece that points out that a remarkable percentage of beer sales in the US are single cans stored cold, sold at convenience stores. Most residents of the US drive to convenience stores. Given that they are buying 1-2 cans at a time it doesn't take much in the way of inference to figure out that they are buying them to be consumed while driving.
When I was in graduate school, my wife and I bought an affordable house in a neighborhood with a big factory next door. It was otherwise a lovely place, and so my morning jog often took me up and down the rural roads around the factory. On every road within a kilometer of the factory, the roadsides were littered with beer cans. On one particularly early morning, I was running when the late shift got out, and I watched somebody finish work (around 6am), get in their truck, pop open a beer, start driving, and then throw the can out the window as they drove past me. Given the quantity of cans on the roadside, this probably went on for years.
I have used the same system at home to reduce unplanned beers. Alcohol-free beers are always in the fridge waiting, and the ones with alcohol in are somewhere much warmer. On the two to three nights a week I want a refreshing malted beverage, this almost always leads to me going for the alcohol-free version.
That said, following your Wikipedia link, it seems that a different mechanic is at play:
> "No product may be favoured over another, which in practice means that the beers are not refrigerated, since otherwise all beer would have to be refrigerated which is too expensive."
Same thing with nips (1oz liquor bottles) which you see everywhere on roadsides in some parts of the US - The product basically exists to make open containers immediately disposable
The majority of litter on the sidewalks of the through streets near me is those 1oz shooters. Followed by aluminum cans (mostly beer), fast food trash (plastic cups for sauces, disposable drink cups), and then household trash that looks like it flew out of a trash can on windy days (empty boxes, plastic wrappers, a bottle of laundry detergent, etc).
Source: new year's resolution to pick up at least 1 piece of trash per dog walk.
Yeah, this kind of thing lead to some recriminations as a kid. Air conditioning was rare, many shops were small and had no seating, so the right thing to do was take your cold soda outside. But it the weather was so hot that it could be warm before you finished a bottle.
A few nice adults told us that it would stay cold a lot longer in a paper bag, and that a plastic bag wouldn't help. Both statements proved true…but most other adults would assume it was alcohol. They'd be scowling at us, telling us off. Sometimes we'd show the bottle, but few even need to smell it to be sure it wasn't alcohol.
Even then, most of them never started acting like they were the ones who had been in the wrong. All because some people were known to use a paper bag around beer bottles.
>If these were common cases, cops would lay in wait and nab them for open container.
I mean, they do. One of the big issues is coverage of enforcement. Here in Texas you see disparities where arrests in big cities converge on public intoxication, where in smaller cities you run into a higher ratio of open container because of cops having time to sit and watch stores.
Pretty much everyone in the US owns a working fridge. If you just want to get drunk at home, you just buy a case of beer and leave it in there. It's actually much cheaper to buy beer by the case in most places
Although I also assume people are drinking these beers in the car, it does seem like a bit of a leap… I mean, an alternative is that they just figure they’d rather have the beer ready right when they get home (instead of sticking it in the fridge for a bit).
The same reasons convenience stores sell single cigarettes, and people smoke them in their cars. Compelling cravings don't care about your externalities and don't want to wait. Lots of people don't want the people they live with to know how much they actually consume. Some people live with others who don't allow beer in the fridge for various reasons. Some have a housemate who can't be trusted around a surplus. Lots of people like to think of themselves as the kind of person who doesn't need to have a whole pack around, they just want this one and maybe another one. Depending on who you're hanging out with, sometimes it's nice to go to a BYO party and not contribute a surplus if that would get abused. And as always, who said they waited to get started until they were driving home anyway?
But that requires planning ahead. The whole point of a convenience store is that it's a convenient place to get small quantities when you didn't plan ahead, and people are willing to pay a premium for that.
For some people, a beer is a once-in-a-while add-on to their purchase, a bit like a chocolate bar. I rarely drink at home but I can be tempted by a balcony beer when the weather is right.
Speaking of public transit: bus stops and train stations are prime locations to drink your singlet can of beer and drop it on the ground, in a planter, or just leave it on a seat for someone else to move it later.
While it is not easy to drink an open container on a bus or train, drunks will consistently stop in a nearby convenience store, have a cold one before boarding, and leave it there for others to clean up. I suspect that a high percentage of convenience-store sales for singlet cans and bottles may be attributed to pedestrians and transit passengers.
Most drunks would rather not invite trouble by carrying around glass bottles. You don't want them near pools or jacuzzis, and you don't want to drop one on a bus or train and cause undue attention. Dropping or abandoning a metal can, by comparison, is no trouble.
And you're definitely right about recovery value. I believe, in Arizona, that glass has no redemption value at all, and so cans are the only logical choice.
There used to be a guy around here, a real character, called himself the Can Man, and he weighed about 350 lbs, and just rode the bus all the day, accompanied by an enormous bag full of cans that he would collect from every site possible. And he had songs he would sing and a little patter about himself, and whereas a can-collecting dude would normally be sort of smelly and repulsive, he managed to add to the "local color" and be somewhat endearing as he rode the bus around doing his can-collecting thing. I miss that guy!
Have you actually looked up what how much a blood bank CEO makes? Is it a lot?
Edit: I just did a bit of research and didn't come up with a lot. I found this example [1] where the CEO's total compensation is $414k. That doesn't seem all that high...
Well, not in the us. here that is considered an unenthical amount for a semi-public servant.
In 2011 they made 260k€, which was at then time about 50% more then our prime minister made. Which is used as a norm to limit how much you are allowed to make when working for public services.
Pretty close? Like 80k for your regular living expenses leaves you 180k/y in savings. That's a nice holiday house in France every few years.
I mean to really get to a mansion and multiple holiday houses and a bunch of fancy cars you need to work the job for like 15 years, but still. In NL (where I think GP is from) earning that kind of money qualifies you as "seriously rich". Even more so if the salary got inflation-adjusted since 2011.
Does your country not have taxes? Progressive taxation eats a lot of that quickly and all of the tax benefits of home ownership aren’t available for secondary homes. Additionally, vacation homes in desirable vacation places cost even more than normal homes.
Someone making 3x a normal salary is not excessive by any means.
The CEO of a blood bank likely has the skills and connections to be a CEO of many other for-profit companies, where they would make much more than $414k. Intermediate FAANG employees are paid more. I’m perfectly happy that this person gets $414k for their role in _saving lives_.
Fwiw, here are a couple other rough estimates of pay in the US. These are entirely my opinion, but I am in engineering so I think these are pretty well calibrated. I only share these because they might be useful to get a sense of how your job measures up:
Entry level engineering (any type): 80k minimum
Entry level software engineering: 120k minimum
Multiply by 1.5x for high cost of living area (Bay Area, New York, Boston, LA)
Multiply by 2x for FAANG in HCOL area
Levels.fyi gives good estimates of software eng pay bands above entry level. Non-software almost always makes less :/
Emotionally I agree — what could these people be doing to uniquely add millions of dollars of value? However, the fact that they aren’t replaced with cheaper options is (imo) pretty good evidence that they are uniquely worth that pay. If there was a cheaper option, the board of directors would replace the CEO, and enrich themselves and other shareholders with the saved money.
Either way, that’s kindof disconnected for the CEO of this bloodbank. Their opportunity cost is quite high. They choose to work for comparatively low pay, but have a positive impact on the world.
i think i understand where you're coming from, but i think you're begging the question a little bit (ie, ceo pay is high because it is high).
i do think it's more likely that the executive class has a vested interest in keeping their own pay high (not just CEOs, but board members as you've mentioned), and they've got a lot more class solidarity than the rest of us, though they'd never put it that way - it's just The Way Of Things, you know? divide and conquer.
i should maybe mention that i'm a public employee and my "opportunity cost" is also relatively high, but... hell is hot, and i want to be able to sleep at night.
The boards of most public companies are made up mostly of C-level executives of other public companies. Retail shareholders hardly ever get involved to a sufficient degree to fire boards.
There is a good theory on why CEO's are paid more than they're worth called tournament theory.
A person in an upper layer of a hierarchical organization is paid for the value they provide PLUS an amount that incentivized anybody below them to reach that layer. If everybody is paid just for the value they provide, they wouldn't have a reason to try and reach higher layers and they would minimize work. After all, we cannot assume the value a person provides goes up in higher layers.
This additional pay bubbles up in larger organizations to exorbitant levels for CEO's.
That's nothing.
In NY, the "non-profit", "New York Blood Center" has a monopoly on blood harvesting, even the Red Cross has no blood drives here as a result.
Their CEO makes $3 million, most of their executives above $400k.
I interviewed at a place that made the software to track blood as it moved around. It's a regulated thing to make sure that the blood stays cold and that they can track who donated. Anyways, the point is that the guy who interviewed me casually mentioned that the PE firm bought up companies until they controlled 90% of the market. I'm sure they're making bank off blood as well.
Yeah, same. Illegal to pay donors here too. I’ve donated multiple gallons, kinda felt it was my duty as a driver on the road… but at some point I came in to donate and got told they were extra short staffed and I’d have to wait at least an hour. The clinics already have terrible hours that seem to mostly cater to retirees, never open in the evenings and most clinics are closed on the weekends too, the one nearest me that I was going to stopped opening on the weekend entirely, meaning I had to travel quite a ways. I’m basically poor and the cost in terms of time, travel, energy and food is not insignificant. Meanwhile the high level staff making the cuts to the clinics have secretaries to reply to the emails they solicit from donors. Even though I sent them a long, insightful email, with followups, about my detailing why they are struggling as a young millennial (supposedly an audience they are trying to attract), and after all of it I get phone calls from the vampires minimum twice a week every week, sometimes every day.
Which country are you talking about? I believe it's legal to pay donors on the USA.
Presumably a European county given you quoted euros?
Looks like the EU encourages member states to encourage unpaid donations:
> Furthermore, Member States should take measures to promote Community self-sufficiency in human blood or blood components and to encourage voluntary unpaid donations of blood and blood components.
They say paying donors puts them & patients at risk, because it would stimulate donors' to lie about their health when donating and we can't be asked to test blood for everything. And the say it is unethical to pay for human tissues.
If it’s things like CJD or other prion diseases then it’s true they don’t test, but AIDS, hep C, and other common blood borne diseases? They’ve been screening every donation since the 80’s.
I have the same story in the same country with presumably the same organization (Sanquin). I used to give blood, but not anymore because I don't find what they're doing ethical.
Does it just not feel ethical or is one of their claims false?
Both of the key claims do seem to have evidence to support them:
1) Paying for blood shifts the socioeconomic distribution of the donor pool.
2) The socioeconomic shift results in more contaminated blood due to greater incidence of drug use and/or related blood-borne diseases that cannot all be tested for with high accuracy.
It is legal in the US. In fact you can potentially make a decent bit of money if you're paid $70 per donation and can donate 100 times per year [0]. Don't know if it would be worth the time to travel to the centre and wait in line, for many HN users.
You could sell your plasma twice a week in the town I went to college. We also found that it took significantly less alcohol to get drunk if you had nearly a liter less plasma running through your veins, so it would also save us money in the evening!
My understanding, at least where I live, Florida, is that plasma can be sold, but whole blood must be donated. I still get a $25-$35 gift card every time I donate a pint of whole blood (as close as possible to every 8 weeks).
I think there might be some confusion by commenters in this thread about selling blood in the US.
Blood can be separated out into its plasma, red blood cells, and platelets by an apheresis machine. The machine cycles the unused components back into the donar so only one component is donated.
Blood plasma (~55% by volume), the amber colored water and disolved proteins, can be sold. Red blood cells (~44% by volume), and platelets (~1% by volume) can NOT be sold in the US by donars.
Most blood drives that you'd experience at school or in the workplace takes whole blood (so there is no need for the apheresis machine) which is more exhausting than if just one of the components was taken.
Plasma can be used outside of prophylactics as well, I don't think this is accounted for in the article (human plasma is used in cosmetics for example).
A lot of plasma is also separated out of whole-blood donations and manufactured into all sorts of things. I don't know all of the end-user financial ramifications of this, but hospitals absolutely do pay (sometimes quite a pretty penny depending on rarity of antigens and antibodies) for RBCs and platelets (and plasma) from suppliers like the American Red Cross.
Purely anecdotally, I have heard stories of some donors being compensated extremely handsomely for their regular donations because of the rarity of their blood attributes - even being flown across the country and wined and dined to obtain their blood on top of thousands of dollars per donation.
Behind the Bastards recently did a two part podcast on the blood industry in America, particularly how lack of regulation and taking advantage of the incarcerated (focused on Arkansas) led to the spread of blood borne illnesses and how it killed a lot of people. I had no idea blood was such big business and that it was in our top 10 domestic exports
Incorrect, yes, but to be fair .67% and 2% occupy the same "wow, that's a large proportion of the economy" order-or-magnitude band of surprise (for me). Obviously not as charismatic/sensational, but still significant and surprising (to me).
It's a big scandal in the UK. Over 30,000 people were infected with HIV or Hep C from US blood stock in the 70s and 80s. The UK Government will be paying almost £12bn as compensation, which to put into context is over a third of our education budget.
I remember reading that the presence of for profit prisons in an area increases the rates of incarceration in that area. So many of them have heavily under minimum wage, almost free forced work, and now blood harvesting. Modern USA is so dystopian in a lot of places
it's outsourcing by choice rather than necessity. Europe can grow its own blood. The much more permissive laws in the U.S. which cause an oversupply for local usage mean it's cheaper to import it. During periods of high demand that exceed current supplies, countries are typically able to increase donations substantially to cover the shortfall, and long term, could pursue similar laws to the U.S. There is no prospect of blood being a meaningful bargaining chip in a trade war.
Yep, blood donation infrastructure isn't like an oil pipeline or a refinery. Sure, it'll be painful for a little while, but it doesn't take nearly as long to set up, especially if there's an urgent shortage motivating a country to move fast.
In the past the WHO recommended countries don't compensate for blood or plasma donations. The following countries countries decided to still allow compensation for plasma donations for drug products: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the US.
Its just that the US has the largest population of these five countries. And generally the rest of the countries outside the five don't get sufficient plasma donations to make the drug products needed for their patients and have to import it.
The plasma can be separated out to different products to treat various diseases many of them genetic.
The only ones to hold accountable are the WHO and those countries that followed their advice. If more countries paid for plasma donations there would be more supply of these drug products available.
People could just donate more. Just make a campaign that you can Stick it to Trump and Help Your Country and you would get an influx of plasma.
As long as the demand is not steep. Since you can do it only a dozen or so times each year according to recommendations. (American Red Cross recommends every 28 days; private donors are not beholden to that)
Globalization has led to most countries deluding themselves about supply chain vulnerabilities for a long time. COVID was the first shock. Now Trump's tariffs are the second.
However, I think people grossly overestimate the degree to which this state of affairs is static. If the supply chain shows itself to be vulnerable, economies often adjust quite easily. Even when it's not "easy", like natural gas in Europe post-2022, it's still very much doable without too much hullabaloo and frozen seniors.
Point being: if it no longer makes sense to import 38% of blood from the US or whatever, it'll be imported from elsewhere or made locally, and that's pretty much the whole story. This is true of most goods and services, though not all.
That's only really true for raw materials and assemblies.
Chip production is the very obvious and real hole in this argument. It'll take half to a full decade to get new chip fabs up to what TSMC's Taiwan fabs are doing now.
Quality steel production and machining is going to take time and investment as well.
This is my time to shine - I know the cause of this mistake. Like the article mentions, international trade is specified using the HS (Harmonized System) encoding mechanism.
Now, product groups for which data is most frequently and easily available is the 4-digit level, which is quite broad. If you look at the code 3002 in the HS classification system (of which there are many versions but we'll ignore that for now), you'll find a category, succinctly named:
> "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products; cell cultures, whether or not modified:"
People new to trade data, especially programmers, with some hubris, tend to think this is way too long a category name to fit in a title or dropbox, so they chop it at the semicolon and call it good, resulting in "Human Blood" or similar. Better data sources tend to shorten these based on the real world percentage of the subcategories, e.g. see here "Serums and vaccines":
The podcast https://behindthebastards.com/ had two episodes about the surprisingly large export of blood (products) from USA. Spoiler alert, it is mainly rooted in exploitation of the insanely large prison population:
I used to donate ever opportunity I could. I only stopped for medical reasons. I know there are a lot of companies that sell the blood, but it's still needed and can save a life.
Also - it might be worth looking in donations from Mex/canada. The anecdotal tidbit is that during Trump I with the border shenanigans and COVID, the drop in Mexican nationals crossing the border to donate blood/plasma (paid opportunities apparently), led to a nationwide shortage of derived products like IV IG infusions, etc. At least according to some of the Pharma reps that passed thru the office
I don't understand why an otherwise reputable forum (HN) would be so tolerant of meaning-uninferrable clickbait link titles. Sentience, posters, sentience.
It's worth a read, even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title.
> even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title
Tangent, but: I wish Hacker News was a bit less dogmatic about preferring the original site's title over any better semantic summary the submitter might offer. Blog posts and news headlines have a strong incentive to be clickbait-ey or just plain catchy, which often makes them less informative and in turn makes the HN homepage harder to scan for interesting posts.
It also feels like an arbitrary dividing line where if the original title is too long to fit HN's max limit, the submitter edits it and their take on what's a good summary stands. But if the original title could fit, the submitter's headline is often overwritten with the article title by mods even if it's less useful.
Agreed. I feel awkward sharing my blog here, because I title my posts to appeal to a hypothetical regular audience, but I'm trying to build a regular audience by showing it to non-regulars who lack the context to interpret the title. (Or rather: I want the title to be sensible and entertaining in hindsight.)
Could you title your posts in a HN-friendly style and subtitle them with your actual preferred title? And then (if this wouldn’t be considered Poor Form) swap back to the original title once it’s dropped off the front page?
Possibly, but I already use title and subtitle in other ways.
I suppose I could create aliases and redirects instead.
I just thought about this 10 minutes ago, when I saw the top post "Mycoria is an open and secure overlay network that connects all participants".
The actual title of the page is "Mycoria".
I actually wanted to thank the submitter for extending the title to something meaningful, but thought that it would be a too low value-adding comment.
Agreed. That's the second in the last few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880951
On a vaguely related note, I hacked together a WayBack machine type thing on top of Common Crawl in like 50 lines of Python. So it transparently lets you load any page directly from the dumps (it loads only those few bytes from the crawl dumps, and gunzips them).
It was really easy, and I was surprised it apparently hadn't been done before.
The only problem is the index IP blocks you if you query it too often, and it gets queried once for every resource on the page.
I've been informed that there are ways around this (download an index?), does anyone know more about that?
Couldn't this still work as a service if you run all queries through the front-end?
Thanks. I meant that light usage from a single user was already enough to get banned. (Though if you rewrite the HTML so there's no resources to fetch, it should be OK...)
Also, it's just a proxy, there's no front-end. (Being a 50 line Python script with one dependency (Flask), the idea is that the end user would run it.) It's just http://localhost/URL, and it loads it from the hardcoded snapshot. I guess https://localhost/snapshot/url might work better.
I'd also like to see how many lines it ends up being if you remove the one dependency. I've done this for other projects and the answer is "not much more" and "also runs way faster for some reason."
I see, thanks for the extra details. I'm pretty sure you can forgo Flask in favour of directly using the underlying WSGI protocol, while keeping the the Web server you are already using (Gunicorn, probably). The Web server would still be a dependency though.
I imagine that they'd get blocked by CORS
Good point. CORS somehow didn't cross my mind.
This sounds a fantasic idea. Will you be releasing it?
First — 0.69% of total exports is blood still is surprisingly high! Remember, you can get blood from humans in your own country, and prepare it there. So, why do you need it from the US?
Second — it’s amazing the detail that you can achieve from public data.
Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.
The reason the US exports blood products is because it is one of 5 countries that allow commercial blood product harvesting. Well, at least plasma. I don't remember which organization it is, but there is an international organization that tries to get countries to be "self-sufficient" in blood products so that they are not internationally traded (the organization is something like WHO, UN, or Red Cross). Only those 5 countries that allow some level of commercialization actually meet their goals of being self sufficient (and export as on top of that).
Source: A guest lecture at my university by Al Roth, Nobel prize-winner in economics, who is currently focusing his work on these type of markets. Most of his work is on kidney exchanges right now.
Man it is weird that the word for that is "harvesting".
I had that weird moment a few days ago learning that word is also used when you slaughter a (non human) animal:
"The chickens are harvest when they’re 32 days old"
Let’s sprout some semence in the cow (or not).
If that sounds weird, the term around here for butchering chickens is "dressing" them, as in, "We're going to dress chickens today."
The term for slaughtering pigs around here is 'turning them off' - all attempts to disconnect from the reality of what is happening.
Cognitive dissonance really is required to keep our “warm fuzzy empathic friendly” self image while simultaneously being ruthlessly pragmatic cold blooded killers when it suits us.
Pretty accurate though!
I don't think so? To me 'harvest' implies that the crop is destroyed afterwards.
We "harvest" all sorts of tree-grown products without killing the trees.
Similar for Asparagus.
Just wait till these robot maximalists figure out that a pile of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen is much cheaper than robots made out of steel and carbon fiber.
I mean, they haven't glommed onto the daily experience of giving a kid a snickers bar and asking them a question is cheaper than building a nuclear reactor to power GPT4o levels of LLM...
If we could directly convert the food energy of a Snickers bar to electricity we could easily power AI. A Snickers bar has 250 kcal, which is 1000 kJ or about 250 grams of TNT.[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=250+kcal+in+joule] chatgpt-4 uses 3.6 kJ to 36 kJ per query so you could get potentially hundreds of queries on a single Snickers bar.
We only need a way to harness the power of the human body. Maybe we put people in VR for fun while using their body heat to power the AI.
But then eventually you need Keanu Reeves to put boundary conditions on the AI
I was watching The Matrix Revolutions last night with my 14-year old. At one point, he told me "hey, that looks like ... Keanu Reeves"
TNT and other explosives have relatively little energy per kg compared to eg petrol or snickers.
That's explosives are chemicals selected / designed to be able to release their chemical energy really quickly and without needing any external oxidizer (because harvesting atmospheric oxygen would be too slow). That focus obviously leads to compromises in other areas, like energy density.
The snickers bar allows more than a single query for the human though
Temporarily, on the margin. A human would need multiple Snickers bars per day to survive, and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.
Also no human is anywhere close to being as knowledgeable and skilled as LLMs at all the things at the same time, so it hardly even compares.
> and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.
lol, the spoiled times we live in that you think this. The human body is capable of surviving on very little.
A thing with protein, fat and sugar would sustain you for incredible amounts of time. Many many months if not years.
How much vitamin C is in a snickers bar? I think you'd get scurvy within a month or two if that's all you had.
How much vitamin A? Night blindness. Vitamin B? Neurological issues, confusion.
That's the thing with mono-diets, your body needs a diverse range of things that it can't synthesise itself.
But to the core point, in cases where the output of an LLM is good enough, many already have much lower energy requirements than humans: o4-mini is currently priced at $1.1 per million tokens of input and $4.4/million tokens of output; if that's all being spent on electricity at $0.1/kWh, that's a max of 11 kWh/million tokens in and 44 kWh/million tokens out — how many calories would a human have to burn to read, write, hear, speak, and internally monologue the equivalent of a million tokens?
Only if you also ate some random other stuff you found lying around. Doesn't even have to provide much in the way of energy, just enough 'dirt' to round out your diet with whatever other essentials you need.
Human bodies have evolved to survive for a long time on relatively little, yes. But not to evolve for a very long time on a single source of very 'clean' food like snickers bars. 'Clean' in the sense that chemically snickers has relatively well defined inputs, whereas hungry humans would eat just about anything, including insects and grass and bark or leather.
This isn’t true. There are countless cases of people surviving for months on nearly no food at all.
I’m not talking about what it takes to stay alive for long term periods. I was refuting the silly idea that you would die after a couple of days/weeks of snickers.
days? Pretty sure I could survive at least a couple years off snicker bars
Probably not years. My guess is that scurvy, beriberi, or some other deficiency would get you in at most a year.
Though most of these diseases can be avoided with some minimal fortification to the snickers bar that wouldn't really require noticeably more energy.
I don't think I could write lengthy responses to hundreds of questions on a singular Snickers bar. I would need multiple.
They're fully aware of the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans at scale in general, and this includes power efficiency too. Meanwhile, what is not getting comparably better is robotics. This leads to obvious conclusion about natural order of things and division of labor: computers are for thinking, humans are for doing manual labor.
> the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans
I wanted to say that you were wrong, that LLMs can't reason and so it certainly isn't an obvious truth that they do it better than humans, but when I asked AI if LLMs can reason it told me that they can't which (while still not being reasoned by the LLM) seems to support the spirit of your claim since it gave a correct answer while you (a presumed human that can reason) got it wrong.
We might be elevating the importance of reasoning too much because us humans need to use it to solve many difficult problems. But if intuition was stronger, conscious/explicit/logical reasoning might not be needed. Didn't the famous mathemetician Ramanujan say that God gave him his answers in his dreams? That sounds like really powerful intuition like an LLM. Us humans can already solve a lot of incredibly complex problems intuitively, but they're quite domain-specific, like for spatial navigation and social interaction.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson predicted we'll know machines are conscious when we ask a question and the computer responds, "That reminds me of a story."
How are you defining “reasoning”?
That seems to be the hangup. I have to use a definition that would put it on equal footing to what we do as humans since that's the comparison being made.
Computers and software can be said to "understand", "think", and "reason" in their own way and informally people have always used those words in that context. Recently, software which has been trained on human-reasoned output is producing text that mimics reasoning well enough that it can be confused for the real thing, but nobody has been able to show that any reasoning (as a human reasons) is what's occurring.
Why do you care if the software 'reasons'?
If the output it produces is as useful to me as the output produced by a human with the magical and expensive capability to 'reason', why should I care?
You didn't answer my question.
There are several that would apply. Let's use this one as an example: Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing valid conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth.
I don't think you need consciousness to reason. I don't see why repeated application of rewrite rules to extrapolate logical conclusions from antecedents shouldn't be considered reasoning. LLMs are perfectly able to match and apply rewrite rules, while using fuzzy concepts rather than being bound to crisp ontologies that make symbolic reasoning impractical to scale up. And for better or worse, LLMs can also apply simplified heuristics and rules of thumb, and end up making the same mistakes that humans make.
> consciously
What does this mean?
If you think "consciously" is a loaded term, wait until you get to "truth"!
Maybe it'd be easier to try another definition:
2 a(1) : the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence
The same source defined intelligence as:
a(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason also : the skilled use of reason
And here we get the core of the issue. AI doesn't "think". It doesn't comprehend or understand what it does. There is no actual "I" in AI that didn't come from the people whose works were used to train it. At least not yet. I question if LLMs will ever be capable of anything more than producing a convincing affectation of the process used to produce the material it was trained on. I suspect that AGI will have to come from elsewhere. That doesn't mean that what passes for AI these days can't be useful, but I don't think it's capable of reason and as far as I know, nobody has proved otherwise.
Comprehend, from com- ("together" or "with") and prehendere ("to seize" or "grasp"). To take a hold of.
Can a calculator comprehend arithmetic? Can it take a hold of a number (in a register, for example), and a second number, and add them together to get a hold of the result?
What is computation, really? When we design machines to do arithmetic, do the machines actually do arithmetic, or do they just coincidentally come up with states that we humans can interpret as a correspondence with arithmetic?
More importantly, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?
If you put a problem into text, and give it to an LLM, and an LLM applied a series of higher order pattern matching to it to produce more text, and you read the resulting text and interpret it as reasoning about the solution to a problem, has the LLM reasoned? Does the calculator calculate? Or does it really matter?
Have you ever watched an LLM with CoT solve a logical puzzle?
Well, don't blame me, I voted for Kodos...
Kodos the Executioner, or the Rigelian from The Simpsons?
I’m excited at our future where we’re mind-stapled together to be used as meat for our AI overlords to enact their obtuse plans.
If a person costs $100K/year to employ, at $0.10/kWh that would buy 1 GWh/year, or a steady power of over 100 kW.
To all of you complaining about LLMs hallucinating, do try to give the same prompt to a kid on a sugar rush and let me know if you're getting more reliable responses.
The US also has a lot of people and those donation centers like to be around poor people and junkies which sacrifice their bodies for a couple of bucks. All the money they get are compensations for the time being attached to the machine, because you can’t get paid for anything which comes from your body. But then the donation center sells your plasma and various other parts of your donation for top dollar to pharma which sells it again. The machines are not excellent , spills and abrasion products can enter, and you might infect yourself with diseases which you sign a form for. The only safe way to donate blood would be full-blood donations without machines, but they will still separate your plasma and sell it to pharma. Awful system from my perspective. Separating blood from organ trade would be appropriate. A blood donation foundation or something where value is distributed down to the donor would be an idea.
It would be useful to allow more organ trading in general, not just in blood or blood plasma.
Iran is one of the few countries that allow you to pay eg kidney donors. Guess who doesn't have a waitlist for donor kidneys?
Yes, that's what the world needs more of: even more of a divide in long-term health outcomes based on wealth.
People with more connections can already get faster access to donor kidneys.
And a poor person with one kidney less but extra health checkups can probably get better health outcomes than a poor person with two kidneys but extra health checkups. (This assumes that the kidney sale comes with some mandatory regular health checkups. Just like kidney donations do.)
Sure, but that's not the reality.
In Iran, there is no tracking of donors and most donors don't want to be associated with the donation long-term, as it's connected to their poverty and the shame of their poverty. In the limited surveys that have been done many also noted that they haven't been properly informed about the risks of a donation.
It is controversial to put into system letting people sell their bodies to make ends meet.
Wage labour is selling your body for a time. Why not sell your body by part?
The time is gone anyway, and barring industrial accident you still have your entire body to sell again afterwards. That is not true of kidney donation — you can't donate a second time¹ and if your remaining one fails you are up shit creak because if you were in the position of being willing to sell one back then you are unlikely to be in the position to buy one now.
Donation of blood and other replenishables is a bit different of course, but allowing open sale opens some bad avenues in terms of people effectively being forced to (which could carry risks they wouldn't normally want to take).
----
[1] Well, not practically…
> The time is gone anyway, and barring industrial accident you still have your entire body to sell again afterwards.
Your two statements contradict each other.
In any case, we only have a finite number of days allotted to us on earth.
> [...] you can't donate a second time [...]
You can't repeat your 30s either.
Also, I wouldn't trust my country not to mess up compatibility, infection and preservation. These are non trivial technological and social products
The other countries also export a lot of blood, just illegally. Those exports might count as US exports in statistics for laundering reasons.
Sources?
> Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis.
Note that this analysis was performed by Dynonight, a rather bright blogger whose articles appeared several times on the HN front page. The vast majority of humans (I include myself here) probably wouldn't be able to achieve a result of comparable quality, even if it doesn't look that hard in retrospect.
LLM Deep Research can already exceed the performance of not-so-bright humans, but it is a quite different matter to outperform smart people like Dynomight. (I guess "research experts" isn't quite the right term here. The mentioned journalist from The Economist apparently was unable to research the topic to a similar degree, even though research is a main part of his/her job.)
> So, why do you need it from the US?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that most other countries don't allow people to sell their blood for money.
That is the reason. I also believe countries that do allow people to sell their blood have looser regulations on blood donations.
E.g. Hungary allows you to give blood every 56 days (and allows selling it), Italy requires you to wait 90 days (and does not).
>Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.
In the searches I have done Google's "Deep Research" has been better at providing primary data (or very convincingly fabricating).
OpenAI's version seems to more likely to give the answer that everybody thinks is true. For the blood example I could see it finding many sources that repeat the 2% claim, and accept that because everyone seems to agree, then it must be right. That's a mixed blessing in that maybe most casual users might want the commonly accepted answer, but when I have used the deep research tools, it has almost always because I know the answer everybody gives for a particular question, but I suspect it might not be based in reality. This makes my reason for wanting an automated deep research tool coinciding with the weakest area of the tool itself.
It's also been a bit eye opening how often commonly repeated but poorly founded claims, seem to turn up the same names of individuals, (or organisations, or individuals pretending to be organisations) as you trace them back.
> Remember, you can get blood from humans in your own country, and prepare it there. So, why do you need it from the US?
Random hypothesis:
• equipment needs for uranium enrichment for Manhattan project in 1940s
=> US cornering the market on centrifuges (in both a "we buy them all" sense and a "we won't let companies sell them to other state actors in quantity" sense) for decades
=> US biomedical manufacturing of anything requiring centrifuging as a step, quickly outstripping that of all other countries
=> eventual global logistical dependence on US-based suppliers for such products
Centrifuge enrichment was considered for the Manhattan Project but rejected because early experiments encountered many problems:
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Proce...
Centrifuge uranium enrichment wasn't developed to an industrial scale until the 1960s, and it first happened outside the United States:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
In reality simply that the US lets you pay people for blood plasma, an the market does the rest.
There are similar arguments made for kidney donation. Paying people a set amount kidneys is exploiting the poor, but most those who need kidneys are not well off and there is an enormous shortage causing massive shortages, so some argue that we should pay since society would be net better off.
If memory serves right, Iran allows compensating people for kidneys.
The centrifuges needed for biology (or medicine) are very different beasts from those you need for uranium enrichment.
Miele and Bosch makes great centrifuges for their washing machines. That technology is probably closer to what you need for blood, than the uranium enrichment equipment would be.
Well GPT-4o just insisted over and over that it was getting 500 errors while refusing to actually check the page. So... not yet.
Funny, because it is illegal to pay donors here. I used to be a donor, but the energy and effort it takes were too much for me at the time. And plasma donors have to 'free up' a lot more time.
Not to mention how i get a cookie and the semi-goverment organisation charges >600€ for a baggie to hospitals. Someone needs to pay for that CEO's third house and car collection!
Funny data story time.
I used to operate a database for a large North American alcohol retailer. We had a problem with our data that said that 30% of the ring from a particular store saw the name "A GIFT FOR YOU" on the CC stripe. After months of bitter accusations of my database being incorrect, we flew someone out to investigate.
We found that a block away from the store was a plasma "donation" facility. In order to skirt various laws, when you "donate", you are given a prepaid credit card. The name on the card is "A GIFT FOR YOU". Donators then took that card directly to the alcohol store.
All of the data was correct; 30% of the ring from one store was paid by credit cards from the plasma "donation" facility with "A GIFT FOR YOU" on the card. A large reputational battle then commenced as the retailer thought of themselves as a high-end "wine and craft beer" store, when ultimately it turns out Budweiser pays the bills.
*edited for clarity
There's an industry piece that points out that a remarkable percentage of beer sales in the US are single cans stored cold, sold at convenience stores. Most residents of the US drive to convenience stores. Given that they are buying 1-2 cans at a time it doesn't take much in the way of inference to figure out that they are buying them to be consumed while driving.
When I was in graduate school, my wife and I bought an affordable house in a neighborhood with a big factory next door. It was otherwise a lovely place, and so my morning jog often took me up and down the rural roads around the factory. On every road within a kilometer of the factory, the roadsides were littered with beer cans. On one particularly early morning, I was running when the late shift got out, and I watched somebody finish work (around 6am), get in their truck, pop open a beer, start driving, and then throw the can out the window as they drove past me. Given the quantity of cans on the roadside, this probably went on for years.
Refrigerated beer is not allowed in retail shops in Sweden! Tangential but interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget
I have used the same system at home to reduce unplanned beers. Alcohol-free beers are always in the fridge waiting, and the ones with alcohol in are somewhere much warmer. On the two to three nights a week I want a refreshing malted beverage, this almost always leads to me going for the alcohol-free version.
That said, following your Wikipedia link, it seems that a different mechanic is at play:
> "No product may be favoured over another, which in practice means that the beers are not refrigerated, since otherwise all beer would have to be refrigerated which is too expensive."
Their mission statement:
https://www.omsystembolaget.se/english/systembolaget-explain...
Same thing with nips (1oz liquor bottles) which you see everywhere on roadsides in some parts of the US - The product basically exists to make open containers immediately disposable
I thought it existed so you could cheaply spike drinks at baseball games
The majority of litter on the sidewalks of the through streets near me is those 1oz shooters. Followed by aluminum cans (mostly beer), fast food trash (plastic cups for sauces, disposable drink cups), and then household trash that looks like it flew out of a trash can on windy days (empty boxes, plastic wrappers, a bottle of laundry detergent, etc).
Source: new year's resolution to pick up at least 1 piece of trash per dog walk.
IDK
I live in Baltimore and I see a lot of people drinking singles out of a paper bag on the corner or their stoop. I've seen it on the bus, too.
Might be more of a hood corner store thing than a rural guy in a pickup buying a beer for the drive home type thing.
Yeah, this kind of thing lead to some recriminations as a kid. Air conditioning was rare, many shops were small and had no seating, so the right thing to do was take your cold soda outside. But it the weather was so hot that it could be warm before you finished a bottle.
A few nice adults told us that it would stay cold a lot longer in a paper bag, and that a plastic bag wouldn't help. Both statements proved true…but most other adults would assume it was alcohol. They'd be scowling at us, telling us off. Sometimes we'd show the bottle, but few even need to smell it to be sure it wasn't alcohol.
Even then, most of them never started acting like they were the ones who had been in the wrong. All because some people were known to use a paper bag around beer bottles.
I'd actually be willing to take that bet against the inference. Here's my logic:
The only places that sell individual beers are convenience stores
Some of them are driven too, sure, but lots are also in city areas
Even so, people who only have a few bucks drive to the store where they can buy the beer, and drive home and drink it
If these were common cases, cops would lay in wait and nab them for open container.
>If these were common cases, cops would lay in wait and nab them for open container.
I mean, they do. One of the big issues is coverage of enforcement. Here in Texas you see disparities where arrests in big cities converge on public intoxication, where in smaller cities you run into a higher ratio of open container because of cops having time to sit and watch stores.
did you know you can buy a single bottle taken out from a multipack at any us grocery store?
Sauce?
I'm not following the logic. Why do you assume they aren't drunk at home?
Pretty much everyone in the US owns a working fridge. If you just want to get drunk at home, you just buy a case of beer and leave it in there. It's actually much cheaper to buy beer by the case in most places
Although I also assume people are drinking these beers in the car, it does seem like a bit of a leap… I mean, an alternative is that they just figure they’d rather have the beer ready right when they get home (instead of sticking it in the fridge for a bit).
Not if you're the type of poor person who buys lottery tickets, cans of beer, and cigarettes by the single.
There are also other good reasons to buy a single can from the fridge. For example, I do it frequently when staying at a hotel.
The same reasons convenience stores sell single cigarettes, and people smoke them in their cars. Compelling cravings don't care about your externalities and don't want to wait. Lots of people don't want the people they live with to know how much they actually consume. Some people live with others who don't allow beer in the fridge for various reasons. Some have a housemate who can't be trusted around a surplus. Lots of people like to think of themselves as the kind of person who doesn't need to have a whole pack around, they just want this one and maybe another one. Depending on who you're hanging out with, sometimes it's nice to go to a BYO party and not contribute a surplus if that would get abused. And as always, who said they waited to get started until they were driving home anyway?
But that requires planning ahead. The whole point of a convenience store is that it's a convenient place to get small quantities when you didn't plan ahead, and people are willing to pay a premium for that.
Some people don’t want to get drunk or buy a whole case.
warm beer is better
Better beer is served warm I think, but much of our beer is not that type.
Some good beer is better served warmer. Say, an imperial stout. But not all eg Pilseners are bad.
There's also the rare mulled beer which is drunk hot.
For some people, a beer is a once-in-a-while add-on to their purchase, a bit like a chocolate bar. I rarely drink at home but I can be tempted by a balcony beer when the weather is right.
The obvious solution is better public transit!
(Joking.. but not really.)
Speaking of public transit: bus stops and train stations are prime locations to drink your singlet can of beer and drop it on the ground, in a planter, or just leave it on a seat for someone else to move it later.
While it is not easy to drink an open container on a bus or train, drunks will consistently stop in a nearby convenience store, have a cold one before boarding, and leave it there for others to clean up. I suspect that a high percentage of convenience-store sales for singlet cans and bottles may be attributed to pedestrians and transit passengers.
Cans are actually good for this. (Much better than bottles.)
Aluminium is so comparatively high value, that it's usually in someone's interest to collect it.
Used glass is just bulky and cheap per gram.
Most drunks would rather not invite trouble by carrying around glass bottles. You don't want them near pools or jacuzzis, and you don't want to drop one on a bus or train and cause undue attention. Dropping or abandoning a metal can, by comparison, is no trouble.
And you're definitely right about recovery value. I believe, in Arizona, that glass has no redemption value at all, and so cans are the only logical choice.
There used to be a guy around here, a real character, called himself the Can Man, and he weighed about 350 lbs, and just rode the bus all the day, accompanied by an enormous bag full of cans that he would collect from every site possible. And he had songs he would sing and a little patter about himself, and whereas a can-collecting dude would normally be sort of smelly and repulsive, he managed to add to the "local color" and be somewhat endearing as he rode the bus around doing his can-collecting thing. I miss that guy!
This isn’t a correct assumption. I buy one or two singles to drink at home when I don’t feel like committing to a whole six pack.
And I buy them cold because I want them right when I get home. Not after an hour of cooling down in the fridge.
Have you actually looked up what how much a blood bank CEO makes? Is it a lot?
Edit: I just did a bit of research and didn't come up with a lot. I found this example [1] where the CEO's total compensation is $414k. That doesn't seem all that high...
[1]:https://givefreely.com/charity-directory/nonprofit/ein-57066...
Well, not in the us. here that is considered an unenthical amount for a semi-public servant.
In 2011 they made 260k€, which was at then time about 50% more then our prime minister made. Which is used as a norm to limit how much you are allowed to make when working for public services.
Is it enough to have three houses and a car collection as you previously stated?
Pretty close? Like 80k for your regular living expenses leaves you 180k/y in savings. That's a nice holiday house in France every few years.
I mean to really get to a mansion and multiple holiday houses and a bunch of fancy cars you need to work the job for like 15 years, but still. In NL (where I think GP is from) earning that kind of money qualifies you as "seriously rich". Even more so if the salary got inflation-adjusted since 2011.
Does your country not have taxes? Progressive taxation eats a lot of that quickly and all of the tax benefits of home ownership aren’t available for secondary homes. Additionally, vacation homes in desirable vacation places cost even more than normal homes.
Someone making 3x a normal salary is not excessive by any means.
I need to shout into the HN void that, yes, $414k is a very high compensation.
The CEO of a blood bank likely has the skills and connections to be a CEO of many other for-profit companies, where they would make much more than $414k. Intermediate FAANG employees are paid more. I’m perfectly happy that this person gets $414k for their role in _saving lives_.
Mid level faang employees get paid over 10 times more than me? I need to get a new job...
Fwiw, here are a couple other rough estimates of pay in the US. These are entirely my opinion, but I am in engineering so I think these are pretty well calibrated. I only share these because they might be useful to get a sense of how your job measures up:
Entry level engineering (any type): 80k minimum
Entry level software engineering: 120k minimum
Multiply by 1.5x for high cost of living area (Bay Area, New York, Boston, LA)
Multiply by 2x for FAANG in HCOL area
Levels.fyi gives good estimates of software eng pay bands above entry level. Non-software almost always makes less :/
I’m not convinced that any CEO is worth what we generally expect they be paid.
Emotionally I agree — what could these people be doing to uniquely add millions of dollars of value? However, the fact that they aren’t replaced with cheaper options is (imo) pretty good evidence that they are uniquely worth that pay. If there was a cheaper option, the board of directors would replace the CEO, and enrich themselves and other shareholders with the saved money.
Either way, that’s kindof disconnected for the CEO of this bloodbank. Their opportunity cost is quite high. They choose to work for comparatively low pay, but have a positive impact on the world.
i think i understand where you're coming from, but i think you're begging the question a little bit (ie, ceo pay is high because it is high).
i do think it's more likely that the executive class has a vested interest in keeping their own pay high (not just CEOs, but board members as you've mentioned), and they've got a lot more class solidarity than the rest of us, though they'd never put it that way - it's just The Way Of Things, you know? divide and conquer.
i should maybe mention that i'm a public employee and my "opportunity cost" is also relatively high, but... hell is hot, and i want to be able to sleep at night.
The board and shareholders are not made of CEOs. They are compensating the CEO highly because it’s giving them stock returns.
If that correlation doesn’t exist, then investors should be able to easily drive CEO comp way down.
The boards of most public companies are made up mostly of C-level executives of other public companies. Retail shareholders hardly ever get involved to a sufficient degree to fire boards.
Why would retail shareholders need to get involved?
That's what we have eg corporate raiders for.
The strongest predictor of you wage is physical distance to the CEO outside business hours. The second is physical distance to the CFO.
Since CEO is with them all the time, it follows they get the most.
I don’t think this is a rebuttal of my point above, but I do think it’s a very interesting claim! Could you link a study/article about this?
Agreed.
There is a good theory on why CEO's are paid more than they're worth called tournament theory.
A person in an upper layer of a hierarchical organization is paid for the value they provide PLUS an amount that incentivized anybody below them to reach that layer. If everybody is paid just for the value they provide, they wouldn't have a reason to try and reach higher layers and they would minimize work. After all, we cannot assume the value a person provides goes up in higher layers.
This additional pay bubbles up in larger organizations to exorbitant levels for CEO's.
Are you suggesting that shareholders are selfless donors to CEOs?
[dead]
That's nothing. In NY, the "non-profit", "New York Blood Center" has a monopoly on blood harvesting, even the Red Cross has no blood drives here as a result.
Their CEO makes $3 million, most of their executives above $400k.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131... (look under Compensation)
Fuck this shit.
They also award them bonuses.
They are so bloated that they invest in PE funds with their spare cash.
I interviewed at a place that made the software to track blood as it moved around. It's a regulated thing to make sure that the blood stays cold and that they can track who donated. Anyways, the point is that the guy who interviewed me casually mentioned that the PE firm bought up companies until they controlled 90% of the market. I'm sure they're making bank off blood as well.
> That doesn't seem all that high...
Maybe not that high by SC/HN standards.
Yeah, same. Illegal to pay donors here too. I’ve donated multiple gallons, kinda felt it was my duty as a driver on the road… but at some point I came in to donate and got told they were extra short staffed and I’d have to wait at least an hour. The clinics already have terrible hours that seem to mostly cater to retirees, never open in the evenings and most clinics are closed on the weekends too, the one nearest me that I was going to stopped opening on the weekend entirely, meaning I had to travel quite a ways. I’m basically poor and the cost in terms of time, travel, energy and food is not insignificant. Meanwhile the high level staff making the cuts to the clinics have secretaries to reply to the emails they solicit from donors. Even though I sent them a long, insightful email, with followups, about my detailing why they are struggling as a young millennial (supposedly an audience they are trying to attract), and after all of it I get phone calls from the vampires minimum twice a week every week, sometimes every day.
Which country are you talking about? I believe it's legal to pay donors on the USA.
Presumably a European county given you quoted euros?
Looks like the EU encourages member states to encourage unpaid donations:
> Furthermore, Member States should take measures to promote Community self-sufficiency in human blood or blood components and to encourage voluntary unpaid donations of blood and blood components.
From https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2002/98/oj/eng
Yeah, I am in the Netherlands.
They say paying donors puts them & patients at risk, because it would stimulate donors' to lie about their health when donating and we can't be asked to test blood for everything. And the say it is unethical to pay for human tissues.
Except when they are selling it ;)
I can assure you that the Netherlands tests all blood donations. It’s been standard for decades now.
People have diseases they don’t know about and if people are ashamed by a disease, they’ll lie even when donating.
I just shuddered thinking that donations wouldn’t be tested.
to be fair they said "test for everything"
If it’s things like CJD or other prion diseases then it’s true they don’t test, but AIDS, hep C, and other common blood borne diseases? They’ve been screening every donation since the 80’s.
I have the same story in the same country with presumably the same organization (Sanquin). I used to give blood, but not anymore because I don't find what they're doing ethical.
Does it just not feel ethical or is one of their claims false?
Both of the key claims do seem to have evidence to support them:
1) Paying for blood shifts the socioeconomic distribution of the donor pool.
2) The socioeconomic shift results in more contaminated blood due to greater incidence of drug use and/or related blood-borne diseases that cannot all be tested for with high accuracy.
The second claim would applies just as much to the US.
It is legal in the US. In fact you can potentially make a decent bit of money if you're paid $70 per donation and can donate 100 times per year [0]. Don't know if it would be worth the time to travel to the centre and wait in line, for many HN users.
[0] https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/finance/how-much-donatin...
You could sell your plasma twice a week in the town I went to college. We also found that it took significantly less alcohol to get drunk if you had nearly a liter less plasma running through your veins, so it would also save us money in the evening!
You can donate every 3~4 days in the US? In France I believe it is only once every 2 months for men and every 3 months for women!
edit: confused plasma donation with blood donation; it is still only every 2 weeks for plasma donations over here
My understanding, at least where I live, Florida, is that plasma can be sold, but whole blood must be donated. I still get a $25-$35 gift card every time I donate a pint of whole blood (as close as possible to every 8 weeks).
Possibly Canadian, where it isn't legal to buy human blood.
On the other side, it is legal to pay donors where I am, but then it makes it feel like a waste to donate because you could be getting paid for it
No more of a waste than, say, any monetary donation.
Well, a bit more of a waste, because monetary donations are generally more efficient.
I think there might be some confusion by commenters in this thread about selling blood in the US.
Blood can be separated out into its plasma, red blood cells, and platelets by an apheresis machine. The machine cycles the unused components back into the donar so only one component is donated.
Blood plasma (~55% by volume), the amber colored water and disolved proteins, can be sold. Red blood cells (~44% by volume), and platelets (~1% by volume) can NOT be sold in the US by donars.
Most blood drives that you'd experience at school or in the workplace takes whole blood (so there is no need for the apheresis machine) which is more exhausting than if just one of the components was taken.
Source: an O+ blood donar with 50+ pints donated.
Didn't expect to see Thor mentioned so much in a comment about blood donations
Fun reference (I had to look up what you meant).
For anyone reading: Donar is "Old High German" for Thor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor#Post-Roman_era
Plasma can be used outside of prophylactics as well, I don't think this is accounted for in the article (human plasma is used in cosmetics for example).
A lot of plasma is also separated out of whole-blood donations and manufactured into all sorts of things. I don't know all of the end-user financial ramifications of this, but hospitals absolutely do pay (sometimes quite a pretty penny depending on rarity of antigens and antibodies) for RBCs and platelets (and plasma) from suppliers like the American Red Cross.
Purely anecdotally, I have heard stories of some donors being compensated extremely handsomely for their regular donations because of the rarity of their blood attributes - even being flown across the country and wined and dined to obtain their blood on top of thousands of dollars per donation.
Mostly because its a lot harder to acquire an infection via plasma, though there are some diseases like Hepatitis E that can be transmitted that way.
Am I misremembering that, also, donating plasma for whatever reason tends to be much rougher on the donor for some reason?
I don’t think that’s correct. Specifically because it’s easier on the donor, it’s allowed to be done much more frequently than whole blood donation.
Behind the Bastards recently did a two part podcast on the blood industry in America, particularly how lack of regulation and taking advantage of the incarcerated (focused on Arkansas) led to the spread of blood borne illnesses and how it killed a lot of people. I had no idea blood was such big business and that it was in our top 10 domestic exports
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-how-tainted-h...
> and that it was in our top 10 domestic exports
Note that a main point of the article is that it is not in the US' top 10 exports
Well one of these has to be incorrect then as this was said it was the US's ninth largest export
https://app.podscribe.com/episode/130950753
Like the GP said, the whole topic of this article is getting an accurate figure, and how the 2%/9th largest figure is incorrect.
Incorrect, yes, but to be fair .67% and 2% occupy the same "wow, that's a large proportion of the economy" order-or-magnitude band of surprise (for me). Obviously not as charismatic/sensational, but still significant and surprising (to me).
BtB is not a serious news source, its mostly ragebait.
It's a big scandal in the UK. Over 30,000 people were infected with HIV or Hep C from US blood stock in the 70s and 80s. The UK Government will be paying almost £12bn as compensation, which to put into context is over a third of our education budget.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48596605
> The UK Government will be paying almost £12bn as compensation, which to put into context is over a third of our education budget.
Presumably that's a one time compensation, and you are talking about the annual recurring education budget?
I remember reading that the presence of for profit prisons in an area increases the rates of incarceration in that area. So many of them have heavily under minimum wage, almost free forced work, and now blood harvesting. Modern USA is so dystopian in a lot of places
https://youtu.be/hBA0AH-LSbo?si=tGr6FPzWQ8ry2b33
That silicon valley skit, bryan johnson, and Theranos are all starting to come together now
0.5% of all goods is still a lot and much more than most people would have expected.
Also interesting: "In 2023, total US goods exports were $2,045 billion, almost exactly ⅔ of all exports, including services."
It’s because the US has a massive blood for money industry while other countries explicitly ban payments.
That distorts supply/demand between countries
if I understand correctly you can only sell "plasma" which is just one component of blood
And less dangerous to the donor to harvest I think.
Do we really have 38% of Europe's BLOOD as a bargaining chip in trade agreements? This does not bode well for them.
it's outsourcing by choice rather than necessity. Europe can grow its own blood. The much more permissive laws in the U.S. which cause an oversupply for local usage mean it's cheaper to import it. During periods of high demand that exceed current supplies, countries are typically able to increase donations substantially to cover the shortfall, and long term, could pursue similar laws to the U.S. There is no prospect of blood being a meaningful bargaining chip in a trade war.
Yep, blood donation infrastructure isn't like an oil pipeline or a refinery. Sure, it'll be painful for a little while, but it doesn't take nearly as long to set up, especially if there's an urgent shortage motivating a country to move fast.
Yes, all the blood economy needs is a shot in the arm.
Blood from US
Sweat from China
Tears from everywhere else
In the past the WHO recommended countries don't compensate for blood or plasma donations. The following countries countries decided to still allow compensation for plasma donations for drug products: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and the US.
Its just that the US has the largest population of these five countries. And generally the rest of the countries outside the five don't get sufficient plasma donations to make the drug products needed for their patients and have to import it.
The plasma can be separated out to different products to treat various diseases many of them genetic.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/approved-blood-...
The only ones to hold accountable are the WHO and those countries that followed their advice. If more countries paid for plasma donations there would be more supply of these drug products available.
> the Czech Republic
Interesting. Now I know why in a small town I regularly visit there's a high-street plasma "clinic".
Sad news.
Denying the blood would increase the US trade deficit though, so it would cut both ways.
People could just donate more. Just make a campaign that you can Stick it to Trump and Help Your Country and you would get an influx of plasma.
As long as the demand is not steep. Since you can do it only a dozen or so times each year according to recommendations. (American Red Cross recommends every 28 days; private donors are not beholden to that)
You also have most of our digital services.
Use either as a bargening chip and you are likely to lose them.
Globalization has led to most countries deluding themselves about supply chain vulnerabilities for a long time. COVID was the first shock. Now Trump's tariffs are the second.
However, I think people grossly overestimate the degree to which this state of affairs is static. If the supply chain shows itself to be vulnerable, economies often adjust quite easily. Even when it's not "easy", like natural gas in Europe post-2022, it's still very much doable without too much hullabaloo and frozen seniors.
Point being: if it no longer makes sense to import 38% of blood from the US or whatever, it'll be imported from elsewhere or made locally, and that's pretty much the whole story. This is true of most goods and services, though not all.
That's only really true for raw materials and assemblies.
Chip production is the very obvious and real hole in this argument. It'll take half to a full decade to get new chip fabs up to what TSMC's Taiwan fabs are doing now.
Quality steel production and machining is going to take time and investment as well.
Fascinating article, fun that even blood has tariffs https://www.searchtariff.com/?q=blood
I wonder when we are going to start seeing proper effects of all these tariffs in the market.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of DataLinks which in turn powers the searchtariff website
The article links to this, which I also enjoyed.
"Please show lots of digits"
https://dynomight.net/digits/
I enjoyed it, but I'm not convinced by it.
Bummed there wasn't one vampire joke or pun or allusion in this entire article.
Or Garth Marenghi quote.
Not even in the subtext.
This is my time to shine - I know the cause of this mistake. Like the article mentions, international trade is specified using the HS (Harmonized System) encoding mechanism.
Now, product groups for which data is most frequently and easily available is the 4-digit level, which is quite broad. If you look at the code 3002 in the HS classification system (of which there are many versions but we'll ignore that for now), you'll find a category, succinctly named:
> "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products; cell cultures, whether or not modified:"
https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=3002
People new to trade data, especially programmers, with some hubris, tend to think this is way too long a category name to fit in a title or dropbox, so they chop it at the semicolon and call it good, resulting in "Human Blood" or similar. Better data sources tend to shorten these based on the real world percentage of the subcategories, e.g. see here "Serums and vaccines":
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...
If you search for 3002 (Serums and Vaccines) in the US's exports in 2023 you'll see the figure 1.58%:
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...
Which seems to me to be how they arrived at that incorrect number - some other website showing comtrade / us trade data with bad category names.
Lesson here: classification systems are hard.
The podcast https://behindthebastards.com/ had two episodes about the surprisingly large export of blood (products) from USA. Spoiler alert, it is mainly rooted in exploitation of the insanely large prison population:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
Market trends show this as a growing industry in the 2025 economy.
https://www.cslplasma.com/be-rewarded
Excellent writeup. Is there any aggregator that focuses on "let's look at the actual data" articles like this?
Dynomight (the author of this article) does a lot of articles like this, and if you enjoyed it you'll enjoy their other content.
A nice write up! Thanks for making it.
I used to donate ever opportunity I could. I only stopped for medical reasons. I know there are a lot of companies that sell the blood, but it's still needed and can save a life.
Does anyone know of, when I give blood to the red cross or other charities can it end up getting sold for a profit, overseas or otherwise?
Plasma from teachers who don't get paid enough to cover the bills shipped to Europe. There's a great sci-fi novel in there.
The film "Never Let Me Go"[0] is kind of about that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film)
Also - it might be worth looking in donations from Mex/canada. The anecdotal tidbit is that during Trump I with the border shenanigans and COVID, the drop in Mexican nationals crossing the border to donate blood/plasma (paid opportunities apparently), led to a nationwide shortage of derived products like IV IG infusions, etc. At least according to some of the Pharma reps that passed thru the office
I love Dynomights writing. I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.
I don't understand why an otherwise reputable forum (HN) would be so tolerant of meaning-uninferrable clickbait link titles. Sentience, posters, sentience.
I donate a lot to mosquitoes
Bzzz?
Gosh, "Hacker News" has become such an abstract garbage can for farfetched longwinded bs articles..
Today I'll unsubscribe, I won't miss your preference for normie filler content..