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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 d
by mehulashah 1y ago
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.
- youainti 1y agoThe 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.
- ajkjk 1y agoMan it is weird that the word for that is "harvesting".
- bliteben 1y agoJust 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.
- caycep 1y agoI 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...
- jjmarr 1y agoIf 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 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.
- spookie 1y agoThe snickers bar allows more than a single query for the human though
- TeMPOraL 1y agoTemporarily, 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.
- drilbo 1y agodays? Pretty sure I could survive at least a couple years off snicker bars
- przemub 1y agoPretty accurate though!
- ajkjk 1y agoI don't think so? To me 'harvest' implies that the crop is destroyed afterwards.
- foxglacier 1y agoWe "harvest" all sorts of tree-grown products without killing the trees.
- eru 1y agoSimilar for Asparagus.
- aziaziazi 1y agoI 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).
- aaronbaugher 1y agoIf that sounds weird, the term around here for butchering chickens is "dressing" them, as in, "We're going to dress chickens today."
- chris1993 1y agoThe term for slaughtering pigs around here is 'turning them off' - all attempts to disconnect from the reality of what is happening.
- taneq 1y agoCognitive 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.
- hamilyon2 1y agoThe other countries also export a lot of blood, just illegally. Those exports might count as US exports in statistics for laundering reasons.
- eru 1y agoSources?
- eru 1y agoIt 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?
- hansbo 1y agoIt is controversial to put into system letting people sell their bodies to make ends meet.
- eru 1y agoWage labour is selling your body for a time. Why not sell your body by part?
- dspillett 1y agoThe 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…
- eru 1y ago> 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.
- hobofan 1y agoYes, that's what the world needs more of: even more of a divide in long-term health outcomes based on wealth.
- sharpshadow 1y agoThe 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.
- TZubiri 1y agoAlso, I wouldn't trust my country not to mess up compatibility, infection and preservation. These are non trivial technological and social products
- cubefox 1y ago> 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.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- derefr 1y ago> 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
- philipkglass 1y agoCentrifuge enrichment was considered for the Manhattan Project but rejected because early experiments encountered many problems: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Processes/UraniumSeparation/centrifuges.html 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-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
- daedrdev 1y agoIn 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.
- eru 1y agoIf memory serves right, Iran allows compensating people for kidneys.
- eru 1y agoThe 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.
- hwillis 1y agoWell GPT-4o just insisted over and over that it was getting 500 errors while refusing to actually check the page. So... not yet.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Lerc 1y ago>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.
- rco8786 1y ago> 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.
- riffraff 1y agoThat 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).