So Much Blood

> 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

>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

Well GPT-4o just insisted over and over that it was getting 500 errors while refusing to actually check the page. So... not yet.

> 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.)

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

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...

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

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

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.

Didn't expect to see Thor mentioned so much in a comment about blood donations

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?

It’s because the US has a massive blood for money industry while other countries explicitly ban payments.

That distorts supply/demand between countries

> 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

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

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.

Blood from US

Sweat from China

Tears from everywhere else

Denying the blood would increase the US trade deficit though, so it would cut both ways.

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.

You also have most of our digital services.

Use either as a bargening chip and you are likely to lose them.

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.

I enjoyed it, but I'm not convinced by it.

Or Garth Marenghi quote.

Dynomight (the author of this article) does a lot of articles like this, and if you enjoyed it you'll enjoy their other content.

The film "Never Let Me Go"[0] is kind of about that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(2010_film)

Bzzz?