So Much Blood

by debesyla • 1 year ago

440 209 1 year ago

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."

andai3• 1 year ago

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?

speerer• 1 year ago

This sounds a fantasic idea. Will you be releasing it?

RestartKernel3• 1 year ago

Couldn't this still work as a service if you run all queries through the front-end?

ytpete• 1 year ago

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.

zahlman2• 1 year ago

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.)

smcin• 1 year ago

Agreed. That's the second in the last few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880951

qwertox• 1 year ago

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.

boesboes3• 1 year ago

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!

simonw• 1 year ago

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

boesboes3• 1 year ago

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 ;)

n4r9• 1 year ago

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...

3pt14159• 1 year ago

Possibly Canadian, where it isn't legal to buy human blood.

criddell• 1 year ago

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...

boesboes3• 1 year ago

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.

keybored2• 1 year ago

That doesn't seem all that high...

Maybe not that high by SC/HN standards.

delfinom• 1 year ago

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.

GuinansEyebrows3• 1 year ago

I need to shout into the HN void that, yes, $414k is a very high compensation.

-warren• 1 year ago

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

sidewndr463• 1 year ago

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.

e_i_pi_2• 1 year ago

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

tshaddox• 1 year ago

No more of a waste than, say, any monetary donation.

riversflow• 1 year ago

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.

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

Do we really have 38% of Europe's BLOOD as a bargaining chip in trade agreements? This does not bode well for them.

busterarm2• 1 year ago

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.

kspacewalk2• 1 year ago

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.

abxyz• 1 year ago

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.

Sanzig• 1 year ago

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.

layer8• 1 year ago

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

keybored2• 1 year ago

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)

tomjen3• 1 year ago

You also have most of our digital services.

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

riskable• 1 year ago

Blood from US

Sweat from China

Tears from everywhere else

pkaye• 1 year ago

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.

lproven• 1 year ago

the Czech Republic

Interesting. Now I know why in a small town I regularly visit there's a high-street plasma "clinic".

Sad news.

AlfredBarnes• 1 year ago

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.

weinzierl• 1 year ago

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."

Havoc• 1 year ago

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

That distorts supply/demand between countries

sidewndr463• 1 year ago

if I understand correctly you can only sell "plasma" which is just one component of blood

hlovdal• 1 year ago

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...

aezell• 1 year ago

Bummed there wasn't one vampire joke or pun or allusion in this entire article.

panzagl• 1 year ago

Or Garth Marenghi quote.

messe• 1 year ago

Not even in the subtext.

fmsf• 1 year ago

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

ilikecakeandpie2• 1 year ago

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...

tvier• 1 year ago

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

ilikecakeandpie2• 1 year ago

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

make3• 1 year ago

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

jonginn• 1 year ago

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

eru18• 1 year ago

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?

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

https://youtu.be/hBA0AH-LSbo?si=tGr6FPzWQ8ry2b33

That silicon valley skit, bryan johnson, and Theranos are all starting to come together now

ParacelsusOfEgg• 1 year ago

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.

smallpipe• 1 year ago

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

dvaun• 1 year ago

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

Symmetry• 1 year ago

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.

hamaluik• 1 year ago

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.

bee_rider3• 1 year ago

Am I misremembering that, also, donating plasma for whatever reason tends to be much rougher on the donor for some reason?

sgerenser• 1 year ago

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.

mehulashah• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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.

ajkjk2• 1 year ago

Man it is weird that the word for that is "harvesting".

hamilyon2• 1 year ago

The other countries also export a lot of blood, just illegally. Those exports might count as US exports in statistics for laundering reasons.

eru18• 1 year ago

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?

sharpshadow• 1 year ago

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.

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

Also, I wouldn't trust my country not to mess up compatibility, infection and preservation. These are non trivial technological and social products

cubefox• 1 year 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.)

derefr• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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...

daedrdev• 1 year ago

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.

eru18• 1 year ago

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.

hwillis• 1 year ago

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

Lerc• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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).

femiagbabiaka• 1 year ago

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.

iamthepieman• 1 year ago

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

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

morninglight• 1 year ago

Market trends show this as a growing industry in the 2025 economy.

https://www.cslplasma.com/be-rewarded

aeternum2• 1 year ago

Excellent writeup. Is there any aggregator that focuses on "let's look at the actual data" articles like this?

archermarks• 1 year ago

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

11235813213455• 1 year ago

I donate a lot to mosquitoes

coolspot• 1 year ago

Bzzz?

caycep4• 1 year ago

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

andai3• 1 year ago

The article links to this, which I also enjoyed.

"Please show lots of digits"

https://dynomight.net/digits/

philipwhiuk• 1 year ago

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

sour-taste• 1 year ago

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?

thimkerbell• 1 year ago

I don't understand why an otherwise reputable forum (HN) would be so tolerant of meaning-uninferrable clickbait link titles. Sentience, posters, sentience.

makmanalp• 1 year ago

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.

traktorn• 1 year ago

I love Dynomights writing. I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

dezzadk• 1 year ago

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..

So Much Blood

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