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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 reme
by youainti 1y 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.
- 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
- 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
- pfdietz 1y agoIf 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.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThey'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.
- caycep 1y agoWell, don't blame me, I voted for Kodos...
- TeMPOraL 1y agoKodos the Executioner, or the Rigelian from The Simpsons?
- autoexec 1y ago> 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.
- School-Cotton 1y agoHow are you defining “reasoning”?
- autoexec 1y agoThat 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.
- falcor84 1y agoTo 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.
- 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.