The man with the golden blood • Hacker News Board

Re: The man with the golden blood

#101

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 4:38 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #53

niels_olson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money to keep the lights on and pay employees, refrigeration, databases, transportation (we get blood shipped from ARC three hours away twice a day), etc. And if you're not making money, you're losing money. Money is how societies manage these costs. Most blood banks are associated with a hospital or university. Some centers are free standing, like Blood Source or American Red Cross (ARC), and they are often…

The ceo of the red cross makes $600k, with plenty of the execs making over $400k (form 990 available [1]; page 49). I don't know if I can draw a bright line, but I think that's excessive compensation for running a medical charity.

It's one of the biggest global enterprises around. And they work in a very high tech sector.

Those numbers are not really stratospheric, offering less may make the positions impossible to fill.

Re: The man with the golden blood

#102

Post by fragmede » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #95

It's amazing the Kafkaesque rules that have evolved about blood donation. The article does touch on them. I'm not allowed to donate blood (any more), for what I think is an absurd reason. I spent a few months in England, over 30 years ago. So now the USA is afraid that any blood I donate will infect America with Mad Cow disease. If those same rules were applied in the UK, nobody there would be able to give blood. The…

The problem boils down to the fact that there is currently no way to test your blood for blood donating purposes, especially if you're asymptomatic.

I mean, there's this disease, and it kills people, and is known that blood transfusions can infect people and we don't have a test for it. What would you have the Red Cross do?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise...

Re: The man with the golden blood

#103

Post by Mandatum » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 8:04 PM UTC

solistice wrote: post #88

Mandatum wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this nasty image of a big metal vat of blood being mixed with a giant wooden spoon Willy-Wonka-style.

That would most likely result in another blood contamination scandal similar to [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Economy ] in Henan China, where blood was mixed in centrifuges to save cost, subsequently infecting large amounts of the affected population with HIV. But i had that image in my head as well, a big dirty vat of blood somewhere in a dipilated factory building.

Wow.. That's pretty terrible. It seems countries import blood, I wonder what the price they pay for it is, or if there's such thing as "blood farms"..

According to this article, Australia spent $31M in a single year on blood/plasma 'products': http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/australias-blood-b...

EDIT: It appears Pfizer and Baxter are the major suppliers to Australia.

Re: The man with the golden blood

#104

Post by PhantomGremlin » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:02 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #102

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #95

It's amazing the Kafkaesque rules that have evolved about blood donation. The article does touch on them. I'm not allowed to donate blood (any more), for what I think is an absurd reason. I spent a few months in England, over 30 years ago. So now the USA is afraid that any blood I donate will infect America with Mad Cow disease. If those same rules were applied in the UK, nobody there would be able to give blood. The…

The problem boils down to the fact that there is currently no way to test your blood for blood donating purposes, especially if you're asymptomatic. I mean, there's this disease, and it kills people, and is known that blood transfusions can infect people and we don't have a test for it. What would you have the Red Cross do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise...

> What would you have the Red Cross do?

I understand that the US Red Cross is in a difficult position. But the health authorities in the UK (who are presumably "closer" to the situation) don't have the same restrictions. Of course that might be simple expediency, since by the US rules nobody in the UK could donate.

Re: The man with the golden blood

#105

Post by x0x0 » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 9:00 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #77

x0x0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say we can the glibertarian nonsense, because anything is possible (under your metric of oh, it may not happen... but it's possible). Why, we should pay the executive $10m/year -- because otherwise, the quality of the executives will go down, to the point that the Red Cross is less effective at its mission. I'm not saying this is necessarily what will happen, but it's certainly possible.

I'm actually far from a libertarian. I want strong government regulation in many areas (finance, food, healthcare, etc.), a broad social safety net (which would ideally include government healthcare for all), and I'm willing to raise taxes to achieve all of those. But we do live in a capitalist society. So we have to, well, live with it. And part of living with it is recognizing that private entities that do work we…

They pay nothing for their by far most important input, and in fact actively guilt people into giving it to them. For free.

You also appear to have a, well, econ for the gullible version of how executives get paid. Reality is much closer to managing to stack the board with friends, etc -- read eg Jack Welch.

Your argument about the dynamics of the labor market for execs is specious -- arrived at by assuming the current state, then proceeding to demonstrate the current state is necessarily optimal because we are in it.