Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
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Yeah look I’m far from a doctor so I wouldn’t want to speculate or directly link causal relationship between death and plasma “donations”.
The main point here is that you do have people who do this to get cash in China and perhaps the collection station wasn’t exactly doing its job to identify the condition to the donor. If you pull up the annual report of these companies they generally would have thousands of tons of plasma collections per year - definitely a motive to get more considering my understanding is that plasma-based drugs (immunoglobulin therapy for example) has significant under supply in China.
While western keyboard warriors have been busy trying to "own" DeepSeek with Tiananmen sq and Winnie the pooh memes, major global companies like Amazon, Toyota and Cisco are already looking at ways to access and integrate with it.
Talk about losing sight of the important things....
Yup Intels ex-CEO is already using DeepSeek for his new startup venture lol
Billions in profit, LOST - ClosedAI right about now.
Lethe
Captain
I think these are complex topics with no easy answers. One of the arguments against paid "donations" of blood products is that payment encourages vulnerable people to donate against their own health*, and to lie about their health and health history during the screening process. And in a market scenario with many collection agencies competing for the supply of "donors", there is an incentive for collection agencies to accept donors who should perhaps not be accepted. In Australia we have one collection agency (Australian Red Cross Blood Service) feeding one processing laboratory (CSL) with all donations unpaid, which excludes most of those "bad incentives". And yet the output from this system is insufficient to meet demand. The deficit used to be fairly minor but has ballooned in recent years mostly owing to increased applications for plasma products such as immunoglobulin therapy. The end result is that, in practice, our unpaid donation system is supplemented by supplies from the United States, where plasma donors are paid and can apparently donate up to twice a week(!?).
I don't think there are easy answers here. But certainly it seems to me that if the system is going to be paid, then the testing protocols need to be very thorough indeed, with ongoing surveillance to ensure that collection and processing agencies are adhering to those protocols. Even if there is no direct causal relationship between this patient's plasma donations and his death, it seems to me that there is potential negligence on the part of the collection agency and possibly lessons to be learned in the regulations and oversight of such agencies.
* It's conceivable that the patient's severe anemia was identified by the collection agency and communicated to him, but that the patient dismissed the advice or felt unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Apart from raising broader questions at the level of society, this scenario also invites the question of why he was not then excluded from further donations. Even if there is no direct relationship between donating plasma and red/white cell count, being clearly Not Well should be enough. It is for ARCBS -- those assholes will exclude you for any reason they can think of. I still remember when they turned me away for appearing "flushed" after walking 45 minutes to the collection centre and admitting that I planned to walk 45 minutes back home.
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I have to say I'm surprised how much some Americans look like sore losers from the whole DeepSeek saga. It's like they don't even see the biggest hypocrisy of having a company named OpenAI be a closed source for profit AI company. Americans can't even gracefully accept defeat now. Cope is at least understandable, this is just lame now.
At least Americans have a right to be butthurt since they are in the race.
Why are Indians acting so butthurt about it? They're not even in the race at all!
No. Having some Indian author be a contributing author to some paper used in OpenAI isn't the same as being in the race. Otherwise using that logic Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania etc will all be in the AI race too. And unlike India, those guys probably did make some huge changes to AI since east euros are actually good at coding.
Those Americans who are the most butthurt are the ones who have the most to lose if white supremacy is no longer the order of the day.
Because Indians believe they are "aryan" and "white" or "hey there, my fellow caucasoids"; not unlike hispanics who join white supremacist organisations. Jaishankar is a classic exammple of the priviliged brahmin class indian who thinks that just because he was schoolmates with english peers, that he is now part of the aristocracy.