You might be right, but I forewent 
an iud because it tweaked some body horror in me. Nothing implanted. I mean intellectually I know it’s just an anxiety thing on my part, and I’m no Luddite but I’ll be avoiding implantation as long as I can.
Fucking cyberpunk dystopia is right.
Good. I’ve always been suspicious of IUDs, just because their job (it seems to me) is to irritate tissue. And there have been a lot of design failures over the years.
But I love my intra-ocular lenses. Not only got rid of cataracts but fixed my myopia, which was horrendous.
No matter how many times I hear about people selling their blood instead of just volunteer donations, it just never gets any less creepy.
Every time I hear about this, I think about the Tom Waits song where he sings “I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch”.
How much do you get for a kidney? How much for the second one?
Gad.
Also, like most safety nets, it excludes certain people…
Like the article says, it won’t give them the data required to do what they say they want to do.
Mass shootings are just a fig leaf for mass surveillance. It’s not hard to figure out who they’re really after.
Liver’s a better bet. It regenerates and then you can sell it again.
Update, 5:30 p.m. ET: In an email to Splinter, Severino declined to comment further, but stressed that the fired workers were contractors rather than employees of the company.
Well, that excuses explains it.
I sold plasma off-and-on for a semester or so when I was in school. It’s different than donating blood (I think plasma is basically the juice that’s left over after they filter out the blood cells and give them back to you), and that difference somehow accounts for why you can get paid for plasma but typically donate blood for free. I don’t recall the details.
I kind of can’t believe I ever did that, though, because I hate needles and am squeamish at the sight of blood, so much so that, somewhat to my shame, I rarely participate in the perennial blood drives at work and elsewhere.
Can confirm that that scenario will definitely make you a cheap date. 
Not as much as you’d think, apparently. Prices vary, but it looks like the middleman makes most of the money on these deals, at a glance. Average seller only gets $5K while the average buyer pays $150K.
Here’s my source. I explicitly made this plain text instead of a hyperlink, because I’m pretty sure it set off my AV, but that might have been for “only” an obnoxious pop-up. Also, I have no idea of the veracity of this site.
https://www.havocscope.com/black-market-prices/organs-kidneys/
But the weird thing is that, while selling a kidney definitely meets my definition of dystopian, I can almost imagine doing so myself under the right (or more likely, wrong) circumstances. Having been broke-as-a-joke more than once or twice, and having been persuaded to part with some of my precious bodily fluids for a pittance of short-term liquidity during one of those occasions (see above), I can understand the motivational power of even a modest financial incentive (or, to put it more succinctly, I was young and I needed the money).
I still can’t quite believe I’d ever actually sell a kidney, but I think that’s mostly the belief that I won’t ever be that desperate. That’s a fine distinction, perhaps, but it’s also kind of why I feel like organ transplants are one of those things that just shouldn’t be left up to market forces of any sort. Once there’s a profit motive, perverse incentives will inevitably creep in.
OTOH, it seems like even in the absence of explicit financial transactions, there’s still a de facto market of some sort, it’s just harder to quantify since you’re not using easy markers like dollars. Or maybe the difference is that the experts in managing such markets are not economists, but ethicists? I don’t know… but an example of the kind of thing I’m thinking about is the semi-recent changes to rules for liver transplants, e.g. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/09/26/549224583/searching-for-a-fairer-way-to-distribute-donor-livers
I knew several people who did that. Some even went so far as to load their pockets up with padlocks and rocks so that they’d weigh enough, because if they were underweight they’d be turned away, but they needed the money.
I see what you did there.
That anyone needs to do this just shows the inequity of the system; there’s so little safety net (at least in the US) and navigating it seems like a nightmare.
There are two possible theories I can think of.
The first would be that whole blood might have a higher risk of transmitting infection, so you don’t want to incentivize people to donate tainted blood.
The other is that whole blood can only be donated as quickly as a donor can regenerate their red blood cells (typically 8 weeks), where plasma can be donated as quickly as a donor can regenerate their plasma (inside a week), so they think that if people are incentivized to donate plasma, they’ll try to circumvent the system and donate more often than they can recover from the last donation (and make themselves anemic).
I’m sure there’s no way for this to go wrong:
Or for it to turn into this: