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:
An hour and a half of material on Kopernik and his Uber shitshow:
I was never quite that desperate, but I don’t think I was ever in danger of being turned away, either. I didn’t even know it was a thing you could do until one of my housemates told me about it. He would do it twice a week, like clockwork, and regard it as easy money, but it always squicked me out and I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that I needed to find a better “last resort” for my budgetary concerns.
I would not have been thinking about systemic inequality at the time. I was just poor1 and knew that sometimes meant you had to go without or else get creative about how to make it to your next paycheck. Looking back, what amazes me is how little money was involved. You got something like $15 a pop, and a little bit more if you donated twice in one week. Not a lot of money by any measure, but it could make the difference between gas & cigarettes & ramen, and mooching food & rides & smokes (!) off of my friends until I got paid, and they were mostly just as broke as I was, so…
And as a full time student claimed as a dependent on my dad’s taxes, I don’t think I would have qualified for any of the safety-net programs even if I had been inclined to apply for them. I didn’t need food/rent subsidies to survive, I just needed twenty bucks to make it until next Friday. For me, the real safety net was the Pell grants and Stafford loans that made it possible for me to finagle in-state tuition at State U.
1. relatively poor, in the grand scheme of things, but objectively so in the local context. I was never truly destitute, but I definitely lived hand to mouth for a long time. But I also had prospects, and that makes all the difference; sure, it sucked at the time, sometimes very much so, but I had hope that things would improve as long as I could suck it up until I graduated.
Isn’t it a thing among some trucking companies where the hype is that they’ll cover your training and guarantee you a job with a good pay rate if you sign on with them, and at the end of it you’ll have your own truck and could eventually become an independent owner-driver if you want. You just have to contract to work with them for awhile. But the tuition was a loan, the cost of the truck was a loan, they both had high interest and came out of your paycheck so you make awful money, you also have to pay fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc., and if you tried to quit you’d owe the whole amount. So you ended up locked into a lifetime of working for pennies (or even getting negative paychecks) while paying rent-to-own rates on a truck that you could probably never pay off (and would be old and worn by then if you did).
That was informative, thanks. It’s been going on quite a long time, I didn’t realize.
Apparently Bob Wright, the hate group co-founder, is involved in “SAFEHOME”, the proposal for mass surveillance of mentally ill people. Does anyone know the details?
P.S. Came up here. Smooth scrolling/migraine trigger warning for The Hill:
And who gets to define who these people are? People like Bob Wright, probably.
the company has expressed to the staff that it does not believe a union is right for Kickstarter.
You know, just once, I’d like to see a company that does believe a union is right for that company. Just to see what it would look like.
I’d like to see the Easter Bunny, myself.
Hmm, I missed that one.
What I don’t understand is why people (in the US at least) turned away from unions to begin with.