yes this is my read too. In true classic American fashion, instead of investing money to help uplift disadvantaged communities, we treat them as a resource to extract
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/why-blood-makes-up-over-2poi...
I think the trade offs are all sensible here.
1. It doesn't depend on politics, it already works today
2. You have to plan for and show up to a place to get the money and ensure your blood remains valuable, all of which promote a basic semblance of order in your life, especially when you're on the ropes.
3. You save lives and are compensated for it
4. In the area between having no money vs having a job, pretty much anything I can think of to make money is worse than selling plasma.
It's a lucky quirk that you can sell your plasma, because you usually can't sell your blood even though countries, industry, hospitals, and insurance companies pay each other good money for it, just not to the person who created it.
Like yeah, I give (double red) blood as often as I am able because, well civic duty and all but it's still real fucked.
But what I mean is that cash handouts are a constant contentious political battleground that feels like a pipe dream where I live while selling plasma was a political decision made before we arrived and probably not something most people feel quite as strongly about.
The danger as I see it is that we can let perfect be the enemy of good, though I suppose you aren't suggesting that it's bad that people have the option to sell their plasma as everything currently stands. I do see it better than the alternative of prohibiting it.
People get all huffy when you suggest criminal activity isn't an innate trait of a person but due to life circumstances and desperation, as if they would never steal to eat/survive.
It's an attack on a person's identity to insinuate that the only difference between them and a 'criminal' is one of circumstance. For some, such is too much to even consider. This is the real barrier to fixing the problem: a lack of imagination and empathy.
> Not innate
These two thoughts seem to be in conflict. You are describing an innate difference.
I agree there is nuance. We are a product of our environment and innate nature. I suspect the environment is (far: by orders of magnitude) easier to change. I don't think we only need to change the environment, but I would venture the 80/20 estimation here...
This says nothing for 'truly evil' people, which - I suspect - is a vanishingly small number of people. I also think that such people require a degraded environment to operate effectively (according to their goals) and by focusing on improving the conditions people are in: we remove a lot of leverage for those people to act as they wish (maliciously).