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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

    Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

    If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

    Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).












  • Boxer shorts, specifically stretchy cotton knit ones that fully enclose the elastic waistband. I do have a couple of pairs of synthetic boxer briefs for the increasing rare occasions where I am running around enough that I might get chafed, but I think of them as sporting equipment or almost a medical garment.







  • For a while at least, attorneys at treasury were not allowed to use PACER because it charges nominal amounts per page to fund the Judicial branch. PACER is the one and only tool for researching and filing records in ongoing federal cases, which is to say, every single case that these lawyers would be working on.

    It’s kinda bullshit that there is a fee at all, but it is what it is and has been standard operating procedure for 20+ years, and they just flip a switch and wait for the howling to begin, because they have no idea what is important and don’t care. This is just Xitter all over again, except now it’s the government of the largest economy and military in the world.