If it was illegal they would say so. It isn't that is why politicians like PA governor Josh Shapiro imply it is but don't say it because they know it is not.
Election law is complicated. Even lawyers hedge on these things because it's not as simple as looking up the statute, you have to look up previous court cases, and if it's a case of first impression make a lot of inferences.
Issues I see include whether it is legal to solicit political endorsements which will potentially become campaign materials, in exchange for pay or the prospect of pay, whether it's legal to run lotteries in multiple states (but excluding all others), whether it's legal to influence an election by running such a promotion etc.
The first and second issues make for an interesting combination, because my understanding is that Musk is soliciting people to sign a petition in support of the first and second amendments. Since these are in the constitution of the whole United States, why is his 'lottery' restricted to only 7 states, to the disadvantage of people in the other 43?
Mr Beast is being investigated for illegal lotteries. Very similar to this. They're not guilty until tried. But it could end up costing both of them quite a bit.
Some truth here though saying Bangalore airport (BLR) is on par with Singapore airport (SIN) is laughable.
A little stick is what India needs. People doing stuff like driving their motorcycle on the footpath aka sidewalk, will stop doing it if you offer just a touch of resistance and just stand there. It isn’t the US where you have small but real chance of being shot (at least in southern India, bihar etc might be exception)
Same with jumping the que, calling people out generally does the trick.
Some problems are more complex but a little more stick in India would make some solid improvements in everyday life.
The new Bangalore T2 terminal is designed for grand-standing and showing off, and not for passenger comfort.
Its biggest flaw is noticeable, even in the photo on the article - there’s very little seating and only large open spaces (often with lots of greenery and woodwork). The net result is that you get the same sight as every Indian railway station - passengers sitting on the floor.
Closest competitor does a lot of heavy lifting in this situation. Ancestry is the overwhelming leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space. Look at https://www.ancestry.com/ and https://www.23andme.com/
23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
Their pitch is health. But that pitch is murky with no good hook to keep you hooked for a monthly subscription. So after they get the initial $99 from the customer, most of the value customer is going to get is already served up in the first report. Maybe their big database will turn into making cancer drugs but maybe it wont.
> 23andme has basically given up on this part of the business.
The routine emails I get about them allegedly finding new DNA relatives suggest otherwise. The DNA relatives feature is also still pretty prominent in their UI (at least on desktop browsers; haven't looked at the app yet).
That said, it certainly doesn't offer much beyond "these are your relatives; send 'em some messages or something lol". Ancestry probably has a lot more features on that front, which is unsurprising since that's the sort of thing Ancestry was doing long before they even offered DNA sequencing kits like 23andMe does. I don't know if I'd characterize that as 23andMe "giving up", though; more that it's good enough for a product that never intended to enter the genealogy software market in the first place.
The new-DNA-relatives feature is one of the few "growth" things they can continue to bother you with, outside of newly-discovered genome-based indicators for diseases.
I get/got spammed by them about new relatives on the order of "6th cousin who shares 0.3% of your DNA." Thanks, but who cares...
I would say it's a little more murky than that. My anecdotal experience is in the context of Ancestry.com. Effectively, I might not consent to having my information shared but if my uncle, nephew, etc. does it is effectively still being shared.
> leader in the find long lost relative space/your "roots" space.
Acknowledging Ancestry.com are well ahead of the market here, but I never got their appeal of finding some long-lost second cousins... basically strangers, and saying, "hey, isn't it fascinating that we share some arbitrary level of common genetic makeup". If some randomer reached out via email to me doing this big reveal I'd be "thanks, but into the spam folder with you".
I don’t think anyone is actually trying to connect with distant cousins for social interaction; rather the shared DNA segments provide hard evidence to confirm distant ancestors. I got into genealogy a couple years ago after thumbing through some old family documents and I’ve been able to confirm 6th cousins (traced via our shared ancestors) using 23andMe data.
Now there are probably some who think genealogy is a silly pastime and maybe it is, but researching my family history helps me feel grounded and more connected to humanity so I derive a lot of benefit from it.
I mean, computer games are a "silly pastime" too. Whether or not one feels grounded, it can also just simply be fun, and that fine. I've even enjoyed helping strangers solve genealogy problems because piecing together the evidence and ruling out options is just another type of puzzle and one that is often very challenging.
For "close" relatives, I agree there can also be more to it.
E.g. my mums mum never told us that much about her family (we never asked while she was around), and my mum didn't know either, and so uncovering more about that was very fascinating (it helped that there was plenty of drama to uncover) and helped fill in a lot of gaps.
It's not really the selling point. The selling point is the interest in the genealogy, and the "finding the long-lost second cousins" is a feature that helps you address the genealogy.
Concrete example: My grandmother was born in Brooklyn. As it turns out, her half-brother lived a few blocks away. At the time my grandmother was born, he was 9 and living with his grandparents despite the fact his father lived nearby.
I still don't know why, but when I found out he even existed - something I didn't know until long after my grandmother died -, I also soon found his daughter was alive and well in New Jersey, and was able to get in touch. I now have pictures, and stories to fill in not just his background, but thanks to that connection I now have pictures of the graves of my great-great-grandfather, and several of his children, and stories about my grandmothers uncles, and aunts she never mentioned while she was alive.
I also have pictures of my great-grandfather - my mums grandfather - that I hadn't seen before.
Of course, that is reasonably close, but sometimes those things end up passed down one side of a family, with no copies existing, and you can increasingly find relatives far away from you in the tree who has photos of shared ancestors, and that proportion will increase dramatically with each new generation.
So every time I find a match, however remote, with an active account, you better believe I'll message them. Not because I care that we're related, but because I care about whether or not they can fill in some bit or other in my ancestry. For me, anyway, it's a fun puzzle more than anything else, when you go beyond the immediate family.
Like why is that one ancestor showing up as a widow one moment, and someone with the same name as her husband showing up as married to her sister in the next census with an implausible country of origin? Can I find evidence to corroborate theories? Can I find that notorious "hat maker from Bremen" that almost certainly didn't exist but was cover for infidelity, or evidence that he didn't exist (I almost certainly can't) - it'd be funny, because an entire arm of the family took on the supposed, probably invented, last name of the hypothetical hat maker because an ancestor of theirs thought it sounded posh.
The "long-lost second cousins" are just bit players in that game.
A first cousin of mine found a (adult) daughter he didn’t know he had through it. They are in the process of building a relationship. It was a significant/important discovery for them even without having a prior relationship.
Interest in family trees predates Ancestry.com and will certainly outlast it. It’s not necessarily about contact. I’m not sure what’s controversial here.
I run a small web server for a dataset we call the "BIGFAM" - Geneweb with a proxy on the front. It has >120,000 individuals in it. In places it is not so much a tree as a thicket!
That data is hard fought and won by a relative who conducts meticulous research as a hobby. They've been at it for a good 20 odd years now.
How has Geneweb worked for you? Is it straightforward enough to use if you are somewhat technical, or do the “wizards” need to have a solid understanding of OCaml to make it worthwhile?
My daughter has been interested for years in delving into our different familial trees and has extensive records on paper and in various digital formats. She isn’t overly technical but could be taught to use a web interface if she’d gain value from the effort.
In my humble opinion as an amateur genealogist, after a year or so with paid services (Ancestry, Myheritage) I find there is really no good reason not to use a combination of Wikitree and Familysearch, both free, if we ignore DNA tests.
Especially familysearch allows private profiles, no need to share. Wikitree has a policy of "do not add living people", but it is possible to do and Ive done it for close family.
Yes, this means sharing fairly freely, but I do not see a reason not to. Unless you want a fantasy tree, sharing your tree will make it higher quality. We all make mistakes here and there.
Wikitree especially requires you add sources to your work, which might feel odd for a personal tree of course.
I personally think that Webtrees might be the best bet but that is GEDCOM based and GEDCOM cannot store certain things. My relative is an expert in genealogy and if they say that GEDCOM doesn't cut it then it probably doesn't, eventually. I suggest you look into Webtrees - its a LAMP job.
My relative uses The Master Genealogist (TMG) which is no longer developed. We are both Linux users and he uses Wine bottles to keep it alive. I will probably end up hosting a Win XP VM for it.
Geneweb is seeing renewed development and is really fast. The plan is to migrate to Geneweb. The fields that TMG has that GEDCOM can't handle are turned into NOTES which is probably good enough.
You do not have to get to grips with OCAML to run it. The Github releases shield you from that. It is a bit idiosyncratic but it does work!
Genealogy is a very deep and complicated subject with as many opinions as there are practitioners. You could try both Webtrees and Geneweb and use GEDCOM to act as an intermediary data format until you decide which to use full time. Do make sure you listen to her. She may potentially have some "odd" ideas about data that may not have occurred to you. Be warned - genealogists are a breed apart and any reasonably serious one has damn good reasons for that! There are also quite a few reasons for becoming a genealogist as well as methods used.
Im trying, really trying to understand what BIGFAM is about. Is it related to gut biome, and what the bacteria eats, and trying to find the genes for that? Or am I completely lost.
If you are from the United States its interesting to trace back your ancestry and last name to a specific person/persons from another country.
There are tons of websites for different last names in the United States, showing history of the name. Many times the last name be traced back to a singular person, which I find especially cool since you have sprawling families all connected by one guy who made the journey over. Obviously last names like Smith won't be like this, but if you have a unique last name it can actually be quite common that one person coming to the new world connects you and everybody else in the Americas together. I find that super cool to think about and I am glad people are doing the effort to research and find this info out.
In addition, for people who were adopted and didn't know their birth parents, it can be interesting to connect with your biological family through ancestry work.
My mother is adopted and 23andMe and Ancestry have both provided me with a way of connecting with relatives as far apart as Canada and Australia. Before “revealing” my connection to them I’ve stated that in doing so I may reveal information about a shared ancestor that doesn’t put that person in the best light (my mum was the result of a short affair between a married man and a much younger woman at the end of World War 2). All have stated they are ok with this and in most cases had no contact to the ancestor involved anyway.
The family tree is a big deal for Mormons due to their religious beliefs. They can baptise their ancestors, providing lost souls with a chance to convert after death.
The rise of services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have actually allowed people to discover information about their parentage that they would otherwise not have had access to, basically they find out that one or both of their parents are not biologically related to them. Individual situations range from extramarital affairs, closed adoption, in-familiy adoption (teen gets pregnant, her parents raise the child as a sibling), and those who’s parents chose to conceive with donor gametes. In many of these cases where it is a surprise, the parents have either actively chosen to withhold the information or didn’t know.
In cases where the user is trying to find their parent, it’s statistically unlikely that their parent would have taken the test, but 2nd cousin matches are very common. These seem like a huge distance away, but you can work backwards and build a family tree up to their great grandparents and fan out from there.
Yep, this happened to me. Got a random message from a half brother, dug deeper into my ancestry and realized that my dad isn’t actually my biological father. It was certainly an odd week for me when I found out.
I not only found a genetic disorder that my mother and I shared (Partial PNP Deficiency) but I also found an woman who was the illegitimate daughter of my Uncle (who had passed away) and she was fianlly able to see pictures of him and know more about him.
There is so much more power in 23andMe's Raw Data regarding health than people realize and I am capitalizing on it. (Less with the v5 chip but it is still really good,)
Finding drugs with 23andMe is a waste of time and is not wehre they should be focusing on making money. They should be focusing on personalized medicine.
I also have a rare genetic disorder (alpha-1 antitrypsin disorder) and discovered it using 23andMe. I am in the process of working with a pulmonologist to manage the disease, and if they had not screened me for it, I would have written off my symptoms as “just bad asthma.” Currently there is no health product that 23andMe sells that is appealing to me, but if there were, I would gladly pay. I hope they can stick it out because their DNA screening is a valuable service.
Others have shared some more heartwarming tales of using these services but I saw a story that in Australia a project is helping the children of sex tourists to look up their fathers via these services to get child support payments:
If you are sleeping with a prostitute isn’t there like an implied contract that you aren’t responsible for any resulting child? That is practically the entire purpose of prostitution.
If you sleep with someone you are responsible for any resulting child.
Prostitution in the Philippines is illegal so any explicit or implicit contract would be void anyway. Not to mention that consent is questionable anyway when most of these women are either trafficked or forced by economic hardship to partake in it.
I got a photo of my great-great grandfather as a result of a DNA match as well as lots of other information about him - so I suppose it depends if that sort thing interests you or not.
Not everyone is interested in genealogy, that's up to them, but to those of us who are, finding an unknown nth cousin may be worth a lot to untangle the lives of our ancestors, write the stories of our families, and find out where we come from, in a far wider sense than merely the genetic one.
But Ancestry is a roach motel. Of all sites that sell user-contributed data back to their users, and they're all scummy, I don't know any which are more scummy than Ancestry and MyHeritage.
I've found it extremely interesting. It's brought me greater insight into my grandfather I knew nothing about, and even the (very few) family traditions/recipes that have come down to me. It's made the world feel smaller and more connected, seeing actual relatives in all of these far off places, in the kind of way I always HOPED the internet would bring interconnectedness.
I think it's inherently human to want to understand who we are and where come from. Especially for someone like me in the USA. How did my people end up here?
I think a more common use case might be finding siblings if your adopted, or trying to reengage with your roots if you were say a member of an indian tribe or native hawaiian.
I have a family member who is retired and has taken up geneology as a hobby, she has connected our family history really far back. Not my cup of tea personally but I can see the appeal, its like a treasure hunt. She has traveled to go to old libraries and dig up newspaper archives.
Another common use case is "I wonder where all my family went after $War"; some families are still trying to figure out where their parents' families ended up at after WW2, or if they survived at all.
Americans treat their ancestry (specifically the nations they come from) almost like zodiac signs. This is meme material (e.g. Plastic Paddies, Plywood Poles etc.)
It's sad that we have come to a point where people frown upon a company that makes a product and sells it, without luring their customers in with monthly subscriptions.
I’m on mobile and too lazy to check, but is ancestry.com related in any way to Jehovah’a Witnesses? I’m asking because at some point I was online searching for any info about the Russian Imperial census held at the end the 1890s and, to my surprise, the JW website had all the info in there (or at least almost all the info on the region I was interested in, Kherson). And then I found out that this sort of stuff is right down JW’s alley for some religion-related reason, good for them.
Ancestry does more than genetic analysis. Their claim to fame is their tools to search through old public records to help one build their genealogy/family tree.
So I think there are many different marketplaces, but I don't personally find them as useful because of a few reasons - when I'm a seller, the buyers are flaky; as a buyer, I'm worried about being scammed (and it actually happened to me once).
Delivery is an option that we're contemplating now. If we were to build it, it'll be in next few months to try it out.
On the monetization front, we're thinking introducing in-app payment processing and adding delivery options to take commissions. I'm not sure how excited the users are going to be yet tho, so that'd be the challenge
