Dad: “Did you ever take that DNA test?”
Me: “What DNA test? And no, I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.”
Dad: “Why not? Don’t you want to know about your family history?”
Me: “I know enough about you people and I don’t want the government to have my DNA.”
Dad: “How would the government get your DNA?”
Me: “All those companies give their data to law enforcement. How do you think they caught the Golden Gate killer?”
Dad: “Are you a Golden Gate killer?”
Me: “No, not yet.”
Dad: “But don’t you want to know about your heritage?”
Me: “You took the test, mom took the test, and the other kids took the test. I think we have it narrowed down by now. Unless there is something you or mom want to tell me.”
Dad: “Goodbye.”
I’ve always been the ‘difficult’ child. Part of it is instinctive, though- if everyone is doing something I generally don’t want to do it just because they are. I need a reason I should do it.
schrodingers_cat
I am like that too. Are you the oldest child?
John Cole
@schrodingers_cat: Yes
Yarrow
Oh, me too. A lot of use of the word/question “Why?”
Martin
I had a similar conversation with my mom. Mine included ‘I don’t want the risk of having more relatives, to be honest, you are all I can handle’.
That pretty much ended the conversation. That said, I wish people cared half as much for those that are alive as they do for those that are dead.
schrodingers_cat
@John Cole: As am I.
Mercuria
@schrodingers_cat: I am like that, as well, and yes, the oldest child. 3000 miles away from all of them, for purposes of maintaining some degree of sanity.
John Harrold
Pro tip: if your parents submitted samples they have your DNA.
Yarrow
Send your dad one of the many articles about what China is doing to the Uighurs and what China is doing in general with DNA and ask him what he thinks about it. Once any government or business have that information they’re not going to forget about it.
Gin & Tonic
“I’ve always been the ‘difficult’ child.”
Color me shocked.
chopper
you have a point. if they both took the test what’s the damn point?
Baud
I took the test. It said I was 95.5% human.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodingers_cat: @John Cole:
I’ve always been the ‘difficult’ child. Part of it is instinctive, though- if everyone is doing something I generally don’t want to do it just because they are. I need a reason I should do it.
me too, youngest of five, but other than that my family fits the whole birth order thing fairly well
Reader Interactions
Martin
@Yarrow: I thought this was a well presented take on it.
Martin
@Baud: Anything solidly in the ‘mostly human’ category seems pretty good to me.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Yarrow:
This. A lot of people don’t stop to consider what DNA can be used for and who could own it.
In fact, too many people live in la la land and would rather watch a handegg game than try to take collective action to fix society and the world
Ohio Mom
I’ve always told people my family originally comes from Ur, though I’m not sure if anyone has ever gotten the joke.
Yarrow
@Martin: I’m not sure I’ve seen that specific one but I’ve read several articles on it and watched some video. It’s kind of horrifying. I haven’t yet gone into whether or not they’re requiring DNA samples from visitors to China. If so, that’s going to be a massive database.
Roger Moore
@chopper:
You can see what you inherited from whom.
hells littlest angel
Your real dad would never have talked to you like that.
Roger Moore
@Ohio Mom:
But where did they live before the flood?
Odd aside: if you add up all the dates in Genesis, it turns out that Abraham was born before Noah died. That seems intuitively wrong somehow.
schrodingers_cat
@Yarrow: My mother used to call me shankasur when I was younger.
shanka = doubt
asur = monster
doubting monster.
WaterGirl
I will never take one of those DNA tests. Never. Maybe this will sound like tin foil hat territory, but I can easily imagine a world where health insurance companies buy or hack into DNA data and use it to deny insurance or make people pay more.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Didn’t everyone live to like 1000 back then?
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Pretty sure John got his stubborn streak from his Dad and his kind nature from both of them.
SFAW
@Yarrow:
To which parents respond either “Because,” or “Because I said so.”
Chetan Murthy
Two thoughts:
(1) We Are All Pappa Cole. Damn! He’s hilarious!
(2) He’s damn right. A number of articles have investigated how pharmas and (ding ding ding) insurance companies are teaming up with these “ancestry” and “gene analysis” companies to use their databases. And (OF COURSE) when you provide your genome to these companies, you sign away ALL RIGHTS to the use of that data. The article described how insurance companies could use that data to push away possibly-high-cost customers. Etc. The possibilities are endless. You walk into an interview, and HR already has your gene report with all your possible future illnesses (let’s not worry about whether it’s ACCURATE — the point is, it’s believable, look at all that DATA!) and they’re going to be evaluating you against stuff you don’t even know about.
I would NEVER submit my data for analysis. NEVER. Yeah, I know I might learn something lifesaving. But I believe in the fact that I’m a median guy: not better, not worse. Probably, I’ll learn nothing really useful. But guaranTEED somebody’s gonna find a way to screw me. Oh and I feel the same way about medical records, but there seems to be no way to prevent them from being sold to the highest bidder.
OH and BTW, I have a friend who works with a startup in the “eye” space, and he told me that they get data from various groups of ophthalmologists — full medical records. This startup is most definitely for-profit, but somehow, they’ve found a hole in HIPAA, so that they can get data from patients without their consent (or even being INFORMED). So HIPAA seems to not really mean as much as we might hope.
It’s all a morass of sharks and remoras. Hence: “don’t give ’em anything unless you get something VALUABLE back”.
SFAW
@Baud:
Only the Boom-Urs.
Oh, wait, wrong thread.
SFAW
Outstanding.
Another “Comment doesn’t appear, even after 15 reloads, but as soon as it’s retyped — Bingo!”
patrick II
@WaterGirl:
After Warren wins and there is Medicare for all, what then?
Actually, that is one more reason for socialized medicine of some sort for all.
And if your members of your family get tested for medical reasons, the choice may no longer remain with you.
Gin & Tonic
As someone who is always interested in languages (and sometimes regrets not having pursued an advanced degree in linguistics) this article points to a fascinating map showing the linguistic diversity of the best city on Earth. Opening graf:
WaterGirl
@patrick II: What then? We’ll all be in a much better place.
Mallard Filmore
Dad: Are you a liberal?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
The PRC is a totalitarian abomination. Worse, it represents the future; a cage from which we will never escape. Well, climate change will offer an escape. A thin reed to hang one’s hopes on
Steve in the ATL
@Yarrow:
what is the correct pronunciation of “Uighur”? In my head I always say “wigger” and then I think about Eminem and then the time I got donuts at the Tim Horton’s on 8 mile road and then the week I spent bargaining in Detroit one January where my rental car never warmed up enough to blow heat and I get really cold.
What was I talking about?
Barbara
The next time he brings up the subject, ask him if there is something he hasn’t been telling you about the circumstances of your birth. In reading how cold cases are being solved, I found out that enough white people have submitted their DNA, that nearly any white person could be located through the combination of DNA matching and genealogical investigation. That is astounding to me.
I have mixed feelings. The killer of my next door neighbor’s sister in 1973 was identified earlier this year, through law enforcement not commercial databases. She and her friend were brutally murdered while vacationing at the beach, and no one thought it would ever be solved.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Cole@top: Didn’t they take a DNA sample when you enlisted? They do now.
NotMax
That my ancestors possessed the smarts, wherewithal and gumption to do what ended up creating me is sufficient knowledge. Don’t require any sausage-making or diary-snooping details.
Plus what could be considered more proprietary information than one’s DNA? If it has value as a commodity then I ought to be paid for providing it.
SFAW
@Steve in the ATL:
The pros and cons of pedantry, especially that dealing with grammar?
Gin & Tonic
@Steve in the ATL: This is how the dementia begins.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, and if that’s not chilling, I don’t know what is.
Yarrow
@Steve in the ATL: Wee-gr.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: Pretty sure he got his proclivity to injure himself from his dad as well.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I did not know this. Happen to know why?
@WaterGirl:
Yup. Genetically engineered super-soldiers perhaps? T
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@WaterGirl: Yeah, it’s to help ID the body(or what’s left of it).
JAFD
To Ur is human ?
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Same reason I use a made-up name and data for the supermarket club card. Don’t want a history of my red meat or liquor purchases potentially available to insurers.
Before anyone chimes in about credit cards, I always pay in cash at the market.
frosty
@Steve in the ATL: I think you were talking about speechwriting for Trump.
Amir Khalid
@Steve in the ATL:
Ithappens to be Cenk Uygur’s surname. You could say it his way — “yoo-ger” — although my own preference is for the more correct “ooey-goor”.
Steve in the ATL
@SFAW: I was literally just thinking that
@Gin & Tonic: we’re all trump now
@Yarrow: well that’s no fun.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You are most definitely right about that!
Sab
@Baud: Was the rest Neanderthal or Cromagnon? My sister in law had my husband take the test. He was thrilled to be not entirely human.
Chip Daniels
Dad: “Are you a Golden Gate killer?”
Me: “No, not yet.”
Yeah, that made me LOL.
NotMax
@JAFD
To cross-dress, Divine.
:)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Sab:
Curmudgeon.
trollhattan
Dag-gonnit, it’s the Golden State Killer.
Which means Golden Gate Killer is still available.
I was intrigued by the DNA thing five years ago but today, no way no how. Doubly so after learning they separate your sample into two and keep one of them in longterm storage. I also suspect the industry is crawling with Mormons.
Sab
@schrodingers_cat: Thank goodness I am to old too have children. That would top my namelist. You presumably earned it. Mine would only having their mother aspire to that for them.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
WEE-gurz is also acceptable.
Sab
@trollhattan: “Golden gate killer is still available.”
Dude, seriously, please hush your mouth.
dnfree
It’s worse than that in our family. Back in my youth I would get my musical instrument out of its case to practice, up in my bedroom. My mom would call up the stairs “Did you practice yet?” and I would pack my instrument back in its case. I couldn’t stand being told what to do even if I had intended to do it anyway. Our kids inherited this obstinate streak.
JanieM
@NotMax:
You would think so, right? But that horse left the barn a long time ago. Have you ever read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks? I resisted reading it for a long time in part because of this very aspect of the story. But I did read it eventually. It’s a great book, but very sad, and it will make you very angry. Or at least, it did me.
chopper
@Amir Khalid:
when it comes to him, “ooey-gooey” also works.
Sab
@Steve in the ATL: Uighur= “WEEghur”.
Bill Arnold
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Or perhaps “misanthrope”.
Yarrow
Heard this on the radio:
End of an era.
trollhattan
Donny loves the troops, just ask him.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
I think you may have been in visual mode when you pasted that in. Text mode is what works for tweets.You had it fixed by the time I hit post!
Chris T.
Well, you’ve got me beat.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
People routinely lived into their 900s before the flood, but their lifespans got shorter fairly quickly afterward. So Shem, Noah’s son, lived to be 600, but Peleg, Noah’s great great great grandson only lived to be 239, so Shem outlived him by 162 years. Shem actually outlived Abraham, who was his great^7 grandson, which is pretty crazy.
One thing I noticed when adding up the ages of the different patriarchs is that Methuselah, who was famously the longest lived of them all, appears to have died in the Flood. He was Noah’s grandfather. Noah’s father, Lamech, was born when Methuselah was 187, and Methuselah lived for 782 years after that (969 years total). Noah was born when Lamech was 182, and the Flood happened when Noah was 600, which means it happened the same year Methuselah died. So Methuselah either died in the flood, or God delayed the flood until just after he died.
Mary G
@NotMax: I found out years ago that supermarkets will give me a card with an application to fill out and bring back and let me keep using it forever even though I toss the application in the recycle bin as soon as I get home.
My parents were both eldest children and this explains so much about them.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: I KNOW THAT. IT’S FUCKING ANNOYING. Sorry for yelling. I sometimes forget to use the Text tab. I wish it would default to that. It wasn’t a problem with the old site. Copy Embed Tweet and paste and there you go. Now I have to remember to go to the Text tab and I forget sometimes. So frustrating. Do not like this “feature.”
Amir Khalid
@Sab:
I should point out that the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples were every bit as human as we Homo Sapiens.
Martin
@JanieM: Oprah movified it on HBO. Did a good job.
schrodingers_cat
@Sab: My question to everything was, but why?
mad citizen
Have there been any pictures of Steve or the pups on the new BJ? BlogKingCole, consider this a formal request. ( ETA: I vaguely remember one of Steve a weekend or two ago)
Wapiti
@WaterGirl:
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
They used to do panoramic xrays of everyone in the service, I think every two years, so they could id remains by their teeth. I think they started the DNA sampling ~1994 (or at least that’s when they got my sample).
The DNA samples were taken to only be used for remains identification. They cracked the DNA open to solve a string of on-base rapes at some point, so that genie is out of the bottle.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: Many people asked for and want the ability to be able to see what their post is going to look like before they post it. That’s why we have the visual mode. It was in the specs.
It is apparent that sometimes what one person wants is in direct opposition to what other people want. I am sorry you are unhappy and find it frustrating. It’s truly not possible to please everyone. I wish we could.
Wapiti
@Roger Moore: my theory is that ancient Hebrews counted their age in months.
Raven
Adam had some pretty strong alerts about getting the DNA tests.
Martin
Nunes suing CNN for $435M. This won’t end well for him.
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m not sure about how much stuff gets shared with insurance companies. For example, 23 and Me says:
They will share data with researchers, but only with “explicit consent”. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever break their privacy policy- companies do break their own rules distressingly often- but you would presumably have some kind of legal claim against them for doing so.
They do also share aggregated information, which is what is most likely to be useful to researchers. Those researchers could include insurance companies, who might want to look for correlations between genetic markers and health. That’s a potentially slippery slope, especially if the insurance companies start demanding genetic testing before selling insurance. But if insurance companies start to do that it will be a problem for everyone, not just people who got themselves tested.
Cacti
Hey everyone, if you hadn’t heard, Kamala Harris is out.
geg6
@mad citizen:
Seconded!
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Thanks. I can’t even imagine how long the OK Boomer meme lasted back then.
HinTN
@Roger Moore:
Real math wasn’t invented until zero was conceived.
Baud
@Martin: Did CNN falsely portray him as a patriotic American?
Roger Moore
@Wapiti:
I think it’s a matter of record keeping. People lived to great ages way back when before the flood. But as soon as the people in Ur invented cuneiform and clay tablets, people stopped living so long. This kind of thing isn’t limited to ancient history, either. There was a recent research article that showed the strongest correlation to people living to great ages was poor record keeping.
Jeffro
Earlier today I forwarded along Jen Rubin’s op-ed (the Intelligence Committee’s report is a triumph) to RWNJ dad and bro, asking them not what they *think* will happen, but what they think *should* happen.
I’ll be interested to see if I get anything but ‘arglebargleShiftySchiff!’ and (puts head in the sand), respectively.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: The current set up leads to mistakes and frustrations, like when I posted the embed tweet code in the wrong tab. I am not the only one who has done that.
Roger Moore
@HinTN:
Euclid would beg to differ.
Chris T.
@Roger Moore: Just ask any six year old how old their grandfather is. “Really old! A MILLION YEARS OLD!”
Sab
@Roger Moore: If we have decent and adequate health care insurance and protections, it doesn’t matter what they know.
Medical scientists not knowing what they could know is bad for reasearch and treatment. The only advantage is hiding it from insurance companies.
Our current medical funding structure is based on hiding bad news from insurance companies. That is really really detrimental to medical research.
HinTN
@Martin: Nope, but entertaining for some.
HinTN
@Roger Moore: Quibble, quibble, quibble.
jl
OK, I am lost. I hate to say this, loathe to say it, but Cole is correct. The West Virginia Cole family has it narrowed down by now. If both your parents took a DNA heritage test, why on earth should you?
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: That high? Wow.
FWIW now that Harris is out, I have decided to give up politics and support your campaign. Is there some kind of door prize?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Half drank can of beer.
JanieM
To see what they have that you don’t??? I mean, you only get half of each of your parents’ genes. So their results define a superset of what you have, but not your set exactly.
Not being someone who wants to do the testing, I’d be curious as to the answers you’d get from someone who does, esp. if their parents already did and they did as well.
Yarrow
I saw McKinsey was trending so went to see why. This is awful.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl:
We’ve know that for years, jl.
Ksmiami
@NotMax: My daughter is good friends with a health insurance actuary and they watch for spending on extra large clothing and lots of packaged food so…
JanieM
@JanieM: never mind….couldn’t edit at first, then I could. Weird.
Gin & Tonic
Browsing some musical stuff on Amazon, I select “bebop” and they tell me the #1 best seller is John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Bebop? Huh?
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
And not a Japanese animated teevee show? Weird.
Martin
@Roger Moore: I wouldn’t put much faith in that. Here’s how I typically assess these things:
I think the answer to 1) is fairly ‘no’, at least until we have DNA sequencers in all of our smartphones (which is probably coming eventually). But I qualify that for now. For 2) the answer is ‘yes’. Almost none of the DNA information is helpful to what they’re doing, so throw it out. It only serves as a liability, unless… For 3) the answer is ‘hell yes’. Once you’ve gotten your little report, what else do they have to sell you? There’s virtually no recurring business here. But they have a hell of a large asset sitting there generating no income. And what do I need them for in the future once I have my raw DNA? Can’t I theoretically take that to anyone else for any additional services?
Since they give you back your raw DNA data, I don’t understand why they hold onto it at all. I see no reason why they can’t change their TOS after you’ve paid. I see no reason to believe that someone can’t just steal the data.
So, I’ll bring up Apple here (I do that a lot because I really understand how they work, but there are others that could be chosen here such as Amazon). Apple has the largest credit card database in the world, and has for a decade. But they’ve never been hacked. They’ve never leaked credit card numbers, despite being the biggest single source of credit card numbers (more than Visa has issued).
The reason it turns out is that they don’t keep your credit card number. They don’t have it. There’s nothing there to steal. They keep the last 4 digits so you can verify which if your cards you gave them, but Apple converts your card into a completely different identifier, one that they can’t reverse. The only party that can reverse it is the payment processor that they use. In order to get the card numbers, you need Apples database, plus the key from the 3rd party, plus the algorithm. What’s more, Apple converts the transaction using a one-time token so even if you intercept the transaction in transit, you end up with an identifier that you can never use, because its already been used. Nobody is going to find all of those pieces.
That’s how DNA should be done. Nobody should be able to read the actual data except for the exact authorized party, and if I want additional services from 23 and me, just ask me to send the encrypted DNA data back. They don’t need to store it. Yeah, maybe mine gets hacked someway, but that doesn’t expose everyone else’s in the process. This is just the Target hack waiting to happen. It’s actually worse, because my credit card can be cancelled and a new card issued. But my DNA is my DNA. Once its out, it’s out. There’s no getting it back.
What’s more, Apple does it this way because the card data isn’t worth much to them. Getting you to buy a new iPhone next year is worth WAY more, and they are motivated to make sure that earning a buck off of your credit card information doesn’t jeopardize their ability to earn 700 bucks next year. It’s just not a valuable asset to them, so they don’t risk holding onto it. It’s actually a liability. I don’t see that with 23 and me (or any of the others right now for that matter).
Gin & Tonic
@Martin:
Yes, yes, you do.
Martin
@jl: Well, 23 and Me provides health information as well. I have a genetic mutation which has some relevant medical consequences. That’s not necessarily deduced from my parents DNA.
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: I’m sorry. It’s an area of expertise I have.
MomSense
one of the great song lyrics.
Steve in the ATL
@Ksmiami: there is no way this is true. Actuaries have friends? Riiiiiight.
mrmoshpotato
LMAO. That just struck me as hilarious.
NotMax
@Martin
Ahem. And ahem from the not so distant past.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Baud! 2020! Mostly human!
NotMax
@NotMax
And as for Apple’s own eponymous credit card, just ducky unless you, y’know, might want to carry it around and use it.
Slaves to technology, indeed.
chopper
@JanieM:
shrug. i mean, from a ‘family heritage’ standpoint if i know my mom is 50% this and 50% that, and my dad is 50% that and 50% this, that’s generally gonna be good enough for me at least to not have to hand my DNA over to some private company over a pinky swear that they totes won’t sell it.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan:
Ancestry.com is (or was, 5yr ago) based in Park City, UT.
Martin
@NotMax: Well, the first isn’t an iOS 13 bug. It’s a longstanding CDN caching bug. Basically the CDN is serving the data back to you that a previous user used and the CDN didn’t clear it. That’s certainly problematic, but it’s a different type of solution related to how information like that gets encrypted. Note that it’s a transaction to manually enter a card number, not a card on file transaction.
The 2nd case is similar. It’s just a plain phishing attempt. There is no card information to enter in an ApplePay transaction because you don’t have the information used in an ApplePay transaction. Your card number isn’t stored on your device, instead as part of the setup process a secret identifier is transmitted to your device that is only valid on that device. You don’t know it, have a way to know it, or have a way to accidentally give it out. They’re trying to spoof an Apple Pay setup process. So again, it’s a phishing attack.
The solution to the phishing problem is to do what ApplePay ultimately does – use a card number that you don’t know and can’t give out.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore:
*precisely* I’m not saying they advertise “all your data is US”. Rather, I’m saying they do not say, and clearly, enforceably, “all your data is YOURS”.
That they CAN change their policies at a later date, is -enough- already.
Martin
@NotMax: The only downside is that the card might scratch or discolor, like every other card on the market. It’s not like the card won’t work.
Lots of other metal cards carry the same warnings after people complained of them discoloring in their Coach wallets.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: I realize that “upvote” was not part of the specs for the redesign. And I accept and support that. But still, this comment deserves *all* the upvotes. All. The. Upvotes.
Procopius
@hells littlest angel: To this day I cringe at one lesson in high school Biology class. Studying genetics, we were told that blue eyes are a recessive gene, that is you have to inherit the gene from both parents to have blue eyes (it’s actually more complicated than that). One of the kids piped up that he has blue eyes but his father has brown eyes. The teacher replied, “What color eyes does the milkman have?”
opiejeanne
@Procopius: The teacher’s comment was a mistake, because brown-eyed dad could very well have a recessive blue-eye gene and passed that to his kid instead of the brown-eye gene.
trnc
What’s the margin of error?
Jay
@HinTN:
isn’t that there one of those Islamic inventions?
Real ‘Merkin’s shouldn’t use Islamic numbers.
Jay
Gvg
@Procopius: it’s a recessive gene. You have to get the gene from both parents but neither of them have to have expressed blue eyes, they can both be carriers and have one recessive blue gene that they don’t necessarily know about. Your teacher didn’t understand the subject they were teaching.
maybe you knew that and were being sarcastic, but I thought it was worth being explicit.
debbie
@Martin:
With his proclivity for filing lawsuits, I think Devin must be Trump’s bastard son.
opiejeanne
I’m late to the party, but there’s one reason you might want to avoid the genetic test. One is lack of accuracy, but the other is that at least one test may put you in touch with relatives you’d rather not get to know, and you may not be able to easily avoid them. My older daughter used Ancestry and some distant relative of her dad emailed her demanding to know about her own mother. She’s the granddaughter of one of my husband’s great uncle. I’d never heard of her mother at all but I did know the great uncle. I took over the conversation with this woman seeking her terrible mother, who had given her away to a stranger, a woman tending bar, who turned out to be a good mom to her. I thought she was looking for money but then the half-sisters and half -brothers started appearing and they wandered away to talk among themselves.
The inaccuracy is hilarious. My niece used 23 + me and got similar results of regional background with slight divergence due to different fathers (we’re all so white we’re nearly transparent). That was last year. Then a month ago both agencies sent corrections. My niece became more “English” and my daughter got more “Scandinavian”. Their Portuguese great X 5 grandfather is just about erased as is the tiny bit of Mediterranean background.
Did someone call them out and make both services take a second look at the details?
debbie
@Yarrow:
Me too, but I now excel at correcting it. //
Chetan Murthy
@Martin:
I’m glad Martin mentioned this. “Information against his case”, etc. Indeed, there’s a chance that you can learn about something really awful, health-wise. Here’s the thing: you’re assuming that the “bad health issues” that you learn about, that are good for you to learn about sooner, are going to outweigh the “bad health issues” that all the insurers, employers, etc, in the world, want to learn about. You have weigh those two countervailing interests. It sucks.
100%, I’m with the commenter who pointed out that in any single-payer national healthcare system, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this shitty, shitty, shitty discussion.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Won’t go well for Nunes.
Doesn’t that fall under Steps on own dick with golf spikes on.”
And no I have no idea how he’d manage to do that but isn’t he stupid enough to find a way? Along the lines of “Hold my beer and watch this!”
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: “I’m luxurious at the troops, and totally not a Soviet shitpile mobster conman taking an orange dump on NATO! Just ask my Daddy Vladdy!”
Ruckus
@debbie:
He’s got to be someones bastard son. Makes you wonder if even his parents refuse to claim him……
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m not sure about that.
My medical records are all electronic at the VA. In many ways it’s much, much better. I can read most things but only going back something like 3 yrs. And a lot of things I can not see. Mostly that’s not important but anyone with a proper access card and SS number can access them. Could they be hacked? Well pretty much any record can be, given enough effort. That Apple transaction thing Martin discusses can not be because there is nothing there to actually access. But your medical records have to be there. And have to be reasonably accessible to be of any use. What actual use they would be is another good question, but your point that not much to be gained if the provider is also the money end stands. That’s pretty much a part of what secures the VA records, they really aren’t very useful, there’s no money in them.
rikyrah
Your Dad is on point. I don’t trust those companies either. That’s why I refuse to take the test.?
SFAW
@Bill Arnold:
Better that, than “lycanthrope,” I guess.
SFAW
@Roger Moore:
You mean like this?
“Euclid — a big, strong man — came to me, tears in his eyes, and said ‘Thank you, sir, for inventing mathematics. Without your invention, I could never have been able to do the work I did. Unfortunately, sir, those Democrat traitors give ME a lot of credit, instead of you!’ “
evodevo
@WaterGirl:
You are NOT paranoid…this is quite possible, especially with a corporate-friendly govt. in power…
WaterGirl
@Jay: God, that is depressing. I feel kind of sick to my stomach after reading that.
Olivia
@Gin & Tonic: I am the oldest and was also considered a very difficult child until my 4 younger sisters became teenagers. My mom finally realized how good she had it with me. By the time the last one moved into those teen years my mom pretty much gave up and let her do whatever she wanted.
moops
Do not give your genetic blueprint to these corporations. You no longer own it, and they have marginal cyber security, at best. We are in the early stages of genotype-phenotype mapping, but it is going to get more capable. Your ancestry is the most boring and useless thing your DNA can tell you.
SteverinoCT
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I enlisted in 1981. Sometime in the 90s, we were all required to give a cheek swab. My fingerprints have been on file from the get-go due to clearance requirements (“These hands are registered with the FBI…”)