• 3 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2023
  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Do you still use Facebook?
    6·
    22 hours ago

    I have it, but it’s not my real name. I removed all the photos from my profile about 10 years ago. I don’t have the app on my phone, so I only check it when I’m on my PC. I don’t post to it, rarely comment on other people’s posts, and only occasionally “like” or “love” the comments.

    The only reason I keep the account is because if I deleted it, I would lose track of everyone I’ve ever known in my life since high-school onwards (I’m 45, to put that in perspective) that I don’t really communicate with at all anymore, but I still like seeing what they’re up to in life. I don’t know how else/where else I’d be able to do that.

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Has anyone here dealt with a pest issue in your home? How serious is/was it? How was it dealt with?
    6·
    22 hours ago

    We got Carpenter ants around the front entrance to the house one year, had to call an exterminator to spray the nest, which was outside under the front porch. Those little fuckers stuck around for weeks afterwards, which is apparently how long the poison takes to eradicate them all.

    We pretty much always have mice in the attic, despite the exterminator calls and the snap-traps we set. Occasionally we catch one in the garage. They never manage to infiltrate the rest of the house because we have 5 cats and each one lives for the moment a mouse is spotted so that they can catch it and play with its barely-breathing corpse before they try to eat it. We don’t use rodent poison for that reason, just in case the cats get one.

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What's the craziest thing that ever happened at your workplace?
    47·
    3 days ago

    I used to do dispatching for night-shift security for a large computer-related company in a western state in the U.S. (sorry for vagueness).

    One foggy night/early morning as we were nearing the end of our shift, one of the patrol guys calls in from his vehicle and says he found a dead cow on one of the roads that ran adjacent to company property. Our building was surrounded by fields that sometimes had cattle on them, so we figured one must have gotten loose somehow and got hit by a car, probably because it was so foggy and hard to see. The officer was on his way back to dispatch anyway, but 3 minutes later, as he’s on his way back and on another road (the company site was several acres), he calls in again to say there are MANY LIVE cattle all over the road and running into one of the parking lots in front of the main building. Turns out they all busted a fence and escaped, and were now freely running around the campus. We have no idea who they belong to, so we call the head of security (who was on his way in as by now it was like 6am), then call the cops to see if they can tell us who owns the land the cattle escaped from.

    Meanwhile, other people who work in the building are arriving for the day, and they are calling in to dispatch saying they cannot leave their cars because they’re surrounded by cattle. The herd (we later learned it was about 100 head) split into several groups, and started blocking the entrances to the building, and people were just afraid to get out of their cars with them roaming around. The fog made everything worse because you couldn’t see very far across the lot before you were suddenly up against a herd of spooked cattle.

    Eventually we got ahold of the owners, and they had to come out to the campus with horses and literally round the cattle up with lassos and herd them back into the fields. The cops came to redirect traffic on the highway to avoid the worksite entirely while our patrol assisted with the Jeeps. It was utterly ridiculous. Thankfully the only casualty was the 1 dead cow.

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•My folks want to give ancestry.com a try what do I need to know?
    4·
    5 days ago

    That’s fair, it does appear that the church itself never owned Ancestry.com outright, so I concede I was wrong on that, however this article from the Harvard School of Divinity states that they did own it (see Mormons, Genetics, & Digitized Data:

    " In 2001, Mormon billionaire James Sorenson started one of the earliest genetic test kit companies, Relative Genetics, in part due to his religious interests.It was later bought by Ancestry.com, another Mormon company. While today, Ancestry is a publicly traded company, it uses LDS church records and the IGI. All LDS church members receive free memberships, and they can use their account to send relatives they find on Ancestry.com directly to the LDS church for a proxy baptism with the click of a button."

    While yet another article states : Is Ancestry.com owned by the Mormon Church?:

    "Since many of the digitized records on Ancestry.com can be accessed at FamilySearch, many people assume that the company Ancestry is owned by the LDS church. This is not the case! However, the two organizations have done massive amounts of collaborative work throughout the years. In fact, if you are an LDS member, you have free access to Ancestry’s World Edition. You can also obtain free access at different municipal libraries and other non-religious institutions.

    The company still to this day continues to grow, and though its past was highly influenced by people in the LDS church, the company has never been owned by the church itself.

    However, the company has truly been a pioneer in the online subscription business model. Today, Ancestry is considered a major technology company rather than a genealogical company. Though the company has done numerous amount of collaborations with the LDS church’s non-profit organization Familysearch.org, it has never been owned by the church itself."

    This article points out how Ancestry.com and FamilySearch are often confused (FamilySearch is in fact owned by the Mo’s) Ancestry’s Associations with FamilySearch:

    "Ancestry’s Associations with FamilySearch I think one of the reasons that people think Ancestry is owned by the LDS church is that they mix it up with FamilySearch.org.

    Who owns Family Search? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    Like Ancestry, Family Search is a global online genealogy service based in Provo, Utah.

    The two rivals have a history of partnership and collaboration.

    The LDS operates a global network of Family History Centres for genealogy research. Members get free access to Ancestry.com services from those centers.

    In 2013, Ancestry and FamilySearch started a significant collaboration in access to archives across both sites.

    When you’re logged into Ancestry and searching for records, the results may include documents that are indexed by FamilySearch.

    Is Ancestry.com Owned By The Mormon Church? Why do people mistakenly think that Ancestry is owned by Mormons?

    Is it just because Ancestry and FamilySearch are two online genealogy giants headquartered in Utah? No, I think there’s more to it than that.

    The original buyers of “Ancestry, inc” (Paul Allen and Dan Taggart) were both members of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

    Also, because the company is based in Utah, many of the staff were drawn from the Mormon community.

    Brigham Young University looms large in this regard. Unlike Ancestry, it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    I’ve already mentioned that Allen and his business partner were BYU alumni. A sizeable number of local Ancestry staff are alumni."

    So it appears ownership was never their thing, but a heavy influence remains. I assume that if Mo’s are running the show, or did at some point, that the church has de facto control over the business, because the people running the company would just bend over for the church at any point, whether that means giving them access to the DNA database unofficially, allowing them to search it any time for any reason, etc.