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New User [Mr Lovenstein] (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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Mr Lovenstein | Mastodon | Patreon

Secret Panel πŸ’¦

Transcript4 Panel Comic

Panel 1: A doctor lifts up a healthy baby in front of a tired mom

Doctor: Welcome to the world, little guy!

Panel 2: The doctor holds the child up in front of a tablet

Doctor: You need to create a life account

Panel 3: The baby is frustrated as the tablet rejects the input

Tablet: Sorry, that username is taken

Panel 4: The baby facepalms as the tablet needs even more info to create the account

Tablet: You need to make an email account for Two-Factor Authentication

Secret Panel: The baby sweats as the tablet continues

Tablet: Enjoy your 30 day trial of life. After-which, there is a monthly charge.

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[–] 4 points 1 month ago (11 children)

As an aside, I don't see any reason why we couldn't have a system where the combination of someone's name and birth year had to be unique. This would make identifying unique people a snap. Your full name and your birth year would be enough to find your file at the doctor's office, bank, or literally anywhere else.

Even assuming people only choose to pick from the 500 top names, this allows 125 million unique combinations every year following the English trinomial naming convention. It rises to 62.5 billion combinations if one follows the tetranomial Hispanic naming convention. The issue of running out of names or duplicate names would almost never come up. And parents could just reserve a name for their child if they were so bothered.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

    Because you get issues with the most common last names in pretty much any language. Do you realize how many people out there have the same Last name? And does this system take into account homophones? Because if not, you didn't actually gain any meaningful benefit out of this effort.

    It would result in December babies being named 'Xyoabxoanz Smith" or similar.

    Edit: just looked it up and did some napkin math. There were 2,369,644 Smiths in the USA alone in 2020. Half of them are women, and lets say about one third of them are in the age where they can have children, which leaves us with around 400k female Smiths in a childbearing age range. US fertility is at around 54 children / 1000 women / year, meaning you would have to assign around 21500 unique first names every year. This is before taking homophones to Smith into account, which will make the issue far worse. The user who said Unix Epoch would be his choice has a better system than this one could ever be.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    You are vastly overestimating the number of people with the same surname. Like, comically overestimating it. The 100 most common surnames only make up 15% of the US population. If anything, 500 surnames is insanely conservative. I should have said something like 2,000 surnames if I wanted to have a serious estimate.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

    Ehm i looked up the distribution beforehand, see my edit. These things are not distributed evenly - you have a few surnames with an insane amount in relation to any others before even coming to homophones which tilt the balance even harder towards those supercommon surnames. Smith and Brown are the ones you would have real issues if using the suggested unique name schemata.

    Edit: There's a whole another issue with this approach. If we do this on a per-country-basis, people moving into foreign countries will have to add the country of birth to everything, for example doctors appointments, for the rest of your life in case of a name collision. Making the system work worldwide will exacerbate the issue with very common surnames, because these are not only common in a single country. (Even in the DACH-area the name Schmid/Schmied/Schmidt and so on, which is simply the german form of Smith, is one of the most common surnames)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (6 children)

    You calculated that 21,500 given names are required annually to make this work.

    500 Γ— 500 = 250,000.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

    i do not know what you are calculating here.

    You need 21500 names for the last name "Smith" alone without any homophones messing everything up. There is no second "500".

    Edit: unless you mean forcibly reassigning last names. That will go down real smooth mate, go for it lol

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (4 children)

    Names in English typically have three components. A given name, middle name, and surname. Within any given surname, assuming people choose only to pick from the top 500 for the given names and middle names, that is 500 Γ— 500 combinations.

    However, there is in fact more variety in given names. The top 1,000 given names account for 72% of children according to the US Social Security Administration.

    So there are actually at least 1 million viable combinations. Certain enough that except for all but the most common names ("John William Smith"), a person's trinomial name is almost already going to be unique.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (3 children)

    Ah, you are counting middle names. The one i know exactly noone actively using. I have one too! But the amount of people knowing it is around 7, and most of them will already have forgotten it.

    This makes everyone's name they have to use in basic situations increase in size by about 50%. I can't see many people being happy about that change.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (2 children)

    Are you being obtuse on purpose? Nothing is supposed to change about everyday use of names. This is to make indexing easier by allowing records to be easily searched by formal legal name and birth year, information that is always available and always known to the person whose records are being found.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    I am not being obtuse. There are tons of cultures not following your name schema. It makes people moving from one country to another a pain in the ass.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Yeah, and I am a member of one of those other cultures. I maintain my position that you are talking about an overblown problem. And if it becomes a problem, they can pick a fourth name to distinguish it. Immigrants making modifications to their names when they arrive in a new country is not a new phenomenon, and the overwhelming majority of them will not have to make any modifications as well.

    Here's a better attack line for you to adopt, since your previous one was bad: How would the proposed system deal with people who had non-unique names before the system was implemented? That is something that would be far more disruptive.

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