Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?
theregister.com
theregister.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_D...
Wow, I would not have been nearly as kind there at the end.
But people are falsely declared dead, or get revived after being declared dead quite infrequently, and that's why this process is typically not automated and sometimes even entirely missed.
It’s amazing how lax the old paper system was.
Canada used to accept baptismal certificates as proof of birth in Canada. The Millennium bomber stole a blank form and got himself a Canadian passport pretty damn easily.
It’s not easy to get a death certificate (needs to be signed by a doctor or coroner) so reversing such an official document must be difficult.
And on top of that, there is probably no process for actually do it, so that’s a challenge itself.
Your attitude is - they know it will happen, it is rare so fuck it and lets ruin few lives so some government fucker does not have to strain all 2 brain cells they have left.
Btw when bad things happen to "important people" suddenly it gets fixed in no time.
No one could un-fire him, the only solution was to hire him again as if he was a new employee.
Edit: I guess a fair number of states do have laws for that, though unlimited vacation still gets around that.
There's a traditional way to screw over co-workers. On a day they are not in the office, scrawl "DECEASED" on all their mail, and drop it in the outbox. It's said to take years to undo. That long predates computers.
The Motorhead vid was a bit sad, though. R. I. P., Lemmy.
I love this part of his autobio at the end:
> He still stings from having to provide proof to the French authorities that he was not a bigamist prior to getting married. Most countries have such a thing as a Wedding Certificate but in France, there is also an official Certificate of Unmarriedness, and it is a right old bugger to find someone to draw one up when you’re not French. In the end, he persuaded a British consul to sign a letter stating that the aforementioned – a person he didn’t know and had never met – was, as far as he could guess, probably not already married, perhaps, maybe, I dunno, I hope not. The French authorities accepted it without further question.
Back to the story, sometimes here in California we have the opposite problem, where someone really is dead, deceased, an ex-person, pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket like Jimmy Durante [1], but no one will let him Rest In Peace.
Every week or so I get a piece of mail with an offer for guaranteed issue of a life insurance policy for an acquaintance who died a few years ago. He never actually lived at my address, but through a chain of events his forwarding address was set to here.
Since they are so insistent, I am tempted to fill in one of those applications on his behalf and see what happens. Maybe they will bring him back to life? After all, they do call it Life Insurance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w00Kab17aeI
"Did you see it? He (slap) sailed right out there!"
Collect the whole set:
…and then send in his death certificate. It should be amusing, provided you aren’t nicked for filling in the policy.
Sounds like no big deal but then they started witholding state income taxes for Illinois out of my paycheck. My actual home office in Seattle is in a state with zero state taxes so it made a big difference.
It took a month to realize that it had happened, then it took another month to get someone who could change me back to the correct state. Of course they were saying that I would need to wait until next year to file taxes and request that Illinois payback the witholdings. I managed to find some Illinois state tax regulations explaining a process to clawback overpaid taxes and sent that to our payroll team. Finally, after around 4 months, they issued me a check for $3,000.00 for the overpaid taxes.
That was a surprisingly complex process even though this is a fairly modern tech company. Can’t imagine what a more traditional company would have been like. It also taught me to keep a closer eye on that automatically paid paycheck to watch for anything odd.
I know, because I recall a project to systematize and consistently revoke access to everything for anyone that left.
My point is: automating a process may not make the opposite process easy, but when it's manual, I'd kind of expect things to be no better and maybe worse.
If you don't even know exactly how a person was declared defunct, it can't be any easier to resurrect them.
Declare yourself dead and start again!
- Someone declared dead will never be declared alive again
By now this should be system design 101: the system should always have an override to move a record from any state into any other state.
Edit: I suppose it could be like addresses, if you had a separate address table and you'd be using the most recent address for a person without losing previous addresses. But it may seem like overkill for a field that's normally set only once.
Please no. It may be really difficult to get a human beaurocrat to fix something but can you imagine what it would be like if there was a smart contract that wasn’t coded with this possibility in mind?
A blockchain is just a series of hash signatures that depend on each other, in this context you can use it to demonstrate integrity on the provided dataset. Period.
In reality there must be situations where voiding a first vote and casting a second should be allowed. But for one, is it even possible IRL in most situations, for instance during a single day voting window ?
For two, how would you make that an option that can be used at the level the reversing decision is taken, while also protecting from abuse from bad faith actors and corrupt elements ?
Should there be an override in the UI? Why? The way you are stating it sounds like a mathematical axiom, but I would like to see it treated as a theorem: with a proof, or at least a powerful set of reasons.
I can see that a particular person may rejoin the same corporation later, but IMHO they should be given a new account, not just have their old account reactivated. They aren't really "the same person" anymore, they might have a different job description etc.