Godel_unicode

The fact that you don’t use yours doesn’t make the thing you lost not an ID. If you lose your house key and always go in through the garage, the key you lost is still a key.

It’s not do you, it’s can you.

So your argument is that you’re right and the state of West Virginia is wrong? All of a sudden the thing isn’t what it actually does because you disagree with whether it should?

> I would still class them under "powerful fools"

Cool, but your opinion of them is irrelevant. They get to decide what forms of ID they’ll take, and they’ve decided to take this one.

> you could just write your name on an index card and use that instead

Of course you couldn’t, the rule is very clear that you can identify yourself with specifically a social security card. You’re the one pretending. Your insistence that it’s not an ID will be small comfort when someone fakes yours and used it to identify themselves as you to steal your identity.

Again. The fact that it’s a terrible form of ID is my point. It being a bad ID doesn’t mean it’s not one.

Edit: I copy/pasted my point about W.Va from one thread to another. Both say, as the law does, that it identifies you. The mail ties the identified person to an address authorized for a license (i.e. an address in the state). It’s authn vs authz.

You really can’t admit you’re wrong, can you. Impressive, I guess?

I don’t believe for one second that you don’t already know, but ok here you go.

https://www.ssa.gov/fraud/#:~:text=How%20to%20report%20fraud....

You don’t need it because it’s so weak that people will accept that knowing the number is the same as having it.

What it does? Ok.

The state of West Virginia will give you a (non-RealID) drivers license with a social security card and 2 pieces of mail. Card to prove your identity and mail to prove that name went with a W.Va address.

It’s an ID, issued by the Federal Government, and every American has one. Now that all the insanity and gymnastics are over can we please just make it better?

The state of West Virginia will give you a (non-RealID) drivers license with a social security card and 2 pieces of mail. Card to prove your identity and mail to prove that name went with a W.Va address.

At one point the lifelock guy had something like 200 W.Va licenses since in the mid-aughts they didn’t actually check to see if that SSN had a license already.

W.Va license gets you a passport. Passport gets you anything you want.

The only thing standing between you and full-blown has-a-passport identity theft is your Social Security Card.

Edit: You can intuitively prove that everywhere doesn’t require a photo ID because some piece of ID has to come first.

What specifically do you think this hypothetical furniture removalist would want to know from their watch? I gave several examples of how people use fitness tracking.

There’s a thriving app marketplace, if you’re so convinced that there’s a market for your working man’s tracker, please feel free to go make tons of money.

You added an artificial constraint by specifying photo ID. I never claimed that a social security card is a photo ID because clearly it isn’t.

You do have one, or if you insist you were issued one, you just don’t possess it.

This is like saying I drive without taking my drivers license with me.

> social security number is closer to an alternate name

`s/is/should be/`

If I have your social security card I can pretend to be you quite effectively as many people will accept it as an ID. They don’t care that you don’t think it is one. The ones that don’t will frequently take an alternative (read: derived) that I can get with just it.

> It doesn't contain evidence that can feasibly be used to prove…

Yes. We agree, it’s a bad ID.

Who said anything about REALID solving the national ID problem? We need to replace SSNs with a modern identity system.

> What purpose would one serve?

Aside from the hundreds of other cost-and-convenience reasons, eliminating the SSN (and associated fraud) would be easily worth it on its own.

Even if it were true that plenty of people get through life without a federal ID, that doesn’t mean all do. As I have said other places in this thread, the rickety machinery of federal identity replication grinds up plenty of people.

Wait until you find out about the photo matching they do to true up license and Global Entry identity. Why have a human (who can be social engineered) do that in person when an algorithm can do it behind the scenes?

The thing that will need to match is the name/DoB on your passport and your file with SSA. You will need them to match when you have to get the window attendant at SSA to help you figure out why your monthly social security check is wrong. Good luck proving you’re you when the records are 40 years old and 6 states away.

The fact that you do not physically possess your social security card does not mean that the federal government did not issue you one. So you Have it, you simply don’t have it on you.

You haven’t needed it since it’s such a bad ID that if you know the number you often don’t need to possess the paper.

Huh? A name is something which is on a federal ID, obviously it is not in and of itself a federal ID.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) issues IDs at the federal level, which are applied for using state or county issued birth certificates (as well as other ways). They sometimes make clerical errors. Those errors can propagate into other federal identity databases, such as the taxpayer record system operated by the Internal Revenue Service or the passport database operated by the Department of State.

The linkages between these systems are fragile or nonexistent, and if you are not careful about manually propagating changes between them you can end up in an inconsistent state which requires court action to rectify.

Passports are often used in lieu of social security cards because people are (correctly!) leery about using their SSN directly. I know people who have no intention of traveling internationally who have gotten passports because it’s extremely convenient to have a federally issued photo id.

Except where they aren’t.

In what way is your social security card not an ID? It is used as a credential to identify yourself, and is one of very few such identifiers that most organizations take (i.e. I can use it to get many other IDs). Many state DMVs list it on a page called “identity documents”. All Americans have been issued their card at least once, and more to the point not having the card doesn’t mean you don’t have the ID as many people will take the number. It’s a very weak ID for a lot of reasons, but that fact alone doesn’t make it not one. It just makes it a dangerous one.

Why are you against having a good one?

Edit: firstly, this is a distraction (i.e. a red herring) from the debate about national IDs. We have a national ID issue which needs to be fixed.

That ruling doubles down on it being a state thing by saying leave citizenship (which is a federal thing) out of it. If a state creates for itself a catch-22, that is the states fault and is therefore the states responsibility to fix.

Arizona needs to stop shirking it’s responsibility to its residents and come up with a solution to this problem, just like virtually every other state has.

I know people who have spent literally years trying to correct misspellings and incorrect DOB issues with State and SSA.

Get a passport as a minor, change your name as an adult, realize SSA has your wrong bday, descend into bureaucracy hell as now both name and DOB don’t match.

There are a large number of people stuck in semi-permanent limbo because their disjointed federal IDs don’t agree about some combination of birthday, spelling of name, etc. I have a friend who fills out their taxes with a birthday which is not their birthday because they can’t get the SSA change the date on file(they insist the state must be wrong and that the state should change). Getting a passport required months of effort and ultimately a lawyer because the federal and state documents disagree.

Having one master citizen record would allow us to have one place to make changes and one group to appeal to when fixing errors.

Also, to be super clear, all Americans already have at least one federal ID, it’s just a bad one. Let’s make it less bad.

> identity theft is so prevalent in the US, and pretty much nowhere else in the world.

That’s decidedly untrue.

https://focusonbusiness.eu/en/news/one-in-five-europeans-hav...

If you are an American, you already have a federally issued ID it just isn’t very good. If you are an American who has traveled internationally you have at least two distinct federally issued IDs, which can get out of sync and cause a huge headache. At least 3 if you ever interacted with the IRS, 4 if you have a KTN, 5 if you have a TSA redress number…

There are plenty of places where just a drivers license isn’t acceptable (getting a passport for instance) and requires you to play the stupid 1/2 from category A/B game.

I agree that bringing up voting is a red herring, that’s a state thing and the several states should solve that for themselves. The US federal government needs a unified ID system which was designed as a robust, centralized ID system that can then be mandated for federal agencies to use.

> have access to infinite resources, knowledge, etc.

I find the pervasiveness of this idea fascinating since it usually falls apart on backtesting. There are tons of elites who get taken in by Ponzi schemes (just look at Madoffs client list), lots of very well connected people lost a ton of money in 08, lots of celebrities use Goop products, etc.

Are there counter examples? I have not found much evidence that there’s some secret elites-only repository of knowledge.

Ah, I see the problem, you appear to never have used a smartwatch. Let me explain. It does that all the time regardless of what you’re doing. Activity specific tracking is it keeping track of additional things (precise gps, reps, running cadence, etc) during a tracked activity.

As I said previously, this additional tracking is for training that needs additional sports-specific data. Everyone gets the same always on steps, sit/stand, and heartbeat tracking.

Your response has nothing to do with what I wrote, did you intend to respond to someone else?

Apple Watch “doesn’t consider it” because nobody who actually does that work would care about or use the feature if it existed. Craftsmen care about craftsmanship not steps or reps or heart rates. They want to track who makes concrete and who makes soup. Who hits the nail every time and who is marking the finish work because they have bad technique.

Huh? We’re talking about activity trackers. I’ve mixed thousands of sacks of concrete, but I’ve never wished that my watch had a “mix concrete” activity. Ditto for slinging roofing up a ladder or framing walls. I tend to take my watch off when I swing a hammer since I wore it on my right wrist and it was irritating.

Activity trackers are for tracking activities about which you need metrics in order to get better. If you’re getting up out of the aerobic zone while doing manual labor you should quit smoking, not use a watch.

I don’t understand the hard-left into fitness watches. I track my running because it’s more difficult to train effectively (especially with regard to avoiding injury) without data. Most people don’t push quite that hard when they’re chopping wood.

I track my hikes so I have a background image (the map) for collages of pictures I took. Most people don’t have a similar tracking need for their raking.