The New York Times and other traditional papers have a tendency to write headlines like that in order to attract attention. When you read it, nine times out of ten you realise they’re not actually endorsing it and the article itself presents a much more reasonable take on it.

Newspapers editors write this stuff with the assumption that you will read it, not just screenshot it and post it online. Maybe that’s not a good assumption in the age of short attention spans, but it’s what they do.

Remember kids, if you did not back it up, it must not have been important.

Okay, and what are crypto miners then?

I live in the US. Some cities have banned credit card surcharges. The bans have been wholly ineffective and achieving the desired result. I’ll illustrate what happened at my local ice cream shop. This is a real example and not made-up for this comment.

An ice cream sundae costs $4.64. There is a 3% cash discount. So it’s $4.50 when paid in cash and $4.64 when paid by card.

This is a credit card surcharge but by another name. And legal according to the rules of Australia’s scheme as well. The only real thing that can be done here is to not patronise businesses who impose a surcharge that you think is unfair.

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.

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.

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 × 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.

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

500 × 500 = 250,000.

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.

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.

The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.

Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.

Compared to not having insurance, where you have to pay for everything.

Stale bread is better than no bread at all

Most desk jobs in the US are salaried. Salaries are quoted typically in annual terms, although payroll is processed typically fortnightly (meaning salary payments are transferred into your account every two weeks, usually on Thursday or Wednesday).

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics collects salary data across hundreds of job descriptions and reports this information regularly. Here are some median annual salaries (along with the monthly equivalent in euros) for various corporate jobs:

• Human Resources Specialists: $75,940 (€5,500 monthly)
• Buyers and Purchasing Agents: $77,710 (€5,630 monthly)
• Budget Analysts: $91,640 (€6,640 monthly)
• Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists: $78,760 (€5,710)
• Paralegals and Legal Assistants: $62,890 (€4,560)
• Lawyers: $159,670 (€11,580)
• Securities, Commodities, and Financial Service Sales Agents: $78,660 (€5,700)
• Real Estate Brokers: $73,220 (€5,810)
• Billing and Posting Clerks: $48,500 (€3,520)
• Secretaries and Administrative Assistants: $47,540 (€3,450)
• Computer Systems Analysts: $105,850 (€7,670)
• Network and Computer Systems Administrator: $99,130 (€7,190)
• Software Developers: $135,980 (€9,860)

Some notes before comparing salaries:

• Office workers work 40 hours per week, and lunch breaks are typically 1 hour. The most common working schedule is 09:00 to 17:00 with a 1 hour lunch break. Two weeks paid holiday is the minimum for most office workers, but three to four weeks is more common. Extra paid holiday is considered a bonus for loyalty. People who have worked for the company for a few years will gradually be given more.
• Sick days in the US are protected by law, but unpaid. Some companies offer paid sick day policies, others do not and force you to use paid holidays if you want to be paid for those days.
• Increasingly, companies offer 12 paid “floating holidays” per year which are used to cover public holidays. But there are only 11 public holidays leaving one extra to be used however the employee pleases. An employer that doesn’t offer floating holidays will instead typically just pay the employee for those 11 public holidays.
• Tax in the US is typically less than in Europe. A person making $100,000 annually would pay $13,200 in federal tax, and between $0 and about $10,000 in state tax, depending on where they live. The US also offers various tax credits and exemptions. For example, putting money into a retirement account means that the money deposited isn’t counted as income.
• The US, famously, does not have a taxpayer-funded healthcare system. Most office workers have decent to excellent healthcare coverage provided by the employer, and typically the employer pays for the majority of the cost. This ends up costing a few hundred dollars a month to the worker out of pocket for their family, typically.
• Everyday expenses in the US tend to be cheaper than in Europe due to lower consumption tax. This also varies between US states, with sales tax (comparable to VAT) ranging from 0% to 10%. Sales tax over 10% is uncommon. 7-8% is typical.
• Energy is cheaper in the US than in Europe. In my area, a gallon of Midgrade 89 gasoline, equivalent to Europe’s 95 E10 petrol, costs $4.50 per gallon (€0.96 per litre), which is not far from average in the US. My electricity costs 10.8¢ (8.7 Euro cents) per kWh, but this is considered low nationwide because my municipality owns its own power generation; on average electricity costs around 18¢ per kWh (15 Euro cents).
• The US is less dense and therefore commute times are longer. Most people drive to work. A commute of around 20-30 km is considered average for most people. A commute of 40 km is not super uncommon, but 50 km and higher is rare.

What country are you in?

But I will give a few pieces of general advice: if food delivery is popular in your country, do not use it. Ever. It is a notorious money drain basically no matter where you are in the country. If you want to pick up food, force yourself to go out and buy it yourself. Or buy frozen foods for when you’re too tired to cook.

I did the maths for one of my friends who was essentially addicted to food delivery apps (ordering almost every day) and discovered that he had spent almost a third of his monthly earnings on food delivery. Cutting this habit essentially singlehandedly fixed his budget problems and allowed him to start paying down his credit card debt.

Which leads me to my second point of advice: don’t get into credit card debt. It is extremely painful to crawl out of.

There is a beautiful thing you can buy called bleach which is hostile to all life forms spanning six orders of magnitude in size.

I don’t agree. The explosion in economic activity is not solely because of industrial advances. The global supply chain is extremely well-connected, and it’s this system of global trade that is the real oil of the modern economy. There is almost nothing more advanced than a wheelbarrow that can be economically made without involving some aspect of global trade. Sure, industrial advances are part of it, but it’s the trade that makes any of the products worth anything.

A machine that can manufacture a million wheelbarrows in one hour produces extremely little value unless those wheelbarrows are traded.

If you want to see what shutting off trade does to a country, take a look at the current happenings of United States.

All the messages have been automated for over a decade.

Unfortunately the US Constitution is among the minority of liberal democratic constitutions where there is no popular vote involved in amending it.

This is non-sequitur. The fact that value derived from labour is required to exist for value derived from trade to be generated does not mean that either category of value is less real.

Labour gets you from 0 to 1. Trade gets you from 1 to 100. Labour generates value by adding to what’s available. Trade generates value by multiplying what’s available. The observation that zero multiplied by anything is still zero does not invalidate the fact that multiplication is still more powerful than addition. It just means that one cannot exist without the other if you want to have more than zero.

UN resolutions aren’t law. There’s a difference between what people have a moral right to and what people have a legal right to