It should be relatively easy to ditch an online identity. Start with changing your email (no mail forwarding either), then set up new accounts for the services you care about.
I changed my identity on HN and reddit all the time -- just create a new account. Of course these services could probably connect new with old just by IP address, but I don't care about that. What I'm actually doing is gaurding against something coming back to bite me in the ass years later (an unpopular opinion, lapse in judgement, etc).
Cahnging legal stuff, that depends on your country.
Average life expectancy is a notoriously bad measurement because it skews way down because of childhood deaths.
For example, Roman life expectancy was only 21, but if you made it to age 5 it jumped to 42.
Even then the laws at the time was 18 to enlist -- so they already viewed child soilders the same way we do now. The big difference is age verification was a lot harder because there was little in the way of a paper trail.
It's a bunch of commentary on the subject mostly. I spoke my piece in that thread. So I won't go into it again here.
Long story short, basically what a previous poster said. People spent so much time trying to find out if they could, no one seemed to stop and think about whether they should.
It's no more difficult, but farming apples is not the same skill set as farming corn. Yes, many skills will transfer but the details need to be worked out. There are many questions that need answers before being successful -- especially on an industrial scale.
One thing Oregon has spent a ton of time dealing with is how to test pesticide levels, THC, and CBD. There are apparently technical issues that make testing difficult and it sounds like it is still needs improvement. Apparently heavy pesticide use is almost universal in growing marijuana and quite a bit remains in the final product. Developing better pesticides would be one thing a national legalization might help with.
Social Security numbers are unique. They don't work as a great identifier because they can be mistyped, can be hard to verify, and people don't want to give them out too much.
SSNs should be unique, the only exceptions are fraud or errors.
According to the Social Security Administration:
> At its inception, the SSN's only purpose was to uniquely identify U.S. workers, enabling employers to submit accurate reports of covered earnings for use in administering benefits under the new Social Security program. That is still the primary purpose for the SSN.
I read it and still don't really understand why there was no one administrating the system. Who could have stopped the system (with the appropriate emails to cover their ass).
I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
That’s what I was thinking. If you had a contract and your manager was saying you were supposed to be working… Why not sue for the three weeks of pay that they illegitimately kept you from earning?
People like to joke about and deride America's litigious culture but the US doesn't have the same labor rights infrastructure as other countries... sometimes lawsuits are the only legal recourse a "typical American" has.
Yeah. It’s what I was thinking throughout most of the article, assuming that the end would be “I lost my job and there was nothing I could do about it“. It’s not like it was a three day thing, I could sort of understand that.
Since they are a contractor, it also seems like perhaps the company that they are actually employed with should be paying them for the contract company’s screwup. That would also probably heavily incentivize the company they actually work for to put pressure on the contractee to fix the issue.
The system didn't need to be stopped. The employee's contract wasn't renewed, which is indistinguishable from a decision terminate him, so the system executed the termination as scheduled.
The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up. Humans who presumably understood the way the system was designed, and didn't care enough to do some due diligence.
>I also do not understand why a check couldn't be cut. Submit to accounts payable with an email approval?
He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
The real lesson here is that few of us, no matter how much money we make, how into the culture we are or how long our tenure has been, are more than a row in a database to our employer, and we can be dropped at any time. The contractor in this case would not have had much more "job security" with humans in the loop.
> He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
Somebody who is in your building, is doing work under your direction, and has not been told they are fired hasn't been fired. A judge in court for the lost wages would laugh you out of the room if you tried a "well but actually, the system..." argument in that situation.
I had a similar situation where it was proven that law is law while contracting at nab, a bank in Australia, years ago.
- When I first started, it took months to get me added to the project phase to bill my time.
- When I was finally added, I couldn't bill it because that project phase was over
- Then a few months to find a solution, then I was asked to bill to the new project phase
- I couldn't bill my old time to the new project phase as it wasn't running in the time I first started.
The bank kept promising they'd work out a way for me together compensated for the time. They continued to do this after I ended the contract.
I kept chasing them, and they went quiet. Then they said they weren't paying me for the time I worked because I hadn't entered my time correctly, then blamed me for walking out the door before I'd been paid the money they owed.
I called a lawyer. nab responded as above. The lawyer told nab that Australian law doesn't care about their billing system - mentioning the specific law helped.
They paid all the money a week later. I should have asked for costs and interest too, but oh well.
Constructive dismissal is treated as "you quit, but you quit because the conditions imposed on you were such that you had no choice, and we will treat that as the company firing you rather than you voluntarily choosing to quit".
I worked as a contractor for a couple of months at a company with 100k+ employees. And then got hired.
Once a year human resources would decide my 'contract' was up and order IT to terminate my network access and payroll to stop paying me. Had another lady got hired from contract around the same time. The day she started working they terminated her email account and it took them six weeks to restore it.
>He was fired. It doesn't matter that people didn't intend for him to be, he was, it went through the system, it was a done deal. Paying people not in your employ is fraud, even under the best of intentions.
There's basically a certainty that it was a violation of his contract and company policies that made it not legally sound. A company can also pay whoever it wants for any reason.
IANAL either, but I did get a Bachelor of Law; one thing that was hard for me to get while I was studying is that while I thought of the law & contracts as a series of instructions that get executed by the "CPU" (our legal system), really for the most part it's being executed by humans who really dislike cute "this then that, screw context" thinking. I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
But, it depends! It's never black and white for this stuff. It'd be an interesting case though, and I'm sure it's happened before!
> I would not be surprised at all if a judge would laugh at an employer that tried to make the argument that he was "terminated" due to a clerical error and automated systems, therefore they don't need to pay him...
Yeah, judging from this thread and the negative scores on some of my comments, I was way off base about that.
"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.
> The system did exactly what it was intended to do, it was the humans who screwed up.
It was the humans who designed and who chose to deploy a system without a human in the loop, and without an override (even after a director was involved) that screwed up.
They screwed up, but that happens. The point where the system takes over and even the higher-ups can't override it is where the story becomes Kafka-esque.
If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
>If you build an automation system that goes out of human control after a human error, that is a failed design.
Unless it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible once a process was started. That would make it a very poor design, but not a failed one.
I've seen lots of internal software that doesn't have failsafes or rollbacks - the operator is simply trained to follow procedure and then is expected to follow it. Software that considers operator error is more complex, and therefore more expensive, to produce. Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility when these systems are developed.
"Self-destruct sequence initiated, cannot abort." should be left in the world of sci-fi.
If there is a physical process that cannot be stopped (rocket, nuclear reactor, oil well) then of course the system must be designed around that physical fact.
But this is an HR process. The "moving parts" are people.
If it was designed with the intent that human intervention should be impossible, the design was a failure.
Perhaps more likely it was just a failure of implementation (there's a cancel button but nobody knows where) or of imagination (nobody thought about whether the process could be canceled or not).
What if instead of HR, this was a financial process, playing out over days or weeks, entirely beyond the company's control. Would any sane CFO approve such a thing?
> Cost often supersedes quality or flexibility
That helps to explain it, but it doesn't excuse it.
No! It happened in the middle of a contract which wasn't terminated. There's no two ways of looking at it. A wrong termination date entered somewhere doesn't change the contract.
> Paying people not in your employ is fraud, [...]
The person was still employed. If anything in this story was fraud, it was the company stopping payment based on a wrong termination date. They even knew the date was wrong and still didn't pay. Clear-cut case!
Of course, if the parties later agree that the contract was in fact canceled at that point, that's how it is. Because parties can agree to cancel a contract. What a sucker though in this case.
Good luck. You may want to narrow it down to just psychiatrists who can see you almost immediately. They can prescribe medicine if they feel it is necessary.
I went this route and despite having decent insurance, every place that took it was a 3-6 month wait for new patients. This is very disheartening to someone who wants to get better but can't even imagine what 3-6 months down the line looks like (have I killed myself yet? did I skip town? etc.)
(This was a past experience, I'm no longer depressed)
I haven't read the original article to see if they address your question -- but generally a trained expert can tell if a disease ravaged someone by markers left of their skeletal system (increased iron deposits, lack of calcium, etc.)
Knowing that, if we wanted to test the hypothesis that it was a disease then we would expect to see those markers on either a majority of males or we would see an equal distribution with the male skeletons trending younger then female ones. After the disease passed (like black death did) we would see male average life spans increase and a decrease in the disease markers.
I changed my identity on HN and reddit all the time -- just create a new account. Of course these services could probably connect new with old just by IP address, but I don't care about that. What I'm actually doing is gaurding against something coming back to bite me in the ass years later (an unpopular opinion, lapse in judgement, etc).
Cahnging legal stuff, that depends on your country.