If I wanna check the internet for someone, I find it impossible because for a lot of names there's at least thousands of people with the same exact full name. It must give both a feeling of safety but also frustration if you may want to stand out.
Javanese names used to commonly be mononyms, was only required that people have a surname in 2022.
In Bali, children are essentially numbered. First kid is called Wayan, Putu, Gede, or Ni Luh. Second kid is Made, Kadek, or Nengah. Third kid is Nyoman or Komang. Fourth kid is Ketut. Fifth kid? They go back to Wayan. Most of these names aren't gendered, either.
> We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts
It's interesting how cultural differences can make some life algorithms hardly work in some countries. I sometimes use a method to find people from my past by googling their full name, switching to the image results, and spending a manageable amount of time scrolling through them until I find the person. I've successfully used this method several times. The images are usually related to job activities or social media profiles. However, from your description, this approach probably won't work in China for at least two reasons: too many raw results and few or no social media results.
UPDATE: a follow-up question. If in a big company two or more figures happen to have the same full name and need to be exposed publicly (on a site or promotional materials), are there any tricks for this?
From what I can tell, official documents rely on ID numbers, and for the social side, people can just come up with informal more unique names. But I'm not an expert.
moslem naming is also not very different sometimes. lots of duplicate names like ahmed ahmed and mohammad mohammad. must be very frustrating! (it would be interesting to know how they manage it, since i do not know any of them personally.)
There are a lot of "true believers" in the Tesla customer base so it's an easy way to collect money without doing much. The same mindset applies to the stock: it's not really based on any fundamentals, just vibes and Elon's personality.
I mean, they were selling something which didn't exist as a one-off payment for about the last decade, so I'm not sure why selling it on a subscription basis is inherently any weirder. They clearly have the sort of customer base who like paying for non-existent things, so why not?
One of the most notorious liars in history was heavily leveraged and needed the stock to do well, to avoid bankruptcy, so he lied repeatedly for years?
If you don't adhere to rules with phone calls and SMS you will get identified very quickly by authorities. That's the point, they have the infrastructure set up like that. For letters, it's a bit different, but if they suspect someone or something they can indeed track things down.
They can track down the origin of a ip packet as well. To rejoinder the response of "what about vpn" - sms, phone, and letters can all be proxied as well.
The tor project was built specifically to ensure anonymity for internet traffic, and it works well as far as I know.
Phone numbers are not the same, countries require you to verify your identity to sign up for a phone plan, most sane countries have a government identity tied to each and every phone number, and proxying doesn't change that.
The US is weird in that it has some anti-government-identity stance that makes this way less centralized, but regardless, phone numbers are mostly traceable, there's nothing like tor, and the law also treats sms as more traceable.
Phone plans also cost at least something to sign up for.
I will give you that physical letters can be anonymous, but due to postage stamps it's much more expensive to send them in excess.
You can send an ip packet to a service, which will in turn send an sms or place a phone call on your behalf. Such services provide varying degrees of anonymity.
The cost of such services is irrelevant in the present discussion, as we are dicussing sending targeted malicious messages, not untargeted spam.
It's interesting to paint the homeowner as an emotional person and the renter as the pragmatic, however both are roughly equally emotional.
As the rent prices keep rising, the renter in the end will end up spending much more money in the same duration as a mortgage, won't they? After a few years, when they end up owning more of the property, they can secure a good deal with better monthly mortgage payments.
They can also quite easily set up an AirBnB or get proper renters, if they want to have some flexibility, and in most cases the rent money will be more than the mortgage payments, so if they want to rent another place of their liking, the additional income will offset the monthly costs.
its a unique math problem for the individual, but if you ARE buying, that likely means you have a down payment. so if you rent instead, you can then utilize that down payment for other investment opportunities.
this touches on something the author sorta hinted at, mortgage as a forced investment. Some buyers/renters won't view the down payment as an investment opportunity if they go the path of renting, they decide to rent and suddenly theyve got a new car loan and all new furniture or whatever, and that down payment is gone, instead of compounding year over year in an attempt to make renting a financial advantage
you can usually napkin math investing the down payment and it makes more financial sense to rent, but from a human perspective its just not gonna happen like that for so many people. they are gonna mess with that money instead.
How about the act of buying itself? Here where I live, you need to pay 12% on top of the home price simply for taxes and notary service. IMO it's one of the biggest obstacles and why most Swiss people prefer to rent.
Switzerland is a bit different from the US. From what I understand, property ownership entails paying the imputed rental value in taxes, which makes property ownership much less desirable. In the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible up to a certain limit, property taxes are deductible, and there's an amount of capital gains that's excluded from taxation when selling one's primary residence. Compared to other places in the world, the benefits of property ownership are pretty bonkers.
Wow that's quite unreasonable. In the UK it's not the case, there's some amounts to be paid if the property is in higher ranges of price, but there is a tier where that's zero.
There needs to be a "score from people who produce scores like me" for everything. E.g. for coffee shops I really don't care if the staff are rude but I care if there are tables and it's clean and the WiFi is good.
I was thinking of having granular scoring e.g. having people rate WiFi, rate cleanliness etc but that won't work because people are lazy. So some kind of Amazon algorithm of "people who buy similar things" but for movie, cafe, etc ratings.
To bring it back on topic, for movies I care about good story and visuals but not so much how "woke or not" it is, I prefer if it's intelligent Vs dumb except if it's a comedy then dumb is fine, and so on.
From your and other comments in the thread, it sounds like the main deterrence then is 1) that it's likely you'll be caught and 2) that if caught, the punishment will be quite harsh.
I wonder if the UK and other cities are struggling more with the first or second
I've travelled to a majority of countries across the globe (exploration geophysics, mostly in the air or deep backcountry, rarely in major cities) and Dubai is another city within a city location; two state; the rich are rich and have no need to steal, or are brazen about it, while the poor are segregated, curfewed and routinely castigated.
These are not places were you want to fall the wrong side of the invisible barrier.
This dynamic exists in many expensive locations around the world, but Dubai stands out for its remarkably low crime rate. Take San Francisco, for instance. More expensive to live and greater wealth inequality, yet riddled with crime.
It isn't the expense; it is the segregation. The poor just aren't allowed to exist or mingle with the rich in Dubai. If you are poor, you are only near the rich while you are at work, performing a job.
What do you mean by that? It's the same kind of segregation that exists in San Francisco: expensive areas are out of reach to those without money. There aren't actual laws enforcing segregation. In fact, it's almost the opposite - it's pretty easy to come and live in Dubai.
If I wanna check the internet for someone, I find it impossible because for a lot of names there's at least thousands of people with the same exact full name. It must give both a feeling of safety but also frustration if you may want to stand out.
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