Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg, IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way, it's sometimes three, but you never know for sure] if they operate on different parts of the globe and 'rarely if ever will confuse an operator'). When the hell did computers need human-understandable designation short-hand codes for things? What the hell was wrong with 1 - American Airlines, 2 - Air Canada, 3 - Delta, 4 - SAS, 5 - That small one that flys between A and B once a year you've never heard of. Why the HELL do we have a system that has "AA" and "AA*" ? This is basically the worst thing you can do for normalization of global data. Travel GDSs are even worse, they don't actually follow along with these standards because they cannot, so while you take your "AA" flight number 123456 (oh, by the way, we recycle flight numbers instead of archive forever historical tickets) from airport zzz to xxx (by the way, depending on the standard they came from, your airport might not even exist), which are actually city codes for airports, so when you're flying to a city with multiple airports you have two cities in the GDS just to deal with this.
We can't even agree on how to measure distance, it's like we're stuck in the stone ages. What the hell is wrong with measuring in kelvin degrees? Why do we have MORE THAN FIVE separate standards for systems of measurme for what most people think is one (the metric system)?
Fact: We do not live in 1950 or any time before then, computers don't give a flying rats ass if the letters make sense to you as a short-hand abbreviation, you should just number them. That's what databases are for, to relate data. Major airports alone have several names people call them anyway, some airlines go by a few names (for example, SAS airlines is actually "Scandinavian Airlines").
Fact: We do not need to encode data about the data into the primary key of our data. For example, we do not need to generate employee numbers like "Q100-5-TR-9" where Q is the building they work in, 100 is their pay grade, TR is their last name's first two letters, 9 is that number we introduced for separating all duplicates of Q100-5-TR. This is just stupid, stop this insanity NOW.
People working on global standards, you should be ashamed. Do you have ANY idea how much time is wasted because we do not have UUIDs for so many things, even something as simple as an airport? There's only 50,000~ of them, and we have duplicates? Did we run out of beads on the abacus??