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The government ate my name

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Re: The government ate my name

#91

Post by miki123211 »

hiatus wrote: post #65
watwut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. They can exist, but sound weird in the language.

> people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.

Countries are inconsistent in what names they do and do not accept.

Want a name that is offensive in your language? Your country probably won't let you do that, but some other one might, and yours still needs to accept that name as valid.

You can't just go to another country and change your name there, but if you have dual citizenship, you can usually change it in either one, and the other one needs to respect that.

Re: The government ate my name

#92

Post by wheybags »

dale_glass wrote: post #43
pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities themselves for a change. I recall some TV program long ago mentioning the police had trouble with Russians because sometimes they think there's a whole gang and it's really just one guy whose name got corrupted in 5 different ways. Depending on the Russian name and the local language there can be many ways to screw things up. Like Elena might get written down as…

There was a hilarious one in Ireland where we were desperatly searching for a prolific polish criminal named "Prawo Jazdy". Which means... driving license.

https://www.joe.ie/news/garda-spent-two-years-searching-for-...

Re: The government ate my name

#93

Post by aftbit »

cortesoft wrote: post #59
pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encount…

I have heard that others have had problems with picking up children from school and with visiting their partners in the hospital. The one and only time my wife has had an issue was at a car rental company (at SFO of all places), where they insisted that she couldn't be a co-driver because we must not be married, and only married couples or employees could be co-drivers (without an additional fee).

I was eventually able to sort this out with the manager but it made me laugh that in San Francisco of all places, they would judge my wife for not changing her last name.

Re: The government ate my name

#94

Post by miki123211 »

kstrauser wrote: post #37
thewebguyd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state. I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done. Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last n…

Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it. I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.

Europe is much worse about that than the US.

Many countries don't let you change your name at all unless you have an extremely strong reason to do so. Others have strict requirements on what an acceptable name is, and foreign-sounding names are often not allowed. Denmark straight up gives you a whitelist of allowed names to choose from.

Re: The government ate my name

#95

Post by miki123211 »

6SixTy wrote: post #80
c0balt wrote: post #2

Interesting article, I've had some similar (though significantly less severe) experiences with having ä and ß in my names, it seems many U. S. companies are just unwilling/incapable of going beyond ASCII. The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy and a clean paper trail when handling names. http://archive.today/5h4v2

Don't completely rule out EBCDIC from the equation. It's generally an IBM-ism meant for punched cards with the same characters as ASCII. Despite the similarity, it means that it's a legacy system kept alive to now and switching to UTF-EBCDIC would likely incur disturbing 70+ year old layers of tech debt dust. Some of them don't even support lower case characters as it's using EBCDIC's predecessor, BCD.

And this is even the case in Europe.

There was a case of some German bank treating ü as "ue", its typical ASCII transliteration. A customer complained under GDPR and won.

Re: The government ate my name

#96

Post by miki123211 »

reorder9695 wrote: post #21
ninalanyon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government being this sloppy at getting accents right is surprising, I would expect them to value accuracy That tells me you're German, I didn't even need to see the ä and ß. Even in the UK I encounter websites that won't accept my Norwegian address because it begins with Å. English speaking countries generally are pretty bad at this sort of thing.

You'd think the UK would be alright with it given Irish names are and were reasonably common (at least in parts of the UK), which commonly have fadas in them (i.e. Béibhinn, Seán, Ciarán, etc)

I mean, English itself has diacritics in perfectly ordinary words that many Americans use every day (café, résumé, and yet somebody decided to put "useless" characters like @, ^ or # in ASCII instead.

Re: The government ate my name

#97

Post by makeitdouble »

fluidcruft wrote: post #90
makeitdouble wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at it from the other way, your mom probably didn't change her name because it's not a big deal where you live ? People getting the issues live in different systems and/or have different needs, and it also changes with our world getting more digital. One part that doesn't much depend on locality this days would be international travel and money. For international travel, small kids having a different name is s…

I mean the comment they replied to specifically mentioned moving to America. I cannot fathom this being an actual issue in the USA.

To your point(and parent's), it won't be if you're never getting out of the USA nor deal with the rest of the world.

But most people moving in don't cut all ties with their home country nor never touch their passport again I think.

Re: The government ate my name

#98

Post by adastra22 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #79
cortesoft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encount…

Looking at it from the other way, your mom probably didn't change her name because it's not a big deal where you live ? People getting the issues live in different systems and/or have different needs, and it also changes with our world getting more digital. One part that doesn't much depend on locality this days would be international travel and money. For international travel, small kids having a different name is s…

My wife doesn’t share my name or the name of our kids. We travel a lot. This has literally never been an issue ever, anywhere.

Re: The government ate my name

#99

Post by School-Cotton »

MisterTea wrote: post #48
comrade1234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u' Ü isn't even a special character or…

> Is their database a 7-bit database? Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

Do people think of this as 8-bit ASCII ? I've never heard of it referred to ASCII until now. In fact, I've never heard of it at all (by the time I was old enough to know what a character encoding was, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 were totally dominant IIRC).

Re: The government ate my name

#100

Post by adastra22 »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #44
db48x wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard. Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now. It's just that the people can't type any of those characters.

Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have ü. But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.

This is probably a Dosbox system from the 90’s, with COBOL batch processing in the backend.
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