SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Norawy is facing a similar issue. Even though the national identification number is 11 digits, the first 6 are reserved for birth date. The 7th digit has some set of rules derived from which century the birth was (something like 5-9 is reserved for year 2000 and beyond). The 9th digit is even for women and odd for men. The 10th and 11th digit are fixed and derived from the rest of the numbers.
In conclusion, the system only leaves room for around 240 people per date of birth per gender (yes this system assumes 2 genders). So if the birth rate would have a spike, even just for a day, the system could be in trouble.
Could embiggen it by a factor of 10 by removing the gender marker.
It’d be easier for the government to start assigning new genders
Since the distribution of male/female is roughly 1:1, that wouldn’t really do anything (except for positively being more accepting). The real solution would be to unlock one of the two last digits, but you can bet that a ton of systems will break as they validate those digits.