Why do people downvote posts like this? What’s the problem? It’s funny, true, and in the right community.
Except it’s not true. Social Security cards are useless for identification purposes. I haven’t seen my SS card in 30 years. I’ve never been asked for it or needed it in any way for at least that long. 
Lack of fiber in the diet
It’s funny, true, and in the right community.
That’s never stopped anybody before.
Seriously, more than once I’ve posted something completely benign, innocuous, and appropriate in a niche community that gets maybe one post a month, and that post receives a score of -10 or something. I don’t understand it, but if you want niche communities to thrive, you have to quit caring about downvotes.
Personally, I think that they should only have upvotes, because downvotes are a negative experience for users, and they’re too easy to game. You can have bots, sock puppets, you name it. And having a post with a negative score tells you nothing about why it has a negative score. Was it offensive? Who knows?
Some servers only allow upvotes. Some only show local downvotes, so it at least minimizes their impact.
Because they are being stupid. You are not supposed to carry it with you. You only take it when you need to for something like the DMV. Otherwise it should just be filed away. A social security card is NOT ID.
Thanks for the link! The last time I looked into replacing my long lost SSA card the government was much less “online” and it was going to involve spending money and traveling long distances. Thanks to you, I’m expecting a letter from SSA in the next few weeks to confirm my ID, and then I’ll get a new card issued.
Some people just downvote for weird reasons, so I figure it’s not worth worrying about. Someone once told me they were downvoting every post I share that has bright colors because they use dark mode… Lol
I always flip a coin for whether I upvote or downvote. It’s not really about trying to make a decision, I’m just trying to get my thumbs in shape for that thumb wrestling tournament I have coming up.
Sometimes I feel an odd catharsis from simply existing on the internet, and this comment captures a lot of why
They were letting you know you have brite ideas!
Some people just need a reason to hate and avoid any personal accountability. They’ll take anything they can get, they’ve had a shitty day/year/life and somehow beating up on a faceless stranger feels morally acceptable to them. The truth is, they are in fact just awful people, looking to justify their shitty behavior by correcting grammar or downvoting a complete stranger. Trying their damndest to avoid looking in the mirror. Whilst the rest of us humans, have a shitty day but roll with it. Because if you can’t let it roll off, you will never be happy.
Yes, however
they are in fact just
awfulhurt peopleSome are less familiar with kindness than others.
Sometimes, I try to swipe to go back and accidentally up or downvote things.
I work at a DMV. I have seen 10 yr old cards shredded to shit and 80 year cards in near mint condition. If great grandpappy can do it, yall can too.
back in high school I stuck mine in a hard plastic card case. Wherever it is now that I lost it, should at least be in good shape almost 30 years later.
I can confirm that it is indeed in great shape!
man, not everyone has an easy life 😔
Slip it into one of the thicker plastic baseball card sleeves. It’s a perfect fit, can be easily pulled out, and provides excellent protection.
SSA will give you a free replacement card. I think TRUMP wanted to charge money for it, but not sure if that plan went through.
Only up to 10 in your lifetime though:
But weirdly only if it was issued after 2005?
There was an antiterrorism law that was passed in 2004 (as a result of 9/11), that went into effect in 2005 that set this limit.
There are a few (difficult, but possible) ways to get extra copies despite the limit though, like changing your name
Why is Trump in all capitals?
That’s how the man himself writes his name.
Are you assuming his capitalisation?
I assume a lot of things about that guy.
Was Trump a SovCit this whole time? Does he think TRUMP the corporate entity created by his birth certificate was elected President in 2016 rather than he the living person, and thus he can’t be prosecuted for crimes that the corporate entity created in his name allegedly committed?
This might actually work 🤔
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Yep. There’s no reason to carry this around with you on the daily. Stick it in a file in a safe file box of some sort. I can’t remember the last time someone asked for a physical SS card…maybe when we applied for my kids’ passports? No idea.
Maybe OP applies for a lot of jobs and is brown enough to be told they need to actually see it? Iunno
Plastic sleeve, boom problem solved, I’m 34 and I’ve only ever had one birth certificate because I keep it in a sleeve.
But hopefully y’all Americans can phase out the physical cards like we did in Canada.
I’m 39 but I had to pay for a new copy of my birth certificate in my 20s because mine was literally falling apart due to just being old and folded up and printed on weird paper and the seal was messed up so the dmv wouldn’t take it
I got it from my mom like that :x
I got mine in 1986 and it pretty much looks like the picture.
Fun side note: back then, you didn’t get a social security number until you were old enough to get a job. I was fourteen when I got my social security number.
My wife found out you can get one earlier as long as your parents sign off on it. They then used her social security to scam some loans while she’s a child, which fucked her up later when she moves out on her own and tried to get an apartment.
This is extremely common, and one of the reasons that using SSN for credit reports is a horrible practice. The only way for someone to dispute the debts is to report their parents to the authorities, which is a horrible position to be in when you’re freshly 18. The real solution would be a simple age check, to verify if the person applying for the loan is actually 18. But that
is apparently too difficultwould prevent banks from saddling literal children with mountains of debt.
LOL, no. I was born in '71 and my parents got me one immediately. I remember them showing me as a child and thinking, “Why do I care about this?”
Yeah, I was born in 80 and have had it since birth.
Same.
I mean, for sure you could. In my country would didn’t get an ID card/number until you needed to get a job or travel by plane. I got mine when I was 12. But nowadays babies always get their I’d card after birth.
Good for you and your parents, but it wasn’t common until 1986 when Reagan’s new tax code suddenly required social security numbers for dependents. It was 1987 when they started rolling it out as part of the birth at the hospital.
Your lol no tone implies I don’t remember my own teen years.
You said we didn’t get ss numbers until we got jobs and we said no.
I understand social security to mean paying into a state pension, a national healthcare service, and provision of education.
What does social security mean in the American context?
It was originally just a number to track contributions to quasi-pension system. However, because it was the only number universally assigned to people, it stated getting used way more often, most notably for credit issuers and reporting agencies.
Depends on who you ask. For millennials and younger, it means paying lots of money into a service that will be dissolved before we get to tap into it.
It’s also a number that’s supposed to be kept secure or something, but applying for pretty much anything requires you to provide it.
Yeah, it became a sort of federal identification since the US government didn’t want to make a federal ID and now we are stuck with a much more inferior system than if they just did anything. Since everyone got a SS card it became the de facto ID.
Thanks all for your replies!
In the US Social Security is retirement income. SS tax comes out of every paycheck then when you retire you will get monthly income. So state pension but none of the other good stuff.
It pays the state pension which is good for a tiny fraction of retirement.
Depends what your spending is like. Someone who earns like 30K/year should get about 65% of their earning if they retire at 65. You’d have to save like another $1500/year (including company matches) to make up the difference.
If I kept working til I was like 70 and my pay only keeps up with inflation, I’d get about 130% of my spending via social security.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. This is a social security card, which displays your social security number, which is the closest thing we have to a national ID. It is used for all things financial and for identity verification & background checks. If someone gets your name, address, and social security number, you can be in for a real bad time.
Which is unfortunately easy to do. There are some of those search sites that include SSNs on them. Haven’t seen one that detailed in a few years, but still. Just today I found a site that had addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and relatives. All accurate and all freely available, no registration required.
To add to the problem, social security was never meant to be an national ID number. It was just really useful for a whole lot of things. However, numbers are handed out sequentially, not randomly. So take your SIN and add or subtract one from it and that is another person’s SIN. Knowing just a few simple things about a person can reveal most if not their entire SIN.
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When I was a food service manager I inexplicably had access to the social security numbers of everyone who had ever applied to work there. Thousands.
Oh no
Especially when Equifax leaked nearly half of all Americans’ names, social security numbers, addresses, birthdays, and driver license number in 2017. That info is just out there and we can never remove it.
At least they were punishe… Hahahaha as if.
There was a fad a long while ago where people would get their number stamped onto a metal card. Only ever got to see one of them after years working at a casino where we collected SSNs for jackpot payouts.
Where I live people just have the number memorized. Fairly easy when it’s just date-of-birth and some three numbers and a letter.
Get married and change your last name! You’ll get a brand new one. Works for men too, trust me!
You don’t even have to get married just file name change paperwork
Or, you can just order a new one without changing your name.
Or you could get a social security card with the name Turd Ferguson on it. I mean, if you’re already going through the trouble of doing paperwork, what’s a little more?
like, you can get a new one though to be fair, I just got a brand new one, granted it was after legally changing my name but I’m certain you can just have one reprinted without a name change, I don’t even think it costs anything.
I also don’t understand carrying it around, my partner does, but I just have my number memorized, and the card itself is kept safe, for the few times in my life I will need the actual physical card.
What’s the reason behind not being allowed to laminate it? Asking as a non American
I’ve been asking that as an American my whole life, I don’t know if anyone really knows
Everyone knows. You’re not supposed to laminate it so if it gets lost it will biodegrade instead of being perfectly preserved for someone to steal your identity with.
Just don’t keep it in your wallet in the first place. There’s a very limited number of times you should need to have it.
You aren’t allowed to laminate the card, because the card says do not laminate.
Mine is old enough that it doesn’t say not to laminate it… I laminated it… lol
In my head, you predate lamination technology which is around 1930. So, good on you for learning to use Lemmy great-grandpappy!
That’s United States property and cannot be modified in any way.
The given reason is that you can’t see the security features on the card if it’s laminated.
security features
In anything related to SSN?
Lol
Makes sense, thanks!
Well they do tell you to sign it, you know so if it stolen they can have that too, so there is one little modification they want. Also taring from a larger piece of paper might count.
Because it’s meant to biodegrade if lost outside so your identity is harder to steal
Normal countries: “there is a picture on the ID to make it harder to use someone else’s”
USA: “it’s so flimsy no one will use it for fear of it falling apart”
Well it’s not meant for all it’s used for. We’re culturally resistant to government ID cards (aside from driver’s licenses, passports, and social security cards, no this isn’t rational and it’s often from the same group because they fear both government and immigrants) and our social security cards were an early form of government ID. So basically you wind up with one of the only proofs of citizenship besides birth certificates or passports, and the only one that’s free, uniform, and everyone has being a number meant to be used to track your status with the government universal pension program that basically doesn’t exist anymore and very explicitly says not to use the way we constantly and primarily use it.
Is this stupid? Beyond a doubt. But it’s America as a whole being stupid not the social security administration. As far as the social security administration is concerned this is just a pension ID.
I never knew you couldn’t laminate them? Why would they do something like that?
“This single plain-text string of characters defines your entire identity in the eyes of the government, creditors, health care, everything. Good luck keep it safe!”
Please don’t give your SSN to health care institutions, they don’t need it. They like to ask for it on their intake forms so that they can find you more easily if they need to send your debt to collections, but most will accept a blank entry anyways.
I’m pretty sure that they removed the restriction on lamination at some point. But I’m not really sure.
You can make a copy and laminate the copy.
