That was their game from the begining

Gotta be acid as fuck!

An account number is a unique number that is associated to your account. That IS an ID.

You have that number → you can find the person.

That is an ID. Even if you call it banana shake and say “bro, trust me this is not an ID”. It is still an ID: a piece of information in a domain that uniquely maps to elements in a co-domain, being the later, the set of persons in this country with a SSN.

Under your logic, a rifle stops being a rifle if it has a sticker that says “not valid as a rifle”

It is a unique number that is associated to your person in an injective manner in the country (specifically designed to identify your tax documents by the IRS).

Regardless of what is printed in the card, that, BY DEFINITION is an ID.

Being an ID and being proof of citizenship are two orthogonal ideas.

The SSN is the former, but not the latter.

The sentence “an ID to proof your citizenship” is misconstructed.

IDs and Proofs of something are both subclasses of “documents”. The correct phrase would be: “a document to prove citizenship”.

That document could (in principle) not identify you, but at the same time demonstrate that you are a citizen (for example, you could have a long cryptographic self-validated number that hashes to a “Yes”, or “Invalid”). But of course that’s not too practical.

This country is so weird… It is so full of stuff that makes no sense. And the strange part (to me) is how natural this is for its inhabitants.

It is an ID. A crappy one, but ID, by definition!: it was created to identify people

Well… an ID is whatever can be used to identify you. Whether it was or not initially envisioned for that. And the SSN does that, to some extend

I once hard (here) that people in USA is kind of against having an ID document.

It ended up anyway giving them one of the crappiest IDs in any country: SSNs

to answer your questions: it is super cheap (~5 US dollars), fast, has many security systems, it is quickly verifyable agains government databases, it has a photo, your signature, and, if valid, nobody will question it.

It looks like a mini version of the plastic card in mdern pastports (of the size of a credit card)

The police can stop you and without probable cause ask you for your ID (and car/driving documents if in a car), check it against the national database, and give it back to you. You have to show it (required by law) and it is your responsibility (if you are over 18) to keep it with you. The intention is to catch people with pending charges or arrest orders and stuff. If you are not hiding from the law, it is a simple, civilized interaction that would take you 2~5 mins.

You know, the kind of things that you would expect from a 3rd world country, less developed than USA.

I am from a country in which you normally take your ID document with you and cast your vote in person. All the millions of us do it, and the afternoon of that day we have the total count of votes. It is a very straightforward process.

I am not supporting Trump, really, but why would the implementation of this be a negative thing?

It has begun… brace yourselves

Protectionism at its finest. Ask Argentina how it went with the Blackberry

Interesting! But why monogamous?

With the “vision” of current corporations… that won’t happen.

Jokes on them. I don’t have either bitcoins or ram

Laughs in emacs…

69 > 67

Repeat after me: plastic does not recycle. It inevitably degrades in the process.

Regarding printers… ink tanks is the only sensible answer.