@RogerBW @futurebird

And yet that may just replace machine-encoded biases with human-habit biases:

sport of sacred spherical cows (@beadsland@hcommons.social)

@dymaxion@infosec.exchange @KatS@chaosfem.tw @futurebird@sauropods.win Once had something shipped to me from Germany that got caught in a USPS mail loop because the shipper was confused by my unit number, and used it for the building number on the routing label, insisting all the while that they had reproduced my address exactly as given to them.

hcommons.social (hcommons.social)

To be clear, in Usia, building numbers appear at the beginning of the line, where unit numbers appear at the end. In Germany, building number appears at the end of the line.

So now you, as a German shipper, prepare a routing label for a Usian address that ends with a unit number. You're given a freeform multi-line text field, but the courier wants specific fields. What ends up in the building number field depends on how cognizant you are of the difference between German and Usian addressing practices.

@jgordon

Calendars don't have standardization because Google, Microsoft, Apple and others are trying to lock people in to their system by NOT making it easy to share such information. So you end up saying "we use google calendar" and doing sales work for them.

This practice should attract more shame and derision than it does. It is very ugly and makes everyone's life worse.

Why can't I add a google calendar event to an apple calendar? It's not because it is "too hard"

@futurebird The basic problem is that the only way to send a message to a calendar is by an email address. But ripple have many email addresses and for each email address may have many cleaners.

So messages routinely go the the wrong calendar. For a while Apple would assign any calendar invite to a users default iCloud calendar regardless of the email address.

@futurebird oh wow so there's 400 of you. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the 12 million mcmansions on half-acre lots that comprise the rest of the city's housing stock

@funkula

Having a single house address in NYC means one of few things things:

1. You live in deep Brooklyn, Queens, SI or maybe the Bronx. These are working class and middle class neighborhoods and the opposite of mansions.
2. You are one of like 37 people who have one of the few intact brownstones, and probably gave your house a damn name for some reason "The Glopper House" it's as expensive as a mansion but not as big. You brag about your 4' by 8' backyard.
3. You are the Mayor.

I get personally offended because I suspect that it's some kind of American suburban-centric mentality that makes apartments an afterthought.

The correct answer is that "apartment suite" should be a separate field NOT tacked on to the street address, but in most renderings it should be on the same line with a comma.

And you need to deftly separate this information if the user tries to enter it in the address line.

ANYWAY.

@futurebird

Except... the address format you just proposed is not the one that the US Postal Service mandates. When I recently spent a few years temporarily living in a condo, the USPS insisted that the correct format for my address was
### Street Name Unit ####

all on one line, no comma.

They delivered mail that used other formats. Mostly. I think? I had the impression that they were grumpy about it, and can't really know whether some items went astray.

I think USPS acceptance is needed.

@elysegrasso

How do they know if
"123 First Concourse 6" is

"123 First Concourse, 6" or "123 First, Concourse 6" ?

(I'm certain your are correct, I just see problems in merging fields without a popular separator character. Never-mind that some street names have commas in them which are stripped out too because of some limited character set I suspect. )

@futurebird Both of your options in your example look identical to me.

At the moment I'm in a house which is on unincorporated land, so it uses the name of the city where the post office that delivers here is located. (also coincidentally the county name)

My business address is in a town that shares a zip code with a neighboring town. This used to be a problem for distribution of sales tax receipts (which relied on zip codes), but I assume they have improved things in recent years.

@futurebird Both of your options in your example look identical to me.

At the moment I'm in a house which is on unincorporated land, so it uses the name of the city where the post office that delivers here is located. (also coincidentally the county name)

My business address is in a town that shares a zip code with a neighboring town. This used to be a problem for distribution of sales tax receipts (which relied on zip codes), but I assume they have improved things in recent years.

@beadsland @futurebird Personally I think the most sensible order is large to small, as used basically nowhere. Small to large, as used in many places, is not terrible Anything beyond that (including the German "Street Housenumber, Town") is as wilfully perverse as M-D-Y dates.

@RogerBW @beadsland

If anyone asked me how addresses should be written it go a little like this:

Earth, USA, Some City, 12345
1234 Some Street, Apartment Six
Floor Five, Department of Things
Person Name

But... noooooo