Mark Carroll's Journal

Part of the issue is the cost of being wrong about that: ranging from not being able to open a bank account to not being able to enter, or having to leave, the country, or at the least weeks of further waiting while a documentary deficiency is addressed. Admittedly the minority of bills have a part that is clearly meant to be a horizontal perforation but also I have only a monochrome laser printer at home, with a decent color one I could probably get away with more. I can see their point: given a valid original, with appropriate software the textual customer-specific details on PDFs are typically trivial to edit, thus forge, just as it was fun to undo the poor redacting on PDFs of partially declassified documents.

Having said all that: I largely agree. My preference would be for all this to settle at some sane point, for example such that bureaucrats will accept a home printout together with a signed release that they can provide to the utility company or bank or whatever that assures that I permit them to confirm my details. I am flexible about what the solution is, I just want it to be confidently satisfiable by genuine applicants.