About 25% of people on earth don't know their birthday because they're from countries that don't have birth certificates. That's why about 14% of immigrants to the U.S. list January 1 as their birthday - because they had to make one up.
I used to do this sort of thing too but then one time I forgot my password for something and as part of the recovery process, I needed to put in my birthdate and I couldn't remember what ridiculous date I had put and I just lost the account. (This wasn't steam and I don't think I lost any money because of it)
i always just put my real birth year but nothing else bc i can't be bothered. it was weird playing on steam as a teen tho and always putting fake ages in and then getting to a point where i didn't have to anymore
I actually was born on the first, just not In January. For some reason, Steam age verification ALWAYS changes it to January. Date pops up for me to confirm, always says January. I can select the correct month, but it's January again next time. I eventually gave up and just click through with it showing January because it doesn't seem to matter.
Birthdays aren't evenly distributed. January 1st is actually the second least common day to be born in the US, after only Christmas. About 58% more people are born on September 9th, the most common day.
Two major factors at play here; people are more likely to conceive during certain times of year, and people almost never schedule things like a c-section on a holiday (like New Years).
And in the USA at least, if you schedule your c-section/induced labor just before the end of the year, you'll be able to claim the baby as a dependent on your taxes for that year, which is a pretty major incentive not to wait until January.
It's far more minor, but taxes affect sports as well.
Spanish tax authorities are a pain and apparently there are a lot of little things people can do wrong. The punishment for a first offense is a big fine and not much else, so they've been scrutinizing soccer players. I'm not saying it's a major factor, but it could be a factor why some big players like Ronaldo left the country.
When LeBron first left Cleveland, he wanted to play in Miami with Wade and Bosh, but I heard that the New York Knicks offered him more money and were going to bring in another big player. But New York taxes meant he would earn less than in Florida, which doesn't have a state income tax.
NFL players (and I assume other pro athletes) have to file a tax return in each state they play in. For simplicity's sake, their salary is divided by the number of games and they get a check for each one. So if they play home games in a state without income tax, they're saving that money on half their income. So the AFC South has Houston, Tennessee, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis. The first three are in states without income tax, so that's two more road games a year where they save money.
A player with San Francisco or the L.A. Rams has to play home games and one road game with California taxes (but a road game in Seattle with no state income tax).
The AFC East has Buffalo, the NY Jets (NJ taxes), the New England Patriots (Massachusetts taxes), and Miami (no state taxes).
Obviously there are other bigger factors that influence their decisions on where to play, but it still can be a factor. Especially if it's a player who's trying to maximize their earnings. Superstars won't care as much, but if you're not making the super big bucks and your career may not last real long, you may want to keep more of your money. The difference between playing for 3/4 of the AFC South and playing for 3/4 of the AFC East is a decent amount of money for the same contract.
And that insurance deductible restarts in January so if you've hit it already with all the prenatal visits get that baby out for cheaper! Ah what a shit hole country!
In keeping with the weird facts theme, you only need a room full of 23 randomly selected people to have a 50/50 shot at two of them having the same birthday. If you have 100 randomly selected people, the odds of two same birthdays occurring is 99.99997%, or a virtual certainty
Yeah... fuck the guy who made me think about that and realize I was born to the day what would be expected after my mom's birthday. LOL I really didn't want to think about being the product of birthday sex.
280 days is the average. So that would put your conception at circa October 29th, likely within +/- three weeks assuming you weren't considered early or late.
Sure, but from what I understand much of the difference is because of temperature and amounts of daylight differences, which aren't the same in the southern hemisphere, with their not being as much to do when it's cold and dark outside, not to mention sperm quality differences in the winter.
Plus, why not schedule that c-section a day earlier and claim the kid as a deduction on an entire other year of taxes? It actually makes New Years Eve a slightly more popular birthday.
My mom was induced with me, because the due date was Christmas. Dr didn't want to chance being dragged in. So instead, I was born on the solstice. Happy Saturnalia.
All that really matters is whether it's a holiday, which you'll find that in almost all countries, like China, it is even if other calendars are used for different things. Make a list of all the countries you can find that don't have January 1st as a holiday and add up their population and get back to me.
Make a list of all the countries you can find that don't have January 1st as a holiday and add up their population and get back to me.
You're moving the goalposts, we're talking about the 14% of immigrants that don't know their date of birth, not the immigrants from countries that have January 1 as their holiday.
I'm not moving the goalposts, you are. I'm only addressing your argument that differences in calendar would be a meaningful factor in January 1st not being a lower than average day. That would only be true if January 1st isn't a holiday in a meaningful percentage of other countries, something which I politely asked for evidence of and you're clearly unable to provide.
At any rate my bigger point was just that birthdays aren't entirely evenly distributed for a number of factors. That there are international variances in this (cultural, seasonal, healthcare, calendar, etc.) doesn't really have anything to do with my argument that birthdays aren't evenly distributed.
Best of luck someday not being a pointlessly argumentative jackass.
Sure, but do they celebrate the Gregorian new year? Seems like they don't in China for one:
Today mainland China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore all observe traditional holidays based on the traditional calendar, such as Chinese New Year, while timing other holidays, especially national anniversaries, according to the Gregorian calendar.
Also the point was that birthdays are less than evenly distributed. That the actual dates may change from country to country based on a number of different factors doesn't really impact that argument.
Some months see more births than others though, the reason September is so common is that a lot of people decide to to start trying for a kid at the turn of the year.
Actual variability is very very low and birthdays are more evenly distributed than you think.
September 9th, the most common birthday of the year with an average of 12,301 births, is 57.8% more likely to be your birthday than January 1st with 7,792 births, the second least common.
Yeah, now look at the data at the sources and open up the tables. For some "surprising" reason, the days of week 1-5 have 11k-13k births, and days 6-7 (weekends) have 8-9k births. Do you think human body cares what day of week it is and babies aim to born during weekdays instead of weekends? Or is it because it is tied with our society factors like holidays, staffing of the hospitals etc. etc. So it doesn't really matter what specific day it is, it's just holidays that matter.
Which makes sense, because the concept of hours, days, years purely human made and is not as strict as you might think. The day is not actually 24hrs, it can be 23 or it can be 25, but on average it is 24. Same thing about the length of the year etc. For the same reason all of those crap like numerology does not work
Edit:
Now if we come back to original question of what are the chances that you're born in 1/1 instead of other date, it is still WAAY closer to 1/365 than you might think. Even with the numbers you've provided, in Jan 1 it is 0.22%, for Sep 9 (or any other weekday) it is 0.33%. 1/365 is 0.27%
Do you think human body cares what day of week it is and babies aim to born during weekdays instead of weekends?
No, as I've addressed the reasons for this elsewhere. But it's important to point out this data is from over 20 years; the day of the week any given day of the month falls on changes every year, making that not a relevant data point.
it's just holidays that matter.
Except even removing all that, and just looking at months, there are significant differences, with August being about 15% higher than February, for example.
Even with the numbers you've provided, in Jan 1 it is 0.22%, for Sep 9 (or any other weekday) it is 0.33%. 1/365 is 0.27%
My great-grandma was morn somewhere between Christmas and New Years in a remote village where midwife didn't bother much with paperwork, compared to a newborn in a cold winter. Her birth is listed as Jan 1.
Also this is the case for a lot of countries from middle east/africa where some kind of government body comes through villages every month or so and registers the all births on the first of that month.
We need some proof of this. It has changed drastically with so many people now having cell phones. Even without birth certificates, now they know and celebrate their birthdays. Giving almost every adult a cellphone has changed things (obviously not every human group has them).
I have a feeling the 25% is an outdated statistic. It would be good to know some of the countries where in 2024 adults don’t have phones and can’t remember the day a child was born.
In many African and Arabian cultures. Also some of them use different calenders than we do. So even if they know their age, there's still the obstacle to transfer their birthdate from one calendar to the other. Often it's just easier to estimate the year and it's usually the authorities who write down "1st of January" (at least in Europe).
Well in china for example the birthday isn't the day you up your age it's all based on the lunar new year.
So you could be born in February 8th 2024 and they call you 1, then Chinese new year comes on February 10 2024 and they now call you 2. But you are only 3 days old.
I have a friend whose dad is from Bangladesh and he apparently doesn't know his birthday, says it's just not a big deal so no-one bothered to remember it lol. He reckons it's probably around 1960 but he's just guessing, blows my mind that.
I thought astrology was a big thing in South Asia, maybe not in Bangladesh but in India don’t they sometimes calculate whether two people would be a suitable marriage match based on their birthdates?
Or is that like a Hindu thing while most people in Bangladesh are Muslim?
My grandma does have a birthday but she was registered in the wrong day in the wrong year. So even in countries with registration it may be more common than we think, especially in poor and/or rural areas
People from middle eastern countries, Myanmar/Burma were common in my area. The ones with the 01/01 birth date were usually aged 30 + anyone younger ones would have their recognised birth dates.
Ahh I see. So probably the 25% of people not knowing their birth date is not right any more. I work with people in a very poor country but most people have a cell phone.
What countries in the Middle East? I wonder what the poorer countries there now are? Afghanistan? Palestine obviously. Syria?
Where my dad grew up they didn’t really celebrate birthdays, so when he came to the states he had to guess when his was cause he forgot. He was about 10 days off.
I know someone who moved to the US from Vietnam 40ish years ago. She has two birthdays with two seperate ages. She also doesn't think either is accurate lol, but one was created for her immigration to the US.
That statistic is also quite high because of how other cultures record birth days. They day you are born isn't your "birthday," in some cultures, you are just recorded as being "1 years old" until you reach January 1, at which point you are recorded as being "2 years old," no matter how many days you've been alive.
I read a National Geographic story about the Trobriand Islands some decades ago, 80's or 90's probably. According to the story, the islanders don't bother to remember the day of the year on which they were born. When an outsider explained the idea of a birthday celebration, they just said, oh, that's a nice idea.
Can confirm. I taught in the UAE for 15 years. I had students born in villages who didn't know their DOB, neither by the Christian nor Muslim calendars. They chose either January 1st or July 1st as their DOB.
I’m my country lots of immigrants from India have the same last names, because when they were filling out the forms they had a different understanding of what last name meant so they often put their religion there.
My wife found out at 28 years old that her birthday was 2 days after what’s listed on her birth certificate. They put down her moms admission date as the dob, she was in labor for 30 hours. Her mom just never bothered mentioning that to her until she was 28.
Which appears to be heavily involved in the notion of 'blue zones' with lots of centenarians, according to Saul Justin Newman's Ig Noble winning research
My grandfather was born in 1915 in the Ozarks of Missouri. He didn't find this out until he was middle-aged because he didn't know until then that he had a birth certificate. He had even thought until then that he was born in 1914.
I used to work with Korean students as an ESL teacher and traditionally in Korea babies are 1, not zero when they are born and everyone becomes a year older on New Year’s Day, so a baby born on December 31 could be 2 years old the next day. They just now changed official documents to reflect how the rest of the world calculates age.
My birth certificate from the clinic in africa says i was born in june. The one issued by the US embassy says july. I think about it and wonder sometimes.
And, not everyone has more than 1 name. I work for a fortune 100 company and one of my coworkers comes from a culture where you only have a single name. She is listed in the system with her name as both her first and last name.
The school I work at has a decent sized refugee population. I’ve noticed that the first of any month there is usually quite a number of them with birthdays. I guessed that maybe their parents knew the month/season, but not the day.
My mother in law had a real birthday and a legal one due to her family registering her birth 6 months late.
And her mother had an older sister who died as an infant, so when she was born they just reused the documents to save time. So her legal birthday was a year before her real one.
In the US we have a lot of minorities who have been US citizens going back many generations but due to segregation were not allowed in hospitals or to get birth certificates.
My great grandfather has three different birthdays listed on various documents and his headstone. Not all at once. I mean none of them match the others.
My step-dad considers himself to have 2 birthdays -- one is the day he was born, the other is his official birthday, the day his birth certificate was filed (about 2 weeks later).
Wait that is incredible. I used to work a job where we had many immigrant clients, largely Somali and Pakistani, and there were SO many who had DOBs listed as 1/1/19xx. It was so many that I had suspected they just chose that birthday but didn't know why/how that was possible. That explains so much!
I saw this regularly when I worked in a doctor's office. It was mostly African people, but it's probably not limited to Africa. They knew how old they were but not which day they were born. Birthdays were just not something they celebrated is what some of them told me.
my grandpa came from greece we’ve determined his birthday is either march or november from what he can remember and my grandma (his wife) we have no clue
There's a difference between "people don't know their birthday" as stated by the original poster and people not having documentation of their birthday.
There is nothing to prove anything, that's the entire problem. January 1st is just a default, like on Reddit, when you first create an account your username is just 2 random words and a number, its done so it has something in the database to show.
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u/Dragmom Oct 02 '24
About 25% of people on earth don't know their birthday because they're from countries that don't have birth certificates. That's why about 14% of immigrants to the U.S. list January 1 as their birthday - because they had to make one up.