201–210 of 320 posts
In Munich, the legal requirement is to register within two weeks, but the waiting time to schedule an appointment is more than two weeks. Luckily, no-one cares. Some of my Erasmus classmates did not register at all.
From a pragmatic perspective this is the right thing to do. But I think people of Berlin should strive to abandon such bureaucracy completely. In other countries, there's no such thing as an Anmeldung and it doesn't look like such countries are falling apart (because of this). Why not simply get rid of this and let the people do meaningful work?
No, no, it's all wrong. Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the…
German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part. That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns out to be even worse: As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-house. 2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like this". Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
Honestly, this just reflects the age of the population. Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of improvement, but they hate change.
Bravo! Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the earl…
No, no, it's all wrong. Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the…
No, no, it's all wrong. Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the…
I actually had to work with two German government agencies, digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them. There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle, but no show stoppers. I think the biggest proble…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I seriously sympathize with some of the above (and below) descriptions of byzantine German bureaucracy and its broad lack of digitization, there's another side to it all that's hard not to appreciate slightly in the context of our creeping, already vast, global surveillance state of constant digital monitoring by thousands of actors both private and public, or both and feeding off each other's surveillance carr…
A wonderful excuse that German people like to wheel out to try to put a positive spin on being stuck in the 20th century.
Bravo! Bürgerämter are most of the time a fucking joke. My registration in Berlin took months after I already moved there, the waiting times are just that long, and this seems to apply to many cities. I live in another city now, and my ID card has been expired for months now (which, legally, is a misdemeanor). There isn't a single free appointment anywhere, citywide. You can attempt to go personally there in the earl…
That brings to mind the romance of waiting in the immigration queue in Dublin at 4 AM with my wife so we could get registered by the end of the day. https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/20853936/ . Simpler times. Of course, the Irish government did eventually put in place an appointment booking system that was so comically bad bots would take all of the appointments immediately for resale on Facebook marketplace. It…
I hate phone calls more than anyone, but this experience is far ahead of the appointment system one.