291–300 of 320 posts
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…
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I do not disagree that sometimes German bureaucracy is not the most efficient. But. I have used Elster and, while it is true it looks old and overly complicated, it actually works great. You get _a lot_ of very useful warnings about fields that cannot be 0 or must at least be x, based on some other distant field. You can save previous forms and start from them (for recurrent things like VAT quarterly declaration). Yo…
Have you ever done taxes in another country? US taxes are not known to be super easy but the sheer ease of filing them compared to filing German taxes completely blew my mind.
I did them in Spain. Honestly German taxes were a bit more intimidating (so many fields, tk is different) but in the end you only need a few. As a salaried employee you can use taxfix and get it done in 20 min.
In Spain they were easier, but also I could not expense many things as a contractor. In Spain they would send you a draft, and you can request a meeting to help you do them (few people do this). This was smooth. You show at your timeslot and a friendly person is there for any questions. Before you leave, the definitive version is done.
I ended up reworking the entirety of my many-paged lease agreement at my last apartment so that I and my roommates could more easily fill it out and revise mistakes. I recently had to fill out a new patient questionnaire, and while someone had clearly tried to digitize the form, it was rife with issues that made the inputs unusable that I had to fix (such as radio buttons being mis-grouped).
Making a functional PDF form is not only nice for those filling them out, but also allows for easier automation when ingesting the forms. I wish that those whose entire jobs revolve around the processing of forms would put in a modicum of effort when creating them. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty of these things for the layman who hasn't touched digital UI stuff.
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> but doesn't anybody else get just bored by the lack of progress? Be the change that you want to happen. Where possible implement it in software with your friends and publish it on the internet. Thus: I am not bored by the lack of progress, instead I am rather overworked by implementing parts of this in my free time after work.
Of course! My comment was not about software since I'm no programmer, but about progress in the general sense. Why don't the people who are involved and take decisions within large civic projects get bored with the slow rate of progress. Like after they've stolen maybe a few millions for themselves and their friends, why not get on with it and actually start working? Is it necessary to stall progress for years and de…
What happens if you don't? I'm from EU, I should be able to move and live within it wherever I please.
EDIT
Apparently you can't open bank account or enter any legal agreement without anmeldung.
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Anyone here who has written a fax gateway (receive TIFF of fax, do OCR, save somewhere and convert to PDF)? raises hand (fax is alive and well in Switzerland)
This boggles the mind on the cultural-legal implications in fax-centric countries of doing: Fax to TIFF to OCR to PDF to internet transfer to TIFF to fax But anyone still requiring fax would probably just be happy "it came out of a fax machine / software."
Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party doesn't need to care.
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…
I bet you would have had a much better experience everywhere else (even in Potsdam, Berlin's neighboring city).
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This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.
> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post. What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.
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You’re right, but this is not what I mean by privatizing. In this scenario you described, the government has a monopoly and you as a citizen don’t get to opt-out or switch to the competition. You will pay for whatever garbage service they provide you with, unless you want to go to jail. There are no consequences to wasting your tax money. These private consulting companies are just the means to waste it.
Government tends to do what only government can do (e.g. issue passports, driving licenses, file taxes, etc.), and things where natural monopolies exist (water supply, trains, roads). What exactly would you privatise? (read: hand over obscene profits to a rent-seeking private entity).
Another function of government is, like it or not, in somehow providing legal tender and in the process regulating it. Efficient free markets need fiat medium of exchange, however counterintuitive that might seen. Because otherwise the trading parties would not have any common value reference, and sooner or later the market itself will create something akin to a government and state. Which is well, probably how the idea of governments and states started some thousands of years ago.
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> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post. What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.
There are salary tiers that are the same across all government employees. A new grad software engineer with a master's degree will earn the same as a new grad biologist, even though the outside government salaries for the two might differ by a factor of 2. There is no practical way of paying somebody more than this narrow wage band even if it's impossible to fill the position with somebody competent. You end up not h…