How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain • Hacker News Board

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#811

Post by secondcoming » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:04 PM UTC

beAbU wrote: post #519

usr1106 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

For all it's many many faults, I have to say I'm sometimes surprised by how efficient some South African bureaucratic state organs function. To get a renewed passport is a 5 minute online form, electronic payment, and then a 30 minute appointment at a local bank branch to get biometrics taken. Then about 1-2 weeks later you can go and pick up your new passport. Driving license not much different. For most people, pay…

I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to renew my Irish passport!

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#812

Post by dash2 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:08 PM UTC

anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #471

usr1106 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…

So the US is usually thought of as more right wing than Europe, so is bureaucracy worse in the US than Europe?

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#813

Post by avar » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:10 PM UTC

amaccuish wrote: post #809

avar wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is discussing limited-liability companies. You're personally liable for that Kleinunternehmer, in Germany your only option is a GmbH.

I'm responding to the parent "It effectively puts the entire country into a position where unless a citizen is born relatively wealthy..." Sure the thread is about limited-liability, but parent argues as if non-wealthy people can't form businesses, which is not true.

I see, I think it's implied there that if you're not wealthy then forming a business while assuming all the liability of the business is an equally or larger moat to cross for the poor.

It means that as soon as you screw something up or just get unlucky you might not only lose your business, but your personal savings, house etc.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#814

Post by harperlee » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:11 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #767

thaumasiotes wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. Are you a native Italian speaker? If not, this makes perfect sense. It is routine for someone to attempt to say one thing in a foreign language while actually saying something completely different.

Marriage generally has a fixed definition by law, anything else would be madness. The vows shouldn’t matter.

Not italian and not a lawyer, but I can see how specific declarations made to another party in front of hundreds of witnesses, in the framework of entering a broader agreement with said party, could be argued as a verbal supplementary contract in case of future disputes!

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#815

Post by folmar » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

miracle2k wrote: post #764

SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis , essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US. Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption. All the way, any foreign government documents need…

Virtually all common law countries provide this easily, and civil law countries provide a slightly different worded document of similar usage, i.e. a certificate of being eligible to marry under your country law. In most cases they are treated as equal once you have them, although the procedures and conditions vary.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#816

Post by dash2 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

GrumpySloth wrote: post #784

treprinum wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same as Czechia, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary being Eastern European when they are Central European. Soviet legacy, west vs east.

The popularisation of the concept of Central Europe stems from some people being ashamed of being from Eastern Europe and feeling inferior to Western Europe. Eastern Europe is defined by the Iron Curtain whose effects are still visible today, while Central Europe is a category created purely by selecting a region on the map without regard for political or cultural factors, just to push Eastern Europe further East and…

Mitteleuropa is an old concept, much older than the Iron Curtain. For example, the old boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire catch quite a lot of it. I've been told that places like Slovenia are pretty different from places like Serbia, and similarly for western vs. eastern Ukraine.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#817

Post by dash2 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:15 PM UTC

shiroiushi wrote: post #604

usr1106 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Japan the industrialized nation with the lowest fraction of foreigners?

AFAICT, Japan has the easiest immigration for skilled professionals, by far. However, this has been the case for less than 10 years, as they totally revamped their immigration laws in the 2010s sometime to try to attract more such people, so of course it's going to take time to see the difference. Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that differ…

My experience in East Germany was that even waiters spoke pretty decent English and would switch to it at any opportunity. Not quite Holland, but not far off. I had a friend who had lived there 10 years and still didn't speak German.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#818

Post by pc86 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:18 PM UTC

anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #471

usr1106 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…

Not every government less cavalier with other people's money is "right wing," not every "right wing" government believes in austerity, and not every implementation of austerity means just haphazardly cutting services to the bone and letting the proles figure it out on their own. So I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to say "oh the government doesn't work because those crazy right wingers intentionally broker it!"

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#819

Post by flypaca » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:20 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #772

miracle2k wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually somewhat similar in Germany. You need a Ehefähigkeitszeugnis , essentially that document proving that you are not married yet. You would have needed to get this from the US. Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US), you then instead need to apply to your local Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) for an exemption. All the way, any foreign government documents need…

> Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US) They don’t? I thought this was a pretty standard sort of document to get…

Yes, it is. Usually, a certificate that says, "No record of marriage of this person in this county". Though, there is still a step to apostille and translate it to German for German cities to use it.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#820

Post by southernplaces7 » Mon, Apr 08, 2024, 3:20 PM UTC

anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #471

usr1106 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…

>The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments.

This is nonsense. Your statement is flatly an ideological talking point in no way backed by actual practical evidence or a reasoned argument of the situation. Government budgets in most european states, (Finland included) have continuously gone up for decades and increase in complexity. A strong ideological focus on claiming "right-wing austerity" has been a common narrative despite nothing about these growing budgets matching that at all. The very idea presupposes that any current amount of spending, no matter how large, has no business being criticized at all and that it's "extreme" to argue that the state could afford to be more agile in doing better with slightly less % of GDP.

Aside from the fact that government budgets are at record levels of economic output anyhow, no, the state shouldn't just automatically have a right to these absurd budgets with any pushback being called "austerity". or "right-wing".