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Estonia is running its country like a tech company

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11–20 of 203 posts

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#12
Before people start praising Estonia for its e-voting system, which inevitably happens on such stories, let me remind you that the system was indeed open to compromise:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonias-id-card-scrisis-how-e...

The timeline may also match the hack the GCHQ and NSA did against the Estonian e-ID provider, Gemalto:

https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/

So remember that even with hardware tokens used in electronic voting, which are supposed to be much more secure than using other forms of authentication, you still run the risk of having the election compromised, especially since an election is something important enough that more than one major country could be interested in manipulating at any given time.

It's not like the "well, I'm nobody, so why would the NSA/other spy agency target me?!" situation at all. We're talking about the decision of who gets to run a whole country, and sophisticated adversaries will be very interested in influencing that if it can serve their interests.

We know China hacks tons of countries, we know Russia has been meddling with all sorts of elections lately, and we also know that for the past 70 years the USA has interfered in about one election per year, on average. This is not just theoretical stuff that would never happen. And I'm sure there are many Middle-Eastern and other Asian countries interested in influencing their rivals' elections, too.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-histor...

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#13

A lot is said about Estonia but Lithuania is better positioned and grows faster than Estonia. It's interesting but to me Estonia cant quite compete with its neighbors to the point of becoming wealthier than they are now.

I'm biased because I lived in Estonia and worked for their govt but why is Lithuania better positioned? Very rarely did we hear companies compare Estonia to Lithuania when they were making a choice for where to build their business

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#15
post #4

I've run and invested in businesses in multiple countries (Spain, Germany, US, UAE, Sri Lanka). One of them (Mobile Jazz - a fully remote company) we've moved to Estonia in 2016. One of the best business decisions we've made admin-wise. While there are for sure better alternatives when it comes to "saving on taxes" (I'd say Estonia is in the European average with 20% corporate tax and an interesting taxation model on…

Important to note that this 20% corporate tax is applied to the taxable payment (e.g. dividend payouts).

There are no taxes to pay for the yearly profit, which makes it much easier for companies that do plan to reinvest the income over the years or just hold it.

Also, one should probably have employees or customers physically in Estonia, otherwise the company tax residency might change into other jurisdictions.. IANAL.

I'm curious if there are any other EU countries with a similar flexibility (corporate income tax not applied until the "payout event")?

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#16
I had a chance to work for the Estonian government for a brief while (headed up business development for e-Residency). While a few things may be overblown about their e-gov initiatives (I'm thinking some of the blockchain hype that foreign journalists didn't really fact check) they really have done an incredible job making their business environment accessible for foreigners. There really is a strong mentality of delivering government services with the end user as the customer mentality rather than the usual bureaucratic nonsense I was used to running businesses in the U.S. and Germany.

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#17
Taking the govt. services online is generally a good idea, but there are a lot of minefields along the way and is inherently tied to the country in question.

I can only speak from the context of India where many things have indeed moved online, but are not exactly accessible. For one thing, they are essentially restricted to a small class of English speakers - which is expected since the English-speaking elite have a monopoly on education and thus technological literacy. This has meant that all the small shops which are now forced to file GST invoices (3 times a month ?) need to hire touts of some kind to get their work done. There are touts for everything, since very few people have computers or the necessary skills to use them - touts for filling in passport applications, for filling in DL forms etc.... and frankly it's all very frustrating, since you'll have to take a printout of the online application and visit some Indian Babu anyway.

Since "Indians" have been decided by the rulers to be essentially corrupt, it has also meant that there is no escape from the inflexibility of the straightjacket that is the Indian bureaucracy. Classic case of extremely poor people employed as manual labour being denied food rations because their fingerprints don't match that on record, or simply because the cellular data is patchy has quickly been covered by the UIDAI and their cronies in the government.

The language issue also shows up often because, after 70 years of so-called independence, the country has yet to create a unified transliteration scheme to go along with its "destroy all Indian languages" policy... and different transliterations of brahmi (for instance "sri" and "sree" are both the same श्री) often require absurd name-change announcements and numerous "letters" to random officers (and the usual palm greasing) in order to get access to services.

For much of India's "independence" a extractive state run for a handful of elites generally kept away from governance while its elites enjoyed vacations abroad and went to hospitals in Vienna (other than passing insane, unenforceable laws). I'm generally afraid what the deeply rooted colonial mindset will give rise to, now that it has also has access to technology. UIDAI and its sister schemes was and remains a rather scary venture with what appears to be a view of replicating China's draconian policies.

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#19
As a Norwegian I can relate to many things written here. Estonia is clearly ahead of us but this thing of not being the innovator but still using off the shelf technology was something I was forced to reflect upon while living in the US 15 years ago.

It was surprising how the country behind so much technology innovation was so bad at using it. It was noticeable both in the private and public sector.

It was something that I was later reminded of when reading guns, germs and steel. The author Jared Diamond remarked that the technological progress of any society is not primarily decided by your ability to innovate but by your ability to adopt and use the inventions of others. As he remarks, most innovation happens outside your own country, so it is the ability to learn from others which matters most.

A thing I think people should be aware of when obsessing about having the most cutting edge researchers rather than a technology literate population.

Re: Estonia is running its country like a tech company

#20

The title says nothing, we need KPIs, average life span, mortality rates, unemployment rates, health indices, education indices, overall quality of life indices. Fancy titles are meaningless.

It seems unlikely they would include all of that in one article - if you're interested the statistics agency has most of that data I believe https://www.stat.ee/en
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