German here. If you ask me, Germany has set up the perfect feudal state.
Except without any of the good parts of historic feudalism.
German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
151–160 of 271 posts
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
German "public" healthcare is much more accessible and has much better coverage than its Finnish counterpart. Despite Finland reapeatedly making headlines (including on HN) about being a Nordic welfare state. Germans are typically complaining from a high level. Source: Members of the wider family living in both countries. Some over 80 and needing a lot of healthcare services. (I hear general practioners can be a prob…
A finnish colleague once told me that the Finns just don't go to the doctor unless something falls off. Any accuracy to that?
Yes, especially for Finnish men in the countryside that's a sterotype with quite some truth behind it.
Edit: And that results in a dangerous combination: First waiting too long and then getting the answser "no free appointments". And if you insist the next one is in 3 or 6 months. Many Finns do not insist.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
High taxes with no matching value behind them is undeniably a negative.
Yes, that's my problem with high taxation, as someone who got burnt by it by virtue of living and paying taxes in the UK. I don't mind paying my fair share of tax if it means I get good value out of it, but the state of our healthcare here means that in practice the public healthcare system is no longer fit for purpose, so we are being forced to pay for a system that doesn't work and end up having to go private (and…
private enterprise is not "bound by competitive pressure". Companies only compete by virtue of the government forcing them to. Are you arguing that humans, inventors of civilization, are too stupid to figure out how to cooperate?
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#154Finally. Germany combines some of the worst aspects of the US (credit ranking, complicated abortion process, private healthcare if you want decent treatments) with the worst aspects of Europe (low digitalization, high taxation, recursive federalism: within the country and within the EU). A country like the Netherlands has its own issues (mainly housing) but doesn't have the myriad of pain points you can find in Germa…
True, but in the Netherlands it’s the government itself which sells all of your data, literally everything from your house, it’s price, location, blueprints, satellite images, what you paid for it, previous owners, your car, and even your government ID number if you are registered as a company, just to many a couple.
And yes, you obviously have to pay to get your own data.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's utter bullshit. Your quality of care in the hospital is exactly the same as with public health insurance. Also sometimes private insurance is even worse when it comes to addiction and psychological treatments
Just open Doctolib and tell me it's the same when looking for any kind of doctor. The difference in waiting time is 3 months, bare minimum.
I just opened Doctolib and did a test with a dermatologist. The difference between private insurance was 23.5.2024 and public insurance 5.6.2024. That makes 13 days and not "3 months bare minimum".
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#156In the process of renting a flat in Germany, SCHUFA is not even the biggest travesty. The worst part is potential tenants handing over full dossiers about their background to the prospective landlords. Passport copies, payslips, account statements and more. And as a tenant, you have no way of knowing when does it all end up. At best it will be dumped into a paper recycling bin. But who knows if all these documents ar…
It is incredible the amount of private information that gets exchanged in Germany to access certain things. You brought up landlords, but I've heard crazy stories about job applications or applications to services that "require" an incredible amount of private information (often even including pictures too!) handed-over for completely obscure reasons with no recourse if your application is denied or simply ignored.
> ob applications or applications to services that "require" an incredible amount of private information (often even including pictures too!)
Those crazy stories are indeed crazy and simply not true.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's utter bullshit. Your quality of care in the hospital is exactly the same as with public health insurance. Also sometimes private insurance is even worse when it comes to addiction and psychological treatments
This is not true. Private insurance means better care in hospitals in Germany. Better access to appointments, choice of head/experienced doctors, even can mean better rooms.
No, it means you may potentially have all of those but there is no guarantee. Neither is there a guarantee that a publicly insured person wouldn't receive the same treatment.
E.g. if there aren't any free "better/worse" rooms what are they supposed to do? Many of these are nowadays covered by employers as a benefit or for cheap (~5€) out of pocket if you want.
Private insurance matters most for specialists that don't (aren't allowed to) have (or want) a public insurance license.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, this working culture makes result slow and expensive, and as a result, in many cases uncompetitive, but it does a good job of avoiding fuckups and while slow and expensive, things usually get done predictably, on time and on budget. Which probably makes it better than American reckless "fake it till you make it" approach in most of the complex projects.
No, it absolutely does not. It might have in the past, when industry was booming in Germany and setup costs were huge and mistakes were very, very expensive. However, they've pretty much lost the race when it comes to software and digitalization, where setup cost is pretty much non-existent, mistakes are inexpensive (fail early, fail fast), and ROI are generally multiples of 100%.
I had an experience with a German client in a software project. It freaked the hell out of me with slowness of decisionmaking, long contract every point of which as it turned out, was material, in a nutshell it was a 50/50 coding vs lawyer job and took 5x the time same thing would take with an American client. It also made me next to no profit.
But, unlike a lot of things we write for Americans, that one turned out to be actually workable, usable in their (rather large) product, and runs happily to this day almost 5 years later. I count it as a success and attribute it mainly to this boring, overly conservative and procedure-ridden work process.
But yes, i agree, that for software projects, virtues of this approach are more limited than in "hard" engineering, and probably do not outweigh downsides in many cases.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it quite disturbing that high taxation is seen as a negative aspect of Europe. I lived in Italy, France and Germany, and I enjoyed public healthcare and education of very high standard at very affordable prices, and free in the limit that one cannot afford to pay for them. As a relative of a person with a chronic disease I can tell you that on the one hand if we are not bankrupt it is because of public healthc…
High taxes with no matching value behind them is undeniably a negative.
Ah that's where the much higher quality of life kicks in.
Re: German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
#160People wouldn't be able to get this information without SCHUFA - at least not doing a fair bit of work. SCHUFA did work to build a system of gathering and providing this information in a consolidated way. I don't think people should have a right to demand this value be provided to them for free.
If everybody now demands this information for free, why would this business continue to operate? And if they don't, how will landlords get information about who is financially reliable and who isn't?
In the US is works because landlords typically will not accept self-obtained credit reports. They pay the credit agency directly. As a consumer I can get my information for free, easily - but my landlord will still want to pay the agency for their own copy.