191–200 of 200 posts
That means de-industrialisation of the country in a major way, because there's no way you can remain competitive on the world stage.
Germany was the major bread-winner and subsidiser for the whole of the EU, so it's not really that 'Germany is the sick man of Europe', it's more that 'Europe is the sick man of the West'.
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" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " " Don't be snarky. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
i think my comment was justified and quite on point. it is very much a cultural thing in india to have servants from a lower and less respected caste. it's not nice but that's how it is. and yes, the caste system is very much racist.
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sounds like you miss your servants which happen to be a little too expensive for you here ... and you even have to treat them respectful. what a bummer
Way to assume. I love how literally everyone who criticizes Germany about being slow and inefficient is assumed to come from a place of privilege. If I missed by "servants" I'd be complaining about separating my garbage and having to make multiple trips to the recyclehof, not about bureaucracy sucking the life out of people.
I'm currently in the process of moving my business (one-man show, incorporated LLC doing IT/SW Eng.) out of Germany. The amount of bureaucracy running even the smallest of companies with no office at all (work out of home) is hilarious. So much you need to get an accountant/tax advisor, but even then they will pass-through a lot of the bureaucracy. I need to put down excel sheets for every day of a business trip I do…
Do they just skip this 5k EUR accountant ?
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Thanks for sharing. I read the replies to your informative post. Sorry to see so much racism directed your way. I’m a resident in Switzerland and my girlfriend is from south India, now also a resident there. This has not at all been our experience. The administration has been surprisingly pleasant and efficient. From the day we applied for her residence to the day she got it took about 6 weeks. Would have been quicke…
To disagree is also racism now, how insightful.
FWIW since I made my reply there has been a lot of thoughtful replies
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Even if you do speak German, it's horrendously slow. You can't sit idle for months because this or that office has no appointments to do this or that thing. Things that can be done online elsewhere must be done in person, by appointment. The appointments are hard to get, come weeks later, and only trigger a 2-8 week wait. Language is just icing on the cake.
I think slow appointments are a thing across the western world right now (and possibly elsewhere, but my knowledge is lacking). I'm currently trying to get my driving license in the UK, as a US immigrant. This means I need to go through the same process as a new driver. The wait was about a month between application and approval for my provisional license, then 1.5 months to take a theory test, then 2 months to take…
Broken bureaucracy is a safe bet. My job is secure for the decades to come.
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It's fine if you're running some sort of IT consultancy or whatever, your first invoice will be running weeks after the fact in any case. Everyone else can wait a week (or less, if you're persistent in nagging the Finanzamt on the phone), but let's be real: if you're a shop owner, you need weeks of "empty" runway to rent a shop, set up the shop, buy inventory, wait for it to arrive... so in reality the week of waitin…
IT consultancies are not the majorities of businesses. Additionally, your tax id does not necessarily take a week. And good luck if you do international (but within EU) buisness - the EU VAT id takes even longer. Additionally, when did we (germans) start to accept and get so stuborn to defend this process? I mean, the process should be: You go to the "Gewerbeamt", fill out the forms, and get the same day a tax id, a…
The anecdotal evidence the author supplies: economic growth is slow, trains are late, IT investment as a % of GDP is half that of US and France, business license takes 120 days to acquire. Nowhere does it seem to talk about living standards of the population. As if the economy is its own end and the population is just an epiphenomenon.
Most sickness has symptoms, often minor and barely inconveniencing for a while until later stages . The author is making observations about symptoms. As a German, it is evident that we have caught a serious disease that started more than a decade ago. We sniffed free Russian Gas and ingested free Chinese manufacturing and got really high and felt great for a while but failed to invest into the future. Now as both dru…
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You're writing this tongue in cheek or really not knowing? That's exactly what Indonesian is , a simplified standardized language to allow hundreds of different ethnicities with their own languages to easily communicate. There are tons more but I guess Indonesian is the world's best example because it is the language of one the most populated island on earth and one of the most populus nations And there's no need for…
I mean European languages, in the context of internal migration inside EU. I don't know anything about Indonesian so, it's nice to know my idea is not a crazy one. If Chinese and Indonesian do not have tenses, how they communicate when the action happens?
:)