911–920 of 1001 posts
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Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, as long as you stay inside Schengen.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.
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> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though. A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument. It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and…
The UK's big opportunity was: to be the "best" EU country by having the most reasonable (informal, common-sense based) interpretation of EU rules permissible, and to benefit from intra-EU trade and freedom of movement. This opportunity was sadly squandered due to populism (and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica financed by Rob Mercer), with the result that now tons of migration from India and other Asian places is ar…
Informal/reasonable interpretations of EU law don't work. To even bring that up as an idea shows the culture gap that drove the UK out. The culture in Britain is incompatible with that. What happens is activists go to the ECJ and get a ruling that's unreasonable but formal, which the UK civil service (which likes clear rules) then goes ahead and implements strictly whilst other countries with different cultures would just ignore the rules. This process was called "gold plating". The result was the UK would end up with the worst possible outcome: a reputation for fighting against bad rules and being generally disagreeable/uncooperative, but then actually enforcing those rules when they pass anyway. The approach used by many other EU countries was to all agree on how wonderful the new rules were and then widely flout them, hence why obscure topics like fishing took on surprising prominence in the Brexit debates, the flouting of those rules was a long term and neuralgic issue that typified the problem.
Ten years from 2016 is only two years from now. There won't be any big changes in two years. The UK economy has closely tracked the rest of Europe and isn't doing any worse post-Brexit than other countries, or even sometimes slightly better (nothing to write home about compared to the USA of course, though how much that's due to US deficit spending is open to question).
> From what my journalist friends are telling me
Journalists?! They are widely distrusted for good reasons! You certainly shouldn't be learning anything about Brexit from them, they will happily say all kinds of nonsense that isn't true to try and defend the EU.
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Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all…
They pull out some cars, last winter I got pulled out at the border when I entered Germany from Austria. They wanted to see our passports and asked where we were going.
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Those are random spot checks, there's no border between France and Germany where everyone's passport will be checked.
"nobody will check passports" "Those are random spot checks" So there are random spot checks where people will check passports. So "nobody will check passports" is false.
When it comes to European bureaucracy: If we put Germany on one end of the scale and put Estonia on the other end, most of Europe is going to be placed near Germany. Germany isn't the outlier, Estonia is. Also one would be mistaken to believe that these bureaucratic processes produce a better result - there's already numerous examples where weaknesses in these systems have been exploited. One recent example exploits…
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Don't forget bread. Whenever I travel to the US I'm appalled by what is considered good bread there. Not throwing shade here, it's just what it is. On the flipside, buying Avocados here in Germany is akin to a crime against humanity.
Then travel to Switzerland and IMHO German bread is just average anymore.
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> So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents. The modern US was founded by slave owners, Spain was a dictatorship for longer than most of Germany, Poland was sliding into illiberal democracy until very recently, most of Latin America seems one recession away from a coup or revolution, ... there is a lot of continuity between liberal democracies and…
Post WWII era was the most impactful for the current state of affairs. The recent situation in Poland was nowhere close in terms of graveness in comparison with the other examples, no slavery of genocide was even marginally likely, not even hyperinflation.
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Schufa, Rundfunkbeitrag, and copyright trolls have no problem cross linking personal data between government databases in Germany. > However, this is understandable given German history. So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.
>modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents. How frustrating for London and Washington to fight and win a war against the Nazis, then occupy (the Western half of) Germany for 7 years, imposing a new government on the country -- all to no effect.
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IT in general is stuck in blind valley and doesn't make anything easier anymore with its aggressive outsourcing and profit extraction. The only systems which go quickly and efficiently are those against the interests of an average citizen - e.g. the covid certification apps determining and limiting basic citizen rights. Oftentimes I prefer to show up in person with ID and fetch a printout with confirmation, than to i…
Biggest problem: Germans don't understand digitization. They often try to recreate the paper process with IT, instead of making a complete new setup. Example: Previously, you had to go to the City Hall or whatever in your pace of birth to get a birth certificate. Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail. How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth…
> Now you can email them, pay, and they mail you the certificate via snail mail.
> How it should be: Use an online token, log into your account, request a birth certificate and just print it. It should have a URL that can be used to verify that it is valid. This would be faster and the risk of forgery would be much lower. A seal - and Germans love seals, they wank of to seals - can be forged much easier.
That's an unreasonably high (or weird) standard. What country has a process like that? Switzerland certainly doesn't.
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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…
> Citizens/residents have no unique identifier actually that's not true: people in Germany have MANY unique IDs: they have not one but TWO tax identifiers ("Steuernummer" and "Steuer ID"), social security number ("Sozialversicherungsnummer"), national ID number ("Personalausweisnummer"), passport number ("Reisepaßnummer") and health insurance ID ("Krankenversicherungsnumer"), among others.