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People ridicule the German fetish for doing things on paper and using cash, but many things tend to work here even if the computers stop working. My general pr

People ridicule the German fetish for doing things on paper and using cash, but many things tend to work here even if the computers stop working. My general practitioner once treated me during a power outage, all I had to do was come back and have my insurance scanned later.

odiroot 2y ago
That's a really moot point because the legacy banking industry there got heavily affected. The nation's weird affinity for pen and paper is nothing but Luddism. Once you have experience living in a country with good e-governance you'd roll your eyes at Germany and their love for faxes.
- niemandhier 2y ago
  Well I did not notice whatever affected the banking industry of my country, which at least for me makes my point. Good e-governance is incredibly difficult, which explains our love for faxes. E.g. Microsoft faced a lot of scrutiny in the congress hearing in June, some people go as far as saying MS is a danger to the national security of the USA. If the US, which is the home of these companies and can put pressure in ways the German government cannot, still can‘t force them to deliver secure systems, a fax ( at least an encrypted one) looks pretty attractive. When the EU parliament still used faxes, the US at least hat to break into the offices and manually install components to the machines to get access.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >Good e-governance is incredibly difficult And yet Estonia, a former impoverished communist country significantly less wealthy than Germany did it, and did it well. But no, Germans always have a laundry list bingo of FUD excuses as to why it can't possibly work. The bingo usually starts with "but m'uh privacy!" even though BAMF, Schufa and every law firm and government agency remotely interested in you can find out everything about you if they want to fine you for something.
    - niemandhier 2y ago
      1.Estonia started more or less from scratch after 1990. Building a new system based on modern standards is easier than reforming one that is working under full load. 2. Estonia is much smaller than Germany, and afaik much more centralised. Estonia did a lot of things right, but countries like Britain, France and Germany can learn little from Estonia. The results just do not translate. 3. The German system as it is, is designed to make it slow to change. Even if hard right AFD would get the majority of votes in the next election, during one legislative term they could not change the system a lot. To do this, even the absurd long Merkle reign was not long enough. 3. might sound like a disadvantage, and it certainly is for the Germans, BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent. There is a joke, that claim that the German anthem actually is:“ Stability, stability über alles“
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        > BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent. Kind of an unrelated point. Using faxes and paper based burocracy won't save you from crappy politicians implementing crappy policies or a government going crazy. Why are Germans so obsessed with correlating that crappy burocracy automatically means more political stability as some lame excuse for maintaining the inefficient and crap public burocracy? You can also have political stability with efficient burocracy. The key is political accountability and separation of democratic powers, to maintaining stability, nothing to do with using digital or paper for burocracy.
        immibis 2y ago
        Germany is NOT politically stable. I would also prefer that when (not if) the next Nazi party wins an election, it has a hard time getting my data. Germany seems to have not learned very much the first time, though, because it still keeps a hierarchical registry of everyone's religion and home address, and everyone in the bureaucracy has a "just follow orders" mentality.
      - hnbad 2y ago
- schroeding 2y ago
  Faxes - I fully agree. But there are areas where it definitely isn't just Luddism, especially in healthcare. See what happened in Finland [1]. Yeah, you can break into a GPs office and steal the physical data quite easily, but that doesn't scale, hacking a centralized service does. (Sure, there are solutions which would be similarly resistant against hacks as paper - like saving the data on the actual insurance card. But those are not implemented - it has to be a centralized (often SaaS) solution, where hacks can scale nicely) [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54692120 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54692120
rootusrootus 2y ago
That is an upside, but what are the downside costs? Are there more errors? Do people die more often because something got overlooked because it was not shared? Certainly it is more expensive, but even putting that aspect aside I would want to know for sure that it was a net positive and not just in this one situation.
ugh123 2y ago
> but many things tend to work here even if the computers stop working. Sure, they work. At the pace of 1980's business speed. The U.S. is 4x bigger population and 6x gdp than Germany.
- niemandhier 2y ago
  The amount of military power that is used to support that gdp is much larger though. As long as oil is traded in dollars, the us will not have anormal economy.
nrr 2y ago
As someone who straddles the Austrian and Swabian ways of doing things, if I had to pinpoint the true underlying German fetish, it's one of avoiding risk. The bureaucracy and obsession with paper-based processes really do stem from that.

odiroot 2y ago

That's a really moot point because the legacy banking industry there got heavily affected. The nation's weird affinity for pen and paper is nothing but Luddism. Once you have experience living in a country with good e-governance you'd roll your eyes at Germany and their love for faxes.

niemandhier 2y ago
Well I did not notice whatever affected the banking industry of my country, which at least for me makes my point. Good e-governance is incredibly difficult, which explains our love for faxes. E.g. Microsoft faced a lot of scrutiny in the congress hearing in June, some people go as far as saying MS is a danger to the national security of the USA. If the US, which is the home of these companies and can put pressure in ways the German government cannot, still can‘t force them to deliver secure systems, a fax ( at least an encrypted one) looks pretty attractive. When the EU parliament still used faxes, the US at least hat to break into the offices and manually install components to the machines to get access.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Good e-governance is incredibly difficult And yet Estonia, a former impoverished communist country significantly less wealthy than Germany did it, and did it well. But no, Germans always have a laundry list bingo of FUD excuses as to why it can't possibly work. The bingo usually starts with "but m'uh privacy!" even though BAMF, Schufa and every law firm and government agency remotely interested in you can find out everything about you if they want to fine you for something.
  - niemandhier 2y ago
    1.Estonia started more or less from scratch after 1990. Building a new system based on modern standards is easier than reforming one that is working under full load. 2. Estonia is much smaller than Germany, and afaik much more centralised. Estonia did a lot of things right, but countries like Britain, France and Germany can learn little from Estonia. The results just do not translate. 3. The German system as it is, is designed to make it slow to change. Even if hard right AFD would get the majority of votes in the next election, during one legislative term they could not change the system a lot. To do this, even the absurd long Merkle reign was not long enough. 3. might sound like a disadvantage, and it certainly is for the Germans, BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent. There is a joke, that claim that the German anthem actually is:“ Stability, stability über alles“
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      > BUT if Germany would follow the likes of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, that would destabilise the whole continent. Kind of an unrelated point. Using faxes and paper based burocracy won't save you from crappy politicians implementing crappy policies or a government going crazy. Why are Germans so obsessed with correlating that crappy burocracy automatically means more political stability as some lame excuse for maintaining the inefficient and crap public burocracy? You can also have political stability with efficient burocracy. The key is political accountability and separation of democratic powers, to maintaining stability, nothing to do with using digital or paper for burocracy.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Germany is NOT politically stable. I would also prefer that when (not if) the next Nazi party wins an election, it has a hard time getting my data. Germany seems to have not learned very much the first time, though, because it still keeps a hierarchical registry of everyone's religion and home address, and everyone in the bureaucracy has a "just follow orders" mentality.
    - hnbad 2y ago
schroeding 2y ago
Faxes - I fully agree. But there are areas where it definitely isn't just Luddism, especially in healthcare. See what happened in Finland [1]. Yeah, you can break into a GPs office and steal the physical data quite easily, but that doesn't scale, hacking a centralized service does. (Sure, there are solutions which would be similarly resistant against hacks as paper - like saving the data on the actual insurance card. But those are not implemented - it has to be a centralized (often SaaS) solution, where hacks can scale nicely) [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54692120 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54692120

rootusrootus 2y ago

That is an upside, but what are the downside costs? Are there more errors? Do people die more often because something got overlooked because it was not shared? Certainly it is more expensive, but even putting that aspect aside I would want to know for sure that it was a net positive and not just in this one situation.

ugh123 2y ago

> but many things tend to work here even if the computers stop working. Sure, they work. At the pace of 1980's business speed. The U.S. is 4x bigger population and 6x gdp than Germany.

niemandhier 2y ago
The amount of military power that is used to support that gdp is much larger though. As long as oil is traded in dollars, the us will not have anormal economy.

nrr 2y ago

As someone who straddles the Austrian and Swabian ways of doing things, if I had to pinpoint the true underlying German fetish, it's one of avoiding risk. The bureaucracy and obsession with paper-based processes really do stem from that.