3 ms·

Does he know what he is talking about?

qznc 1y ago
I don't think so. His previous job was CEO of a EU-wide electronics retailer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger
- ginko 1y ago
  He also has a PhD in computational physics and had leading positions in major European telecommunications and energy infrastructure companies. What kind of CV would you expect for you to say he knows what he's talking about? Because I'm honestly having a hard time thinking of something. Maybe being exec/CTO at a FAANG? (but then that'd make him appear biased).
  - qznc 1y ago
    In general, he has a strong science and business background which is good for his position. What I don't see is any connection to Open Source specifically. It's not like he was a manager at SuSE in his early career, for example.
    - imp0cat 1y ago
      And that's good, he may prefer Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    .
jillesvangurp 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger He's not your typical politician (lawyer or otherwise non technical background, no corporate experience). He actually did a Ph. D. in physics and worked as a management consultant at BCG, and ran a few companies. Pretty impressive profile for such a role as far as I can see. We had some encounter with German bureaucracy in our company that is proper face palm material. We're basically being asked to tell the Rentenversicherung (the state pension fund) a lot of stuff they should already know. We're expected to dig out a lot of stuff from our HR records and send it to them by means of some tedious form. By Fax! We'd laugh about it except we are too busy doing all this bullshit work for them because they can't figure out how to operate in this millennium. We have to dig out records for employees that are long gone, go over their monthly statements, etc. How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. And yet they pay some poor soul to take stacks of paper from a fax machine and enter it into god knows what kind of filing system they have to "update their records". Absolutely appallingly stupid. We're also supposed to sign that fax with our company stamp. This is an actual thing in Germany. At least it used to be. It's no longer actually required to have one. But obviously the German bureaucracy is full of dark little corners that haven't updated their processes since the cold war era when faxes were a new thing. I'd recommend a chainsaw approach but considering how Doge escalated in the US, maybe appointing somebody with a clue is maybe the better move. It's not a bad start. But clearly, something drastic needs to happen. Something more than vague intentions and some IT agency is going to chin stroke over this for a few years. Which is the usual German thing. Lot's of waffle, not a lot of action. And it's probably going to take a decade. My recommendation: disconnect all Fax machines. Anyone caught operating one should be forcefully retired/fired immediately. Make no exceptions. Monitor the telephone network for rogue fax usage and eliminate anything and everything still depending on that nonsense. And then tackle company stamps, civil servants copying information manually from paper into a terminal, etc.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  > How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. Usually the answer is "German data privacy laws that forbid sharing that information with another entity of the same government". If it’s not that, then the fallback is "Federation".
- thyristan 1y ago
  The (I kid you not!) bureaucratic answer to the abolition of fax machines is: Get a PDF/Word form (yes, Word .doc or .docm, the stuff with the macros and exploints), fill it in, print it out. Stamp and sign the printout. Scan it. Send as email. Get your email rejected because of the 1MB size limit for a 100 page scanned document. Split it into multiple emails. Have the latter half of those emails never arrive because obviously you are a spammer. Give up and send the stack of paper via registered snail mail. Some processes can by now be done via some web form, but often with braindead implementations, and still the necessity to print, sign and send a distilled version of your filing. And there is absolutely no common standard, no common auth, no centralized processes even within the same office, so total chaos and madness. The only saving grace is that by now it has gotten easier to get snail mail stamps as numerical codes or matrix codes to embed in printouts...

qznc 1y ago

I don't think so. His previous job was CEO of a EU-wide electronics retailer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger

ginko 1y ago
He also has a PhD in computational physics and had leading positions in major European telecommunications and energy infrastructure companies. What kind of CV would you expect for you to say he knows what he's talking about? Because I'm honestly having a hard time thinking of something. Maybe being exec/CTO at a FAANG? (but then that'd make him appear biased).
- qznc 1y ago
  In general, he has a strong science and business background which is good for his position. What I don't see is any connection to Open Source specifically. It's not like he was a manager at SuSE in his early career, for example.
  - imp0cat 1y ago
    And that's good, he may prefer Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  .

jillesvangurp 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Wildberger He's not your typical politician (lawyer or otherwise non technical background, no corporate experience). He actually did a Ph. D. in physics and worked as a management consultant at BCG, and ran a few companies. Pretty impressive profile for such a role as far as I can see. We had some encounter with German bureaucracy in our company that is proper face palm material. We're basically being asked to tell the Rentenversicherung (the state pension fund) a lot of stuff they should already know. We're expected to dig out a lot of stuff from our HR records and send it to them by means of some tedious form. By Fax! We'd laugh about it except we are too busy doing all this bullshit work for them because they can't figure out how to operate in this millennium. We have to dig out records for employees that are long gone, go over their monthly statements, etc. How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. And yet they pay some poor soul to take stacks of paper from a fax machine and enter it into god knows what kind of filing system they have to "update their records". Absolutely appallingly stupid. We're also supposed to sign that fax with our company stamp. This is an actual thing in Germany. At least it used to be. It's no longer actually required to have one. But obviously the German bureaucracy is full of dark little corners that haven't updated their processes since the cold war era when faxes were a new thing. I'd recommend a chainsaw approach but considering how Doge escalated in the US, maybe appointing somebody with a clue is maybe the better move. It's not a bad start. But clearly, something drastic needs to happen. Something more than vague intentions and some IT agency is going to chin stroke over this for a few years. Which is the usual German thing. Lot's of waffle, not a lot of action. And it's probably going to take a decade. My recommendation: disconnect all Fax machines. Anyone caught operating one should be forcefully retired/fired immediately. Make no exceptions. Monitor the telephone network for rogue fax usage and eliminate anything and everything still depending on that nonsense. And then tackle company stamps, civil servants copying information manually from paper into a terminal, etc.

Semaphor 1y ago
> How can they not know the stuff they are asking for? It's not like we don't file taxes, we are a properly registered Gmbh, etc. All the information they are asking for is already known to the German government. Usually the answer is "German data privacy laws that forbid sharing that information with another entity of the same government". If it’s not that, then the fallback is "Federation".
thyristan 1y ago
The (I kid you not!) bureaucratic answer to the abolition of fax machines is: Get a PDF/Word form (yes, Word .doc or .docm, the stuff with the macros and exploints), fill it in, print it out. Stamp and sign the printout. Scan it. Send as email. Get your email rejected because of the 1MB size limit for a 100 page scanned document. Split it into multiple emails. Have the latter half of those emails never arrive because obviously you are a spammer. Give up and send the stack of paper via registered snail mail. Some processes can by now be done via some web form, but often with braindead implementations, and still the necessity to print, sign and send a distilled version of your filing. And there is absolutely no common standard, no common auth, no centralized processes even within the same office, so total chaos and madness. The only saving grace is that by now it has gotten easier to get snail mail stamps as numerical codes or matrix codes to embed in printouts...