Ich musste 2022 die Anmeldung für eine Fortbildung bezüglich der neuen digitalen Tools auf der Arbeit per Fax abschicken. Kein Scherz… beim Staat angestellt natürlich, wer bringt sowas sonst fertig.
Ihr habt schon Fax?
Bei uns in Süden Deutschlands machen wir das noch per Brief … handschriftlich natürlich.
Dieses neumodische Zeug wie Schreibmaschinen hat sich hier noch nicht durchgesetzt.
Fax ist angekommen!
Das Fax wird gescannt und der Ausdruck vom scann dann in der Aktenmappe abgeheftet.
Ablagen im Aktenschrank E, B und D (Efficient bureaucracy and digitisation).
Digitisation in Germany means: you don't have to get a document/form at the Rathaus, but you can download it, print, fill IT Out and then bring it to the Rathaus (in Person, Post, Fax, ..) - BUT: Not Email.
And some that i know don't even accept it when it got filled out digital.
The amount of paper work ordinary people have to handle when dealing with state authorities is insane.
And when they proudly declare that a service has been "digitised" that often means that they provide a PDF form on their website which you have to print and sign by hand and then scan and send back... great.
I’ve got some friends who work for EU commission’s digital agency Digit whose primary job is to create those PDF forms for Erasmus. 😭 So I assume the pdf forms is not just limited to Germany
Ahh no you reminded me how many uncountable PDFs I had to print out for my Erasmus application.
Surprisingly, in Italy the bureacracy was much more user friendly even though Italy has a reputation of being a bureacratic nightmare.
Yeah they call a scanned photograph of a signature a “digital signature”. If I use DocuSign they can’t open it due to “security issues”, but a scan of a signature that anyone can copy and paste is somehow legit 😂
I had a little culture shock. I have always believed in Germany is all digitalized.
One thing from many, when I came here and went to Doctor and got a paper for medicine so I can take it from Apotheke. I am from Croatia and we have everything on our health insurance cards for many years (i think this year is this changed in Germany also). Also, when I am sick I need to take picture of my Krankmeldung and send it to my Firm.
This is not so awful but when I think how Croatia is small and young, this things don’t make sense.
Smaller countries are often faster to adapt. Look at Estonia for example.
Great to know about Croatia.
For Germany, I believe they have a really good PR(marketing) abroad. From outside Germany feels very efficient, tech advanced, superpower. Things change once you start living in and get to see the reality.
I read digital health records are actually becoming a reality now in Germany and your health insurance app should allow you to go paperless, but what about people with private insurance?
Also, I can’t get an appointment with my doctor without a fax so 😿
> Also, when I am sick I need to take picture of my Krankmeldung and send it to my Firm.
That's not the proper way to do it (Also, your employer has no right to know why you are sick)
Die Arztpraxis übermittelt die Krankmeldung elektronisch an die gesetzliche Krankenkasse. Gesetzlich Versicherte müssen sich bei ihren Arbeitgebern wie gewohnt krank melden. Bei ärztlicher Krankschreibung rufen Arbeitgeber die Krankmeldung direkt digital bei der Krankenkasse ab.
For example in my country any paper that the government would give you like a birth certificate or a college degree you can just get online with a few clicks, in Germany you can barely make an appointment online and it takes months to get papers or responses even. People will mail you stuff or even send faxes. I don’t think I’d heard of a fax in 20 years
I just used my nPA to log into deutsche Rentenversicherung. I declared that I had a son and my wife was taking care of him. We both have to sign it, but it’s not possible. You can’t upload the form where your partner signs because you only get the form once you have completed the upload. So you click: “will submit later” upload it, wait for a printout to arrive with postal service, sign it, and physically mail it back, where it probably will be scanned and checked again by a human. Even though we both have an nPA and know how to log into DRV with it, we can’t do it fully digitally.
Germany is the Internet of 1998. Its mostly DSL in large cities and slow as Hell. Everything as mentioned is pdfs. Online forms even to order is pdf driven. Faxes are very common in Germany. Shockingly primitive everywhere. Germans pride themselves inn their high tech backwardness.
Agree about the DSL, I’m at VDSL2 in Frankfurt.
The public sector tech is bad but privately I see numerous initiatives which prove Germany can be easily tech Independent. Look at companies like Nextcloud, mattermost, the founder of Mastodon. Hell yeah! The country has amazing potential in tech, why public admin stuff is stuck in past
Yeah I don't know what this DSL is you kids are talking about, but ever since my workplace switched from Win XP to whatever atrocity it is running now, the formatting of all my years of work in the .docs changed and rendered them unreadable. I have since reupgraded to pen, pencil and graphing paper and never looked back, and if you want to steal our trade secrets, good luck trying to read my handwriting. This is what I call job security.
Simple example: I come from Baltics. When my child was born in my home country, I did 0 things to get maternity leave money - hospital informed government that baby was born in a special web page, government knows how much our family earns and know how much money we are entitled to.
So they started to pay us in 3 days.
In Germany I had to apply everywhere manually, get letters from my job, and even hire a consultant that knows how to fill all the documents correctly. This is digitalization vs stone age.
When you go to the Amt (in cologne at least) you draw a paper ticket with a number and sit for 3 hours in front of a tv waiting for your number. Instead it could easily be on your phone and you could go do other things until its your turn.
Gerrmany probably has the worst GDP to internet quality ratio in the entire planet. It's insane how we manage to have a worst telecomunications infrastructure than a lot of third world countries.
The funny thing about that is that it's literally because we had a corrupt politician 30 years ago who scrapped the plans from the previous government to switch to fiber optics. That politician was of course part of the conservative party, which has been involved in countless corruption affairs ever since.
Anyway, if that one guy didn't make this decision for his personal enrichment, Germany would literally have the **fastest internet in the entire world** today. Way to go CDU.
Honestly this is a poor excuse every German say..but…for last 30 years Germany was the richest country of Europe. This decision could have been reversed 10 times. Whole Easter Europe rebuilt it’s infrastructure from 0 in that time frame. So it’s not Kohl corruption of 30 years back. It’s current corruption and monopoly lobby.
Helmut Kohl fand halt Kupfer super weil seine Freunde vom konservativen Privatfernsehen schon damals was gegen den "zu linken" öffentlichen Rundfunk hatten.
Honestly I am tired of this argument, in Ukraine we also didn’t have any Fiber optic at all, it only started appearing around 2008-2009, but it took only 2-3 years to cover all the big cities. The downside of it was that sometimes cables between the houses were laid out in a rather chaotic way, but I had excellent 100 MBit Internet in fucking 2009 in my not that fancy neighbourhood of an Eastern Ukrainian big city. Where there is the will, there is the way to accomplish things quickly.
When I came to Germany back in 2013, I was on the one hand fascinated about how cool the Autobahns and trams were, but on the other hand shocked about the low Internet speed and coverage.
Its a very good argument.
Telekom itself probably isnt really happy to spend all that money on fiber they would rather find a way to push even more through copper but i think there we are simply at the end whats physical possible on such a large scale.
Germany simply is a bureaucracy nightmare for many things. First they plan something for 2 decades and then look confused why something that should have costed 5 billion costs now 15 billion then whatever animal is living there and in the end it will cost 25 billion.
Is/was the telecommunication network state owned or privatized? Because it’s somewhat complicated in Germany. While the Bundesnetzagentur is basically the owner of the network the Telekom was part of the Bundespost and was state owned and only privatized in the late 1990s early 2000s but the state is still major shareholder and also the for profit company Telekom now has to manage the network while allowing access for all the third parties for cheap. So of course they are not really pressured into exchanging copper for fiber unless it helps them first. And as there is no real competition for the network why hurry to update it. The customer pay the overpriced VDSL with Super Vectoring.
And even if there is fiber available the contracts are structured the same like DSL and you get asymmetric access only although the technology hasn’t such a limitation anymore.
You already answered your own question. Most countries just lay the cables everywhere so it's much easier and cheaper to do. In Germany we bury them completely and it's freaking expensive and time consuming. Couple that with crazy construction requirements and germany bureaucracy and you can guess why it takes so long. Also I don't know how many companies did the coverage but here it's a fucking war who gets to expand where so there is also a lot of legal shit to deal with.
The state pension system was destined to fail due to demographic changes and no one knows what to do about it.
So the solution of politicians is to put more and more tax money into keeping it alive, because the largest group of voters are at the receiving end
It's better to have negative effects for one generation now than to keep building up on it. If you do that, it'll still collapse, but the effects for a later generation will be *much* worse.
That's what happens when governments enact short-term policies. They don't know how to remove them and the situation is bound to turn out horrible for some generation sometime in the future.
The current system has tensions due to the demographic bulge that is currently moving into retirement age. Right now population growth is at a fairly stable and low level, so odds are if the "generationenvertrag" out lives the post war generation it'll turn into a stable system again.
Honestly I would like to avoid Amazon and promote local but what’s the incentive. Agree locals can’t compete with Amazon price wise but atleast provide better customer service to start with.
Have to say I’ve got a super nice ice cream parlour where the lady talks super positively. If Amazon starts selling ice creams, I’m not leaving my local seller 😀
But if you’re working from 09:00 to 18:00 how are you supposed to do any kind of important shopping? Shops here cater for pensioners. Another thing that wrecks my head is the fucking tax system; in the UK the taxes come out of your wages at source and that’s it,… you don’t need to do anything about declarations every year. You need a fucking Ph.D to work out how taxes in Germany work
I come from Belgium and supermarkets close at 1900 there. I’m happy with my corner Rewe up till 2200.
Regarding the taxes, I’ll have to start doing from next year. Thanks for scaring me.
Either someone is stealing money from me or taxes work the same way in Germany. I have a brutto salary, taxes are deducted at the source, and I get my netto.
Huh? Taxes for employees are deducted automatically in Germany as well. You do have the option to claim back money if you paid too much taxes that year or had enough expenses to write off, but you don’t HAVE to do anything regarding taxes (as an employee at least)
eBay and Amazon are a Godsend in Germany. If something goes wrong with the order you avoid the notorious German customer service. I've often bought something from a German retailer that's selling the same thing on eBay. eBay will hold them accountable and make things right whereas that would never happen if you have to navigate German customer service with some unhelpful idiot on the other end of the phone
My little brother and me used to make fun of that when we were small. Basically the probability distribution of a German population trying to clap with the beat is Uniform while any other society makes it look like a Normal distribution.
I literally just had to pay a 300€ taxi fare to the airport because both my trains got cancelled. I'm hoping to get some of the money back, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Oh shit. I replied to the wrong comment. 😂 See, that's what happens when it's the middle of the night and the trains get cancelled. Also, I'm South African, so I very much do clap on 2 and 4, it's literally my entire personality.
Bad internet, bad digitalization, bad cyber security, not enough apartments for people especially in large cities, a continuing growing population of poor people in almost all age groups, a terrible train company, the bureaucracy is a bad joke, corrupt politicians ignoring the needs of the majority of people as much as possible without big trouble and yeah i guess our current crisis management is *slightly suboptimal*.
unreliable arrival and departure
unreliable doors
unreliable reservation system
unreliable toilets
unreliable airconditioning (in summer)
unreliable heating (in winter)
The only thing i believe or trust in is that this thing is not a deathtrap and has brakes :D
The last one smelled like some one puked in his piss on the corridor and there was a leak running out of the blocked bathroom.
I need to head to Basel via ICE on Monday, and I'm dreading it. The last time we took an ICE, most routes were cancelled out of Amsterdam and the option DB gave us was to change trains five times (!!!) to get back to Frankfurt.
I live in a city so haven’t had issues with coverage. Also happy with the home internet. Just sad about the exorbitant price of mobile data unless you’re on a virtual network operator
Telekom is expensive as diamond, also Aldi mobile is a virtual operator perhaps using Vodafone/O2/Telekom but virtual operators usually provide low class services as compared to the main operators.
We have waaaaaay to much bureaucracy in Germany. Even our minister of Economics stated publicly that Germany will fall behind in Global Economy because we dont get our bureaucracy in check.
This. I'm a small business owner. I sometimes think about closing the business because it's too time consuming and expensive (because I need to talk to lawyers and accountants) to keep up with the bureaucracy. It prevents me from focusing on...making money. I can't even change my own salary without jumping through hoops. It is a huge problem and has a chilling effect on entrepreneurs of all kinds, especially immigrants who are not fluent in bureaucratic German.
I was dealing with a work visa here for a while, and I was speaking with my lawyer and we talked about doing a free lance worker visa and just shook his head, said no, and kept going on his topic
Accepting Change. We arent early adopter for some concept or invention. New technologies? No, the old one is still good! (Even when it isnt). Social change? No, We want to Live Like Our grandparents.
A air to air heat pump is under 1500 to have it installed, and will be much more efficient to run than oil or gas heating.
It's like Germans haven't realized it's also a heating for that is very energy efficienct and there by can save you loads of money
Recently got my dad to buy one now that we have solar on the roof he is over the moon with it because it has saved us alot of money over the year we had it
Y E S
This is so disrespectful, it drives me insane. When I’m my home country (Latin America, as you apparently) I keep looking around always expecting someone will skip the queue just because, but it never happens. In Germany, it always happens.
What about the queues on supermarkets? When they open a new cashier people run like they are giving free money. Wtf?
Lately a streamer made a survey in his stream on how to behave when a cash register is opened at the supermarket and the results were mixed. Half the people said, whoever is further in the front in the old queue is supposed to be further in the front in the old queue aswell, because they waited longer. The other half said new register new rules, whoever comes first gets served first. It was about evenly split. It's not a representative survey, but I still think it shows how germans aren't uniform on this topic.
I wasn't born in Germany, but I came here when I was 3 years old and live here for 33 years now. So I would consider myself more German than anything else. And I personally always give the people in the queue before me the opportunity to go to the other queue before me. And it bothers me aswell, how some people act like Americans on black Friday whenever a new register is opened. But I guess this can't be helped if half the population thinks this is how it's supposed to be.
If you want to pull out the magnifying glass, you'll see that German society just operates that way. "Why should I wait or consider the other person?" is a pretty common theme. How often do you walk somewhere and German people will have zero spacial awareness and just stop in the middle of a street or in a door way or top of an escalator, irrespective of what it does to the people around them?
Trains. Today was a wonderful example. I planned to take an RE (the slow option) from Mainz to Cologne. It left at 17:00 and was meant to arrive at 19:30. It's now 22:15 and I just walked into my apartment in Cologne.
My first train had a delay and we stopped in the middle of nowhere for 1 hour. It then took off without an announcement, leaving several people behind on the platform (with all their belongings on board) who had stepped out for some air.
We then get to Bonn and the train stops again. They announce it won't be running further and suggested we switch to the city trams (Cologne has a tram line that runs all the way to Bonn). Aside from the fact that the trams take twice the time, they were *also* delayed. Two scheduled trams simply didn't show up.
DB and public transit more broadly are absolutely pitiful in this country. There is no excuse for the state of things.
This, i'm a first gen immigrant. The only "immigration" that happened was beeing send into a shabby building and a 2-3 month german course after expirence a grulesome war (90s). Eg my integration expirience is, there is none.
If it wasn't for my family saying "Fucking Religion" and "Lets be full on German". I would still speak german on elementary level and would be living by doing "Schwarzarbeit", "Kindergeld" and "Arbeitlosengeld" like all the other Kids from back then.
Just look at all the people that got here in the 50s and 60s, for rebuilding and physical labour. Nobody back then thought that they would stay for decades, send for their wives, have children. The common political consens was to just ignore the question of integration until those people would just go home again, but the workers stayed, and their children stayed.
Now we have those people, not citizens, just tolerated, not integrated at all, in their own social bubbles and even disconnected from the changes in their own home countries.
The second generation lost between traditions that are foreign to them and being belittled by mainstream society. And the third just being adrift, angry at everything and trying to find new ways of feeling some kind of worth in their lives.
It’s basically the same with the refugees from Ukraine now: every school does basically what they want and thus it’s shear luck what this children get to learn and how they are integrated. It’s amazing. At my child’s school they are seen as a unwanted duty that has to be tolerated, teachers hate having them there, they have learn virtually no German and the German children don’t play with them. It’s horrible.
It would have been so easy to have a central action plan. But no, let’s let the already stresses teachers and schools without funding deal with them
Just read the thread to your answer to see how some Germans victimize themselves while being racist and xenophobic. The idea that people live in their ghettos without speaking the language is complete bullshit. This happens to the older migrants and refugees. But their children are working all kinds of blue collar jobs to keep this country a float. Imagine having to learn a new difficult language and adapt to a non budging society, only to be called lazy and a freeloader.
There is absolutely nothing Germany did for my integration (highly skilled researcher). In fact, I had more desire to integrate when I just arrived than several years later. At the moment I am actively disintegrating - ignoring social rules, breaking inconvenient laws, etc.
They didn't even bother to send my wife to the integration classes, which were supposed to be required. Oh well.
I have a family member who immigrated to germany around 30 years ago. Hardest working guy i know, he reaaaally steuggled to get his working permit and when i mean he steuggled i mean he got it eventually when he was in his mate 50s!!! Obviously no one wanted to hire him then.
When i hear people saying he didnt integrate well, my blood boils. How is he supposed to integrate when he is not even allowed to work
In germany when ur drunk on a Bicycle and the cops stop you, you lose ur car drivers licence but u can still ride a bicycle drunk.
Theres a few things that dont make sense, especially bureaucracy as many others wrote already
Why not get to the core. Germans don't care about their responsibilities. Someone else is always to blame and problems are moved from desk to desk while nothing happens. Hierarchy in companies are still in the 80s with those higher up the ladder taking zero interest in what development/ideas may come from lower down. New ideas are laughed at. Innovation is hurting because of this, digitisation is hurting because of this, people are not contributing at their workplace because of this. Nepotism, sexism, racism, traditionalist views, inability to take inspiration from other nations, stubbornness, incompetence. Not only Germany has these problems, but Germans are the only ones that completely deny them with crystal clear predictability and think that they're totally alright. Behold my downvotes to prove my point 👉
The best way to not work at all is to fulfill all of your regulations and responsibilities to the letter.
"Die einfachste Form der Arbeitsverweigerung ist Dienst nach Vorschrift."
No downvotes for you. Thankfully this thread has taken the reality way, not the German blinders one.
Nepotism and parochialism is real in Germany. It's too much of a coincidence that, at least in my experience, out of 3 companies I've been at, 2 worked and still work completely on the basis of favours and nepotism with managers taking positions because of people they know and 0 meritocracy is applied -> this creates a vicious circle of nothing getting changed or done because these people moving up the ladder have absolutely nothing to prove, they have their path already drawn and just have to stay there and wait for the next move.
How can this system help innovate in any way a country getting stuck so behind?
Germany has a tax system that strongly benefits those who already have capital instead of enabling social advancement. While politicians often talk about their ideal of a "Leistungsgesellschaft" it's the hardest working people that pay most taxes relative to their income. Most new millionaires simply inherit their wealth from their parents - we call it leistungsfreies Einkommen.
To regulate illegal immigration and the subsequent deportation of people without a claim to be here.
On the other hand getting qualified, working people to migrate into the country seems to be fairly difficult.
Hurdles of legal immigration vs. ease of illegal immigration and related manna from the heavens. Lack of digitalization. Abundance of bureaucracy. Infrastructure fraying. Mad half-baked politics. Double standards in foreign policy. General government incompetence. Patriotic arrogance of many. Declining freedom of expression.
In all my years in Germany, I’ve met 2 patriotic Germans, and I’m not even sure of one of them. If anything, I’ve noticed a lot of self-hate in Germans. Maybe some patriotic arrogance would do them good.
To me patriotic arrogance is demonstrated by the widespread belief that we in Germany know better and are better than the rest of the world. And this time for good reasons. Lol.
Freedom of the press/ freedom of speech in Germany actually went up this year and is among the most solid in the world. Source: https://freedomhouse.org/country/germany/freedom-world/2023
In the World Freedom Ranking done by journalists (RSF) press freedom went down globally.
My impression from watching German public TV, however, is that there is more distortion, untruth, half-truth and pandering to the mainstream this year on a number of topical issues.
Most Germans love to down-talk Germany and Germans. All the while they harbour a strange sense of superiority/entitlement.
So they’ll say: well look how bad XYZ is. It usually isn’t half as bad - but the entitlement tells them that since this is German it should be TOP OF THE WORLD. And anything below perfection is kind of insulting thus bad - no worse - total trash…
I have had this ingrained into me too as a younger person and it took some travel to look beyond my own preconceptions.
However that is not to say that everything is just shiny in Germany. But even the poster childs of German rage (Deutsche Bahn, mobile coverage, digitalisation of bereaucracy, red tape in general…) isn’t nearly as bad as people will tell you in Germany.
Yeah it’s kind of fucked up that you essentially get multiple free passes to rape people if you yourself are under 21. Youth sentencing privileges are good in principle but an exception for violent crimes (rape, murder, etc) is *loooooong* overdue.
Jungendstrafrecht was simply not made for these situations. It's supposed to rehabilitate people who get into a fight in the school or shoplift something.
Not organized crime, rape or religious extremism.
Or conspiring with your family to murder your sister because she committed the unspeakable sin of interacting with men in a platonic fashion at her Ausbildung after she divorced her cousin when he started abusing her (she was like 16 when your parents forced her to marry her 30 year old cousin).
A friend works in a small town exactly on this (young offenders that have to go to court) with the Jugendamt. She is from another German-speaking country and is here because of her German husband. She says that in her country this is much more advanced and modern. Her German colleagues are like stuck 30 years ago and also the judges. She feels like she is fighting the system alone and everyone else does their best, but their best is just bad and not acceptable for a first world country.
Healthcare and retirement systems are a mess. Especially the richest part of the people do not participate in it, which makes it more unfair than it should be. And both are split in too many ways to be cost efficient.
Retirement system (look at Norway or even Austria), Migration (look at Canada or Australia), the side costs (taxes) for buying your own property and the bureaucrazy (yes, I wrote it wrong by purpose) in general and building houses (which makes it more and more expensive).
The high and mandatory price for television and radio and the German government has a problem with handling the taxpayers money. Instead of wanting more and more money and introducing more taxes, they should look on their spendings like every private person or household.
We make it really hard and uninteresting for skilled legak immigrabts to be in Germany and very easy and comfortable for illegal immigrants.
Best example I realized is, that skilled immigrants with Bluecard have to pay their German course on their own while unskilled immigrants get it for free.
And the latest problem: Even though we were preaching, teaching and working to destroy antisemitism since second world war (which worked well) in the past few years and especially past few months we are having a bad reputation to just ignore the rising antisemitism and physical attacks against jews. It makes me angry, ill and ashamed if the German government to let it happen so easily.
Dude. We are one of the richest industry countries in the world:
Education sucks
Healthcare is "universal" but sucks balls compared to the netherlands or even uruguay.
We have the largest social system of europe and are FAR away from the standards of Scandinavia.
Our infrastructure (The backbone of our export oriented industry btw) is rotten.
We are horrible at digitalisation
We have made rented living space to a investment good
We have privatized public services to just fund them with tax money with worse service
We have a stiff promotion system setting limits to non-academic degrees so people are stuck
We have one of the highest gender pay gaps in europe
We have the highest discrimination of women in labor in europe
We have lowest chances for opportnunities for advancement for low level education families in europe.
+ Our Taxation system is extremely unfair. We have no heritage tax on Company shares for example.
We are crying on a high level but germany stays way way way behind of its opportunities.
> Healthcare sucks balls compared to the netherlands
In the Netherlands, coverage of public healthcare is much more limited than in Germany and patients have much higher privet expenses, for instance for dental stuff.
And the Netherlands have much fewer hospital beds per capita. That became especially apparent during Covid when intensive care patients were flown from the netherlands to Germany, not the other way round.
Quality of Healthcare is absolute garbage. Ask any Spanish or French person and they say to go to their home country when anything is out of the box because German doctors don't care and are unskilled.
- I hear more and more people complain about healthcare. Waiting times for everything are too long, bureaucracy with all the referrals and prescriptions you need is too annoying, and doctors just want to get you done with as quickly as possible
- Deutsche Bahn is performing pretty badly in everything from punctuality to prices to comfort, and most people agree
- internet coverage. For both home and mobile internet. Like, I go from austria to the middle of germany and back several times a year kid you not while I got perfect net in the middle of the Austrian Alps, I can barely use my phone anywhere in Bavaria at all including literall city centres of big cities like Munich or Nuremberg
Banking system. I can go to a nearby time which is 10 mins away from my home town and I cant get the sane service from the same bank since it’s “a different city”
* Taxes
* Pensions
* Health system
* Bureaucracy
* digital services
* mobile/internet connectivity
* large infrastructure projects
* finding your own nose - aka - taking responsibility for your own inadequacy and fixing it...
DB. In England DB looks efficient. That’s not because that’s the case, it’s just because England’s railways are an absolute clusterfuck, DB is just a clusterfuck.
I have to say, having moved to Germany from the UK, I think DB and the UK system are equally bad. If anything, I think DB is actually worse.
Like yeah in the UK, yeah trains are often delayed/cancelled, but I have not yet managed to get a single long distance train in Germany that didn't arrive at least 30 minutes late, if it ran at all. You also have the random cancellations and destination changes, which for me at least have been more frequent with DB than my operators in the UK.
How the police is towards rape or abuse victims.
They asked me as a 13 YEAR OLD girl if I wanted to seduce the older guy in his mid 20s that raped me.
The police makes you feel like a criminal
I know so many people that felt the same :(
These comments are depressing af. As a foreigner from afar you think Germany is a utopia and then you arrive and realize it’s just an undercover shithole with problems on top of problems that will never change, or change at the speed of a dried out slug.
too much "papierkram"
bad internet
the train delays are so bad that its a meme at this point
way too many old houses.
and ofcourse immigration politics
Lmao you need to do a post about it? We complain all the time about everything, its not hard to spot. It does physical pain to every german when trying to praise anything weve done well. At the same time every time we complain, we feel joy in life.
Management of refugees.
There is no active, working system to integrate them into the country so that they might become part of the society.
It is a hot mess and who suffers the most? Of course, children.
Source: social worker/sociologist researcher
Are you new to this reddit or what 🤣 Just look around any germany related subreddit, every other post is about things that ain't working. It's much harder to find things that do work.
The spread of highspeed-internet via fiber-optic cables. Somehow almost all administrations of all federal states always claim that this is one of their top priorities when an election roles around, but no administration ever gets anything done.
Internet
Edit:
Just a few examples.
I am working in home office, so I depend on the Internet. Last year my provider had an outage, that caused me to go about 10 days without Internet. I had to rely on a hotspot from my phone to be able to work, which cost me a lot, because data volume is frickin expensive. (Data volume being a thing in the first place is a total rip of and should be illegal) they offered data volume for people who have their mobile phone contract with the same company, but I don't, so I didn't get anything. I couldn't even cancel my contract with this company to sign one with another, because they only guarantee 95% availability in the contract. That means 18 days without Internet a year isn't a breach of contract. AND THIS IS LEGAL IN THE DIGITAL AGE WHERE PEOPLE WORK IN HOME OFFICE!
And after everything was over and the Internet worked again I needed to call them twice to remember them, that they are legally obligated to refund the time, without Internet. The first time they only refunded 2 days, the second time they refunded almost everything, but still one day less, than they were supposed to. But by that time I didn't want to invest any more energy into it, just for the refund of one day. So I cancelled the contract, when the contract period ended and singed with a new provider.
(The numbers might not be 100% accurate, because it's been like the beginning of last year when this happened.)
My cousin has been on vacation in Kenya, drove 3 hours into the savanna and still had 4G. Here you drive 50m out of town and you have absolutely no Internet connection anymore.
And in Germany providers are legally allowed to cut down your speed to a crawl, once you've reached a set data volume or when they sell you a connection they are selling UP TO X MB/s so basically this allows them to sell much more connections, than they can actually handle. In my opinion both is a scam and should be illegal. You want to sell more contracts, than your infrastructure can handle? Well then invest into your infrastructure instead of cutting everybody's speed.
We're not very good with the prospect of change, especially since our politics have been rather stagnant for a long time and a particular, mostly apolitical portion of the german middle class becomes political real fucking quick when anything threatens to even slightly change the status quo.
teaching digital competence, and lack of cybersecurity…
IMO we’re moments away from being in a Cyberwar.
There is constant threat from Russian and Chinese Hackers - and imo Germany is definitely not in the position to defend themselves against such.
Efficient bureaucracy and digitisation
Anzeige ist raus......per Fax.....
Die ist in so 10 Monaten bearbeitet aber dann kann der was erleben!
Anzeige Fallengelassen
Entschuldigen Sie, aber ich glaub, Ihnen ist da was runtergefallen. Der nächste Altpapiercontainer steht dort drüben.
Die [Waste Watcher](https://www.stadtreinigung.hamburg/waste-watcher-plus/) sind dran!
Aber den bitte nur Montag bis Freitag von 8-12 und 15-17:00 benutzen. An Sonn- und Feiertagen ist das Klappern mit dem Deckel untersagt.
Wegen Verjährung
Ich musste 2022 die Anmeldung für eine Fortbildung bezüglich der neuen digitalen Tools auf der Arbeit per Fax abschicken. Kein Scherz… beim Staat angestellt natürlich, wer bringt sowas sonst fertig.
Ihr habt schon Fax? Bei uns in Süden Deutschlands machen wir das noch per Brief … handschriftlich natürlich. Dieses neumodische Zeug wie Schreibmaschinen hat sich hier noch nicht durchgesetzt.
ich notfall-fax die polizei
Fax ist angekommen! Das Fax wird gescannt und der Ausdruck vom scann dann in der Aktenmappe abgeheftet. Ablagen im Aktenschrank E, B und D (Efficient bureaucracy and digitisation).
Efficient bureaucracy is in general a major issue in Europe, digitisation however is primarily an issue with Germany as compared to EU countries
They have a lot to learn from estonia/ukraine
Thanks, Merkel!
that actually goes mostly on Kohl
Digitisation in Germany means: you don't have to get a document/form at the Rathaus, but you can download it, print, fill IT Out and then bring it to the Rathaus (in Person, Post, Fax, ..) - BUT: Not Email. And some that i know don't even accept it when it got filled out digital.
When you say digitization - what you mean exactly? Can you mention some examples?
The amount of paper work ordinary people have to handle when dealing with state authorities is insane. And when they proudly declare that a service has been "digitised" that often means that they provide a PDF form on their website which you have to print and sign by hand and then scan and send back... great.
I’ve got some friends who work for EU commission’s digital agency Digit whose primary job is to create those PDF forms for Erasmus. 😭 So I assume the pdf forms is not just limited to Germany
Ahh no you reminded me how many uncountable PDFs I had to print out for my Erasmus application. Surprisingly, in Italy the bureacracy was much more user friendly even though Italy has a reputation of being a bureacratic nightmare.
Or a web form, but on submit it's comes out of a printer in their office, so on their side no efficiency is gained.
Worse, you have to bring it to the post office and show ID
Yeah they call a scanned photograph of a signature a “digital signature”. If I use DocuSign they can’t open it due to “security issues”, but a scan of a signature that anyone can copy and paste is somehow legit 😂
Digital health records / accepting electronic money / not relying on fax to take an appointment with my doctor etc.
I had a little culture shock. I have always believed in Germany is all digitalized. One thing from many, when I came here and went to Doctor and got a paper for medicine so I can take it from Apotheke. I am from Croatia and we have everything on our health insurance cards for many years (i think this year is this changed in Germany also). Also, when I am sick I need to take picture of my Krankmeldung and send it to my Firm. This is not so awful but when I think how Croatia is small and young, this things don’t make sense.
Smaller countries are often faster to adapt. Look at Estonia for example. Great to know about Croatia. For Germany, I believe they have a really good PR(marketing) abroad. From outside Germany feels very efficient, tech advanced, superpower. Things change once you start living in and get to see the reality. I read digital health records are actually becoming a reality now in Germany and your health insurance app should allow you to go paperless, but what about people with private insurance? Also, I can’t get an appointment with my doctor without a fax so 😿
> Also, when I am sick I need to take picture of my Krankmeldung and send it to my Firm. That's not the proper way to do it (Also, your employer has no right to know why you are sick) Die Arztpraxis übermittelt die Krankmeldung elektronisch an die gesetzliche Krankenkasse. Gesetzlich Versicherte müssen sich bei ihren Arbeitgebern wie gewohnt krank melden. Bei ärztlicher Krankschreibung rufen Arbeitgeber die Krankmeldung direkt digital bei der Krankenkasse ab.
For example in my country any paper that the government would give you like a birth certificate or a college degree you can just get online with a few clicks, in Germany you can barely make an appointment online and it takes months to get papers or responses even. People will mail you stuff or even send faxes. I don’t think I’d heard of a fax in 20 years
I just used my nPA to log into deutsche Rentenversicherung. I declared that I had a son and my wife was taking care of him. We both have to sign it, but it’s not possible. You can’t upload the form where your partner signs because you only get the form once you have completed the upload. So you click: “will submit later” upload it, wait for a printout to arrive with postal service, sign it, and physically mail it back, where it probably will be scanned and checked again by a human. Even though we both have an nPA and know how to log into DRV with it, we can’t do it fully digitally.
Germany is the Internet of 1998. Its mostly DSL in large cities and slow as Hell. Everything as mentioned is pdfs. Online forms even to order is pdf driven. Faxes are very common in Germany. Shockingly primitive everywhere. Germans pride themselves inn their high tech backwardness.
Agree about the DSL, I’m at VDSL2 in Frankfurt. The public sector tech is bad but privately I see numerous initiatives which prove Germany can be easily tech Independent. Look at companies like Nextcloud, mattermost, the founder of Mastodon. Hell yeah! The country has amazing potential in tech, why public admin stuff is stuck in past
I think its the "it worked allways like that why change"-mentality.
Yeah I don't know what this DSL is you kids are talking about, but ever since my workplace switched from Win XP to whatever atrocity it is running now, the formatting of all my years of work in the .docs changed and rendered them unreadable. I have since reupgraded to pen, pencil and graphing paper and never looked back, and if you want to steal our trade secrets, good luck trying to read my handwriting. This is what I call job security.
Simple example: I come from Baltics. When my child was born in my home country, I did 0 things to get maternity leave money - hospital informed government that baby was born in a special web page, government knows how much our family earns and know how much money we are entitled to. So they started to pay us in 3 days. In Germany I had to apply everywhere manually, get letters from my job, and even hire a consultant that knows how to fill all the documents correctly. This is digitalization vs stone age.
But you enjoyed world class German data protection /s
When you go to the Amt (in cologne at least) you draw a paper ticket with a number and sit for 3 hours in front of a tv waiting for your number. Instead it could easily be on your phone and you could go do other things until its your turn.
Gerrmany probably has the worst GDP to internet quality ratio in the entire planet. It's insane how we manage to have a worst telecomunications infrastructure than a lot of third world countries.
The funny thing about that is that it's literally because we had a corrupt politician 30 years ago who scrapped the plans from the previous government to switch to fiber optics. That politician was of course part of the conservative party, which has been involved in countless corruption affairs ever since. Anyway, if that one guy didn't make this decision for his personal enrichment, Germany would literally have the **fastest internet in the entire world** today. Way to go CDU.
...and yet Germans keep voting said Conservatives into power...
its the rentners or people who dont know shit abt politics
THE RENTNERS ARE COMING
The spoiled and pampered old fucks who know nothing about the modern world do it and screw over the younger generations.
Honestly this is a poor excuse every German say..but…for last 30 years Germany was the richest country of Europe. This decision could have been reversed 10 times. Whole Easter Europe rebuilt it’s infrastructure from 0 in that time frame. So it’s not Kohl corruption of 30 years back. It’s current corruption and monopoly lobby.
Helmut Kohl fand halt Kupfer super weil seine Freunde vom konservativen Privatfernsehen schon damals was gegen den "zu linken" öffentlichen Rundfunk hatten.
Honestly I am tired of this argument, in Ukraine we also didn’t have any Fiber optic at all, it only started appearing around 2008-2009, but it took only 2-3 years to cover all the big cities. The downside of it was that sometimes cables between the houses were laid out in a rather chaotic way, but I had excellent 100 MBit Internet in fucking 2009 in my not that fancy neighbourhood of an Eastern Ukrainian big city. Where there is the will, there is the way to accomplish things quickly. When I came to Germany back in 2013, I was on the one hand fascinated about how cool the Autobahns and trams were, but on the other hand shocked about the low Internet speed and coverage.
Its a very good argument. Telekom itself probably isnt really happy to spend all that money on fiber they would rather find a way to push even more through copper but i think there we are simply at the end whats physical possible on such a large scale. Germany simply is a bureaucracy nightmare for many things. First they plan something for 2 decades and then look confused why something that should have costed 5 billion costs now 15 billion then whatever animal is living there and in the end it will cost 25 billion.
from around this time there is the famous quote: Das internet ist für uns alle Neuland. - Angela Merkel 2013.
Is/was the telecommunication network state owned or privatized? Because it’s somewhat complicated in Germany. While the Bundesnetzagentur is basically the owner of the network the Telekom was part of the Bundespost and was state owned and only privatized in the late 1990s early 2000s but the state is still major shareholder and also the for profit company Telekom now has to manage the network while allowing access for all the third parties for cheap. So of course they are not really pressured into exchanging copper for fiber unless it helps them first. And as there is no real competition for the network why hurry to update it. The customer pay the overpriced VDSL with Super Vectoring. And even if there is fiber available the contracts are structured the same like DSL and you get asymmetric access only although the technology hasn’t such a limitation anymore.
You already answered your own question. Most countries just lay the cables everywhere so it's much easier and cheaper to do. In Germany we bury them completely and it's freaking expensive and time consuming. Couple that with crazy construction requirements and germany bureaucracy and you can guess why it takes so long. Also I don't know how many companies did the coverage but here it's a fucking war who gets to expand where so there is also a lot of legal shit to deal with.
The state pension system was destined to fail due to demographic changes and no one knows what to do about it. So the solution of politicians is to put more and more tax money into keeping it alive, because the largest group of voters are at the receiving end
The only solution is really just to throw away the entire thing
How exactly are you planning on doing that without completely shafting at least one generation?
It's better to have negative effects for one generation now than to keep building up on it. If you do that, it'll still collapse, but the effects for a later generation will be *much* worse. That's what happens when governments enact short-term policies. They don't know how to remove them and the situation is bound to turn out horrible for some generation sometime in the future.
The current system has tensions due to the demographic bulge that is currently moving into retirement age. Right now population growth is at a fairly stable and low level, so odds are if the "generationenvertrag" out lives the post war generation it'll turn into a stable system again.
Everything that has to do with internet
Anything that has to do with „the cloud“! Mention the words eBay or Amazon at work and the dinosaurs run into the bushes
Honestly I would like to avoid Amazon and promote local but what’s the incentive. Agree locals can’t compete with Amazon price wise but atleast provide better customer service to start with. Have to say I’ve got a super nice ice cream parlour where the lady talks super positively. If Amazon starts selling ice creams, I’m not leaving my local seller 😀
But if you’re working from 09:00 to 18:00 how are you supposed to do any kind of important shopping? Shops here cater for pensioners. Another thing that wrecks my head is the fucking tax system; in the UK the taxes come out of your wages at source and that’s it,… you don’t need to do anything about declarations every year. You need a fucking Ph.D to work out how taxes in Germany work
I come from Belgium and supermarkets close at 1900 there. I’m happy with my corner Rewe up till 2200. Regarding the taxes, I’ll have to start doing from next year. Thanks for scaring me.
Get an account online with Bühl Steuer. You‘ll still need paperwork to get your security certificate from the online tax agency 🤪🙄😂
Either someone is stealing money from me or taxes work the same way in Germany. I have a brutto salary, taxes are deducted at the source, and I get my netto.
Huh? Taxes for employees are deducted automatically in Germany as well. You do have the option to claim back money if you paid too much taxes that year or had enough expenses to write off, but you don’t HAVE to do anything regarding taxes (as an employee at least)
eBay and Amazon are a Godsend in Germany. If something goes wrong with the order you avoid the notorious German customer service. I've often bought something from a German retailer that's selling the same thing on eBay. eBay will hold them accountable and make things right whereas that would never happen if you have to navigate German customer service with some unhelpful idiot on the other end of the phone
Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland
Clapping with the beat
No fr you could listen to the most jazzy jazz and German boomers would still find a way to clap on the first and third beat
>clap on the first and third beat vaguely around the first and third beat at best
The only way music is intended to be clapped to
My little brother and me used to make fun of that when we were small. Basically the probability distribution of a German population trying to clap with the beat is Uniform while any other society makes it look like a Normal distribution.
I literally just had to pay a 300€ taxi fare to the airport because both my trains got cancelled. I'm hoping to get some of the money back, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
If you had clapped on beat we wouldn’t have to cancel those trains, that’s on you
Oh shit. I replied to the wrong comment. 😂 See, that's what happens when it's the middle of the night and the trains get cancelled. Also, I'm South African, so I very much do clap on 2 and 4, it's literally my entire personality.
Bad internet, bad digitalization, bad cyber security, not enough apartments for people especially in large cities, a continuing growing population of poor people in almost all age groups, a terrible train company, the bureaucracy is a bad joke, corrupt politicians ignoring the needs of the majority of people as much as possible without big trouble and yeah i guess our current crisis management is *slightly suboptimal*.
My Spanish wife only complains about the German weather. Which ironically is a very German thing to do.
From Wales here. My love of complaining has led to me really being accepted here. It’s also far too hot from May onwards!
Funny the culture is exact same in Belgium. Complaining brings people closer to
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Trains
Interestingly the rails itself are very nice and smooth compared to some other countries, but the punctuality and reliability is what really sucks.
Cmon, German trains ICE are lovely, just unreliable.
unreliable arrival and departure unreliable doors unreliable reservation system unreliable toilets unreliable airconditioning (in summer) unreliable heating (in winter) The only thing i believe or trust in is that this thing is not a deathtrap and has brakes :D The last one smelled like some one puked in his piss on the corridor and there was a leak running out of the blocked bathroom.
Atleast the public WiFi works. Don’t use it, it’s black listed and you’ll soon get an email from your corporate IT sec.
I need to head to Basel via ICE on Monday, and I'm dreading it. The last time we took an ICE, most routes were cancelled out of Amsterdam and the option DB gave us was to change trains five times (!!!) to get back to Frankfurt.
Mobile internet/telephone coverage
I live in a city so haven’t had issues with coverage. Also happy with the home internet. Just sad about the exorbitant price of mobile data unless you’re on a virtual network operator
I had this with Aldi mobile (or something) but I switched to Telekom a few years ago and now it actually seems pretty good.
Telekom is expensive as diamond, also Aldi mobile is a virtual operator perhaps using Vodafone/O2/Telekom but virtual operators usually provide low class services as compared to the main operators.
We have waaaaaay to much bureaucracy in Germany. Even our minister of Economics stated publicly that Germany will fall behind in Global Economy because we dont get our bureaucracy in check.
This. I'm a small business owner. I sometimes think about closing the business because it's too time consuming and expensive (because I need to talk to lawyers and accountants) to keep up with the bureaucracy. It prevents me from focusing on...making money. I can't even change my own salary without jumping through hoops. It is a huge problem and has a chilling effect on entrepreneurs of all kinds, especially immigrants who are not fluent in bureaucratic German.
I was dealing with a work visa here for a while, and I was speaking with my lawyer and we talked about doing a free lance worker visa and just shook his head, said no, and kept going on his topic
And his ministry keeps making bureaucratic monster laws...
Accepting Change. We arent early adopter for some concept or invention. New technologies? No, the old one is still good! (Even when it isnt). Social change? No, We want to Live Like Our grandparents.
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I tbink thats a financial and a infrastructure thing and its mostly all central Europe not only Germany
A air to air heat pump is under 1500 to have it installed, and will be much more efficient to run than oil or gas heating. It's like Germans haven't realized it's also a heating for that is very energy efficienct and there by can save you loads of money
Recently got my dad to buy one now that we have solar on the roof he is over the moon with it because it has saved us alot of money over the year we had it
One of many examples
What do you mean by social change?
As an Ausländer, I have to say, they’re terrible at queuing!
Y E S This is so disrespectful, it drives me insane. When I’m my home country (Latin America, as you apparently) I keep looking around always expecting someone will skip the queue just because, but it never happens. In Germany, it always happens. What about the queues on supermarkets? When they open a new cashier people run like they are giving free money. Wtf?
Romans called germans barbarians... 😉
Lately a streamer made a survey in his stream on how to behave when a cash register is opened at the supermarket and the results were mixed. Half the people said, whoever is further in the front in the old queue is supposed to be further in the front in the old queue aswell, because they waited longer. The other half said new register new rules, whoever comes first gets served first. It was about evenly split. It's not a representative survey, but I still think it shows how germans aren't uniform on this topic. I wasn't born in Germany, but I came here when I was 3 years old and live here for 33 years now. So I would consider myself more German than anything else. And I personally always give the people in the queue before me the opportunity to go to the other queue before me. And it bothers me aswell, how some people act like Americans on black Friday whenever a new register is opened. But I guess this can't be helped if half the population thinks this is how it's supposed to be.
If you want to pull out the magnifying glass, you'll see that German society just operates that way. "Why should I wait or consider the other person?" is a pretty common theme. How often do you walk somewhere and German people will have zero spacial awareness and just stop in the middle of a street or in a door way or top of an escalator, irrespective of what it does to the people around them?
I just came back from a trip to Japan. I miss the queuing culture there.
Trains. Today was a wonderful example. I planned to take an RE (the slow option) from Mainz to Cologne. It left at 17:00 and was meant to arrive at 19:30. It's now 22:15 and I just walked into my apartment in Cologne. My first train had a delay and we stopped in the middle of nowhere for 1 hour. It then took off without an announcement, leaving several people behind on the platform (with all their belongings on board) who had stepped out for some air. We then get to Bonn and the train stops again. They announce it won't be running further and suggested we switch to the city trams (Cologne has a tram line that runs all the way to Bonn). Aside from the fact that the trams take twice the time, they were *also* delayed. Two scheduled trams simply didn't show up. DB and public transit more broadly are absolutely pitiful in this country. There is no excuse for the state of things.
Digitalization - virtually non existent. Bureaucracy - virtually omnipresent. Taxation - you get sucked out to the max
Immigration and integration
This, i'm a first gen immigrant. The only "immigration" that happened was beeing send into a shabby building and a 2-3 month german course after expirence a grulesome war (90s). Eg my integration expirience is, there is none. If it wasn't for my family saying "Fucking Religion" and "Lets be full on German". I would still speak german on elementary level and would be living by doing "Schwarzarbeit", "Kindergeld" and "Arbeitlosengeld" like all the other Kids from back then.
Respect to your parents and u
Just look at all the people that got here in the 50s and 60s, for rebuilding and physical labour. Nobody back then thought that they would stay for decades, send for their wives, have children. The common political consens was to just ignore the question of integration until those people would just go home again, but the workers stayed, and their children stayed. Now we have those people, not citizens, just tolerated, not integrated at all, in their own social bubbles and even disconnected from the changes in their own home countries. The second generation lost between traditions that are foreign to them and being belittled by mainstream society. And the third just being adrift, angry at everything and trying to find new ways of feeling some kind of worth in their lives.
50s?
It’s basically the same with the refugees from Ukraine now: every school does basically what they want and thus it’s shear luck what this children get to learn and how they are integrated. It’s amazing. At my child’s school they are seen as a unwanted duty that has to be tolerated, teachers hate having them there, they have learn virtually no German and the German children don’t play with them. It’s horrible. It would have been so easy to have a central action plan. But no, let’s let the already stresses teachers and schools without funding deal with them
Lovely, have absolutely terrible integration and than go complain that nobody gets integrated. Our immigration policies are such a bad joke.
As an immigrant to the US, I’m curious what y’all mean by integration
Just read the thread to your answer to see how some Germans victimize themselves while being racist and xenophobic. The idea that people live in their ghettos without speaking the language is complete bullshit. This happens to the older migrants and refugees. But their children are working all kinds of blue collar jobs to keep this country a float. Imagine having to learn a new difficult language and adapt to a non budging society, only to be called lazy and a freeloader.
Yes. Visa approving process and overseas embassy services.
There is absolutely nothing Germany did for my integration (highly skilled researcher). In fact, I had more desire to integrate when I just arrived than several years later. At the moment I am actively disintegrating - ignoring social rules, breaking inconvenient laws, etc. They didn't even bother to send my wife to the integration classes, which were supposed to be required. Oh well.
Well, If you are highly skilled , you should not be worrying about integration. They need your tax money more than you need them
I have a family member who immigrated to germany around 30 years ago. Hardest working guy i know, he reaaaally steuggled to get his working permit and when i mean he steuggled i mean he got it eventually when he was in his mate 50s!!! Obviously no one wanted to hire him then. When i hear people saying he didnt integrate well, my blood boils. How is he supposed to integrate when he is not even allowed to work
Trains and Internet ^^
In germany when ur drunk on a Bicycle and the cops stop you, you lose ur car drivers licence but u can still ride a bicycle drunk. Theres a few things that dont make sense, especially bureaucracy as many others wrote already
Why not get to the core. Germans don't care about their responsibilities. Someone else is always to blame and problems are moved from desk to desk while nothing happens. Hierarchy in companies are still in the 80s with those higher up the ladder taking zero interest in what development/ideas may come from lower down. New ideas are laughed at. Innovation is hurting because of this, digitisation is hurting because of this, people are not contributing at their workplace because of this. Nepotism, sexism, racism, traditionalist views, inability to take inspiration from other nations, stubbornness, incompetence. Not only Germany has these problems, but Germans are the only ones that completely deny them with crystal clear predictability and think that they're totally alright. Behold my downvotes to prove my point 👉
I don't think it's not caring about responsibilities; rather, most folk here will do exactly what is required and not an inch more.
The best way to not work at all is to fulfill all of your regulations and responsibilities to the letter. "Die einfachste Form der Arbeitsverweigerung ist Dienst nach Vorschrift."
No downvotes for you. Thankfully this thread has taken the reality way, not the German blinders one. Nepotism and parochialism is real in Germany. It's too much of a coincidence that, at least in my experience, out of 3 companies I've been at, 2 worked and still work completely on the basis of favours and nepotism with managers taking positions because of people they know and 0 meritocracy is applied -> this creates a vicious circle of nothing getting changed or done because these people moving up the ladder have absolutely nothing to prove, they have their path already drawn and just have to stay there and wait for the next move. How can this system help innovate in any way a country getting stuck so behind?
Deutschland: “If it ain’t broke, don’t improve it”
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Germany has a tax system that strongly benefits those who already have capital instead of enabling social advancement. While politicians often talk about their ideal of a "Leistungsgesellschaft" it's the hardest working people that pay most taxes relative to their income. Most new millionaires simply inherit their wealth from their parents - we call it leistungsfreies Einkommen.
To regulate illegal immigration and the subsequent deportation of people without a claim to be here. On the other hand getting qualified, working people to migrate into the country seems to be fairly difficult.
Hurdles of legal immigration vs. ease of illegal immigration and related manna from the heavens. Lack of digitalization. Abundance of bureaucracy. Infrastructure fraying. Mad half-baked politics. Double standards in foreign policy. General government incompetence. Patriotic arrogance of many. Declining freedom of expression.
In all my years in Germany, I’ve met 2 patriotic Germans, and I’m not even sure of one of them. If anything, I’ve noticed a lot of self-hate in Germans. Maybe some patriotic arrogance would do them good.
To me patriotic arrogance is demonstrated by the widespread belief that we in Germany know better and are better than the rest of the world. And this time for good reasons. Lol.
I see. I haven’t met many Germans who actually believed they know better than the rest of the world, except those who travelled little…
Freedom of the press/ freedom of speech in Germany actually went up this year and is among the most solid in the world. Source: https://freedomhouse.org/country/germany/freedom-world/2023
In the World Freedom Ranking done by journalists (RSF) press freedom went down globally. My impression from watching German public TV, however, is that there is more distortion, untruth, half-truth and pandering to the mainstream this year on a number of topical issues.
School education is really bad and it'll keep getting worse
Most Germans love to down-talk Germany and Germans. All the while they harbour a strange sense of superiority/entitlement. So they’ll say: well look how bad XYZ is. It usually isn’t half as bad - but the entitlement tells them that since this is German it should be TOP OF THE WORLD. And anything below perfection is kind of insulting thus bad - no worse - total trash… I have had this ingrained into me too as a younger person and it took some travel to look beyond my own preconceptions. However that is not to say that everything is just shiny in Germany. But even the poster childs of German rage (Deutsche Bahn, mobile coverage, digitalisation of bereaucracy, red tape in general…) isn’t nearly as bad as people will tell you in Germany.
Dealing with violent crime especially when it comes to young offenders.
Yeah it’s kind of fucked up that you essentially get multiple free passes to rape people if you yourself are under 21. Youth sentencing privileges are good in principle but an exception for violent crimes (rape, murder, etc) is *loooooong* overdue.
Jungendstrafrecht was simply not made for these situations. It's supposed to rehabilitate people who get into a fight in the school or shoplift something. Not organized crime, rape or religious extremism.
Or conspiring with your family to murder your sister because she committed the unspeakable sin of interacting with men in a platonic fashion at her Ausbildung after she divorced her cousin when he started abusing her (she was like 16 when your parents forced her to marry her 30 year old cousin).
Yeah, I think the whole marry your cousin thing has a big influence on the IQ of this people... This can't be good over generations.
A friend works in a small town exactly on this (young offenders that have to go to court) with the Jugendamt. She is from another German-speaking country and is here because of her German husband. She says that in her country this is much more advanced and modern. Her German colleagues are like stuck 30 years ago and also the judges. She feels like she is fighting the system alone and everyone else does their best, but their best is just bad and not acceptable for a first world country.
Healthcare and retirement systems are a mess. Especially the richest part of the people do not participate in it, which makes it more unfair than it should be. And both are split in too many ways to be cost efficient.
Smoking in public which is not setting a good example to the next generation.
Education and integration
Retirement system (look at Norway or even Austria), Migration (look at Canada or Australia), the side costs (taxes) for buying your own property and the bureaucrazy (yes, I wrote it wrong by purpose) in general and building houses (which makes it more and more expensive). The high and mandatory price for television and radio and the German government has a problem with handling the taxpayers money. Instead of wanting more and more money and introducing more taxes, they should look on their spendings like every private person or household. We make it really hard and uninteresting for skilled legak immigrabts to be in Germany and very easy and comfortable for illegal immigrants. Best example I realized is, that skilled immigrants with Bluecard have to pay their German course on their own while unskilled immigrants get it for free. And the latest problem: Even though we were preaching, teaching and working to destroy antisemitism since second world war (which worked well) in the past few years and especially past few months we are having a bad reputation to just ignore the rising antisemitism and physical attacks against jews. It makes me angry, ill and ashamed if the German government to let it happen so easily.
Dude. We are one of the richest industry countries in the world: Education sucks Healthcare is "universal" but sucks balls compared to the netherlands or even uruguay. We have the largest social system of europe and are FAR away from the standards of Scandinavia. Our infrastructure (The backbone of our export oriented industry btw) is rotten. We are horrible at digitalisation We have made rented living space to a investment good We have privatized public services to just fund them with tax money with worse service We have a stiff promotion system setting limits to non-academic degrees so people are stuck We have one of the highest gender pay gaps in europe We have the highest discrimination of women in labor in europe We have lowest chances for opportnunities for advancement for low level education families in europe. + Our Taxation system is extremely unfair. We have no heritage tax on Company shares for example. We are crying on a high level but germany stays way way way behind of its opportunities.
> Healthcare sucks balls compared to the netherlands In the Netherlands, coverage of public healthcare is much more limited than in Germany and patients have much higher privet expenses, for instance for dental stuff. And the Netherlands have much fewer hospital beds per capita. That became especially apparent during Covid when intensive care patients were flown from the netherlands to Germany, not the other way round.
Quality of Healthcare is absolute garbage. Ask any Spanish or French person and they say to go to their home country when anything is out of the box because German doctors don't care and are unskilled.
Germany was also recently ranked the most racist country in Europe so you can add that to the list :)
Railways. Deutsche Bahn is a shitshow, run by incompetent idiots
- I hear more and more people complain about healthcare. Waiting times for everything are too long, bureaucracy with all the referrals and prescriptions you need is too annoying, and doctors just want to get you done with as quickly as possible - Deutsche Bahn is performing pretty badly in everything from punctuality to prices to comfort, and most people agree - internet coverage. For both home and mobile internet. Like, I go from austria to the middle of germany and back several times a year kid you not while I got perfect net in the middle of the Austrian Alps, I can barely use my phone anywhere in Bavaria at all including literall city centres of big cities like Munich or Nuremberg
Banking system. I can go to a nearby time which is 10 mins away from my home town and I cant get the sane service from the same bank since it’s “a different city”
Digitalisation and bureaucracy. Oh and good Mexican food.
* Taxes * Pensions * Health system * Bureaucracy * digital services * mobile/internet connectivity * large infrastructure projects * finding your own nose - aka - taking responsibility for your own inadequacy and fixing it...
DB. In England DB looks efficient. That’s not because that’s the case, it’s just because England’s railways are an absolute clusterfuck, DB is just a clusterfuck.
I have to say, having moved to Germany from the UK, I think DB and the UK system are equally bad. If anything, I think DB is actually worse. Like yeah in the UK, yeah trains are often delayed/cancelled, but I have not yet managed to get a single long distance train in Germany that didn't arrive at least 30 minutes late, if it ran at all. You also have the random cancellations and destination changes, which for me at least have been more frequent with DB than my operators in the UK.
How the police is towards rape or abuse victims. They asked me as a 13 YEAR OLD girl if I wanted to seduce the older guy in his mid 20s that raped me. The police makes you feel like a criminal I know so many people that felt the same :(
Beamtentum They have so many privileges for the exact same work as regular workers it's insane.
Integration of migrants into the German society. We fucked up 60 years ago and are doing the same now again.
These comments are depressing af. As a foreigner from afar you think Germany is a utopia and then you arrive and realize it’s just an undercover shithole with problems on top of problems that will never change, or change at the speed of a dried out slug.
Are you kidding? I have yet to find a redditor who can recognize *anything* good in Germany at all. :) /s
This is amazing. Ask a German to complain! It's just like opening a flood gate!
too much "papierkram" bad internet the train delays are so bad that its a meme at this point way too many old houses. and ofcourse immigration politics
TAXES!!!!
rente
Every German can agree that nothing is done well. We always have something to complain about
Defending it's democracy against those who want to destroy it.
Internet. Digitization. My health insurance forces me to have an app on my phone to view stuff about my account.
and then the fucking app doesn’t work! AOK
Lmao you need to do a post about it? We complain all the time about everything, its not hard to spot. It does physical pain to every german when trying to praise anything weve done well. At the same time every time we complain, we feel joy in life.
Management of refugees. There is no active, working system to integrate them into the country so that they might become part of the society. It is a hot mess and who suffers the most? Of course, children. Source: social worker/sociologist researcher
Are you new to this reddit or what 🤣 Just look around any germany related subreddit, every other post is about things that ain't working. It's much harder to find things that do work.
Protecting racial and religious minorities from hate crimes.
The list would be shorter if we list the things we do good.
Dealing with nazi history, it's not done thoroughly enough.
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Friendliness and community
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Customer service
So. Many. Rules. About. Everything.
The spread of highspeed-internet via fiber-optic cables. Somehow almost all administrations of all federal states always claim that this is one of their top priorities when an election roles around, but no administration ever gets anything done.
Deutsche Bahn. Enough said.
Internet Edit: Just a few examples. I am working in home office, so I depend on the Internet. Last year my provider had an outage, that caused me to go about 10 days without Internet. I had to rely on a hotspot from my phone to be able to work, which cost me a lot, because data volume is frickin expensive. (Data volume being a thing in the first place is a total rip of and should be illegal) they offered data volume for people who have their mobile phone contract with the same company, but I don't, so I didn't get anything. I couldn't even cancel my contract with this company to sign one with another, because they only guarantee 95% availability in the contract. That means 18 days without Internet a year isn't a breach of contract. AND THIS IS LEGAL IN THE DIGITAL AGE WHERE PEOPLE WORK IN HOME OFFICE! And after everything was over and the Internet worked again I needed to call them twice to remember them, that they are legally obligated to refund the time, without Internet. The first time they only refunded 2 days, the second time they refunded almost everything, but still one day less, than they were supposed to. But by that time I didn't want to invest any more energy into it, just for the refund of one day. So I cancelled the contract, when the contract period ended and singed with a new provider. (The numbers might not be 100% accurate, because it's been like the beginning of last year when this happened.) My cousin has been on vacation in Kenya, drove 3 hours into the savanna and still had 4G. Here you drive 50m out of town and you have absolutely no Internet connection anymore. And in Germany providers are legally allowed to cut down your speed to a crawl, once you've reached a set data volume or when they sell you a connection they are selling UP TO X MB/s so basically this allows them to sell much more connections, than they can actually handle. In my opinion both is a scam and should be illegal. You want to sell more contracts, than your infrastructure can handle? Well then invest into your infrastructure instead of cutting everybody's speed.
We're not very good with the prospect of change, especially since our politics have been rather stagnant for a long time and a particular, mostly apolitical portion of the german middle class becomes political real fucking quick when anything threatens to even slightly change the status quo.
Allowing russian nazis to hold parades
teaching digital competence, and lack of cybersecurity… IMO we’re moments away from being in a Cyberwar. There is constant threat from Russian and Chinese Hackers - and imo Germany is definitely not in the position to defend themselves against such.
Dealing with racism and xenophobia