this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
844 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
7113 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh, everyone who ever travels by train in Europe will tell you that the German infrastructure is very much broken. You're lucky if your delay is less than a day travelling through Germany.
Afaik Deutsche Bahn loses 5 mil a day: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-same-daily-misery-germanys-terrible-trains-are-no-joke-for-a-nation-built-on-efficiency
Germany doesn't really seem like a very efficient country, they still use fax for things and every person has to manage like 10,000 different insurances for everything. Seems like an old (and inaccurate) ww2 trope.
I have no doubt their bureaucrats perform world-class efficiency in their handing out, filling in, faxing and archiving a sophisticated system of paper forms.
I guess it's the trap of getting complacent and stopping modernizing as soon as you've convinced yourself you have the best system in the world.
It's more that the bureaucracy is so complex and fragmented that it's incredibly hard to digitalize. Lots of small fiefdoms that are entitled to make IT purchasing decisions themselves means paper is the only universal interchange format. In addition there is an unwillingness to change how things have always been done, or to simplify procedures. So there you have it: The German bureaucracy is too fat to move.
I work for german government agencies from time to time and they are working on it... It's just really slow because there is so much of it, and due to organizational overhead. Also, there is not a single push for the entirety of Germany, but some things everyone does for themselves.
He's actually German.