In Estonia virtually every process is digitized | Hacker News Reader

In Estonia virtually every process is digitized

fortune.com

137 pointsbreck96 comments

Meanwhile, Germany is moving in the opposite direction. Taxes are increasing and now Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world (according to OECD). and freelancers here can't even work without a tax advisers who will manage all their taxes, because the system is so complicated. Mobile internet is extremely expensive. Just one day of using mobile internet in Germany will cost you more than a a whole month mobile internet in Ukraine... everything is very bureaucratic and a lot of paper work is required on every corner. and don't forget, there are more than 300000 laws and rules for everything. I can keep this list forever, but after all, I think I should just move to Estonia, because Germany is definitely not for me.

Sounds a lot like Spain, rules and paperwork. Taxes are lower but so crappy that even with an accountant you often pay the weirdest things and cannot declare many of the legitimate expenses you might have so in the end I pay as much as I did in NL.

The Estonia e-residency is very good for ‘nomads’ ; if you travel a lot (say you do not reside in one country 6 months + 1 days and (but this is debatable somehow) are not in a country more than 60 days continues, you can have a company in Estonia and declare tax for that company there. Which is to say, no tax until you take money out. If you don’t travel like that it is far more complex.

Spain is not nearly as complicated for a freelance. The problem in Spain is that the administration is a disaster in the "customer care" level. Also, every time a new technology appears they have to open a process for companies to bid (basically because their own IT dept is totally overloaded and I highly doubt they are keeping up with technologies) and do whatever is needed, but it's at least one year cycle.

They try to make everything anti-cheat, but in the end cheaters cheat anyway, and in the process they make everything slow and painful.

It's not moving in the other direction. In fact there's a clear political consensus among the parties (probably) making up the next government that "digitization" should be one of the main foci of attention going forward. Particularly the liberal parties of course (Greens, FDP), but the CDU seem to also fancy this newfangled internet-thingy. Fifteen years late, but moving in the right direction.

I have the feeling this is generally true in the other conservative parts of the EU as well. Eyes are very much on Estonia in the EU for this reason. It's all very sluggish, but the wheels are starting to turn, I think.

Knowing Germany, the transition will probably be 10 years long, because everything has to be 100% perfect and 99.8% ist außerhalb der Fehlermarge!

And yet.. Germany has probably the most successful economy in the world. I guess being friendly to startups and freelancers just ain't that important?

What metric are you using to measure successful?

High productivity, huge trade surplus, low unemployment, very high standard of living

Huge trade surplus (and resulting low unemployment) is effect of the euro, which is undervalued for Germany (and overvalued for most of the eurozone).

Germany sure is nice country to live in, but it benefits a lot at the expense of others.

average and peak developer income would be a good metric.

>Germany has probably the most successful economy in the world

Nope. Not even in the EU. Not even close. Where does this myth come from? Is it that it has passed the UK per capita?

I mean, there are loads of nice things about Germany, and economic strength is one, but that's a wild exaggeration.

Well, it's the biggest capital exporter in the world (huge surplus) and is the third largest exporter in total. It's also got the highest GDP in the EU by a fair margin.

Per-capita in the EU is skewed by a fair number of very small but very very rich countries. Luxembourg, the leader, being a tax haven and a population of half a million (!!) does not make it the healthiest and best economy.

Total GDP is irrelevant to everything. People use it like it means something, and it's just annoying.

Ok, that's quite convenient. What metric would you use? Because Germany has a higher GDP per capita than the UK or France. It would be a hard point to argue that any other country in the EU has a stronger economy than those three.

There's no reliable indicator to define success. GDP per capita is skewed heavily by some industries and doesn't represent how well people are doing.

Germany is certainly not the richest country in Europe but it has been one of the most successful when measured vs. 15 years ago. But that was achieved mainly by keeping wages low so that Germans, while usually living comfortably and not threatened by unemployment, have much less wealth than people in the UK or US.

If you have BMW, VW, Daimler, Siemens, Bosch and Liebherr, you can afford not being friendly to startups. Until the next market turn or a disruptive tech makes those irrelevant.

True. They try to fish startup founders by running corporate incubators but they will make sure that you won‘t get a high exit. If the idea works you‘ll get a job offer. If you decline, they will drop support like a hot potato. And because they know all insights, no other competitor is interested in you anymore. It‘s kind of a faux startup culture just to sell some „coolness“ to attract people to big corps.

Not sure. I've heard from a lot of start ups recently moving from London to Berlin. I doubt many start ups have the complexity of the tax system high up on their list. It's about finding talent (where Berlin improved a lot over recent years) and to some degree costs (where parts of London have become extremely expensive).

But it's probably mostly network effects. The US has an extremely complex tax code and SV is one of the most expensive places to live. It still remains a favourite among founders.

Having countries peg their currencies to yours certainly helped: http://fortune.com/2014/10/22/why-germany-is-the-eurozones-b... , meanwhile the other Euro countries are suffering. Even freaking Finland.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/greece...

Successful yes. Harmful and not very sustainable for everyone. Absolutely.

I'm a freelancer in Germany and I only have to pay two kind of taxes, income tax and turnover tax.

And Rundfunkbeitrag, Krankenversicherung, Pflegeversicherung, Kapitalertragssteuer, Kirchensteuer, Gewerbesteuer (if you have a LLC (UG, GmbH)...

I concur with parent.

Health insurance: if you're freelance, your health insurance is preferably private (cheaper) and you're free to cancel it if you please.

Capital gains: is for speculations, can choose to "be a saver not a gambler".

Church tax: is for church members, don't join.

Gewerbesteuer: is for LLC/Ltd/GmbH/UG etc --- not for freelancers/Freiberufler

Pflege: never joined that in my whole life. Seems to be optional then.

Rundfunk: this becomes an issue when you register as a resident or fail to deregister as a resident. Now, not being registered as a resident while residing qualifies as "offense"/"misdemeanor" (Ordnungswidrigkeit), not as a crime, last I checked =) (I registered though, when I moved back here after years abroad. Though in retrospect, I have no idea why I did --- for someone who never makes it to the voting booth, all it gives you is GEZ hassles.)

You should talk to a tax laywer

> Health insurance: if you're freelance, your health insurance is preferably private (cheaper) and you're free to cancel it if you please.

No, having health insurance has been mandatory in Germany since 2007. You're free to switch providers, or go from private to public insurance, but you can't just cancel it and go without insurance.

I stand corrected.

The first one is a fee for TV and I haven't heard of anyone who needed an accountant for this. The second and third are health insurance which you should have in every country. The German system of paying for that is not more complicated than some single payer systems such as the UK (NI contributions).

Church tax is automatically deducted with the other taxes. It's collected alongside other taxes and you don't have to file separately for this.

The corporate tax code is certainly not the easiest but common for most countries of the world.

I'd totally agree that German taxes are complicated but the number of taxes to pay says nothing about the complexity. Neither does it say anything about digitisation.

I don't have to pay Gewerbesteuer, Kirchensteuer or Kapitalertragsteuer.

Also, Rundfunkbeitrag, Krankenversicherung and Pflegeveraicherung aren't taxes.

> and freelancers here can't even work without a tax advisers who will manage all their taxes, because the system is so complicated.

Basically everybody with more than a minimum wage job in the US needs this kind of help, and regulatory (actually congressional) capture by the two giants Intuit and H&R Block mean that any efforts to fix this are squelched.

People forget that Germany was still reverberating from its own bounce-back for many years. Now it's bogged down by immigration and currency woes.

As for Estonia.. here's a golden ticket to make international internet income + low cost of living. Not to mention Talinn is charming.

I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world. The closest I can find is the tax as a percentage of GDP and, in that listing, they are 13th.

I'm interested in reading more/a list of the highest taxed nations as a way to easily counter the claim that the US is the highest taxed. Do you have a link/citation, so that I can verify that?

I think the general notion on such lists is that you can think of numerous different ways to rate how highly taxed in nation is. You can therefore come up with many different lists that have different countries in the top few positions. Simply pulling out a well-chosen list allows one to make the claim that a country to be criticized is the highest taxed.

I'd also like to see such a list, but with several different measures of highly taxed, and some plausibly unbiased attempt to aggregate them together. I am curious how the overall taxation compares among countries.

If you're in the US, you probably pay a much lower percentage than you do in many other nations. That much I can establish.

Wikipedia has some good tables but, like you suggest, compiling that data is not that easy due to biases. There are also different names for the taxes, different categories, differences in reporting, etc... About all I can conclude is that I don't pay much, compared to what I'd pay elsewhere, in taxes.

I actually don't mind paying taxes. I do mind how the money is spent, but that veers into a digression and politics. So, I'll skip that for today.

Wouldn't the correct thing be to find some list that just tracks the final tax to each individual, averaged and bucketed over some range of income, ignoring individual reasons for taxes?

It doesn't immediately seem that difficult for a group to gather, if they're interested in declaring average tax by country; and it seems like an interesting enough question that someone should have done it by now

Check how much unmarried singles have to pay.

http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I6

Germany 39%

USA 26%

The early time in life when you build the foundation for your financial freedom. In Germany you won’t get the chance. You will be conditioned to pay into all the nice, costly systems that mathematically will fail due to shrinking population and longer life spans (medical/care costs) long time before you will be able to get „something back“

Hmm... I'm not sure 'unmarried singles' equates to 'secind highest taxed in the world.' That's a rather small category? As a percent of GDP, it is pretty far down the list of the countries they include.

We here in the US enjoy very, very low taxation. What is strikingly odd, to me, is that many of my fellow citizens believe we are taxed at comparably high rates.

At any rate, I'm still not able to find anything that puts Germany at the top, even for corporate/business taxes. It looks like some of the Scandinavian countries are pretty find of taxation, though they do enjoy quite a few benefits from that system.

Edited to clear up some verbiage.

Sort the table. Germany is second.

Yes, I see that. It's second in a very narrow category that I'm not sure equates to 'the entire world' when talking about general taxation. The OP didn't state that "German single people are taxed at the second highest rate in the entire world."

So, while it's interesting, that's not really the same as what the OP suggested.

It is, as I pointed out: Everyone starts as single, unmarried person with 0 children. It's the time in your life when you make the big decisions, take high risks, maybe get high returns.

1. If you cannot save enough money to buy a condo, you will probably run into financial problems once/if you marry and grow your family. It's easy as that. Having children ist one of the top reasons to become poor in Germany. You add additional costs and risks to your life. Sure you pay much less taxes then but you already have a tight income situation (child care is expensive).

2. In the US the usual wages in IT are much higher. Let's say 75-150.000. Minus 26% taxes. You can easily save a lot of money in 5-10 years if you live a modest lifestyle. Compound interest/index ETF savings plan. Simple math.

Hmmm, it is a completely different situation, normally in the US someone that is in IT also has a huge college/university debt that he/she should re-pay.

And besides - probably not so relevant when you are young and fit - somehow you have to consider the social assistance (healthcare before anything else) that Germany (or most EU countries) offers to their citizens (compared to the US provided ones, which is - I believe - 0 or nearly 0).

Before or later you won't probably be a single, unmarried person with 0 children, and I believe that "social" states such as Germany offer a number of advantages when it comes to children's costs, so a good "tactic" would be:

1) be born in Germany

2) study there (for free or almost free)

3) as soon as you are fit to earn a decent wage, emigrate somehow to the US getting a highly paid job in IT

4) stay there for ten years or so, living modestly so that you can maximize your savings

5) when the time comes for marriage, go back to Germany (hopefully in the meantime you will have enough experience as to find easily a well paid IT job there too)

6) get the "social" provisions and benefits that Germany offers you and your family (at the cost of a higher than US taxation level)

Yes. That's how I would do it, if I were 18-20 again. :(

I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second highest taxed country in the world.

They got it from the same place they found out they found that Germany also had "more than 300000 laws and rules for everything". You know, the "it feels like it must be so, therefore it might as well be so" place.

Still very strange that they even claimed the citation came from a very specific source. I'm mostly just curious, at this point.

Also, if we count all the various regulations, even at just the Federal level, I'm pretty sure that '300000' is not actually a big number. The US tax code is larger than that.

But, hey! It looks like a big scary number. So, there's that.

Luckily they can just walk across a couple of open borders to Estonia. Is that right? That must place a cap on how bad an EU country can get since it's competing with the others for citizens.

A couple of years ago, my friend bought... IIRC, a 40 MB wireless connection to his and his partner's new second, weekend home in the Eifel Mountains of Germany. (There was no reasonable wired option.)

I forget the exact details, but again IIRC it was well under 100 € / month (40?, 60?) and unmetered.

I was jealous.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but it fell into my mental category of "Europeans now getting a lot more and better connectivity for a lot less".

Contrasted with a decade or two earlier, when telecom prices over there seemed to be quite relatively high (compared to the U.S.).

P.S. Pinged him to check the details.

The article positions the Estonian ID number as something magical and superior to SSN. In reality, out of the 11 symbols, 6 are governed by your date of birth and another one denotes the gender, and out of the remaining four one is a checksum digit.

The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information, so you can't get a loan on your neighbours name just because you caught a glimpse of his passport.

Sure, but isn't it interesting that freaking ESTONIA has been a forefront thinking country when it comes to tech-as-right country?

FFS - I live and only have ever worked in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even get freaking DSL for five years after it was invented in San Jose!

No, it's not. Baltics got their independence in 1991 and they had to re-build a lot of infrastructure rendering it more modern.

Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.

It's the other way around. Remember, countries pay for R&D independent of the number of people in it, but they only get taxes relative to their population. So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT or deal with worse systems.

What's going on is larger counties made the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to learn from.

  So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT

That... or just import IT that was already developed elsewhere.

Let's be frank, R&D costs are not the problem here.

Nobody sells 100% of IT in a box for an arbitrary country, off the self, zero customization required. Now, they can import things like operating systems, routers, word processors, etc, but so can large counties. And even then localization may not work out of the box.

Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.

A country's size cannot be overstated. I don't know about cost, but for mere agility, the smaller a country is, the more nimble it can be for all sorts of reform and progressive progress. Singapore and the Netherlands are both small countries that have managed to overhaul aspects of society without much barrier in years past. Germany is a big place, the U.S. much bigger. Estonia, tiny. You can do all sorts of things when you have just a few people it will affect.

Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that help?

Economies of scale would make the opposite true.

Population density is probably the important factor. Small countries tend to have a higher population density which makes infrastructure cheaper.

I have no idea if that's true in general, but, in this case, Estonia is the one with the lower population density.

Non sequitur. It does not follow from your argument that there is nothing to be learned from the Estonian model.

If nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise [economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is much discussion of the US (and several European countries') aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity of modernizing them is being scrutinized.

Granted, this kind of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of intellectual curiosity.

Several of the Nordic/Baltic countries are like that. Why does Russia not follow that pattern? What's different about it culturally?

There's probably something to being a lot bigger and having more diverse population density.

But ultimately the biggest culprit is probably the major political, economic and cultural hangovers from over a century of political instability.

Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation.

>Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal and is actually pretty convenient innovation.

Yet, but the prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level of technical comprehension comparable to people called "jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30 somethings." You guys in the West complain about age discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would.

What makes a seeming difference in the level of quality is that experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum significant portion of any much senior developers on the job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.

If you tried to make a point you kind of failed.

I make $40k after tax, in Russia, employed locally, and while that doesn't sound like much to an American ear, I've bought my apartment for $90k a year before. I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay me $400k before tax in the US as you suggested. I'm 32 by the way. And I never work more than 40 hr/week.

I don't see how you can underpay a dev in Russia. Maybe you can by hiring in really small and depressive towns? Or promising rocket science job?

>I make $40k after tax, in Russia

That makes you a rather expensive employee if the company hiring you actually pays your pension contributions, EI, medical bills, and other quasi-tax charges (which are much higher than in the West.)

24k a year is what a good grad can expect in a company that pays taxes in full. The full cost of employing such a guy will be right about $40k

Not sure it's much higher, I'd say roughly the same when you consider tax bracket and things like 401k. But sure, it's not cheap.

In Estonia the employee doesn't have to pay any taxes what-so-ever. The employer is the one that pays taxes from your bruto salary, which is required by the law (health insurance, pension, etc). In fact most people, when negotiating salaries, simply ask for how much they want in NET, because nobody besides the company cares about bruto.

In Russia, you pay 13% in direct tax (deduced automatically) and also your employer pays an additional ~30% to health insurance, pension, etc.

It's frequent nowdays to be cited your salary before 13% tax.

Estonia and its people are culturally the most similar to Finland - in fact none of the baltic countries are slavic - and all speak exceptional English (better than Western Europe). They are very pro-EU countries whom have benefitted greatly economically and 'defensively' (vs Russia, at least in terms of peace of mind). What will continue to limit Russia are its authoritarian attitudes towards information and trade.

The part about English spoken in the Baltic is vastly untrue -- outside (center of) Tartu and Tallinn [the 2 biggest cities] English is not that well spoken when it comes to Estonia. Latvia is similar - mostly Riga (even though Russian is more profoundly spoken). Most of the younger generation could have an ok English but nothing remarkable, even doctors may not have good English. I don't have good enough impressions of Lithuania, although it's not uncommon to fall back to Russian in restaurants.

Compared to Denmark or Norway where virtually everyone (from kids to elderly people) actually speak decent English, none of the Baltic countries have 'exceptional English'.

Compared to the Nordic countries or Netherlands, 'exceptional' might be the wrong word. But certainly compared to, say, Germany or France, the level of English is in my experience considerably higher in the Baltics (and in Poland too). I say this having lived in both Germany and France and visited all the Baltic countries.

"Even doctors may not have good English" -- in Paris I'm happy to find one that will speak English at all. Do not underestimate how unwilling or afraid to speak English a lot of people are even in places like Paris and Berlin.

I agree about Germany (depends a lot on the city, though) or esp. France.

Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian (which is non indo european language) have virtually no non-native speakers and large amounts of the Russian born citizens (and aliens) may not speak the language, rendering English a good choice to obtain information. Having tiny user base forces the case compared to France, Germany or Italy (imo worse than both France/Germany).

For instance movies at the theater (and largely on the TV) have no dubbing unless they are targeted to kids who are unable to read.

>will continue to limit Russia

Russia doesn't seem very limited to me.

"Russia-China Bilateral Trade Up 30% In Q1 2017" [0]

"Russia upgraded to top rank in world wheat exports in 2017-18" [1]

"In Moscow, Saudi king slams Iran, signs billion dollar defense, energy deals" [2]

"King Salman and Putin Deals Leave the U.S. Out in the Cold" [3]

"Russia, world's 2nd-biggest arms seller, wants to expand its arms sales abroad" [4]

[0] https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-china-bilateral-...

[1] http://www.agrimoney.com/news/russia-upgraded-to-top-rank-in...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-moscow-saudi-king-slams-ira...

[3] https://www.rand.org/blog/2017/10/king-salman-and-putin-deal...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-russia-poised-to-expand-it...

That's some great info and thanks for sending those.

Check out another one I found -- "Russia US Trade up 25% in 2017"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2017/04/22/russia-u-...

There no doubt that Russia is still a major player in trade, in fact economists see it as one of the countries with the most potential for development in BRIC (brasil russia india china).

Unfortunately, the way the strata of government and society are has left the population to stagnate in terms of their well being and they are missing the opportunities in new-age, non-oligarchical industries - Russia is held back by its antiquated social structures and lacks incentive to change.

Culturally? Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are culturally distinct from Russia, i.e. non-slavic. E.g. they all have their own archaic languages and so on.

One can look at the populations in circa 1300 and extrapolate from that. Without going into details - the baltic coast had it's own catholic/pagan populations with trade ties to hanseatic cities, and those populations are the basis for current nation states.

Russia, with it's slavic culture strongly tied to the greek orthodox church was a bit further to east.

See for example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Russi...

and other wikipedia pages on the baltic states.

None of this have much to do with the current tech scene, though :)

So interesting how the diaspora happened. Especially with the slavic Czech Republic and Croatia all the way west.

Russia has been through the wringer.

They had an insane monarchy that delayed industrialization, missed out on the middle class development and went through a scorched earth total war and communist regime.

It’s a nation of contrast and paradox. Russia is a lot like the US in many ways.

> insane monarchy that delayed industrialization

That actually isn't true. Russian monarchy wasn't late to industrialize, and around half of industrial success claimed by USSR is rooted before 1917. For example, Donbass was already a thing back then.

The other half was built by the USA.

Most sources talk about the industrial revolution hitting Russia in the 1890s — it was an agrarian society with feudal governance.

It was decades behind the UK and others. That’s not to say there was no industry, but over half of output was peasant agriculture circa 1900, and the old methods were unable to adequately feed the nation.

Of course it was behind UK. Everybody was behind UK at the time. It's like comparing with South Korea today.

Soviet period is when mass starvations happened. And not only during wars.

> The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information

That's precisely the issue with SSN.

For the SSN it was ignored. In other European countries that law works as well. I've never been identified with an ID number anywhere in Europe. You always have to provide the corresponding document. Where IDs are used for identification they're not shared with private companies.

Can you explain this more? The ID number can't be treated as identifying information? ID literally stands for Identifier- if not used as identifying, how is it used? How does one identify themselves when getting a loan if not by using their ID?

I guess he means something closer to treated as an authentification means.

It identifies someone but it doesn't authentify him. Just like shireboy is your identity but it doesn't authentify you.

In the US, the Social Security Number is widely regarded as a "secret password". Not as an identifier, but authentication credentials.

If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet.

But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack.

If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.

The ID number is used to identify us in all the government databases, it's an universal foreign key. If the police want to know my address then they use our x-road to connect to the API of the population registry and call a method to get my address using my ID number. If they want to see what cars I own and if I have done my yearly technical inspection then the use my ID number to get the data needed.

When someone wants a loan or anything like that then we have to show our real ID card or passport, or authenticate on the web with our smartcard and pin. So nobody can do stuff that's possible in the us - apply for credit cards and loans without authenticating properly.

The Starship delivery robot is real, but it's not really operational. One can be seen in downtown Redwood City, wandering around with a keeper following it. It's been doing that for six months. They have a few in Estonia, a few in San Francisco, and a few in London. All demos.

Starship reminds me of Better Place, the car battery swap company out of Israel. Too much PR, too many demos spread around the world, not enough profitable deployment. It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used.

There is a drone delivery system that is being developed right now. The plan is to install towers into buildings, where the drones can land and drop off the deliveries. You could potentially do your shopping at work, and then pick up your deliveries at the door once you come home (or have them delivered at your workplace). I'm much more excited for this than the robot.

In many areas, it won't stay at the door intact by the time you get home.

But the roof would probably be fine, which is where the drones would drop the packages. Most package theft from what I can tell happens from strangers, not tenants, and tenants are probably the only people with roof access.

Starship is lauded as one of these 'Estonian success stories', but to me (as a half Estonian / half Australian with I would hope to think a somewhat balanced perspective) it seems like one of these 'solutions looking for a problem' startups. When we have food delivered in Tallinn it's often by an older person who is obviously making some extra cash to help ends meet; I feel better about my 5EUR or whatever going to them than to some startup. The "person in a car" solution, which can do multiple deliveries and also immediately handle at least some product quality issues on the spot, seems like a fairly optimal solution to me. Does the world really need a 10k robot to be delivering a $10 pizza? What happens when there is snow / ice / people messing with it etc etc?

"It looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets used."

I could not agree more.

Wouldn't it be better to use a cheaper robot and just donate your extra cash to the old people? Is it that you want to compel all other less generous customers to pay for the old people too, and a robot would take away that requirement, which is a kind of tax?

Initially, all the extra money would go to the startup, but with competition, it's the consumers that would save. If it actually works.

Nothing much came of it, but there was a Mercedes/Starship concept video.[1] A van carries a number of delivery robots. The van makes a stop, and the robots fan out and deliver to nearby locations. The robots return to the van, and it goes on to the next stop.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0YtPjQ5WCE

shameless plug for battery swap on uavs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cUnNtTElaaVJWRDA... minutes 1:05 onwards.

and this is from tesla: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event But seems like Tesla discontinued battery swapping in favor of superchargers.

The flip side of this movement is of course even better profiling and mass surveillance.

The government already knows a lot about you, doesn't matter if you live in the US or Estonia or Germany. Having an ID number doesn't enable the government to spy even more on it's citizens.

The ID card and id number make it safer than the alternatives.

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