Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivanovb | Hacker News Reader

On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy.

Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy.

If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL.

The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts.

You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.

View on HN

Bless you, so true.

And once you have a business set up then the fun starts. For extra sadism, try winding down your business!

I wonder if Europeans know US companies of much bigger dimensions are capable of keeping their own accounting and the sky is not falling. But in Romania, every month the accountant must get the paperwork, do the magical incantations (that nobody! reads). The Annual report even costs extra since it's more stuffy and it gets uploaded to the Finance Ministry so they get a chance to do nothing with it.

Sorry for the rant, I'm also traumatised by living here and knowing it could be different.

What's the point of having social safety nets if you can't exercise them taking risks? Seems like a crying shame.

Social safety nets in post-Communist EU countries are purely theoretical. People throw money at bureaucratic structures which evaporate the money. Practicaly, think US-level of "social safety net", including healthcare. I'm not exagerating.

It’s like the safety net is not just below you, but also above.

It's like the nets are all over you except in place where they'd prevent you from falling down.

Bold of you to assume there's a social safety net to speak of in Eastern Europe. It's only on paper.

You have to be a cripple or not worked for like a year or two in order to be eligible for some very minimal sum a month, and even that is taken away from you if you don't actively look for work and haven't found it in 6 to 18 months.

The whole thing is crafted in a way that unless you are living in shanty towns and rely on your relatives stealing food and clothes for you, then you will not want to descend that low on the social ladder just to get something like 200 EUR or so. And that implicit and indirect discouragement works really well; people just don't bother pursuing social help because it's meaningless and 99% of the time you won't get it anyway. Only the gypsies are persistent in it.

It's every man for himself here in EE. I am not complaining by the way; I've never known any other state of things so I don't actually care about social safety nets at all. But when we here in EE heard about the "Corona stimulus packages" (basically you get money because of the pandemic even if you didn't lose a job) then a lot of us couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the idea that something like that would ever happen here.

There's only the social safety tax which you get clubbed if you don't pay. Other than that you are on your own and will pay out of pocket for whatever thing you imagine the safety net should have provided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com