Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artemonster | Hacker News Reader

I have immigrated into this country 12 years ago and became citizen 3 years ago and still, to this day, some facets of german culture fascinate me. Most of germans have seriously high threshold for „pain, which reflects in almost every everyday life situation:

1. customer service is abysmal and they are ok with it.

2. bureucratic machine is horrible and they are ok with it.

3. politics stagnating last decades and they are okay with it.

4. so little doctors with super long waiting times for so many people (to the point of memeing about it) - and they are okay with it.

5. no wealth accumulation through generations because its impossible to buy anything. Everyone rents and they are okay with it. Nothing gets built, infrastructre expnsion is non existent in cities.

Impotence in the government (digitalisation is a joke right now, everyone knows berlin airport fiasco, now vaccination stuff) is the most infuriating one for me and yet they still vote for CDU. At this point I have no idea how to understand this. CDU have lost many of its voters not because people had „enough“ and switched, but because lots of CDU electorate just died of old age. sigh

Regarding point 1, we Germans absolutely do NOT like someone getting in the way if we could do it ourselves faster and better, so please let us put our grocery into bags ourselves. The second worst thing is imo waiters hovering your table instead of doing their job and letting you enjoy your meal in peace. (Thinking of it, you might have the problem that you are not beckoning the waiter over if you need them? If you don't, you might actually wait quite a while and perceive that as bad service;)

Very much agree on Germans wanting to be left alone: I'm always annoyed at waiters abroad, because they keep asking and bugging me if I want anything else, if everything is OK, if the food was adequate. If I need anything I'll becon, if something is not right I'll tell you, leave me be!

I can fully understand that foreigners expecting the above level of buzzing around from a waiter are disappointed in Germany. Expectations here are completely different.

I really feel what you're saying. It's deeply aggravating. I feel a lot of it is due to the high level of wealth and overall satisfaction that much of German society has experienced for the past few decades (inb4: I know there's poverty here). It's a very weird form of decadence, based on the principle that "this worked well so far".

My coping strategy is to remind myself that it's probably the linked flip side of many of the things that I appreciate - good labour and consumer protection, good healthcare, public transport, a not-totally-fucked income distribution.

But: yeeeaaaah.

I think you can answer your own question.

> I have immigrated into this country 12 years ago and became citizen 3 years ago

It somehow still is better than the alternatives on the grand scheme of things. Short answer: Record low unemployment rates (before the pandemic).

Yes, and I love it here. It doesnt mean you have to accept all the problems „because everywhere else is worse“ - this is the worst whataboutism there is.

> so little doctors with super long waiting times for so many people (to the point of memeing about it) - and they are okay with it.

What action would you suggest the average person to take if they are not ok with this situation?

Vote for a party that makes medical universities a priority! There are laughably many german students studying medicine in other EU states and coming back, because current central system is overwhelmed by applicants and there are so little seats.

The main problem is that all the doctors sit in big cities (you can't walk 50 meters in the middle of Berlin without stumbling over a doctor's office), but far too few in urban areas.

Rural infrastructure is nonexistent. Where you can reach any settled area by public transport in Switzerland, in Germany public transport exists only in the cities and their surroundings. Maybe a few tourist spots. So to be reachable by patients, all specialized doctors almost have to be city-dwelling. General physicians not so much, but then there is the question: high-earning in a city with proper infrastructure, or low-earning in the sticks with the last remaining old people.

Huh? I travel every few weeks from Berlin into my tiny little home village in the Ore Mountains by train, and what's not reachable by train has bus connections. The urban infrastructure is (mostly) fine. I guess doctors can simply make more money in cities with a bigger selection of rich privately insured patients to milk :)

as big as a fiasco as BER was/is - it turns out it's (attempted) infrastructure expansion. That and stuff like U5 extension, etc (is it a tourist line? sure, but it's work being done). Trialing/using Electric buses is another one (though they have suffered in both heat and cold).

I'll grant you digitization being crap - don't understand why copper is still king here.

Politics I don't pretend to understand or care about, i just like that nobody's shooting/assassinating/oppressing each other (turns out that's a surprisingly high bar in the world).

vaccinations definitely sucked/were late, but it's finally now ahead of many (even first world) countries [0]

[0]: some selection: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

BER isn't really an expansion, it is replacing the two other airports in Berlin that were more central and had to close down (because they were old and too central to not be a major noise problem), Tegel (TXL) and Tempelhof (THF) and parts of the old function of Schoenefeld (SXF, formerly a regular airport, now just a government airfield, but right next to/part of BER).

still a nicer airport than the dump that was SXF (TXL did have a special place in my heart though)

That said, flying budget airlines remains a ridiculous experience at all european airports.

6. Vee arr värry scroogy, therefore can't afford the platform ticket to enter the free revolution train ;->

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