Growing up, Germany always seemed like a paragon of virtue. Starting somewhere around the VW Emissions Scandal, my view has changed. Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
But ich bin Ausländer, and my German isn't good enough to do an in-depth analysis of local media opinions on any topic, so I may just be focusing on a few headline cases and mistaking the details for the gestalt.
Genuinely curious which countries HN users think are actually paragons of virtue.
Multiple times, I've had the experience of thinking a country is a paragon of virtue, then finding a thread here or on reddit full of people from that country complaining about it...
Seems like Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are the "paragon of virtue" countries people complain about the least.
Wikipedia has a list of political scandals here, which is mostly fairly laughable if you are from most other countries, with headline numbers being $100,000: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_i...
I remember an Israeli acquaintance laughing hysterically at our lack of problems, because the front page of a major NZ newspaper was about a large seal that had got onto a motorway and was causing trouble. Seriously, our major news items often read like we all live in some hick back-country village. That’s a good thing, by the way.
One of the 3 major “scandal” highlights from 2015: “National cabinet minister Murray McCully is involved in the controversial setting up of a sheep farm in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Saudi businessman Hamood Al-Ali Al-Khalaf, seemingly to negate the risk of Al-Khalaf suing the New Zealand government”. Another highlight from 2017: “Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei reveals that she had at one time committed benefit fraud during the 1990s”.
We apparently had no scandals at all in 2012.
Angela Merkel made massive deals with Putin for expansion of energy integration which was a key economic driver in a massive war in Europe. Gehard Schroder cut a deal with Russian Oil companies after he was voted out as Chancellor, just as he was leaving office whereupon he took Board Positions on said Russia Oil companies literally the day after being out of office including massive monetary payments. Which is beyond conflict of interest, just straight corruption, that of course also put Germany - and Europe including the UK on a trajectory to war.
Justin Trudeau was caught wearing Blackface. Twice. And there are other instances of this, as he has hinted 'he doesn't remember how many times he did it'. He implemented extrajudicial measures to quell a protest that was threatening his political legitimacy, while lying to the public that it was at the behest of the RCMP, whilst they in fact denied it was at their request. Those measures included the ability to seize individuals finances. He's allowing local provincial leaders in Quebec and Alberta to literally ignore the Constitution without a challenge. His family accepted $500 000 in consulting fees and travel from an entity his cabinet subsequently awarded a $1 Billion 'no bid contract' to. He bullied his Justice Minister into not investigating SNC-Lavalin, a massive international construction firm. There is $32 Billion in unaccounted for COVID payments. The $5M/year government payroll project is now close to a Billion dollars in cost.
Those are mostly 'material issues' meaning the scandals in these circumstances affect the nature of our governance, some of it in existentially consequential ways (aka 'extrajudicial actions').
I have no love or support for Boris Johnson - but 'scandal' is how the press (especially even outside the UK) turned his floozy escapades into material issues while they ignored nearly criminal actions elsewhere.
'Forever sullied British Politics' ... you must be young.
Basically a dictatorship
> Denmark
Only if you are Danish.
> Norway
Yeah, Norway gets some things right.
> Switzerland
Slow transition away from tax haven.
> Finland
Can't complain too much.
> Netherlands
An actual narco state in the heart of Europe, just don't tell the Dutch, they get upset when you tell them this.
It's still nowhere close to true that drug dealers are being elected at the national level here, nor are national politicians clearly being pressured by drug dealers. But at the municipal level, there are a few cases of elected drug dealers and many cases of extortion.
More worryingly is the infiltration of this business into wider society. Farmers who are asked to rent out sheds, and getting blow-back if they say no is a common example. Rampant corruption and extortion of dock-worker in Rotterdam is another example.
I do want to note that the problem here isn't that we legalized weed. The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.
What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding. Those are legitimate (though probably immoral) but it is a great climate for money-laundering. Both because there is lots of other money flows to hide amongst, and because the experts that could do it are already here. All they need is convincing to do illegal work.
Part of the problem is that the Netherlands didn't legalize weed.
The current policy in the Netherlands leaves the actual wholesale production, supply and distribution in the hands of drug cartels and gangs.
Only the retail sale and consumption is legal.
> The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.
Yep. Except the problems more limited in Belgium for some reason. Tonnes of cocaine is smuggled through Antwerp, but there is less of the associated violence.
You also seem to forget that the vast majority of amphetamine and MDMA marketed in Europe is manufactured in illicit labs in the Netherlands.
There's a huge environmental issue with the wastes from these labs being dumped in the Dutch countryside.
> What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding.
Tbf, that is a BeNeLux wide problem, with Lux being the worst offenders.
Like, if the drugs are manufactured in the Netherlands already, legalization won't change that.
The hope would be that legalization would reduce the associated violence and corruption. You'd have legitimate, "above-board" producers outcompeting the assholes, with state power on their side.
Just have to do it quickly before state power gets totally corrupted.
I guess the best counterargument would be that export is the key issue, and receivers of Dutch imports would cut those imports off of if the Dutch aren't making even a token effort to restrict illegal-in-recipient-country drug smuggling.
No, for two reasons. First the political climate here is turning against legalization. We are pushing back on the free sale of weed, and production was never legalized, and attempts at legalizing production are consistently pushed back.
Second, our production of non-weed is inherently criminal. Legalizing it will only give these criminal enterprises a legitimate facade. The production is part of a bigger criminal organization, so legalizing it won't actually turn them away from crime. The criminal organizations are not 'small time doing crime to pay the bills'. Our most notorious captured criminal was recently suspected to be attempting to hire mercenaries from the Balkans (I forget which country) to break him out of prison with a helicopter escape. That is intentional criminality.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/fi...
It's interesting to me that Finland is right next door to Russia and yet so different. I suppose that goes for Baltic states like Estonia as well though. (Speaking of which, does anyone have dirt on Estonia?)
One might want to know about the barbarism Denmark has been committing against the Inuit in Greenland: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942173
No idea how true it is.
They also seem very stable, and have been allies with the USA for longer than pretty much any other country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU_donations_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_affair
For instance if you pay a politician after they have done you a "favor" it's not corruption, it only is if you pay the beforehand.
For years Germany is urged to implement certain anti-corruption laws but they don't do it because it would hinder their "politcal work".
There has always been corruption. Germany under Kohl was also called Bimbesrepublik at times. "bimbes" being a cutesy/deragatory term for money in Kohl's idiom.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5883815/Ab-he...
OTOH, Gerhard Schröder, former head of fed government, and long-time member and chief of the social-democratic party, is/was sitting in the board of Rosneft and Nord Stream.
Ms Kaili, currently being accused of having taken bribes, is a member of Greece's Pasoc.
Olaf Scholz, as head of the city of Hamburg and proponent of the G20 2017 summit, is responsible for unheard of chaos and destruction during said event. Without any chance of re-election, he changed mid-term into the position of a federal minister and handed his former position to unknown und unelected Peter Tschentscher. Moreover, there's been a penal charge brought against Scholz due to his role in large-scale tax fraught in the CumEx/Warburg bank affair.
This isn't held back by the bigger industries but by entrenched boundaries of responsibilities in the administration (defined in the regulations), data protection, and over-engineering.
Latest example: Warning the population. Instead of simply sending SMS to all active phones in an area, it has to be cell broadcast, which doesn't work on old phones. The reason seems to be (information in media is... limited) that sending SMS would not provide a way to send a cancel/warning-end message. That's only possible with cell broadcast. And that hasn't been used so far due to data protection concerns (there's a list of phones that have been warned, i.e. were in the affected area).
We cannot solve things the simple way.
SMS also gets ignored all the time since spam and fraud over it is rampant nowadays.
My mobil phone number has existed since the beginning of time. It is listed in the public phone book. It was on my private web site for a long time. I've never not handed it over to any sign-up that needed a phone number.
I cannot remeber receiving any spam and/or fraud SMS, ever.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or the report of huge amounts of spam/fraud SMS is elsewhere, but not in Germany.
In the end everything need some extra layers of bureaucracy to comply with the laws or is simply not done. And the funny part is that many think this is how it works in other countries too.
Germany went so far as to request a change in EU legislation that required cell broadcast to be used.
After the last warning test day was disastrous, it was decided to implement it after all.
It was a complete failure on all fronts where the federal and state governments then tried to blame part-time mayors afterwards for not being experts in catastrophe management.
You conveniently omitted SPD, who overall was involved in some of the biggest scandals in history of BRD. Including the current Chancellor.
At the beginning of April 2022, it was announced that Gabriel would become Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (Arms industry). (Wikipedia)
(the left is equally corrupt as the liberals/conservatives)
With hindsight I also think that language barriers play a role in leaning on stereotypes. When companies with English-speaking employees have internal problems that leadership is ignoring, I can read complaints from lower level employees (anonymous or otherwise) posted online. But I don't know where Japanese power plant workers hang out online. Even if I did I wouldn't be able to understand what they're writing. So my views get colored more by whatever makes it into English-language media, which may be less representative.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.037...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1995...
Remember the decades of corruption they found in Greece?
Companies like Siemens were the ones who bribed greece politicians.
Governments can look very different from one decade to the next. So it doesn’t make sense to reference a war-time government from 80 years ago as an example of how a current government behaves.
For what's worth, the "German efficiency in WWII" is mostly a myth.
Takes me about an hour to do the same in the UK and half of that is trying to remember how to log in and do it.
You can send in your tax documents digitally and there are decent software packages to help you do it correctly. For most people it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours a year. That is for your typical employee. If you’re running a corporation, do not try to file your taxes without a tax advisor.
There are some tax benefits which are only accessible if you file taxes but if you don't want to take advantage of these tax benefits you don't have to file them. In general you also get 5 years to do it.
But it is true.
> I recommend your friend to find good tax advisor if he/she is not capable to do it by himself/herself.
The situation is just as bad in the US. And I would be surprised if it isn't similarly Byzantine in the UK.
A few years ago the federal administrative court recalled tax reforms because nobody could understand them. That's a Normenklarheitsgebotverstoß!
Also, it's not unlikely that the government is printing the electronically filed information in the traditional paper format to be able to process it the traditional way. (maybe not for taxes, but it's surely the case for some other processes.)
But I agree that "3 months" is probably the time required to collect information, not the time needed to summarize the information for the government. Some banks take a couple of months to send the required yearly investment income/taxes-paid statement.
There's certainly a lot of improvement possible, but for simple cases it's pretty easy already (if you've done it at least once before).
Adding information from the employer is data that the employer has already submitted. Investment data could be transmitted from banks to the tax office directly, instead it's paper, as it always has been for the traditional process. The only iformation that would require filing is such not created through parties that are transmitting data anyway. e.g. private loans, collecting rent, etc.
As soon as any information is required to be transmitted, all information is required.
It's a process designed for execution on paper put into a computer. It's not a process designed for full automation. If any private company would operate that way they wouldn't be making any money.
Journalists (FT) who investigated and reported on the Wirecard scam were prosecuted.
BaFin (Financial Supervisory Authority) supported WireCard (prohibiting short selling).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard#Berichterstattung_der...
This is not the first time some Austrian dude causes trouble in Germany :)
The "Emissions Scandal" is largely bunk.
The aim was to engineer a legislative and social move away from petrol and diesel cars, and engineer acceptance in environmental restrictions (or greater governance), in support of the fake climate crisis, that no one has seen. Except in statistics.
Most of what we see are meta narratives playing out, that are meant to capture the minds, and get us to consent willingly to greater governance. Turkeys voting for Christmas.
You believe the stories you are told, you trust the emissions testing, you trust the government to do something, the law-making process, the corrections to the bad acts on the part of corporations, etc. You've literally no idea whether any of that is true! I doubt you even think you are being gassed by cars.
But you probably support early scraping of functional cars, subsidising of electric cars (even though they are dirty to produce and not fit for purpose), artificially increasing the cost of travel (fuel taxes), food production, deliveries, etc, you support forcing cumbersome travel options on everyone (public transport accessible via tracking ids), decreasing parking, pedestrianising of areas, etc.
But these options are not ones you wanted either! You have simply been told they are good, you are saving the planet. You might not believe in religion, while you pay penance for your sinful nature.
In the past, towns and cities were engineered in order to provide access for cars - people then were told that was good, and believed it! It seems to me, that whatever government tells people is good, if they see it on a screen, they believe it! Even though they are actually poorer and have less options. Its amazing to me, that this is all it takes! To take ever more money from people, for less - you simply tell them on TV!
And I'm the one doing mental gymnastics! Do you actually notice the world at all? Do you verify any of your cherished beliefs? Has the water risen? Is it warmer? Was weather ever unchanging?