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Comment by leononame | Hacker News Reader

Sure, renewable _electricity_ is up. But up alone is not enough. When talking energy, you should use gross energy, including e.g. transport.

Take this chart [0] from wikipedia [1]. Doesn't look too amazing. Now, being a gross exporter, the numbers are obviously skewed, but I didn't really mean EVs or electrical production specifically. German bureaucracy famously still runs on fax and emails are printed, there are lots of small-ish villages to small cities with _really_ bad internet connection among other things. It's a big country where politicians seem to be really afraid of change. It's not that the country is stuck in the 70s, but some things just take more time to arrive in Germany, or at least in parts of it.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/8v6gc06xa... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe...

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I'm not sure where this fax myth originates. I've been living in Germany for most of my life, and I'm no longer in my thirties. During this time, I have sent a total of zero faxes. I can't even remember anyone ever asking me to send one.

I've lived in Germany for 30 years and I've sent zero faxes as well. That doesn't mean the administration doesn't run on fax. The number of times I've been told by the tax agency or my healthcare provider to send a fax is astonishing.

When doing my taxes, I've asked if I could send some required documents of my deceased father via email, and the lady _didn't even know if she had an external facing email address_. I was just to send it to info@, tell them to print it and put it on her desk. She also didn't have a direct phone line, so I had to call the central office first and ask them to connect me to her.

My mom runs a small business there and luckily she's got fax-to-email and email-to-fax. Just because younger people use other means of communication now doesn't mean it's a myth. It's very much there, and other means very much aren't.

I live in Germany, and while I never used fax as well, I did use paper mail a lot, and I don't know how I would live without a printer and a scanner. It gets better, e.g. taxes have been completely digitized in the recent years, but still a lot of paper there.

I don't live in Germany and this is all based on accounts I have seen posted in HN. Everytime there is a post that journals the process to setup a startup in Germany or do other business functions, it always included something that needed to be faxed.

FAX is still a leaglly accepted way to send official papers, e.g. to courts. As is paper mail. True.

One can so easily set-up a company without it so. 90% of what you read about companies and how to run and set them up im Germany on HN is wrong.

I work for a large German company and some of our suppliers and business partners have had a fax machine for a long time that they used exclusively for our purposes.

Fortunately, these times are over, and the company has celebrated the long overdue abolition of the fax machine ;-)

Lawyers, administrations and corporations still send each other faxes because it is a way to provably deliver documents instantly. At scale it’s cheaper and quicker than a registered letter.

Last time I had to fax something was probably around 2018. It were legal documents, sending it to a lawyer. Most faxes I've sent in my life as a private person were legal documents. This is not something common for most people, but it can happen. There are several corners in administration which are famously still use fax, but the good part is, the normal citizen will barely encounter them these days, and they are working hard on removing them.

Then you clearly don't work in healthcare or law.

I live in Germany and I can't even remember where and when I have seen a fax.

I was flying back from munich to hamburg last week, with a passenger jet, which is produced in my hometown, with internet in the plane - not a fax.

I often see faxes in the health industry.

In the US this is common.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1626950/the-fax-is-sti...

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