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Comment by askonomm | Hacker News Reader

That's crazy. Notarization in Estonia can be done entirely online using a digital signature, just like everything else here is done (including voting, getting married, getting divorced, filing taxes, opening/closing a company, etc). From all I hear Germany is still stuck in the 90s for some reason.

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90s is charitable. Most important thing here is that nothing changes. Everything new is considered suspicious.

The weird thing is that, at least as an Estonian, I would've never expected this from Germany. Italy, Spain? Sure. Germany? That just feels weird.

Germany is incredibly under developed in the digitalization plus the amount of red tape to do even basic things is also very large as well. Getting rid of these things takes a lot of will power and at the moment there is very little.

Germany never thought it would be in the current situation - decaying health care, pension system, cornerstone industry in decline, lack of digitalization, the list goes on. Massive reforms are needed, action is needed, but there is too much inertia in the system to change anything quickly.

Smaller countries like Estonia have the ability to be much more nimble.

Yes somehow they believed the 90s continue despite zero public investment. They talk about the dangers of debt for future generations, but they are silent about the infrastructure debt they are saddling their children with by not investing on any serious scale.

Fun fact, the Bundestag is one of the most representative parliaments in the world thanks to MMP. Is the executive dysfunctional? Is it the federal split into 16 tiny states causing this?

If it was just a matter of size, similar/larger countries would be in the same state, and at least one of your smaller states would get ahead right?

Just wait until you try to use their trains

More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.

Lots of systems are stuck in very old ways of working and using humans as cogs. My American utility bill has a typo in my name that is not there in the online system through which I opened my account; a human in a back office read text from one app and typed it into another. Maybe there was even a piece of paper involved.

I can also listen to a notary online in Austria. I just absolutely do not want to have the notary involved in the first place.

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