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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>Japan and Germany [...] share similar challenges — including their businesses being heavily reliant on fax machines, which are often used as an emblem of unshakable bureaucracies as both markets face an uphill battle to digitize.

Preach it brother.

>However, Germany lacks Japan’s unique currency woes.

Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.

Also, dupe from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619

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Japan is geographically larger than Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Germany is part of the European Union, which is 10x larger than Japan and a sixth of world GDP.

Why sixth? EU's GDP is #2 (nominal) lagging very slightly to US [1], or #3 by PPP.

Germany's GDP is #3 (nominal) or #5 (PPP) [2].

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany

UPDATE: fixed the statement, previous was about world trade share.

Not #6 but "a sixth" as in 1/6 of the total GDP of the world.

>EU's GDP is #2, greatly surpassing US

Your link [1] shows that the EU surpasses US in international trade, not in GDP.

Yep, fixed (you're too fast! :).

Although the statement still holds, but it's "slightly" not "greatly" now.

Not quite sure what you're getting at, but that claim is not true. The US economy was roughly comparable in size to the EU's 15 years ago but is now nearly 1/3 larger than the EU + UK, or about 1/2 larger than the EU without the UK: https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...

Seems like the difference is in PPP vs Nominal. Numbers are hard. Matching the numbers:

                 US   / EU   / Europe:
    Nominal [1]: 27.0 / 18.4 / 25
    PPP     [2]: 15.5 / 14.6 / 21

My point was that EU is higher than #6, as well as Germany, whatever the metric.

But, as I was corrected below, they meant "sixth" as share, not as rank.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/USA/EU/EUQ

[2] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/USA/EU/EUQ

A lot of Japan's landmass is basically uninhabitable mountains, though. Not much arable land, for instance.

Yeah but it's mostly mountain. 11% arable (33% in Germany).

>Preach it brother.

Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.

It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.

>Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with.

Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it.

While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever.

>It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive.

Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more.

Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium?

At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person.

>It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.

What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.

> pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result

That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds.

> Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany

It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.

Sorry, but this is not accurate: People messaging over Slack 100% makes us more effective. Like any technology, including printing 20 pages of status report, there are ways to be efficient with them, and ways to be inefficient with them.

The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.

The concept you're missing is that a barrier to communication, like sending the fax, forces one to organize their thoughts before impinging on another person's time.

So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused.

This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed

wonder if this is an opportunity for some enterprising individual to sell llm powered "idea distillation before hitting send" (as a service)...that was intended as a joke...but i can see it being great hahaha.

When has increased barrier to communication ever been good? It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier as a punishment.

> When has increased barrier to communication ever been good?

Phone call costs used to mean you probably wanted to answer every phone call you received, rather than missing calls you should have answered because you're so used to ignoring them since most are spam and fraud. IDK about good in terms of humanity or whatever, but if I could snap my fingers and set a $0.05/minute rate on all phone calls, and $0.15 for long distance connections of any kind, I'd do it, because it'd be a net-improvement for everyone I know.

> It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier

The medium is the message. You want to change the message, look at the medium, not the people.

Friend of mine had an idea of an email budget - everyone gets x emails a month. Can't send any after that.

Ok it would never work because idiot senior managers would give themselves 100x then dole out extra to their tamed pets but you can see why the idea is attractive to consider.

Or grow up and accept that a volume of emails and comms are expected when you're coordinating with dozens of other human beings.

Hard agree. Seen too much shit like Kanban boards suddenly sucking because they’re digital and limitless instead of physical and limited in size, or schools sending avalanches of mostly-useless email and other digital messages home where before you’d just have gotten a handful of paper notes in the mail or sent home with kids.

Wait, hold up. Are you saying that anytime you need to ask a coworker, or maybe someone one a different team, a question you send a fax instead of slacking them? Do you all have fax machines in your homes?

It's similar to issues encountered with previous eras of industrialization: when you have a factory, you can make a lot of one thing. So you reshape society around that thing, and now one size fits all, even if it doesn't.

The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.

> Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany.

Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.

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