HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-22) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
In Estonia virtually every process is digitized
83 points by breck
http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/estonia-digital-life-tech-startups/tartups/___________________________________________________________________
benevol - 41 minutes ago
The flip side of this movement is of course even better profiling
and mass surveillance.
[deleted]
Animats - 1 hours ago
The Starship delivery robot is real, but it's not really
operational. One can be seen in downtown Redwood City, wandering
around with a keeper following it. It's been doing that for six
months. They have a few in Estonia, a few in San Francisco, and a
few in London. All demos.Starship reminds me of Better Place, the
car battery swap company out of Israel. Too much PR, too many demos
spread around the world, not enough profitable deployment. It
looks like they're trying to make enough noise to be acquired by
Amazon and exit, rather than actually providing a service that gets
used.
emerongi - 32 minutes ago
There is a drone delivery system that is being developed right
now. The plan is to install towers into buildings, where the
drones can land and drop off the deliveries. You could
potentially do your shopping at work, and then pick up your
deliveries at the door once you come home (or have them delivered
at your workplace). I'm much more excited for this than the
robot.
DrScump - 5 minutes ago
In many areas, it won't stay at the door intact by the time you
get home.
silversmith - 2 hours ago
The article positions the Estonian ID number as something magical
and superior to SSN. In reality, out of the 11 symbols, 6 are
governed by your date of birth and another one denotes the gender,
and out of the remaining four one is a checksum digit.The only way
the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number
not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information, so you
can't get a loan on your neighbours name just because you caught a
glimpse of his passport.
perfmode - 1 hours ago
> The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law
dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or
identifying informationThat's precisely the issue with SSN.
samstave - 2 hours ago
Sure, but isn't it interesting that freaking ESTONIA has been a
forefront thinking country when it comes to tech-as-right
country?FFS - I live and only have ever worked in Silicon Valley
and I couldn't even get freaking DSL for five years after it was
invented in San Jose!
romanovcode - 2 hours ago
No, it's not. Baltics got their independence in 1991 and they
had to re-build a lot of infrastructure rendering it more
modern.
omginternets - 1 hours ago
Non sequitur. It does not follow from your argument that
there is nothing to be learned from the Estonian model.If
nothing else, it's a shining example of what can be achieved
when a collective effort is put into modernizing digital
infrastructure, i.e. putting a little -- otherwise
[economically] unremarkable -- baltic country on the economic
map. Moreover, this comes at a time during which there is
much discussion of the US (and several European countries')
aging infrastructures, and in which the economic opportunity
of modernizing them is being scrutinized.Granted, this kind
of transformation may or may not be possible elsewhere, but
to brush it aside as "uninteresting" is to suggest a lack of
intellectual curiosity.
mamon - 1 hours ago
Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million
citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.
Retric - 1 hours ago
It's the other way around. Remember, countries pay for R&D
independent of the number of people in it, but they only
get taxes relative to their population. So smaller
countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT or deal
with worse systems.What's going on is larger counties made
the jump sooner so small countries have many examples to
learn from.
hellofunk - 1 hours ago
A country's size cannot be overstated. I don't know about
cost, but for mere agility, the smaller a country is, the
more nimble it can be for all sorts of reform and
progressive progress. Singapore and the Netherlands are
both small countries that have managed to overhaul aspects
of society without much barrier in years past. Germany is a
big place, the U.S. much bigger. Estonia, tiny. You can do
all sorts of things when you have just a few people it will
affect.
icebraining - 44 minutes ago
Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that
help?
aaron-lebo - 1 hours ago
Several of the Nordic/Baltic countries are like that. Why does
Russia not follow that pattern? What's different about it
culturally?
aquadrop - 1 hours ago
Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is relatively
good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast, mobile coverage
is good and mobile internet is relatively cheap, internet
banking & mobile banking is better than most of Europe and
USA. There's also such thing as "Gosuslugi" which is country-
wide services internet portal and is actually pretty
convenient innovation.
baybal2 - 56 minutes ago
>Russia is kinda actually like that. Tech usage is
relatively good in Russia. Internet is cheap and fast,
mobile coverage is good and mobile internet is relatively
cheap, internet banking & mobile banking is better than
most of Europe and USA. There's also such thing as
"Gosuslugi" which is country-wide services internet portal
and is actually pretty convenient innovation.Yet, but the
prime majority of all that wonderful digital cornucopia is
being developed by underfed and underpaid devs with level
of technical comprehension comparable to people called
"jquery monkeys" in the West. By the time most of them
reach late twenties, more experienced ones will move on to
become professional devs abroad, another will, sadly, join
the socioeconomic construct/caste of "going to nowhere 30
somethings." You guys in the West complain about age
discrimination and skill obsolescence only by the time you
hit forties, fifties, if not sixties, but here people hit
the same stage much earlier. Companies do not pay for skill
even 1/10th of what an American Dotcom would.What makes a
seeming difference in the level of quality is that
experienced tech people are found more evenly distributed
than in US where Dotcoms and well funded companies vacuum
significant portion of any much senior developers on the
job market, or in China where Alibaba and Tencent literally
employ double digit of all tech workforce and almost all
real talent. Here, the fact that a software developer is
just yet another "nothing special" white collar occupation
somehow, counterintuitively brings some benefit.
thriftwy - 32 minutes ago
If you tried to make a point you kind of failed.I make
$40k after tax, in Russia, employed locally, and while
that doesn't sound like much to an American ear, I've
bought my apartment for $90k a year before. I seriously
doubt anyone is going to pay me $400k before tax in the
US as you suggested. I'm 32 by the way. And I never work
more than 40 hr/week.I don't see how you can underpay a
dev in Russia. Maybe you can by hiring in really small
and depressive towns? Or promising rocket science job?
baybal2 - 22 minutes ago
>I make $40k after tax, in RussiaThat makes you a rather
expensive employee if the company hiring you actually
pays your pension contributions, EI, medical bills, and
other quasi-tax charges (which are much higher than in
the West.)24k a year is what a good grad can expect in a
company that pays taxes in full. The full cost of
employing such a guy will be right about $40k
aj-4 - 1 hours ago
Estonia and its people are culturally the most similar to
Finland - in fact none of the baltic countries are slavic -
and all speak exceptional English (better than Western
Europe). They are very pro-EU countries whom have benefitted
greatly economically and 'defensively' (vs Russia, at least
in terms of peace of mind). What will continue to limit
Russia are its authoritarian attitudes towards information
and trade.
xxs - 4 minutes ago
The part about English spoken in the Baltic is vastly
untrue -- outside (center of) Tartu and Tallinn [the 2
biggest cities] English is not that well spoken when it
comes to Estonia. Latvia is similar - mostly Riga (even
though Russian is more profoundly spoken). Most of the
younger generation could have an ok English but nothing
remarkable, even doctors may not have good English. I don't
have good enough impressions of Lithuania, although it's
not uncommon to fall back to Russian in
restaurants.Compared to Denmark or Norway where virtually
everyone (from kids to elderly people) actually speak
decent English, none of the Baltic countries have
'exceptional English'.
elefanten - 1 hours ago
There's probably something to being a lot bigger and having
more diverse population density.But ultimately the biggest
culprit is probably the major political, economic and
cultural hangovers from over a century of political
instability.
fsloth - 12 minutes ago
Culturally? Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are
culturally distinct from Russia, i.e. non-slavic. E.g. they
all have their own archaic languages and so on.One can look
at the populations in circa 1300 and extrapolate from that.
Without going into details - the baltic coast had it's own
catholic/pagan populations with trade ties to hanseatic
cities, and those populations are the basis for current
nation states.Russia, with it's slavic culture strongly tied
to the greek orthodox church was a bit further to east.See
for examplehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_change
s_of_Russi...and other wikipedia pages on the baltic
states.None of this have much to do with the current tech
scene, though :)
unitboolean - 1 hours ago
Meanwhile, Germany is moving in the opposite direction. Taxes are
increasing and now Germany is the second highest taxed country in
the world (according to OECD). and freelancers here can't even work
without a tax advisers who will manage all their taxes, because the
system is so complicated. Mobile internet is extremely expensive.
Just one day of using mobile internet in Germany will cost you more
than a a whole month mobile internet in Ukraine... everything is
very bureaucratic and a lot of paper work is required on every
corner. and don't forget, there are more than 300000 laws and rules
for everything. I can keep this list forever, but after all, I
think I should just move to Estonia, because Germany is definitely
not for me.
gumby - 55 minutes ago
> and freelancers here can't even work without a tax advisers who
will manage all their taxes, because the system is so
complicated.Basically everybody with more than a minimum wage job
in the US needs this kind of help, and regulatory (actually
congressional) capture by the two giants Intuit and H&R Block
mean that any efforts to fix this are squelched.
aj-4 - 55 minutes ago
People forget that Germany was still reverberating from its own
bounce-back for many years. Now it's bogged down by immigration
and currency woes.As for Estonia.. here's a golden ticket to make
international internet income + low cost of living. Not to
mention Talinn is charming.
tluyben2 - 1 hours ago
Sounds a lot like Spain, rules and paperwork. Taxes are lower but
so crappy that even with an accountant you often pay the weirdest
things and cannot declare many of the legitimate expenses you
might have so in the end I pay as much as I did in NL.The Estonia
e-residency is very good for ?nomads? ; if you travel a lot (say
you do not reside in one country 6 months + 1 days and (but this
is debatable somehow) are not in a country more than 60 days
continues, you can have a company in Estonia and declare tax for
that company there. Which is to say, no tax until you take money
out. If you don?t travel like that it is far more complex.
iagovar - 36 minutes ago
Spain is not nearly as complicated for a freelance. The problem
in Spain is that the administration is a disaster in the
"customer care" level. Also, every time a new technology
appears they have to open a process for companies to bid
(basically because their own IT dept is totally overloaded and
I highly doubt they are keeping up with technologies) and do
whatever is needed, but it's at least one year cycle.They try
to make everything anti-cheat, but in the end cheaters cheat
anyway, and in the process they make everything slow and
painful.
tormeh - 1 hours ago
It's not moving in the other direction. In fact there's a clear
political consensus among the parties (probably) making up the
next government that "digitization" should be one of the main
foci of attention going forward. Particularly the liberal parties
of course (Greens, FDP), but the CDU seem to also fancy this
newfangled internet-thingy. Fifteen years late, but moving in the
right direction.I have the feeling this is generally true in the
other conservative parts of the EU as well. Eyes are very much on
Estonia in the EU for this reason. It's all very sluggish, but
the wheels are starting to turn, I think.
adwhit - 1 hours ago
And yet.. Germany has probably the most successful economy in the
world. I guess being friendly to startups and freelancers just
ain't that important?
aaron-lebo - 1 hours ago
What metric are you using to measure successful?
adwhit - 1 hours ago
High productivity, huge trade surplus, low unemployment, very
high standard of living
tormeh - 1 hours ago
>Germany has probably the most successful economy in the
worldNope. Not even in the EU. Not even close. Where does this
myth come from? Is it that it has passed the UK per capita?I
mean, there are loads of nice things about Germany, and
economic strength is one, but that's a wild exaggeration.
orf - 41 minutes ago
Well, it's the biggest capital exporter in the world (huge
surplus) and is the third largest exporter in total. It's
also got the highest GDP in the EU by a fair margin.Per-
capita in the EU is skewed by a fair number of very small but
very very rich countries. Luxembourg, the leader, being a tax
haven and a population of half a million (!!) does not make
it the healthiest and best economy.
tormeh - 21 minutes ago
Total GDP is irrelevant to everything. People use it like
it means something, and it's just annoying.
orf - 11 minutes ago
Ok, that's quite convenient. What metric would you use?
Because Germany has a higher GDP per capita than the UK
or France. It would be a hard point to argue that any
other country in the EU has a stronger economy than those
three.
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KGIII - 12 minutes ago
I can't find any OECD data that says Germany is the second
highest taxed country in the world. The closest I can find is the
tax as a percentage of GDP and, in that listing, they are
13th.I'm interested in reading more/a list of the highest taxed
nations as a way to easily counter the claim that the US is the
highest taxed. Do you have a link/citation, so that I can verify
that?
k__ - 58 minutes ago
I'm a freelancer in Germany and I only have to pay two kind of
taxes, income tax and turnover tax.