> The only way the Estonian system is better is that the law dictates this number not to be treated as sensitive or identifying information

That's precisely the issue with SSN.

For the SSN it was ignored. In other European countries that law works as well. I've never been identified with an ID number anywhere in Europe. You always have to provide the corresponding document. Where IDs are used for identification they're not shared with private companies.

Can you explain this more? The ID number can't be treated as identifying information? ID literally stands for Identifier- if not used as identifying, how is it used? How does one identify themselves when getting a loan if not by using their ID?

In the US, the Social Security Number is widely regarded as a "secret password". Not as an identifier, but authentication credentials.

If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet.

But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack.

If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.

The ID number is used to identify us in all the government databases, it's an universal foreign key. If the police want to know my address then they use our x-road to connect to the API of the population registry and call a method to get my address using my ID number. If they want to see what cars I own and if I have done my yearly technical inspection then the use my ID number to get the data needed.

When someone wants a loan or anything like that then we have to show our real ID card or passport, or authenticate on the web with our smartcard and pin. So nobody can do stuff that's possible in the us - apply for credit cards and loans without authenticating properly.

I guess he means something closer to treated as an authentification means.

It identifies someone but it doesn't authentify him. Just like shireboy is your identity but it doesn't authentify you.

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!

No, it's not. Baltics got their independence in 1991 and they had to re-build a lot of infrastructure rendering it more modern.

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.

Also, it helps that it's a tiny country (1.3 million citizens), so providing IT infrastructure is dirt cheap.

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.

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.

  So smaller countries need to spend a higher % of GDP on IT

That... or just import IT that was already developed elsewhere.

Nobody sells 100% of IT in a box for an arbitrary country, off the self, zero customization required. Now, they can import things like operating systems, routers, word processors, etc, but so can large counties. And even then localization may not work out of the box.

Remember, things like local tax laws are not going to simply reflect some other country's rules 100% of the time.

Let's be frank, R&D costs are not the problem here.

Fewer citizens also means smaller budget, how does that help?

Economies of scale would make the opposite true.

Population density is probably the important factor. Small countries tend to have a higher population density which makes infrastructure cheaper.

I have no idea if that's true in general, but, in this case, Estonia is the one with the lower population density.

Several of the Nordic/Baltic countries are like that. Why does Russia not follow that pattern? What's different about it culturally?

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 example

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_Russi...

and other wikipedia pages on the baltic states.

None of this have much to do with the current tech scene, though :)

So interesting how the diaspora happened. Especially with the slavic Czech Republic and Croatia all the way west.

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.

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'.

Compared to the Nordic countries or Netherlands, 'exceptional' might be the wrong word. But certainly compared to, say, Germany or France, the level of English is in my experience considerably higher in the Baltics (and in Poland too). I say this having lived in both Germany and France and visited all the Baltic countries.

"Even doctors may not have good English" -- in Paris I'm happy to find one that will speak English at all. Do not underestimate how unwilling or afraid to speak English a lot of people are even in places like Paris and Berlin.

I agree about Germany (depends a lot on the city, though) or esp. France.

Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian (which is non indo european language) have virtually no non-native speakers and large amounts of the Russian born citizens (and aliens) may not speak the language, rendering English a good choice to obtain information. Having tiny user base forces the case compared to France, Germany or Italy (imo worse than both France/Germany).

For instance movies at the theater (and largely on the TV) have no dubbing unless they are targeted to kids who are unable to read.

>will continue to limit Russia

Russia doesn't seem very limited to me.

"Russia-China Bilateral Trade Up 30% In Q1 2017" [0]

"Russia upgraded to top rank in world wheat exports in 2017-18" [1]

"In Moscow, Saudi king slams Iran, signs billion dollar defense, energy deals" [2]

"King Salman and Putin Deals Leave the U.S. Out in the Cold" [3]

"Russia, world's 2nd-biggest arms seller, wants to expand its arms sales abroad" [4]

[0] https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russia-china-bilateral-...

[1] http://www.agrimoney.com/news/russia-upgraded-to-top-rank-in...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-moscow-saudi-king-slams-ira...

[3] https://www.rand.org/blog/2017/10/king-salman-and-putin-deal...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-russia-poised-to-expand-it...

That's some great info and thanks for sending those.

Check out another one I found -- "Russia US Trade up 25% in 2017"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2017/04/22/russia-u-...

There no doubt that Russia is still a major player in trade, in fact economists see it as one of the countries with the most potential for development in BRIC (brasil russia india china).

Unfortunately, the way the strata of government and society are has left the population to stagnate in terms of their well being and they are missing the opportunities in new-age, non-oligarchical industries - Russia is held back by its antiquated social structures and lacks incentive to change.

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.

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.

>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.

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?

>I make $40k after tax, in Russia

That 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

In Estonia the employee doesn't have to pay any taxes what-so-ever. The employer is the one that pays taxes from your bruto salary, which is required by the law (health insurance, pension, etc). In fact most people, when negotiating salaries, simply ask for how much they want in NET, because nobody besides the company cares about bruto.

In Russia, you pay 13% in direct tax (deduced automatically) and also your employer pays an additional ~30% to health insurance, pension, etc.

It's frequent nowdays to be cited your salary before 13% tax.

Not sure it's much higher, I'd say roughly the same when you consider tax bracket and things like 401k. But sure, it's not cheap.

Russia has been through the wringer.

They had an insane monarchy that delayed industrialization, missed out on the middle class development and went through a scorched earth total war and communist regime.

It’s a nation of contrast and paradox. Russia is a lot like the US in many ways.

> insane monarchy that delayed industrialization

That actually isn't true. Russian monarchy wasn't late to industrialize, and around half of industrial success claimed by USSR is rooted before 1917. For example, Donbass was already a thing back then.

The other half was built by the USA.

Most sources talk about the industrial revolution hitting Russia in the 1890s — it was an agrarian society with feudal governance.

It was decades behind the UK and others. That’s not to say there was no industry, but over half of output was peasant agriculture circa 1900, and the old methods were unable to adequately feed the nation.

Of course it was behind UK. Everybody was behind UK at the time. It's like comparing with South Korea today.

Soviet period is when mass starvations happened. And not only during wars.