I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that there even is a radically different approach to building up a business (the US/VC/growth model), and that this might be the only model to create modern tech companies to rival the US players. You won't compete with AWS by creating a family-owned business over a few decades where your primary objective is to provide stable and fair employment to people, often for their entire working lives. I'm not saying either one is better, just that I think that's the reality.

Maybe that was the case in the '50s to '80s but I recently worked at two small family owned German companies that were leaders in their niche and their primary objective was to make their owners rich, not their employees happy(Kununu employee reviews reflected that). After that, I learned my lesson and moved to $BIG_CORP where at least I know it's all about the profits and they don't pretend to be your family as an excuse to pay you peanuts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23416169

Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company.

The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=9aamDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT142&dq=%E...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-ci...

Same with US corporations. I recently tried to sign up for Microsoft's partner network because that's required for an Office 365 integration I was interested in. But I wasn't able to complete their byzantine signup process because there's a bug in the user interface that prevents me from confirming the tax status of my company. It's a simple bug, completely unrelated to the specifics of our company.

I wrote to them asking them to fix the bug so I can proceed. Predictably, they want to talk on the phone. They left some unintelligible message on my voicemail. Then they sent me an email saying they needed additional information from me without saying what that information was. They just want me to reply to arrange a time for a phone call.

I lost interest.

When I lived in the UK things like online banking, internet speeds (even in London) and 4G/5G coverage all felt a few years behind as well.

A few years behind whom, though? Consumer banking in the UK is eons ahead of America, and the UK has had a very dynamic and competitive consumer phone sector for years.

Dito here, the solution is to validate your domain in Business Intelligence. No I am not joking. My email is in profile, I'll send you the process.

/s

Some allow you to sign the papers online and only require you to authenticate yourself to make the contract binding. This authentication can be done by letter as you said, it in person in the post office or with a video call in which you show your Ausweis.

Your bank just might not support these options, but some do.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to stuff like this in GP's comment:

> Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home!

I personally love human interactions, but the idea that I'd have to call Joe in sales to spin up a VM for a few hours is ludicrous. Likewise for a lot of routine mundane stuff that is easily automatable. I think the world will be poorer if we move humans out of our daily interactions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to gain by moving the humans to where they can what they do best - namely be human!

Edit: They do have a technical section but that is 70% cars and the rest are other physical tech thinks like kitchen utensils and vacuum robots.

/me snorts...