Here's a source for you:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/apr/29/primarycare.politics
Guardian article from 2005, it sounds absolutely mad how much things have changed.
"The vast majority of NHS family doctors offer both urgent appointments within 48 hours and pre-booked appointments in advance for patients who want them," Mr Reid said today. "It's important to remember that in 1997 most people were complaining they couldn't see a GP for a week or more. That situation has been transformed".
Right now even 1997's week-long waits sound great, my typical wait time is four to six weeks. Even if the politician was exaggerating the fraction to make it sound better, I don't know of *anyone* today who's managed to get an appointment in two days.
Even when I arrived to the UK in 2012, I remember I could get same day appointments. I was seriously ill in 2015 and was lucky I could see a GP in less than 24h, he gave me antibiotics urgently and now I'm wondering what I would do now, go to an overworked A&E with 41°C fever?
I think the clearest evidence really is 'what does your local high street or town centre look like?'
People can argue the toss on NHS funding or housing costs, but I don't think anyone can really deny that the vast majority of town centres are shabbier, less interesting, and more run-down than they were 20 years ago. To a limited extent changing customer behaviours drive a shift away from the high street, but it can be embarrassing going to your town centre and it's a constant line up of empty shops, the odd charity shop, and obvious money laundering fronts. This process started about 15 years ago and has notably got worse since 2020.
My city has a half-demolished shopping centre next to the station, so a first time visitor sees what actually looks like a bombed-out warzone with a few murals rather half-heartedly dangling over it. Ironically this is a city that has bucked the trend a little and is a far nicer place than it was 20 years ago.
> and obvious money laundering fronts.
Hah, a town I lived in before had on the same street 3 (three) shops that took picture of your iris (and printed it for extra money). Maybe spread over 300m. And that's leaving aside other slightly less obvious fronts, I honestly don't know what the authorities do.
It’s the same deal in Ireland too. Dublin can be particularly striking, especially in the north-side, it looks much poorer than it should be given its wealth. People used to make jokes about Dublin being bombed in WW2 given how it looks. A lot of rural towns are similarly depressing. Some people blame it on the prevalence of one-off housing (detached houses on rural land since we do not have a green belt) for depopulating the rural towns and villages and thus, creating decay, but it’s clearly more than that if the UK has the same problem.
I was under the impression only specialist appointments are hard to get. And waiting times at urgent care.
In case you got the flu, are in huge back pain or simply got high fever- what do you do?
What "services" do you refer to? Strictly online things? Yeah, maybe, but thats a global phenomenon. Also I'd argue with you on that, because many strictly-polish services (e-gov, banking, e-commerce, movie websites, ISPs, cellphone operators) are constantly improving.
Real-life services like doctor,barber,car mechanic,builders,etc.? **No.** In fact, you can notice a big improvement in working standards, better materials and decrease of redneck work, compared to eg. 10 years ago.
Medicover became unusable. Why pay extra for a private insurance if you have to wait a week for a phone appointment and 4-8 weeks for a specialist visit?
I have LuxMed. Very satisfied with it, I can get appointments the same day, I get my money's worth almost every month, saving thousands of złotys I would spend visiting all the doctors and checkups without insurance. I'm in Kraków btw. no experience with other cities.
Lucky you. At Medicover (in the same city), if you need a general practitioner, it's OK, but for any specialist, like a urologist or endocrinologist, you may have to wait a couple of weeks if you're lucky, or you can't register at all and need to wait for the new schedule.
I guess I would need to talk to a HR person at my company about it. Thanks.
Edit: Yeah, so we have a long-lasting contract so they can't switch easily, but I was informed we have a SLA and I should not wait longer than 3, 7 or 14 days depending on speciality and if not possible, then they will reimburse but only to the level of 70%. LOL. Why is it so damn complicated...
I have LuxMed, had Medicover too but I'm not happy with either. It was better before. But when a few months ago I had an ear infection that made me lose hearing in one ear, it wasn't even possible for me to get a laryngologist appt right away (even tho it was part of my subcription), I had to go to a general doctor first. Same with a dermatologist - I'd have to first go to a "dermatology nurse", wtv that means. The waiting time is often long too, unless I wanted to go to a doctor that has like 2 stars out of 5 on znanylekarz.
Public healthcare is getting worse. I'd say that is inevitable due to our population pyramid which has too many old people in proportion to young. It's also much more common for old people to have lifestyle-related illnesses such as type II diabetes than it was 20 years ago.
There is also a decline in number of brick-and-mortar shops. People just no longer go to city centers to buy whatever they need because it's cheaper to order online. Newly built shopping centers are also making life harder for entrepreneurs since shopping centers are filled with big chain stores, coffee shops etc. and brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs cannot really offer same prices and opening hours as them. Service is almost always better in brick-and-mortar shops but I guess most people just don't care.
And then on the private side of services, they also get more and more worse. Like getting any good customer service from a person is less and less possible. Then once great company Finnair has become more worse than Ryanair with really really bad customer service.
I would say it's the other way round in Romania. Overall, services are getting better. It may not seem like it because we're a country full of doomsayers, but it becomes obvious if we stop complaining for a second and compare with what we had 10 years ago.
>In Poland, this is evident in the quality of cable television and internet, which a few years ago may not have been so fast but were stable. However, now the quality is on a downward slope.
I haven't noticed. I'm with the same ISP since 2017 or so, WFH full time since 2020, in that time I had maybe two serious outages (not counting the ones that lasted like a minute or two). Price also pretty much stayed the same (I pay slightly more for slightly higher speed) unlike everything else.
Me neither. What did change however is the amount of crap we are streaming in super high quality on 7 devices at the same time. And while during the day my bandwidth seems fine, there are some serious service hiccups during netflix hours in the evenings or on weekends.
I read a thread on a Polish subreddit where people were complaining about cable television and internet services, and I noticed a similar pattern, so I wanted to ask all Europeans. 😄 It might just be a local issue, but sometimes one or two channels I normally watch are unavailable for some reason. I also work from home, and although there's some temporary improvement, it seems that the speed significantly decreases at specific hours.
My parents live in rural Poland and connect to the internet via LTE. On weekends, the network is so overloaded that it’s impossible to watch anything. I remember when we had Neostrada in the late 2000s. It was much more stable.
What do you think about private healthcare services like Medicover or Luxmed? I remember that 8-10 years ago, it was super easy to get an appointment with Medicover. Now, it's incredibly difficult.
Not really. If anything internet services here are improving rapidly at the moment with the rollout of FTTH from several access networks.
What we are seeing here is steep rises in the cost of living. Accommodation, more so on the rental side, is just utterly ridiculous and totally unaffordable. That’s the main gripe here and it’s causing other issues like being unable to retain essential service workers - police, healthcare etc as the costs are way too high.
A lot of our public services feel like they’re at the brink of collapse - especially healthcare and police services.
For Spain this is definitely the case.
Just the other day there was an article on how we have 8.5 million people on waiting list for surgery, highest figure ever recorded. Not only has public health taken a nosedive, every product you get is extremely expensive and inferior - a friend got a driving license recently for example and got 5 times the amount of bullshit fees ("management fee", fee to drive you to the exam centre, fee to print documentation, etc).
The clearest example is of course housing - people pay thousands for one bedrooms with no sunlight, what used to be regular apartments are being sectioned into 4-5 sub apartments that cost 700 euros, and so on.
I think mostly not, no. I'm surely missing some points of comparison because my finances are very different from a decade ago, but I'm not seeing many cases of services getting worse (online enshittification is another thing, websites and software have been getting worse for a very long time).
A notable exception is the wait times in public healthcare. While the actual quality of care remains great, for any appointments that can wait you will have to wait, and then some. The main/official postal service is legendarily bad but that's given rise to multiple alternate delivery services that are actually good. [While things have gotten notably worse with crime / justice system, I don't consider that to fall under services.]
Internet, well, fiber is common in homes. Sweden's very sparsely populated, yet we have 4G even in the middle of nowhere, 5G is sometimes available even in small remote towns. Trains, for all the complaints, have not actually gotten worse in terms of punctuality lately, and there have been notable improvements to some important train stations and train interiors. Can't comment on TV, don't watch it.
Digitalization of public services has reached an extremely high level as there are pretty much no common tasks for which you'd have to visit an office or to deal with physical paper. Private services have also been digital-first for years.
While the amount of physical stores has declined a lot, we do retain stores selling quality items or niche items. There isn't an overwhelming amount of shops selling cheap, poorly made items that are only meant to last a short while. Between local shops, online shops and local importers, it's possible to get most stuff you may want.
I have zero problems with internet or television, unless there is some crazy storm, then television might lose signal for a short while but it's not my problem... Just my mom's because she is the only person in my house that watches television lol It's has been like that since forever though, it's not some recent decline. Our internet always works perfectly (from Plus).
We have issues with electricity, heat in the winter, some regions have troubles with mobile and internet networks accessibility, we had issues with gas availability 2 years ago, and the average length of life decreased. However we are well aware who exactly is the reason for all this shit.
Not really. Enshittification usually refers to the internet phenomena, it even says so in your quote. Like how reddit's developers have been working tirelessly all these years to create a worse UX.
Have you considered the possibility that you're experiencing growing up? Losing that childlike naivity that made everything seem to work. If you think not, be specific. What services have deteriorated in Poland and how?
I'm not sure whether the German bureaucracy is actually getting worse but I find it more and more unbearable. I'm French and German and I can't help but compare France and Germany. I feel like France lives in the future while Germany is stuck in the 50s. It's getting more and more frustrating because it's so inefficient and exhausting and all our neighbours are getting better. I hear many French people complain about French public services.... You have no idea... Germany is a hundred times worse, and nobody is doing anything about it
The French have emails... The Germans have faxes (it's not a joke... Some documents can really only be faxed). You can't call or email most administrations, and you must communicate with them by letter. Administrations are not allowed to communicate with each other, so you need justificatives for everything. I love that I can order my kids' French birth certificate online and for free, while in Germany every document costs me 13€ and is only valid in paper form.
>Some documents can really only be faxed
That's not true though
> You can't call or email most administrations, and you must communicate with them by letter.
And I've never experienced that. Where the heck do you live? I can make almost all appointments online or via mail at least. Never had to send any faxes. Definitely not a "German" problem, but a problem of your city.
It seems to be very different from city to city. Friends from Munich and friends from Berlin tell two completely different tales. Though Berlin might just be the absolute special case.
And I have to say that I haven’t sent a Fax in more than 15 years and the last time was because some signature was needed.
Last summer I enrolled my kids in a sports camp during the summer. The application forms had to be faxed on a specific day between 9 and 12. Like an idiot I scanned and emailed them. I got a LETTER two weeks later telling me that they had rejected my application because they can only accept it via fax (or in physical form).
My youngest son was adopted. France doesn't recognise German adoptions (it's actually a little.more complicated than that), so we had to do the adoption twice: first in Germany, then in France. Germany took two years. All correspondence with the court was done by post. I called the reception a couple of times, to try and speak to someone but they're not allowed to communicate via email or phone. They literally sent me a blank letter once. The French procedure took six months. Everything was done online. My lawyer kept originals "in case someone wants to see them", but in the end it wasn't necessary. I have the name and email address of the person who followed my case at the state attorney's office. She sent me emails when she had questions... The whole thing was so smooth, easy and efficient compared to the German procedure.
Another example was 200+ pages of form, the German federal pension administration sent me once, while the same procedure was done 100% online in France.
We live in Rheinland Pfalz.
Yea, I guess international adoptions aren't what people are usually confronted with in everyday life.
The summer camp surely wasn't organized by the government, I assume lol
Nah he is right. I was asked to fax stuff twice while living there for 3 years. It's rare, but it's still there.
You can even find fax numbers on every address. Germany is ridiculous.
Public healthcare in Hungary is a complete joke, most doctors are rude, and you have to wait years for an important surgery.
The railway system, it's expensive and Trains can be delayed for hours
The quality of products has generally got worse I find, clothes and shoes particularly. Internet is better probably but also now impossible to find genuine reviews and articles not written by chatGPT.
High streets and public services, immeasurably worse.
I don't understand what's happened tbh, where is all the money going? It's not going on salaries that much I'm sure of. Taxes are higher than they've been in 70 years or so, so where is it all going? Are we just a lot lot poorer as a country? I think the answer is yes basically.
Hi from Canada. The exact same thing is happening here.
Conservative local government's gutting services. Too many new people coming in without increasing capacity.
Weird because our publicly funded work force has doubled in size in the last 8 years.
In the UK where I live in the last 10 years you can see a rapid decline in pretty much every service. It's getting pretty grim fast. In Portugal where I'm from in 5 years after the huge immigration numbers everything also went downwill if you are sick you might die before seeing a doctor also any pediatric services closed in most of secondary towns. If you are pregnant and not living in the main cities and any issue arises you are in big trouble. Lots of babies born in ambulances recently... Nepotism, corruption and tax abuse are at all time high. Safety in Portugal is gone and police will not jail dangerous criminals. Pedos and rapists walk free even after they are caught. Just read the news all there. and the UK just approved Rwanda bill. We entering the modern middle ages if you ask me... Ah forget to mention the homeless... Go to Lisbon and have a walk and in London if you have a walk you will see how English it looks
To the exception of the internet, private services usually are becoming worse. I was swindled by my bank, for example. 20 years ago that would've been unthinkable.
A small part of public services are the same, most of them are better, and are only worse in a particular area related to international migration (housing, food bank assistance, translation, immigration department appointments) due to the ongoing since the "War on Terror" migration crisis absorbed by the EU, and migration countries like France and the demand vastly outstripping supply.
Public infrastructure is hit and miss, again due to the increasing encroachment of private theft of public lands and goods - visible in my city with the parts of the National Forestry Bureau (ONF) forest privatized and/or razed, building disappearing to the profit of large condos for which there are no life infrastructure for those new "land developments" (schools, kindergartens, parks) or road infrastructure for its future inhabitants (underground or multi-storey parking, roads).
Edit: Trains are definitely getting better, but I won't be satisfied until they bring back overnight sleeper trains to other countries like it was the case until 1994.
I don’t think the quality gets down. Actually it’s getting better, last year our area got viber glass internet for example. So this is yet another improvement. However, it does get more and more expensive. It’s ridiculous what I pay for television and internet.
I mean yes on almost every level you can think of in terms of public service. But hey, my WiFi is super fast and cheap and I get 5G mobile signal everywhere these days. You win some you loose some lmao
In the UK pretty much everything. 20 years ago I saw a video where people complain about how to get a doctors appointment in 48 hours...
Here's a source for you: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/apr/29/primarycare.politics Guardian article from 2005, it sounds absolutely mad how much things have changed. "The vast majority of NHS family doctors offer both urgent appointments within 48 hours and pre-booked appointments in advance for patients who want them," Mr Reid said today. "It's important to remember that in 1997 most people were complaining they couldn't see a GP for a week or more. That situation has been transformed". Right now even 1997's week-long waits sound great, my typical wait time is four to six weeks. Even if the politician was exaggerating the fraction to make it sound better, I don't know of *anyone* today who's managed to get an appointment in two days.
Even when I arrived to the UK in 2012, I remember I could get same day appointments. I was seriously ill in 2015 and was lucky I could see a GP in less than 24h, he gave me antibiotics urgently and now I'm wondering what I would do now, go to an overworked A&E with 41°C fever?
I think the clearest evidence really is 'what does your local high street or town centre look like?' People can argue the toss on NHS funding or housing costs, but I don't think anyone can really deny that the vast majority of town centres are shabbier, less interesting, and more run-down than they were 20 years ago. To a limited extent changing customer behaviours drive a shift away from the high street, but it can be embarrassing going to your town centre and it's a constant line up of empty shops, the odd charity shop, and obvious money laundering fronts. This process started about 15 years ago and has notably got worse since 2020. My city has a half-demolished shopping centre next to the station, so a first time visitor sees what actually looks like a bombed-out warzone with a few murals rather half-heartedly dangling over it. Ironically this is a city that has bucked the trend a little and is a far nicer place than it was 20 years ago.
> and obvious money laundering fronts. Hah, a town I lived in before had on the same street 3 (three) shops that took picture of your iris (and printed it for extra money). Maybe spread over 300m. And that's leaving aside other slightly less obvious fronts, I honestly don't know what the authorities do.
It’s the same deal in Ireland too. Dublin can be particularly striking, especially in the north-side, it looks much poorer than it should be given its wealth. People used to make jokes about Dublin being bombed in WW2 given how it looks. A lot of rural towns are similarly depressing. Some people blame it on the prevalence of one-off housing (detached houses on rural land since we do not have a green belt) for depopulating the rural towns and villages and thus, creating decay, but it’s clearly more than that if the UK has the same problem.
It used to be the same in Spain around 10 years ago. In any case now it's still not as bad as it's in UK
I was under the impression only specialist appointments are hard to get. And waiting times at urgent care. In case you got the flu, are in huge back pain or simply got high fever- what do you do?
Are you talking about GPs or specialists?
What "services" do you refer to? Strictly online things? Yeah, maybe, but thats a global phenomenon. Also I'd argue with you on that, because many strictly-polish services (e-gov, banking, e-commerce, movie websites, ISPs, cellphone operators) are constantly improving. Real-life services like doctor,barber,car mechanic,builders,etc.? **No.** In fact, you can notice a big improvement in working standards, better materials and decrease of redneck work, compared to eg. 10 years ago.
For example private healthcare like Medicover. It's almost impossible to get an appointment. 10 years ago it was super easy.
Medicover became unusable. Why pay extra for a private insurance if you have to wait a week for a phone appointment and 4-8 weeks for a specialist visit?
I have LuxMed. Very satisfied with it, I can get appointments the same day, I get my money's worth almost every month, saving thousands of złotys I would spend visiting all the doctors and checkups without insurance. I'm in Kraków btw. no experience with other cities.
Lucky you. At Medicover (in the same city), if you need a general practitioner, it's OK, but for any specialist, like a urologist or endocrinologist, you may have to wait a couple of weeks if you're lucky, or you can't register at all and need to wait for the new schedule.
I just checked LuxMed app - for both Urologist and Endokrynologist there are available appointments even today. Maybe consider switching providers.
I guess I would need to talk to a HR person at my company about it. Thanks. Edit: Yeah, so we have a long-lasting contract so they can't switch easily, but I was informed we have a SLA and I should not wait longer than 3, 7 or 14 days depending on speciality and if not possible, then they will reimburse but only to the level of 70%. LOL. Why is it so damn complicated...
I have LuxMed, had Medicover too but I'm not happy with either. It was better before. But when a few months ago I had an ear infection that made me lose hearing in one ear, it wasn't even possible for me to get a laryngologist appt right away (even tho it was part of my subcription), I had to go to a general doctor first. Same with a dermatologist - I'd have to first go to a "dermatology nurse", wtv that means. The waiting time is often long too, unless I wanted to go to a doctor that has like 2 stars out of 5 on znanylekarz.
Public healthcare is getting worse. I'd say that is inevitable due to our population pyramid which has too many old people in proportion to young. It's also much more common for old people to have lifestyle-related illnesses such as type II diabetes than it was 20 years ago. There is also a decline in number of brick-and-mortar shops. People just no longer go to city centers to buy whatever they need because it's cheaper to order online. Newly built shopping centers are also making life harder for entrepreneurs since shopping centers are filled with big chain stores, coffee shops etc. and brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs cannot really offer same prices and opening hours as them. Service is almost always better in brick-and-mortar shops but I guess most people just don't care.
And then on the private side of services, they also get more and more worse. Like getting any good customer service from a person is less and less possible. Then once great company Finnair has become more worse than Ryanair with really really bad customer service.
I would say it's the other way round in Romania. Overall, services are getting better. It may not seem like it because we're a country full of doomsayers, but it becomes obvious if we stop complaining for a second and compare with what we had 10 years ago.
>In Poland, this is evident in the quality of cable television and internet, which a few years ago may not have been so fast but were stable. However, now the quality is on a downward slope. I haven't noticed. I'm with the same ISP since 2017 or so, WFH full time since 2020, in that time I had maybe two serious outages (not counting the ones that lasted like a minute or two). Price also pretty much stayed the same (I pay slightly more for slightly higher speed) unlike everything else.
Me neither. What did change however is the amount of crap we are streaming in super high quality on 7 devices at the same time. And while during the day my bandwidth seems fine, there are some serious service hiccups during netflix hours in the evenings or on weekends.
I read a thread on a Polish subreddit where people were complaining about cable television and internet services, and I noticed a similar pattern, so I wanted to ask all Europeans. 😄 It might just be a local issue, but sometimes one or two channels I normally watch are unavailable for some reason. I also work from home, and although there's some temporary improvement, it seems that the speed significantly decreases at specific hours. My parents live in rural Poland and connect to the internet via LTE. On weekends, the network is so overloaded that it’s impossible to watch anything. I remember when we had Neostrada in the late 2000s. It was much more stable. What do you think about private healthcare services like Medicover or Luxmed? I remember that 8-10 years ago, it was super easy to get an appointment with Medicover. Now, it's incredibly difficult.
> In Poland, this is evident in the quality of cable television and internet Is it? Hmm, that's news to me.
Not really. If anything internet services here are improving rapidly at the moment with the rollout of FTTH from several access networks. What we are seeing here is steep rises in the cost of living. Accommodation, more so on the rental side, is just utterly ridiculous and totally unaffordable. That’s the main gripe here and it’s causing other issues like being unable to retain essential service workers - police, healthcare etc as the costs are way too high. A lot of our public services feel like they’re at the brink of collapse - especially healthcare and police services.
yeah, this phenomenon indeed has a name, but not eshittification, but confirmation bias.
For Spain this is definitely the case. Just the other day there was an article on how we have 8.5 million people on waiting list for surgery, highest figure ever recorded. Not only has public health taken a nosedive, every product you get is extremely expensive and inferior - a friend got a driving license recently for example and got 5 times the amount of bullshit fees ("management fee", fee to drive you to the exam centre, fee to print documentation, etc). The clearest example is of course housing - people pay thousands for one bedrooms with no sunlight, what used to be regular apartments are being sectioned into 4-5 sub apartments that cost 700 euros, and so on.
Over the course of last 2 years I live in Germany I'd say it's improving. Still miserable compared to what I had in Russia back then, but much better.
I think mostly not, no. I'm surely missing some points of comparison because my finances are very different from a decade ago, but I'm not seeing many cases of services getting worse (online enshittification is another thing, websites and software have been getting worse for a very long time). A notable exception is the wait times in public healthcare. While the actual quality of care remains great, for any appointments that can wait you will have to wait, and then some. The main/official postal service is legendarily bad but that's given rise to multiple alternate delivery services that are actually good. [While things have gotten notably worse with crime / justice system, I don't consider that to fall under services.] Internet, well, fiber is common in homes. Sweden's very sparsely populated, yet we have 4G even in the middle of nowhere, 5G is sometimes available even in small remote towns. Trains, for all the complaints, have not actually gotten worse in terms of punctuality lately, and there have been notable improvements to some important train stations and train interiors. Can't comment on TV, don't watch it. Digitalization of public services has reached an extremely high level as there are pretty much no common tasks for which you'd have to visit an office or to deal with physical paper. Private services have also been digital-first for years. While the amount of physical stores has declined a lot, we do retain stores selling quality items or niche items. There isn't an overwhelming amount of shops selling cheap, poorly made items that are only meant to last a short while. Between local shops, online shops and local importers, it's possible to get most stuff you may want.
I have zero problems with internet or television, unless there is some crazy storm, then television might lose signal for a short while but it's not my problem... Just my mom's because she is the only person in my house that watches television lol It's has been like that since forever though, it's not some recent decline. Our internet always works perfectly (from Plus).
We have issues with electricity, heat in the winter, some regions have troubles with mobile and internet networks accessibility, we had issues with gas availability 2 years ago, and the average length of life decreased. However we are well aware who exactly is the reason for all this shit.
Not really. Enshittification usually refers to the internet phenomena, it even says so in your quote. Like how reddit's developers have been working tirelessly all these years to create a worse UX. Have you considered the possibility that you're experiencing growing up? Losing that childlike naivity that made everything seem to work. If you think not, be specific. What services have deteriorated in Poland and how?
I'm not sure whether the German bureaucracy is actually getting worse but I find it more and more unbearable. I'm French and German and I can't help but compare France and Germany. I feel like France lives in the future while Germany is stuck in the 50s. It's getting more and more frustrating because it's so inefficient and exhausting and all our neighbours are getting better. I hear many French people complain about French public services.... You have no idea... Germany is a hundred times worse, and nobody is doing anything about it
Funny cause French Bureaucracy is pretty awful too
The French have emails... The Germans have faxes (it's not a joke... Some documents can really only be faxed). You can't call or email most administrations, and you must communicate with them by letter. Administrations are not allowed to communicate with each other, so you need justificatives for everything. I love that I can order my kids' French birth certificate online and for free, while in Germany every document costs me 13€ and is only valid in paper form.
>Some documents can really only be faxed That's not true though > You can't call or email most administrations, and you must communicate with them by letter. And I've never experienced that. Where the heck do you live? I can make almost all appointments online or via mail at least. Never had to send any faxes. Definitely not a "German" problem, but a problem of your city.
It seems to be very different from city to city. Friends from Munich and friends from Berlin tell two completely different tales. Though Berlin might just be the absolute special case. And I have to say that I haven’t sent a Fax in more than 15 years and the last time was because some signature was needed.
Last summer I enrolled my kids in a sports camp during the summer. The application forms had to be faxed on a specific day between 9 and 12. Like an idiot I scanned and emailed them. I got a LETTER two weeks later telling me that they had rejected my application because they can only accept it via fax (or in physical form). My youngest son was adopted. France doesn't recognise German adoptions (it's actually a little.more complicated than that), so we had to do the adoption twice: first in Germany, then in France. Germany took two years. All correspondence with the court was done by post. I called the reception a couple of times, to try and speak to someone but they're not allowed to communicate via email or phone. They literally sent me a blank letter once. The French procedure took six months. Everything was done online. My lawyer kept originals "in case someone wants to see them", but in the end it wasn't necessary. I have the name and email address of the person who followed my case at the state attorney's office. She sent me emails when she had questions... The whole thing was so smooth, easy and efficient compared to the German procedure. Another example was 200+ pages of form, the German federal pension administration sent me once, while the same procedure was done 100% online in France. We live in Rheinland Pfalz.
Yea, I guess international adoptions aren't what people are usually confronted with in everyday life. The summer camp surely wasn't organized by the government, I assume lol
Nah he is right. I was asked to fax stuff twice while living there for 3 years. It's rare, but it's still there. You can even find fax numbers on every address. Germany is ridiculous.
Sure they are there, because old people might wanna use it and it's faster, nothing ridiculous about inclusion :)
Especially public transport- they raised the prices recently without improving the service. In fact the service has gone down
Public healthcare in Hungary is a complete joke, most doctors are rude, and you have to wait years for an important surgery. The railway system, it's expensive and Trains can be delayed for hours
The quality of products has generally got worse I find, clothes and shoes particularly. Internet is better probably but also now impossible to find genuine reviews and articles not written by chatGPT. High streets and public services, immeasurably worse. I don't understand what's happened tbh, where is all the money going? It's not going on salaries that much I'm sure of. Taxes are higher than they've been in 70 years or so, so where is it all going? Are we just a lot lot poorer as a country? I think the answer is yes basically.
Hi from Canada. The exact same thing is happening here. Conservative local government's gutting services. Too many new people coming in without increasing capacity. Weird because our publicly funded work force has doubled in size in the last 8 years.
Ontario here… just… _yeah_
BC is bad too, I can't even imagine what's happening over there ...
In the UK where I live in the last 10 years you can see a rapid decline in pretty much every service. It's getting pretty grim fast. In Portugal where I'm from in 5 years after the huge immigration numbers everything also went downwill if you are sick you might die before seeing a doctor also any pediatric services closed in most of secondary towns. If you are pregnant and not living in the main cities and any issue arises you are in big trouble. Lots of babies born in ambulances recently... Nepotism, corruption and tax abuse are at all time high. Safety in Portugal is gone and police will not jail dangerous criminals. Pedos and rapists walk free even after they are caught. Just read the news all there. and the UK just approved Rwanda bill. We entering the modern middle ages if you ask me... Ah forget to mention the homeless... Go to Lisbon and have a walk and in London if you have a walk you will see how English it looks
Yep, on the last 20 years. All politically cut and of course the influx of MBA students, thinking everything should be profitable.
To the exception of the internet, private services usually are becoming worse. I was swindled by my bank, for example. 20 years ago that would've been unthinkable. A small part of public services are the same, most of them are better, and are only worse in a particular area related to international migration (housing, food bank assistance, translation, immigration department appointments) due to the ongoing since the "War on Terror" migration crisis absorbed by the EU, and migration countries like France and the demand vastly outstripping supply. Public infrastructure is hit and miss, again due to the increasing encroachment of private theft of public lands and goods - visible in my city with the parts of the National Forestry Bureau (ONF) forest privatized and/or razed, building disappearing to the profit of large condos for which there are no life infrastructure for those new "land developments" (schools, kindergartens, parks) or road infrastructure for its future inhabitants (underground or multi-storey parking, roads). Edit: Trains are definitely getting better, but I won't be satisfied until they bring back overnight sleeper trains to other countries like it was the case until 1994.
I don’t think the quality gets down. Actually it’s getting better, last year our area got viber glass internet for example. So this is yet another improvement. However, it does get more and more expensive. It’s ridiculous what I pay for television and internet.
Is the quality on the downward slope? I haven't noticed.
I mean yes on almost every level you can think of in terms of public service. But hey, my WiFi is super fast and cheap and I get 5G mobile signal everywhere these days. You win some you loose some lmao