[askonomm]

That's crazy. Notarization in Estonia can be done entirely online using a digital signature, just like everything else here is done (including voting, getting married, getting divorced, filing taxes, opening/closing a company, etc). From all I hear Germany is still stuck in the 90s for some reason.

[tietjens]

90s is charitable. Most important thing here is that nothing changes. Everything new is considered suspicious.

[_petronius]

More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.

[askonomm]

The weird thing is that, at least as an Estonian, I would've never expected this from Germany. Italy, Spain? Sure. Germany? That just feels weird.

[yencabulator]

Lots of systems are stuck in very old ways of working and using humans as cogs. My American utility bill has a typo in my name that is not there in the online system through which I opened my account; a human in a back office read text from one app and typed it into another. Maybe there was even a piece of paper involved.

[the_mitsuhiko]

I can also listen to a notary online in Austria. I just absolutely do not want to have the notary involved in the first place.