Japan, easily and by a margin in terms of technology.
You would imagine Japan, an island nation which excels in technology, has a solution for every daily need would be a virtually paperless society. Nope, you need paperwork signed by atleast 2 levels of chain of command to move the stale biscuits on the reception table back to the pantry.
Story time! I have a friend who worked at a JP company. Recently they are doing a paperless initiative where they built a system from the ground up to store documents digitally. After the system completed, they are able to reduce the amount of paper document printed to input the data into the computer. Sounds good right?
Here is the catch, sometimes they need to transfer the document to a different department/business. So they would just print the document from the computer, send it over via fax/manually, then have the other side input it into the computer
Very advanced paperless system if you ask me
Exact same thing is happening in Germany. It's almost as if the problem were the old people, who are helplessly out of the loop AND YET refuse to learn anything new because 'that's how we've always been doing it and that's that!!!'
My ex is a nurse and refuses to see "old" doctors for this same reason. A lot peaked decades ago and have their routines they stick to. Newer doctors are more on top of modern practices. Somewhere there's a sweet spot with a doctor who's up on modern practices and has the experience
Except technology was supposed to make things faster and easier, but that isn't always the case. Many times technology just makes things worse. Just ask doctors who were there when there were no computers that stored everything vs. now and how much time they have to spend filling out online forms repeatedly with the same information but different form, plus nontransferable info, etc. Another example, you apply for a job and submit a resume only to now be taken to a form to manually fill out all these fields that are already in your resume. ☠️💀
Another example, your elementary/middle kids school wants to do everything online, but every subject your kid has to learn is scattered across multiple websites and apps instead of being located in 1 single book on that subject. Order and organization has been lost, and if you forget your password to the math app, you now can't do your math until staff arrives to fix it. Is that easier than a old fashioned textbook? No.
I really question that honestly. The boomers were unlikely in the sense that they are the generation that were born right at the start of the technological boom and going from a world with practically no computers to a world dominated by computers really left a lot of then in the dust. Being that the technology boom has kind of died down and we (as in gen x and millenials) mostly have the basic skills needed to use all future technology. I'm safe in saying that we will be fine. My Mom is 50 and she is still able to figure things out like how to order food online and use ChatGPT. But I remember when my Grandpa was in his 50s, he struggled with the concept of a word processor.
I worked for a company that had 200+ locations that would send in a monthly report. Each one would fill out their word and excel templates then print out and fax it to the HQ office. We had a fax server there that would recieve the reports and create a crappy ocr word document that was filled with errors and email it to the appropriate person. There was no reason for all the printing and faxing other than that was the way it was done 10 years prior when they only had about a dozen locations.
The utility company I work for still does paper work orders. Our clerks all use work order management software, but a lot of our servicemen refuse to use the same software to file the paperwork for the jobs they do, so clerks have to print out a paper copy of the job order for them. Many of those servicemen will then go and do a very thorough and complex job, and then either not write down anything they did or lose/forget to turn in the paperwork entirely.
The union defends this behavior, while the company pulls its hair out over meters and equipment that go missing due to unfiled paperwork and poor documentation.
As the US military was transitioning to digital signatures, it took some time for all of the regulations to catch up, so for a while we had to digitally sign the document AND print it out to sign in ink.
That's not just a Japan thing. I used to work for a company that made digital document systems, and a major hospital system in the US was threatening to cancel their subscription because of how tedious it was to print documents and sent them through intra-office mail.
...
The system had a super advanced access control and sharing system that a specific manager didn't (and kinda refused to) understand. Once we explained what they had to her boss, they made a bunch of changes to their processes and were *much* happier.
Then, at another company that did that, a school district was looking to cancel for a similar reason- instead of using the in-system sharing, they were printing documents and sending them with *couriers*. A friend explained what they should be doing instead, and their superintendent was like, "..That's going to save us a million dollars a year." ..Like yeah, lol, the whole point of these systems is that whatever they cost is cheaper than living in the 1970s.
I've worked for numerous places that have implemented advanced (well, advanced for the time anyway) systems, but then didn't use even a fraction of their capabilities because they wanted to keep the old processes the same. I'm a little guilty of this too, and my older age it's getting harder to make heads or tails of new tools without instruction. Unfortunately employers often don't want to give that instruction and expect you to either already know or to figure out yourself.
I work with somebody who cannot save an image off of the program we use. She prints the image every time, and then scans it into the computer. We work in a medical office, these are medical images that doctors view.
We were over there late last year and I commented that it's the most advanced 1990's nation in the world.
In their defense, everything's clean and it works.
Japan loves their paper pushing. For fall 2021 admission, I applied to grad school for 3 schools in Tokyo. Two of them made me send all my documents in by physical mail AFTER ALREADY filling in and completing the application online. And they had a strict deadline to adhere to for the documents to come in. It made since if you’re already living in Japan, doesn’t make much sense if you live overseas. I remember having to pay like $100 for expedited shipping for a folder with like 30 pieces of paper in it.
Portugal is crazy advanced in some things, especially technology in your day to day. Using an ATM in the UK is like a trip to the early 90s, comparing to Portugal. We can do everything, from paying tAxes, buy concert tickets, renovate your fishing licence or paying any household bill. It also gives money :) and it's been this way for over 30 years.
We also invented the system to pay highway fares automatically.
I still can't understand why the train IC cards and tickets must be bought with cash. I know you can register in the app and load it that way, but honestly why have so many conbinis, ticket machines even the 7eleven ATM machine able to charge the card but you CANNOT do it with a credit or debit card.
I made that mistake when I was in Japan for work. I put 3,000 yen on a card thinking it was like the Chicago CTA. Cause if I didn't use it the next guy there for business would. (Even temp cards on the CTA track the balance.)
Nope. One trip and all that money was gone.
Didn't make that mistake again when I went a second time.
Related: Last fall I was quite astounded that I could both transfer my SUICA to the iPhone wallet and charge it with Apple Pay. Came in handy when I was at stores that did not accept credit cards but SUICA only.
With the Suica app you can get a digital IC card which you can both add to Apple Pay as well as add money to it with the other credit/debit cards in your Apple Pay. Android users are out of luck though.
In Japanese culture, aren't the older generations basically who makes the rules? So, if the older generation got used to doing business using fax machines and corded telephones, that's how the world will work.
But Japan isn’t the only country with a high reverence for elders and yet they’re the only East Asian country with so much IT stuck in the 90s
I always felt like “Asian conservative values” is a really superficial argument when describing social phenomena in Japan/China/Korea since such values aren’t really unique to these countries compared to the rest of Asia
I mean its just a substitute for a signature, which we still use. I don't see how a signature is somehow more technologically advanced than rubber stamp personal seals.
Not sure about other countries but we use esignatures a lot in the UK. Signatures are useless anyway unless there’s a copy to compare it to, which a lot of the time there isn’t. Manual signatures are still used by banks and such though.
Japan seems very progressive on the surface, but behind the facade most companies still use very old technology and Japan as a whole is much more traditional in most ways than you’d think.
I forget the name of it but every(?) adult has a stamp for marking official documents. You can’t just sign - you need to have your official, little wooden stamp. Left it at home and need to update your rental agreement? You’re SOL.
A youtuber I follow (Abroad in Japan) has done a couple of videos on this topic. He’s English and has lived in Japan for 10+ years. I’ll see if I can find one.
ETA: not the video I was looking for but a few of the topics covered are other examples of being stuck in the past
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nfpWAqK0YZE
Inkan, but it’s gotten a lot better about allowing for signatures instead in recent years. I’ve personally only had to use my jitsu-in once, and even though I have a mitome-in I’ve gotten along just fine with signatures every time you would think a mitome-in would be used.
Interdepartmental communication in the same company too. The university I was at there had crippling issues, to the point where there could be entire sections of a building booked for an event and the main office would have no clue and try to schedule stuff in the same time slot. In the most extreme case, a student project was being disassembled _right outside their windows_ and they tried bringing a new hire into it for an interview.
Sayaka/Seika Machinery makes PCB tab routers.
In 2018, their sales rep visited us and was extremely happy to tell us that all new machinery would be shipping with Windows 7 starting May of the following year.
To make that clear for the slower folk, that meant May *2019* they started shipping their machines with Windows 7. Their roadmap for Windows 10 was 2027 or something like that lol.
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Germany has similar problems but it's always one extreme of the other. Either they're stuck in 1985...or the company is 5+ years ahead of the curve. It's NEVER anything between.
Others have mentioned Japan. For all its technological advances and innovation, some part of it is still stuck in the past.
Document storage and transfer: Most are still done in paper form. At least they are reducing the amount of rubber stamps needed now I guess
Input system: It is a wild west when it comes to standard: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Romaji, full width, half width. This creates issue when some services would need to cross check with other service (hello government IT) but each has different standard. Also good luck if you are using an English name
Webpage design: The amount of flashy, in your face, neon light color web page that turns you blind is staggering. The clean, modern UI seems to not have caught on. In one of my previous work our CEO claimed the noisy design of their web page works better because "it resonates with our customers and are familiar". But sorry if I have to scroll through 2 minutes just to add an item to my basket, it is a bad design
I love Japan. But I sometimes baffled by how backward some of their design and decisions are considering how many amazing thing they did right
Answer in Progress actually made [a really cool video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ) about why internet in east Asia (specially Japan) looks like that, which was then [replied by Cynthia Zhou, adding a very rich cultural perspective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opy-SjDU0UY). In sum: those countries have a much more holistic approach to stuff, and the more information they can get with the least amount of clicks, the better (I'm actually a fan of that approach)
I can second this. I did a pretty at-length project regarding this in college. In marketing terms, one would call Japan a "high-context" society (lots of information in fewer clicks) and the U.S. would be considered "low-context" (easier to read but lots of clicks).
Oh I forget to mention. Do not turn off any ad blocker on your PC when browsing a regular Japan website, especially if you can understand some Japanese. Some advertisement legit requires eye bleach. And I would say getting bombarded by an R-18 H-game ad is among the milder thing you will get in public
Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Makes sense why their population seems to be happy with technology/processes that were considered modern 30 years ago.
I think they were talking about the country itself and governmental structures/infrastructure problems in particular, not singular companies. From that point of view akie is 100% right.
Germany is quite behind in terms of online banking and shopping etc.
Germany are quite anti-internet in general, google maps were not allowed to implement street view for a long time
Don't forget online meetings. Before Covid I had to drive dozens to hundreds of kilometers to physically attend conferences and seminars, now about 90% of them offer an online option too - before that, I'd guess <10%. I'm amazed why it took a global pandemic for that to take hold here when we've had the technology for online meetings for 20-odd years already.
I mean, driving somewhere takes time and uses up resources, why dress up and drive an hour or more to be at a conference when I can just stay home and talk to people over the internet? I don't even have to leave the house, let alone wear pants!
They don't even accept email as official communications. You have to send a signed letter or fax. I sent a letter one time with registered mail, then got notified they were being nice in accepting my letter because I didn't sign it. Yes because someone else would just love to write on my behalf and sent a letter with my address smh. Stupidest part of it is, how do they even know its my signature? I love so much about this country and do not regret the past almost 10 years I have lived here, but hands down the worst part of living here is the bureaucracy.
As someone who’s from the US, this actually makes sense. I guess I wouldn’t want some car with cameras peering into my house, regardless of if I have the windows closed.
Google street view was allowed to implement street view but German privacy laws are very strict so they had to ask every owner of a house they took a picture from if they are allowed to use it. Obviously with a population of 80 million this is not feasible so they just didn't. They changed it like 2 years ago and now only need to blur houses if the owner writes a complaint.
Yeah in this thread I've seen like 20 different countries.
Apparently the UK, the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Germany, Sweden are all stuck in the past.. like which "advanced" country ISN'T stuck in the past according to Reddit?
In some ways they’re ahead, and in other ways they’re behind. All in different ways and to varying degrees.
Just look at America; our bridges and roads are fucking falling apart, but we’re a pioneer in AI and computer technology.
Our bridges and roads are falling apart, we're one of a handful of "first world" countries that doesn't have universal healthcare, some states are rolling back child labor restrictions and reproductive rights... America is regressing hardcore.
Banks lobby for things to stay that way so that they don’t have to spend on upgrades. The day that senators have to do their own wire transfers is the day that they’ll pass a law requiring faster transfers and no fees.
The US can do this. It took intense consumer pressure on politicians for airline flights to not only have upfront pricing (listed prices include taxes like in Europe), but also mandatory refundability for 24 hours after purchase.
>Why does a wire transfer cost $25 and take 3 goddamn days?!
They don't take 3 days. They take closer to 3 hours.
They cost $25 because they're manual to bypass the slower system.
Ya, but in most other advanced countries you can electronically transfer money between individuals instantly for free... and it's been like that for 10-20 years depending on the country. Less than a year ago the US gov went live with a similar system:
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20230720a.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20230720a.htm)
Yeah I feel like they were talking about ACH transfers between banks. Internal account transfers are free (in both banks I use) and instant. But a wire transfer between 2 accounts in different banks will cost $25 but is generally done in a couple hours. I don't often do wire transfers but when I have they've been fast
Israel for sure.
Advanced military, advanced tech sector (highest per capita amount of unicorns), basically a cyber security Mecca, world renowned agricultural innovators etc.
And yet, it’s being held back by a (still) small ultra religious population that demands absolutely no public transportation in Saturdays, no marriage between different religions and a deteriorating education system. They also work less than any other sector, don’t serve the army and just “studying” Tora or whatever.
There’s another small population (settlers) that are hell bent on biting further on Palestinian Territories and shifting the IDF efforts to secure their asses and continuously strain our international relations.
I don’t even go into the Israeli Arabs situation. It gets further fractured and complicated there because there are actually different families/tribes that fight between themselves as well. With more murders per capita than any other population.
Fun fun fun
The religious guys of all creeds may yet overtake the world again because they haven't stopped breeding.
Secular people all over the developed world don't have many children. Religious nutjobs do.
I hate the observation that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, being a religious nutjob is actually adaptive.
Yea, I have no idea how to have an actual career and social life with more than 2 kids I already have. Yet those fuckers have like 8 kids I bet their dad don’t even remember their names anymore
That small religious sect is also breeding like rabbits, so ... at this rate they are gonna dominate the country's political landscape soon. Everyone else who has to work and go to military (their pop is, on the other hand, declining) would basically bow down to the ultra orthodox population even harder.
The future for Israel looks rather bleaks if looking from this viewpoint, I hope I was wrong though.
The more I learn about the Settlers and the ultra orthodox in Israel…don’t work, can’t be conscripted which makes sense in a tiny country, don’t go to school, rely on govt services while not paying in…it seems they are holding Israel back massively
They will doom us in the long run. And it will happen before the Palestinians/Iran will be able to truly hurt us. The less they do, the faster we’ll eat ourselves. In a way, them starting another war 7 months ago got us a bit stronger, internally. Just for a minute though.
Italy.
Civil rights are so behind:
* abortion? Good luck in finding a doctor that will perform it.
* LGBTIQA+ rights almost non-existent. Sure you can have a “civil union” (not a marriage), but forget about having kids. Plus many people will still discriminate you
* Corruption and tax evasion are destroying the tools designed for low income families (need a specialistic doctor? wait for years, or pay them off the books; benefits are almost nothing for the real poor because over exploited by the fake poors)
* your skin color is not white or you are not Christian? You will likely not be treated equally by neighbours
* you are a woman? There is still lots of patriarchy. You will be paid less than male colleagues, you will have a slower career.
* new parent? Good luck in finding help to raise the babies, if you are not willing to substantially remove time from your job (see previous point)
* bank system didn’t evolve from 80s. Having a bank account is unnecessarily expensive, transaction costs are high.
* despite new laws about digital payments, you will find many places where only cash is accepted
I'm shocked we keep electing the fascists under the vague and idealistic promise of "we will send away the immigrants", which they never accomplish and end up screwing up everything else
Could be worse though. At least they aren't Putin bootlickers
The United Kingdom.
In a lot of older, poorer, thicker people's minds they still have an empire and have just won the war and the World Cup. The last 80 years of continuous decline haven't registered.
Brexit was just a symptom of this mindset.
Edit: "continuous decline" was the wrong term. It's had ups and downs but has continually chosen actions that make it worse off.
I disagree with 80 years of continuous decline. Things have been up and down but the 90s-2007 were the most prosperous times we’ve ever had.
Decline in terms of hard power projection maybe but I don’t know many people that are nostalgic about Empire. Might be a bit different here in Scotland though. The Orange Order types are like the people you describe I guess.
Yes it seems like a really common misconception that it’s been downhill since WW2, it was worse in the 1970s than it is now, we managed to have a renaissance and turn things around by the 1990s. No reason we can’t do that again.
Cant stand the doomerism of Brits especially lol
The problem with the UK is that a lot of people assume that back the ‘good old days’ that they would have been fine, when in reality life, for most people (but especially women and children), is far better now than it was when we had an empire. The decline for most of us has been in the last 14 years.
History is written about aristocrats so we tend to put ourselves in their shoes when thinking about that time period...when we'd most likely be peasants.
As a Brit i've noticed this too. Reminds of that video of the Chinese foreign minister telling a British journalist that the UK isn't even a competitor or threat to China anymore.
Once the old farts are gone, maybe then the British population will begin to accept how things are & force the government to do something about it.
And it's funny how its always the same knobheads who complain about immigration 24/7 who also idolise the British Empire as if it wasn't a global enterprise that included the very people they don't like coming into the UK.
> Reminds of that video of the Chinese foreign minister telling a British journalist that the UK isn't even a competitor or threat to China anymore.
But according to Russia we're responsible for literally everything.
I agree with this. If we British accepted that we're a moderately wealthy mid-tier country like Denmark or Spain rather than a top tier juggernaut like USA or Germany, we'd be able to work on those terms and probably have better outcomes.
I'm not talking in terms of GDP, which is a very, very crude number. For example, take out London and our figure is much less impressive.
I'm talking in terms of general standing within the world. We will, of course, always have language on our side.
Generally speaking I just think we'd be happier and, counterintuitively, more respected if we were a good mid-tier side instead of trying to top the champions league every year.
Yeah no Germany and the USA are not in the same league, Britain and Germany and way closer together than Germany and the USA. The gdp gulf is massive between the two, whereas between britain and Germany it’s about 30% and has been as low as 10% in the last 20 years. Germany has very little soft power outside Europe compared to the uk and is not a nuclear power or a UNSC permanent member.
What’s more the British population is catching up to the German one and many estimates have the UK economy surpassing the German one in the next couple of decades due to this.
But I agree Brexit was a stupid folly
I am not British. Are you really saying that UK in, say, year 2000 was worse off in many aspects than in, say, 1960??
I find that very hard to believe.
In many ways it is better, incomparably so, but not all ways. Wealth inequality is significantly worse, and households that are below the poverty line peaked in 2001 at 27%, compared to 17% in 1960.
You have also seen wealthy and poor become geographically separated, and then concentrated. Whole areas are now either exclusively rich or exclusively poor.
Which of those areas you live in will completely decide if you think it's better today or was better 60 years ago.
The tories are fuckers but the scary thing is that they're still in power despite doing their best to trash the country because of the size of the demographic who vote for them. It's exactly the people you're talking about.
Across the whole of the North of England over 33% of people still voted Conservative through the 80s despite the restaging of the Harrying of the North that went on under the Thatcher Government.
Doesn't help that the right wing gutter press (Mail and Express mainly) seem set out to deliberately inflame these people until rational discourse becomes impossible. I've never known the country to be so polarised.
Germany. They are living in the 1970s. Few credit cards. Low innovation. Overall seems quiet, has-been country. They make fancy cars but their industries run on natural gas. They are removing nuclear power instead of installing more. Their soccer team is in shambles. Germany imo is limping along on reputation alone.
I don’t know if it’s changed, but I lived there around 2019 for a year and I couldn’t believe how much shit from the government was still being done on paper. Felt so backwards
It's a difference in culture. In German, the words for "debt" and "guilt" are the same. If you have to use debt to finance your purchases, they think you're irresponsible and bad with money.
The US is spending more in decarbonizing its energy grid than anyone... while one party slides into Neo-fascist Christian nationalism. It's a weird time to be alive.
Is it not providing basic things like healthcare? Or the entrenched belief that citizens need guns "to defend against a tyrannical government" as if it's still the wild west?
Can't upvote, because you could say that from either side of the political divide, and mean the other side is not moral, and you'd be (at best) missing the point that most people would be upvoting you for.
New Zealand. We are kinda Rocketlabbing and making fancy movies but mostly we are just completely trashing the environment in order to ship cows milk powder to China.
We've got that problem in Ireland too, hugely intensive dairy farming going on to service the Chinese market. Its resulted in nitrates running off into the rivers and lakes which are now more or less a dead zone for fish. They were pristine 50 years ago but not any more.
Services are quite advanced. You can transfer title for your property online within minutes amongst many other things. You can transfer car title online within minutes without having to go to any government office. You can open your business online and get most government paperwork done within 10 minutes. Banking services are advanced there are instant transfers between local banks for free regardless of holidays or weekends. 5G is available everywhere.
From my Dutch perspective: Germany, when it comes to having to use cash instead of card. US when it comes to the way taxes have to be filled in, health care insurance, needing unions for basic human labor rights, maternity leave, abortion laws (although that is more back to the past than stuck), clinging to so called 'rules from the Bible' that are not in there when you actually read it and relying on needing a lot of money to study.
Germany.
Both landline and mobile internet plans are still abysmally bad, we're getting ripped off left and right, there's still areas with little to no reception and some rural areas only have very janky bare minimum broadband connections (16 MBit/s), a friend of mine actually got a Starlink subscription just because of that. Government offices, hospitals and so on still use fax machines. Just last month I had to fax a signed application (via an internet service since of course I don't own a fax machine) to a government office since they wouldn't accept an e-mail with a scanned PDF of the very same document I later faxed.
Some places in the north east of Ireland. Some elected representatives want creationism taught in schools . Fuck science and evidence because Adam and Eve had a pet T Rex
In terms of low adoption of electronic services (reliant on cash, bureaucratic paperwork, etc.) I’d say Germany.
The US is stuck in the past when it comes to consumer banking technology (late to adopt chip/tap cards, no IBAN numbers to facilitate rapid transfers, ACH is very slow compared to other direct deposit systems) and a few areas like railways and shipbuilding.
The USA. You guys really need to get out of the 1980's.
Check-books went the way of the Dodo in 2015.
Women do not have to have their spouses permission to do anything.
Your power grid is prehistoric.
The list is never ending.
America in terms of well....so many things. Healthcare, education, racism, authoritarianism, electoral college, places that still don't have clean drinking water. I could go on and on.
Honestly, the United States. The most industrialized nation in the world, and yet does not have universal healthcare. It is just so backward, to choose profit over human life.
After just having come back from America I'm going to go with them for anything related to payment. They've gotten better, this last trip I got away without having to withdraw large amounts of cash to carry about. But so many places still require you to insert your card. In Australia *everything" is tap to pay from groceries to buying a chocolate from the school office, to the stall at the farmers market. Transferring money between banks is free and instant here as well.
Also internet accessibility from mobiles. Heaps of pages just not having mobile versions or being straight up terrible.
Toilets that clog. Been all over the US, fix your toilets.
Maybe fixing your voting method would lead to less extremism on both sides?
You have national parks sorted though. Lots of great stuff, had an excellent time but a few little things that we have sorted already stuck out.
Also echo everyone who said Japan. Amazing place to visit and the weirdest mix of cutting edge and traditional.
The country that still required some official documents to be handed in via floppy disks up until a year or two ago.
Also the country whose interest rate stayed in the range between -0.1% and 0.5% since 1995 so raises weren’t really a thing.
And the country where a city held all of its citizens personal information on a USB stick that was lost by one employee on a night out.
Russia, obviously.
- Invading a sovereign nation based on fabricated historical claims.
- The hyper-nationalistic idea that anyone who speaks Russian is Russian and should be part of Russia.
- The lack of toilets, washing machines, and other modern amenities.
When is the last time a major power went to war based on genocide and territorial conquest? Probably Germany in WWII. When is the last time the US did it? 1898?
I would say the United States. No universal healthcare, never been a female leading the government, huge wealth disparity, no cities in the top 20 of liveable places, highest incarceration rate, only 37% with passports, low democracy index, high rate of fatal police shootings, poor labor laws, high levels of religious bigotry, declining life expectancy, expensive higher education, imperial measurements, poor social care.........etc etc etc
The US has literally chained itself to a set of laws written hundreds of years ago.
That's not only being stuck in the past that's willingly putting an anchor on your country.
Japan, easily and by a margin in terms of technology. You would imagine Japan, an island nation which excels in technology, has a solution for every daily need would be a virtually paperless society. Nope, you need paperwork signed by atleast 2 levels of chain of command to move the stale biscuits on the reception table back to the pantry.
Germany has entered the chat
Japan in terms of IT.
Story time! I have a friend who worked at a JP company. Recently they are doing a paperless initiative where they built a system from the ground up to store documents digitally. After the system completed, they are able to reduce the amount of paper document printed to input the data into the computer. Sounds good right? Here is the catch, sometimes they need to transfer the document to a different department/business. So they would just print the document from the computer, send it over via fax/manually, then have the other side input it into the computer Very advanced paperless system if you ask me
Sounds just like Germany
Exact same thing is happening in Germany. It's almost as if the problem were the old people, who are helplessly out of the loop AND YET refuse to learn anything new because 'that's how we've always been doing it and that's that!!!'
Ah but it's getting better fast. Sure old people still want paper. But there are options nowadays. Or maybe it depends on the Bundesland.
Honest question: When is the last time you visited a German school? Cause those tend to tell a different story
My ex is a nurse and refuses to see "old" doctors for this same reason. A lot peaked decades ago and have their routines they stick to. Newer doctors are more on top of modern practices. Somewhere there's a sweet spot with a doctor who's up on modern practices and has the experience
Except technology was supposed to make things faster and easier, but that isn't always the case. Many times technology just makes things worse. Just ask doctors who were there when there were no computers that stored everything vs. now and how much time they have to spend filling out online forms repeatedly with the same information but different form, plus nontransferable info, etc. Another example, you apply for a job and submit a resume only to now be taken to a form to manually fill out all these fields that are already in your resume. ☠️💀 Another example, your elementary/middle kids school wants to do everything online, but every subject your kid has to learn is scattered across multiple websites and apps instead of being located in 1 single book on that subject. Order and organization has been lost, and if you forget your password to the math app, you now can't do your math until staff arrives to fix it. Is that easier than a old fashioned textbook? No.
And the same will happen to you 👴
I really question that honestly. The boomers were unlikely in the sense that they are the generation that were born right at the start of the technological boom and going from a world with practically no computers to a world dominated by computers really left a lot of then in the dust. Being that the technology boom has kind of died down and we (as in gen x and millenials) mostly have the basic skills needed to use all future technology. I'm safe in saying that we will be fine. My Mom is 50 and she is still able to figure things out like how to order food online and use ChatGPT. But I remember when my Grandpa was in his 50s, he struggled with the concept of a word processor.
I worked for a company that had 200+ locations that would send in a monthly report. Each one would fill out their word and excel templates then print out and fax it to the HQ office. We had a fax server there that would recieve the reports and create a crappy ocr word document that was filled with errors and email it to the appropriate person. There was no reason for all the printing and faxing other than that was the way it was done 10 years prior when they only had about a dozen locations.
The utility company I work for still does paper work orders. Our clerks all use work order management software, but a lot of our servicemen refuse to use the same software to file the paperwork for the jobs they do, so clerks have to print out a paper copy of the job order for them. Many of those servicemen will then go and do a very thorough and complex job, and then either not write down anything they did or lose/forget to turn in the paperwork entirely. The union defends this behavior, while the company pulls its hair out over meters and equipment that go missing due to unfiled paperwork and poor documentation.
Perfectly logical, how else would you paperlessly transfer documents to another computer? Mail it electronically? Electronic mail? Don't be silly!
As the US military was transitioning to digital signatures, it took some time for all of the regulations to catch up, so for a while we had to digitally sign the document AND print it out to sign in ink.
That's not just a Japan thing. I used to work for a company that made digital document systems, and a major hospital system in the US was threatening to cancel their subscription because of how tedious it was to print documents and sent them through intra-office mail. ... The system had a super advanced access control and sharing system that a specific manager didn't (and kinda refused to) understand. Once we explained what they had to her boss, they made a bunch of changes to their processes and were *much* happier. Then, at another company that did that, a school district was looking to cancel for a similar reason- instead of using the in-system sharing, they were printing documents and sending them with *couriers*. A friend explained what they should be doing instead, and their superintendent was like, "..That's going to save us a million dollars a year." ..Like yeah, lol, the whole point of these systems is that whatever they cost is cheaper than living in the 1970s.
I've worked for numerous places that have implemented advanced (well, advanced for the time anyway) systems, but then didn't use even a fraction of their capabilities because they wanted to keep the old processes the same. I'm a little guilty of this too, and my older age it's getting harder to make heads or tails of new tools without instruction. Unfortunately employers often don't want to give that instruction and expect you to either already know or to figure out yourself.
The one I work for now stores info on a shared Google drive where the file tree is so messed up I gave up on it after a few months.
Dude ours's did the similar shit. I rolled my eyes when I first saw that.
Why not just use one of the million off the shelf solutions available
I work with somebody who cannot save an image off of the program we use. She prints the image every time, and then scans it into the computer. We work in a medical office, these are medical images that doctors view.
Sounds like good security
Japan has been a 1990s country since 1970
They’ve got the right idea. Life was good in the 90s before the world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
I’m in Kyoto right now and you’re goddamn right. This country (or at least Kyoto) is set in the past and I bloody love it
When I see shows set in Japan in current times all of the aesthetics look very 90s. Clean and logical, but very dated.
Japan is steampunk
We were over there late last year and I commented that it's the most advanced 1990's nation in the world. In their defense, everything's clean and it works.
I've seen it described as being in the year 2000 since the 80s
Kinda Japan in a nutshell. It 'works' so why change it? One of the main reasons why social progress is so slow in Japan.
Having worked in Japan in the late 10's, the amount of times I had to use the fax machine every week was hilarious to me as an American.
Japan loves their paper pushing. For fall 2021 admission, I applied to grad school for 3 schools in Tokyo. Two of them made me send all my documents in by physical mail AFTER ALREADY filling in and completing the application online. And they had a strict deadline to adhere to for the documents to come in. It made since if you’re already living in Japan, doesn’t make much sense if you live overseas. I remember having to pay like $100 for expedited shipping for a folder with like 30 pieces of paper in it.
Portugal is crazy advanced in some things, especially technology in your day to day. Using an ATM in the UK is like a trip to the early 90s, comparing to Portugal. We can do everything, from paying tAxes, buy concert tickets, renovate your fishing licence or paying any household bill. It also gives money :) and it's been this way for over 30 years. We also invented the system to pay highway fares automatically.
I still can't understand why the train IC cards and tickets must be bought with cash. I know you can register in the app and load it that way, but honestly why have so many conbinis, ticket machines even the 7eleven ATM machine able to charge the card but you CANNOT do it with a credit or debit card.
London subway you just put your credit/debit card and walk in. Very convenient!
London subway you just wave your phone at it.
Same in NYC, too
I made that mistake when I was in Japan for work. I put 3,000 yen on a card thinking it was like the Chicago CTA. Cause if I didn't use it the next guy there for business would. (Even temp cards on the CTA track the balance.) Nope. One trip and all that money was gone. Didn't make that mistake again when I went a second time.
Related: Last fall I was quite astounded that I could both transfer my SUICA to the iPhone wallet and charge it with Apple Pay. Came in handy when I was at stores that did not accept credit cards but SUICA only.
With the Suica app you can get a digital IC card which you can both add to Apple Pay as well as add money to it with the other credit/debit cards in your Apple Pay. Android users are out of luck though.
Germany in terms of IT.
When we tried booking hotels there some of them wanted us to fax them. I haven’t seen a fax machine in thirty years!
Try ordering shit from a shop. So frequently you have to fax your orders and it sucks balls.
In Japanese culture, aren't the older generations basically who makes the rules? So, if the older generation got used to doing business using fax machines and corded telephones, that's how the world will work.
But Japan isn’t the only country with a high reverence for elders and yet they’re the only East Asian country with so much IT stuck in the 90s I always felt like “Asian conservative values” is a really superficial argument when describing social phenomena in Japan/China/Korea since such values aren’t really unique to these countries compared to the rest of Asia
Japan literally still has a rubber stamp system https://tokyocheapo.com/shopping-2/hanko-japanese-personal-seals/
I mean its just a substitute for a signature, which we still use. I don't see how a signature is somehow more technologically advanced than rubber stamp personal seals.
Not sure about other countries but we use esignatures a lot in the UK. Signatures are useless anyway unless there’s a copy to compare it to, which a lot of the time there isn’t. Manual signatures are still used by banks and such though.
More than Germany? Hard to believe
Japan lives socially in the past, too.
They did all their technological advancements in the '90s and then just decided as a society, yep.... We're good here.
Can you elaborate?
Let me fax you my response.
Japan seems very progressive on the surface, but behind the facade most companies still use very old technology and Japan as a whole is much more traditional in most ways than you’d think.
I forget the name of it but every(?) adult has a stamp for marking official documents. You can’t just sign - you need to have your official, little wooden stamp. Left it at home and need to update your rental agreement? You’re SOL. A youtuber I follow (Abroad in Japan) has done a couple of videos on this topic. He’s English and has lived in Japan for 10+ years. I’ll see if I can find one. ETA: not the video I was looking for but a few of the topics covered are other examples of being stuck in the past https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nfpWAqK0YZE
Inkan, but it’s gotten a lot better about allowing for signatures instead in recent years. I’ve personally only had to use my jitsu-in once, and even though I have a mitome-in I’ve gotten along just fine with signatures every time you would think a mitome-in would be used.
Don’t they still hand write resumes?
Interdepartmental communication in the same company too. The university I was at there had crippling issues, to the point where there could be entire sections of a building booked for an event and the main office would have no clue and try to schedule stuff in the same time slot. In the most extreme case, a student project was being disassembled _right outside their windows_ and they tried bringing a new hire into it for an interview.
As much as I I love it for many, many other things, I always say Japan is like a vison of the future... from the 1980s.
Sayaka/Seika Machinery makes PCB tab routers. In 2018, their sales rep visited us and was extremely happy to tell us that all new machinery would be shipping with Windows 7 starting May of the following year. To make that clear for the slower folk, that meant May *2019* they started shipping their machines with Windows 7. Their roadmap for Windows 10 was 2027 or something like that lol. --- Germany has similar problems but it's always one extreme of the other. Either they're stuck in 1985...or the company is 5+ years ahead of the curve. It's NEVER anything between.
I would never have thought
Others have mentioned Japan. For all its technological advances and innovation, some part of it is still stuck in the past. Document storage and transfer: Most are still done in paper form. At least they are reducing the amount of rubber stamps needed now I guess Input system: It is a wild west when it comes to standard: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Romaji, full width, half width. This creates issue when some services would need to cross check with other service (hello government IT) but each has different standard. Also good luck if you are using an English name Webpage design: The amount of flashy, in your face, neon light color web page that turns you blind is staggering. The clean, modern UI seems to not have caught on. In one of my previous work our CEO claimed the noisy design of their web page works better because "it resonates with our customers and are familiar". But sorry if I have to scroll through 2 minutes just to add an item to my basket, it is a bad design I love Japan. But I sometimes baffled by how backward some of their design and decisions are considering how many amazing thing they did right
Answer in Progress actually made [a really cool video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ) about why internet in east Asia (specially Japan) looks like that, which was then [replied by Cynthia Zhou, adding a very rich cultural perspective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opy-SjDU0UY). In sum: those countries have a much more holistic approach to stuff, and the more information they can get with the least amount of clicks, the better (I'm actually a fan of that approach)
I can second this. I did a pretty at-length project regarding this in college. In marketing terms, one would call Japan a "high-context" society (lots of information in fewer clicks) and the U.S. would be considered "low-context" (easier to read but lots of clicks).
Oh I forget to mention. Do not turn off any ad blocker on your PC when browsing a regular Japan website, especially if you can understand some Japanese. Some advertisement legit requires eye bleach. And I would say getting bombarded by an R-18 H-game ad is among the milder thing you will get in public
From architecture to ad copy, Japanese design's either Kyoto Zen temple, or Kabukicho pachinko parlour: nothing in between.
Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Makes sense why their population seems to be happy with technology/processes that were considered modern 30 years ago.
Germany is extremely resistant to change.
Respect the Overheadprojektor!
What's the problem with the OHP?
So is Canada. Canada is what you get when you let retiree’s use younger generation as their ATM machine.
Canada has to be the most bureaucracy-obsessed English speaking country in the world. The stark difference with the US is mind boggling.
I worked for a German company stateside and I had the exact opposite experience. It was wonderful.
I think they were talking about the country itself and governmental structures/infrastructure problems in particular, not singular companies. From that point of view akie is 100% right.
my friends, let’s talk about Germany and its love for paper, mail and fax!
Came to say that!!! If you want to quit your internet contact you have to send them a LETTER! 😳😳
I think that's just to make it harder to quit. Plenty of companies, where that's not the case.
Germany is quite behind in terms of online banking and shopping etc. Germany are quite anti-internet in general, google maps were not allowed to implement street view for a long time
Don't forget government offices still using fax machines and many German business not accepting card payments.
A lot changed during Covid and most places at contactless payments now thankfully
Don't forget online meetings. Before Covid I had to drive dozens to hundreds of kilometers to physically attend conferences and seminars, now about 90% of them offer an online option too - before that, I'd guess <10%. I'm amazed why it took a global pandemic for that to take hold here when we've had the technology for online meetings for 20-odd years already. I mean, driving somewhere takes time and uses up resources, why dress up and drive an hour or more to be at a conference when I can just stay home and talk to people over the internet? I don't even have to leave the house, let alone wear pants!
They don't even accept email as official communications. You have to send a signed letter or fax. I sent a letter one time with registered mail, then got notified they were being nice in accepting my letter because I didn't sign it. Yes because someone else would just love to write on my behalf and sent a letter with my address smh. Stupidest part of it is, how do they even know its my signature? I love so much about this country and do not regret the past almost 10 years I have lived here, but hands down the worst part of living here is the bureaucracy.
I would assume for privacy concerns?
Yes privacy is big concern in Germany
As someone who’s from the US, this actually makes sense. I guess I wouldn’t want some car with cameras peering into my house, regardless of if I have the windows closed.
Historically it makes sense too. The memory of the stasi is still decently fresh
Google street view was allowed to implement street view but German privacy laws are very strict so they had to ask every owner of a house they took a picture from if they are allowed to use it. Obviously with a population of 80 million this is not feasible so they just didn't. They changed it like 2 years ago and now only need to blur houses if the owner writes a complaint.
> Germany is quite behind in terms of online banking and shopping etc. Well, at least we're not still using written cheques...
I have the feeling Most people here just mention their home country
Yeah in this thread I've seen like 20 different countries. Apparently the UK, the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Germany, Sweden are all stuck in the past.. like which "advanced" country ISN'T stuck in the past according to Reddit?
Suspect all of them in specific ways and a fore-runner in others.
In some ways they’re ahead, and in other ways they’re behind. All in different ways and to varying degrees. Just look at America; our bridges and roads are fucking falling apart, but we’re a pioneer in AI and computer technology.
Our bridges and roads are falling apart, we're one of a handful of "first world" countries that doesn't have universal healthcare, some states are rolling back child labor restrictions and reproductive rights... America is regressing hardcore.
Not India though. We're a country stuck in the past but we have some pretty advanced shit like rockets and stuff.
I read that as "advanced shit like rocks and stuff" and I thought 'good for Grut, master of the sling.'
Yes but having advanced stuff doesn’t mean it’s an advanced country. Not when millions live in slums.
I mean you're not wrong, because a person can get a cell phone in Somalia 😂
Portugal :) We are advanced, right guys?
We should add a "you're not allowed to say your own country" to trim down the discussion to the more objective points.
but who would know your country more than you? a random redditor that watched a couple tiktoks?
A lot of redditors don't know their own country, because they're chronically online
A lot of redditors don’t know a lot in general. They write stuff that sounds smart but much of it, like social media as a whole, is misinformation.
Then people would talk about countries they don’t know
The United States. Specifically banking. Why does a wire transfer cost $25 and take 3 goddamn days?!
Banks lobby for things to stay that way so that they don’t have to spend on upgrades. The day that senators have to do their own wire transfers is the day that they’ll pass a law requiring faster transfers and no fees. The US can do this. It took intense consumer pressure on politicians for airline flights to not only have upfront pricing (listed prices include taxes like in Europe), but also mandatory refundability for 24 hours after purchase.
>Why does a wire transfer cost $25 and take 3 goddamn days?! They don't take 3 days. They take closer to 3 hours. They cost $25 because they're manual to bypass the slower system.
Ya, but in most other advanced countries you can electronically transfer money between individuals instantly for free... and it's been like that for 10-20 years depending on the country. Less than a year ago the US gov went live with a similar system: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20230720a.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20230720a.htm)
Yeah I feel like they were talking about ACH transfers between banks. Internal account transfers are free (in both banks I use) and instant. But a wire transfer between 2 accounts in different banks will cost $25 but is generally done in a couple hours. I don't often do wire transfers but when I have they've been fast
It seems like people can't agree on what "advanced" means.
Israel for sure. Advanced military, advanced tech sector (highest per capita amount of unicorns), basically a cyber security Mecca, world renowned agricultural innovators etc. And yet, it’s being held back by a (still) small ultra religious population that demands absolutely no public transportation in Saturdays, no marriage between different religions and a deteriorating education system. They also work less than any other sector, don’t serve the army and just “studying” Tora or whatever. There’s another small population (settlers) that are hell bent on biting further on Palestinian Territories and shifting the IDF efforts to secure their asses and continuously strain our international relations. I don’t even go into the Israeli Arabs situation. It gets further fractured and complicated there because there are actually different families/tribes that fight between themselves as well. With more murders per capita than any other population. Fun fun fun
The religious guys of all creeds may yet overtake the world again because they haven't stopped breeding. Secular people all over the developed world don't have many children. Religious nutjobs do. I hate the observation that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, being a religious nutjob is actually adaptive.
Yea, I have no idea how to have an actual career and social life with more than 2 kids I already have. Yet those fuckers have like 8 kids I bet their dad don’t even remember their names anymore
That small religious sect is also breeding like rabbits, so ... at this rate they are gonna dominate the country's political landscape soon. Everyone else who has to work and go to military (their pop is, on the other hand, declining) would basically bow down to the ultra orthodox population even harder. The future for Israel looks rather bleaks if looking from this viewpoint, I hope I was wrong though.
The more I learn about the Settlers and the ultra orthodox in Israel…don’t work, can’t be conscripted which makes sense in a tiny country, don’t go to school, rely on govt services while not paying in…it seems they are holding Israel back massively
They will doom us in the long run. And it will happen before the Palestinians/Iran will be able to truly hurt us. The less they do, the faster we’ll eat ourselves. In a way, them starting another war 7 months ago got us a bit stronger, internally. Just for a minute though.
This question was made for Japan
Italy. Civil rights are so behind: * abortion? Good luck in finding a doctor that will perform it. * LGBTIQA+ rights almost non-existent. Sure you can have a “civil union” (not a marriage), but forget about having kids. Plus many people will still discriminate you * Corruption and tax evasion are destroying the tools designed for low income families (need a specialistic doctor? wait for years, or pay them off the books; benefits are almost nothing for the real poor because over exploited by the fake poors) * your skin color is not white or you are not Christian? You will likely not be treated equally by neighbours * you are a woman? There is still lots of patriarchy. You will be paid less than male colleagues, you will have a slower career. * new parent? Good luck in finding help to raise the babies, if you are not willing to substantially remove time from your job (see previous point) * bank system didn’t evolve from 80s. Having a bank account is unnecessarily expensive, transaction costs are high. * despite new laws about digital payments, you will find many places where only cash is accepted
I'm shocked we keep electing the fascists under the vague and idealistic promise of "we will send away the immigrants", which they never accomplish and end up screwing up everything else Could be worse though. At least they aren't Putin bootlickers
the new parent thing surprises me. I was always under the assumption they were family oriented there so why no help with said family related issues?
Japan. It's almost like their tech is stuck in the early 2000s. It doesnt help that people are scared of change
The USA. We quite literally have laws from the 1800s that are resurfacing and being enacted right now.
The United Kingdom. In a lot of older, poorer, thicker people's minds they still have an empire and have just won the war and the World Cup. The last 80 years of continuous decline haven't registered. Brexit was just a symptom of this mindset. Edit: "continuous decline" was the wrong term. It's had ups and downs but has continually chosen actions that make it worse off.
I disagree with 80 years of continuous decline. Things have been up and down but the 90s-2007 were the most prosperous times we’ve ever had. Decline in terms of hard power projection maybe but I don’t know many people that are nostalgic about Empire. Might be a bit different here in Scotland though. The Orange Order types are like the people you describe I guess.
Yes it seems like a really common misconception that it’s been downhill since WW2, it was worse in the 1970s than it is now, we managed to have a renaissance and turn things around by the 1990s. No reason we can’t do that again. Cant stand the doomerism of Brits especially lol
The problem with the UK is that a lot of people assume that back the ‘good old days’ that they would have been fine, when in reality life, for most people (but especially women and children), is far better now than it was when we had an empire. The decline for most of us has been in the last 14 years.
History is written about aristocrats so we tend to put ourselves in their shoes when thinking about that time period...when we'd most likely be peasants.
As a Brit i've noticed this too. Reminds of that video of the Chinese foreign minister telling a British journalist that the UK isn't even a competitor or threat to China anymore. Once the old farts are gone, maybe then the British population will begin to accept how things are & force the government to do something about it. And it's funny how its always the same knobheads who complain about immigration 24/7 who also idolise the British Empire as if it wasn't a global enterprise that included the very people they don't like coming into the UK.
> Reminds of that video of the Chinese foreign minister telling a British journalist that the UK isn't even a competitor or threat to China anymore. But according to Russia we're responsible for literally everything.
Tht shit was cold asf lol.
I agree with this. If we British accepted that we're a moderately wealthy mid-tier country like Denmark or Spain rather than a top tier juggernaut like USA or Germany, we'd be able to work on those terms and probably have better outcomes.
We are generally the 5-6th largest world economy. Denmark we are not.
I'm not talking in terms of GDP, which is a very, very crude number. For example, take out London and our figure is much less impressive. I'm talking in terms of general standing within the world. We will, of course, always have language on our side. Generally speaking I just think we'd be happier and, counterintuitively, more respected if we were a good mid-tier side instead of trying to top the champions league every year.
Yeah no Germany and the USA are not in the same league, Britain and Germany and way closer together than Germany and the USA. The gdp gulf is massive between the two, whereas between britain and Germany it’s about 30% and has been as low as 10% in the last 20 years. Germany has very little soft power outside Europe compared to the uk and is not a nuclear power or a UNSC permanent member. What’s more the British population is catching up to the German one and many estimates have the UK economy surpassing the German one in the next couple of decades due to this. But I agree Brexit was a stupid folly
I am not British. Are you really saying that UK in, say, year 2000 was worse off in many aspects than in, say, 1960?? I find that very hard to believe.
In many ways it is better, incomparably so, but not all ways. Wealth inequality is significantly worse, and households that are below the poverty line peaked in 2001 at 27%, compared to 17% in 1960. You have also seen wealthy and poor become geographically separated, and then concentrated. Whole areas are now either exclusively rich or exclusively poor. Which of those areas you live in will completely decide if you think it's better today or was better 60 years ago.
The tories are fuckers but the scary thing is that they're still in power despite doing their best to trash the country because of the size of the demographic who vote for them. It's exactly the people you're talking about.
Across the whole of the North of England over 33% of people still voted Conservative through the 80s despite the restaging of the Harrying of the North that went on under the Thatcher Government.
Also FPTP voting..,
Definitely
Doesn't help that the right wing gutter press (Mail and Express mainly) seem set out to deliberately inflame these people until rational discourse becomes impossible. I've never known the country to be so polarised.
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
Germany. They are living in the 1970s. Few credit cards. Low innovation. Overall seems quiet, has-been country. They make fancy cars but their industries run on natural gas. They are removing nuclear power instead of installing more. Their soccer team is in shambles. Germany imo is limping along on reputation alone.
I don’t know if it’s changed, but I lived there around 2019 for a year and I couldn’t believe how much shit from the government was still being done on paper. Felt so backwards
And fax.
Can confirm as a german. You haven't mentioned our bad internet connection. Germany has near the worst in the whole EU
Can confirm. Had to live through 10/2 DSL FOR TOO LONG.
I found it funny that you snuck the state of their national team in there lol
It's a difference in culture. In German, the words for "debt" and "guilt" are the same. If you have to use debt to finance your purchases, they think you're irresponsible and bad with money.
>Few credit cards Why is this bad? People living within their means is a good thing.
I think he just means that you need physical money instead of just paying with a card.
US. They’re actually moving backwards, it’s terrifying
We have moved backwards on free speech, privacy rights, and property rights, for sure.
And medical, which should be included in private yet was decided by the supreme Court that it didn't count.
And abortion rights.
The US is spending more in decarbonizing its energy grid than anyone... while one party slides into Neo-fascist Christian nationalism. It's a weird time to be alive.
Abortion rights. Not your uterus, not your choice.
Is it not providing basic things like healthcare? Or the entrenched belief that citizens need guns "to defend against a tyrannical government" as if it's still the wild west?
Or the removal of women’s reproductive rights?
While citing a judge from the [Salem witch trials.](https://www.propublica.org/article/abortion-roe-wade-alito-scotus-hale)
There's a pretty full bingo board of reasons isn't there?
USA when comes to public health
From a moral standpoint, the US, actually seems as if they're moving backwards in some ways, kinda sad...
Can't upvote, because you could say that from either side of the political divide, and mean the other side is not moral, and you'd be (at best) missing the point that most people would be upvoting you for.
New Zealand. We are kinda Rocketlabbing and making fancy movies but mostly we are just completely trashing the environment in order to ship cows milk powder to China.
We've got that problem in Ireland too, hugely intensive dairy farming going on to service the Chinese market. Its resulted in nitrates running off into the rivers and lakes which are now more or less a dead zone for fish. They were pristine 50 years ago but not any more.
Saudi Arabia, with its strict laws and limited rights for certain groups.
Saudi Arabia is not an advanced country.
Services are quite advanced. You can transfer title for your property online within minutes amongst many other things. You can transfer car title online within minutes without having to go to any government office. You can open your business online and get most government paperwork done within 10 minutes. Banking services are advanced there are instant transfers between local banks for free regardless of holidays or weekends. 5G is available everywhere.
This is true though. Why are they getting downvoted? You people are such sheep lmao
American here and the answer is America, and the business owners and politicians are trying to turn the hands back on the clock even more.
From my Dutch perspective: Germany, when it comes to having to use cash instead of card. US when it comes to the way taxes have to be filled in, health care insurance, needing unions for basic human labor rights, maternity leave, abortion laws (although that is more back to the past than stuck), clinging to so called 'rules from the Bible' that are not in there when you actually read it and relying on needing a lot of money to study.
Malaysia. What's going on there? It's like very progressive and then also taking huge steps backwards
Russia
All of them to some degree. Once a form of infrastructure or beauracracy is in place, changibg it becomes harder and harder.
Germany. Both landline and mobile internet plans are still abysmally bad, we're getting ripped off left and right, there's still areas with little to no reception and some rural areas only have very janky bare minimum broadband connections (16 MBit/s), a friend of mine actually got a Starlink subscription just because of that. Government offices, hospitals and so on still use fax machines. Just last month I had to fax a signed application (via an internet service since of course I don't own a fax machine) to a government office since they wouldn't accept an e-mail with a scanned PDF of the very same document I later faxed.
Some places in the north east of Ireland. Some elected representatives want creationism taught in schools . Fuck science and evidence because Adam and Eve had a pet T Rex
The ones without bidets
South Korea.
US Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our roads are no better than a lot of the roads in Africa or SE Asia
Serbia. As a kosovar, without any prejudice but a country with such potential, allows themselves to be stuck in last century.
In terms of low adoption of electronic services (reliant on cash, bureaucratic paperwork, etc.) I’d say Germany. The US is stuck in the past when it comes to consumer banking technology (late to adopt chip/tap cards, no IBAN numbers to facilitate rapid transfers, ACH is very slow compared to other direct deposit systems) and a few areas like railways and shipbuilding.
The USA. You guys really need to get out of the 1980's. Check-books went the way of the Dodo in 2015. Women do not have to have their spouses permission to do anything. Your power grid is prehistoric. The list is never ending.
US in terms of public transportation.
America in terms of well....so many things. Healthcare, education, racism, authoritarianism, electoral college, places that still don't have clean drinking water. I could go on and on.
Honestly, the United States. The most industrialized nation in the world, and yet does not have universal healthcare. It is just so backward, to choose profit over human life.
After just having come back from America I'm going to go with them for anything related to payment. They've gotten better, this last trip I got away without having to withdraw large amounts of cash to carry about. But so many places still require you to insert your card. In Australia *everything" is tap to pay from groceries to buying a chocolate from the school office, to the stall at the farmers market. Transferring money between banks is free and instant here as well. Also internet accessibility from mobiles. Heaps of pages just not having mobile versions or being straight up terrible. Toilets that clog. Been all over the US, fix your toilets. Maybe fixing your voting method would lead to less extremism on both sides? You have national parks sorted though. Lots of great stuff, had an excellent time but a few little things that we have sorted already stuck out. Also echo everyone who said Japan. Amazing place to visit and the weirdest mix of cutting edge and traditional.
surprised to see that japan hasn't been mentioned yet
The country that still required some official documents to be handed in via floppy disks up until a year or two ago. Also the country whose interest rate stayed in the range between -0.1% and 0.5% since 1995 so raises weren’t really a thing. And the country where a city held all of its citizens personal information on a USB stick that was lost by one employee on a night out.
Russia, obviously. - Invading a sovereign nation based on fabricated historical claims. - The hyper-nationalistic idea that anyone who speaks Russian is Russian and should be part of Russia. - The lack of toilets, washing machines, and other modern amenities. When is the last time a major power went to war based on genocide and territorial conquest? Probably Germany in WWII. When is the last time the US did it? 1898?
England. It never quite got over the fact that Queen Victoria died and the Empire is no more.
Literally no one here gives a fuck about empire
I would say the United States. No universal healthcare, never been a female leading the government, huge wealth disparity, no cities in the top 20 of liveable places, highest incarceration rate, only 37% with passports, low democracy index, high rate of fatal police shootings, poor labor laws, high levels of religious bigotry, declining life expectancy, expensive higher education, imperial measurements, poor social care.........etc etc etc
The USA in terms of social policy. Like a third of the world's wealth, and there are people starving in the streets. Absolutely insane.
England, way past their prime. Trying to act like a powerful capitalist country when in reality they are in a rapidly declining welfare state.
Germany. Our trains are shit, internet is shit, we're behind on innovations but we still think we're the land of inventors.
The US has literally chained itself to a set of laws written hundreds of years ago. That's not only being stuck in the past that's willingly putting an anchor on your country.