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by Bayart 1816 days ago
I can't speak for Britain but a lot of administrative services in France are digital now. I'm rarely trapped in bureaucratic nonsense like I would have been say ten years ago. Most services you'd require on any given day (taxes, welfare, unemployment office, healthcare, ID registration, voting registration, starting a basic corporate structure) are trivially available.

The biggest problem now is discoverability as government programs are still habitually arcane and UI/UX grammar. Some countries, I'm thinking especially of Germany, have national standards that make services appear uniform whereas in France every administration is still its own little shop.
2 comments
mytailorisrich 1816 days ago
As someone who's trying to renew his passport: Services have partially moved online (still have to attend in person...) but they still are bureaucratic nonsense, indeed.

Bureaucracy is Kafkaesque because of the complicated and seemingly random rules, because of the abundance of taxes, etc. There really needs to be a drastic reset of everything.

A good example: The attestation people had to print and fill in if they wanted to leave home during the lockdown. Why? This is bonkers even if it eventually became digital.

Another good example: Starting a business. I don't know if it can be simpler and faster than the way it works in the UK. In France, on the other hand...

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sbuk 1816 days ago
As a Francophile Brit that grew up in France, and with the greatest of respect, you are French. It's a totally different story if you are not French. The bureucracy is horrific, even today. My parents have lived there for 30 years, both are fully integrated into the community, and they still face bureuctratic issues and delays, even digitally because they are not French. I'm not suggesting in any way that France is a particulaly xenophobic nation - us Brits have that sewn up, sadly - but the system is very xenophobic in my long experience.
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CodeGlitch 1816 days ago
> I'm not suggesting in any way that France is a particulaly xenophobic nation - us Brits have that sewn up, sadly

Simply not true.

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