Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

Toplowtech posted:

Well considering that people in berret you will see in France tend to be American tourist with poor fashion sense who think it's still the 40s...

lol je veux que tu partes, grenouille

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Weka
May 5, 2019

That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

YaketySass posted:

honestly kind of weak

At least they got the racism right

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
fr*gs

Weka
May 5, 2019

That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1769915682790293688

quote:

Post
See new posts
Conversation
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
I'd love to understand how France can simultaneously be the country whose administration is the most expensive in the world (government expenditure is an insane 58.34% of GDP, in China - not known for its small government - we're at 33.4%), while simultaneously being the most inefficient in the world.

I applied with
@FranceTitres
to replace my driving license in November last year. We're approaching the end of March and my application is STILL "pending": 4 months later!

I contacted
@FranceTitres
to ask them why it took so long and if there was any way to speed things up and their reply, I'm not kidding you, was (this is a direct translation):

"Hello,

Mr. BERTRAND, we thank you for your email.

We understand that you wish to know the status of your request for your driving license.

After checking in the computer system, we find that the request is being processed by the instructing service.

We invite you to wait while your file is being processed and to follow the progress of your request through the ANTS account by consulting the 'Requests related to the driving license' section.

We hope we have met your expectations and thank you for your patience."

I'm bloody well aware my request is "being processed" and that I can follow its (lack of) progress in my account, I was contacting you to ask why it took so long and if you could speed it up! And despite the fact that my expectations literally couldn't have been lower, you have realized the astonishing feat of failing to meet them with your Kafkaesque reply.

Interestingly, as it so happens, I have 3 driving licenses: a French one, a British one and a Chinese one and I've had to renew all three within the last year. Here's how long it took for me to receive my brand new license in the other 2 countries:
- China: less than 1 hour
- UK: about 3 weeks

France: 4 months later, and I am still waiting... And, again, we're speaking about a country with considerably higher government expenses than the other two, relative to its population (UK is 44% of GDP, and China, again is 33% of GDP).

And it's not only a driving licenses issue: this is how things go for just about any interaction with the French bureaucracy nowadays, things are just completely and utterly broken.

Terrifying illustration of this: just last month a young 25 years old man died of blood poisoning in the emergency room of a hospital in France because he waited there for 10 hours with an acute abdominal infection and no-one took care of him (https://leparisien.fr/faits-divers/...GSIJLG42D4M.php)

Normal country

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
People complain that government bureaucracy becomes bloated and useless because it's impossible to fire people, but at this point I'm pretty sure the problem is the exact opposite; when your job is only begrudgingly tolerated and you can and will be fired for any reason, the most dangerous thing to do is your job, let alone actually point out or try to solve problems. Well, that and the people who are unfireable are the ones in charge.

Toplowtech
Aug 31, 2004

Yes, that's a normal country under neo-liberalist policies but I think it's pretty nice of him to put his long late driver's license rant before the dead kid in the hospital.

lobster shirt
Jun 14, 2021

lol that is ridiculous, here in texas, which is not exactly known for efficient services or high government spending, it took like ten days for them to mail me a new drivers license

i say swears online
Mar 4, 2005

lobster shirt posted:

lol that is ridiculous, here in texas, which is not exactly known for efficient services

gently caress u

Toplowtech
Aug 31, 2004

Well, who care about Texas, they don't have girl bosses politician like Najat Vallaud-Belkacem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftgyKoZxEA4

mortons stork
Oct 13, 2012
I need to renew my id in italy, i booked my appointment in january. The first available slot was in august.

I thought we had been uniquely gutted in the number of public employees but it looks like other places are being similarly mismanaged?

tristeham
Jul 31, 2022


there are not enough driving instructiors in most french regions so there's an absurd backlog. linking this directly to government expenses is very dumb, that guy should know better. we have been (and still are) experiencing austerity mesures in the last two decades and everyone with half a brain can recognise they are the real problem.

January 6 Survivor
Jan 6, 2022

The
Nelson Mandela
of clapping
dusty old cheeks


( o(

tristeham posted:

there are not enough driving instructiors in most french regions so there's an absurd backlog. linking this directly to government expenses is very dumb, that guy should know better. we have been (and still are) experiencing austerity mesures in the last two decades and everyone with half a brain can recognise they are the real problem.

this puts the whole idea of making people over a certain age re-take the driving exam from an idea I'm not particularly against in to something that will once again gently caress over the poors who might not always be able to reschedule their entire daily life just to take said exam.

Wish I could be a driving instructor during the weekends tho, I could use some extra cash and I don't mind being driven around.

YaketySass
Jan 15, 2019

Blind Idiot Dog

he needed his permit A-38

Weka
May 5, 2019

That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

tristeham posted:

there are not enough driving instructiors in most french regions so there's an absurd backlog. linking this directly to government expenses is very dumb, that guy should know better. we have been (and still are) experiencing austerity mesures in the last two decades and everyone with half a brain can recognise they are the real problem.


It's a pretty weird austerity when state expenditures are such a high proportion of GDP for a high GDP country, even with the high government debt.

Am I reading this right, that's €300 billion in government borrowings this budget?
https://www.aft.gouv.fr/en/french-budget-bill-2024

Bertrand's point is that this spending is inefficient. Reissuing drivers licenses doesn't require a driving instructor, it can be largely automated, with manual tasks performed by someone in an office. The UK has if anything more neoliberalism and they still manage to send out a card in a somewhat timely fashion. Like this is a very simple task.

This is hardly a problem unique to France but it is a problem worth talking about, government spending in the west is mostly a very poor use of resources. It seems, from the outside, that France has a unique set of reasons for this as well as the standard package.

tristeham
Jul 31, 2022


yeah those funds clearly don't go where they should.

100YrsofAttitude
Apr 29, 2013




I'll attest to a certain spirit about work in France which I highly appreciate. There's a joie-de-vivre, where work really isn't a lot of people's priority and frankly, I think that's ok. Can it be annoying at times? Sure, but work's a crock by and large. I personally quite enjoy my job, but I'm not going to kill myself because of it, and I think France is pretty good about that.

It's also true that austerity measures have not been kind to the public sector and it's really noticeable too.

Maya Fey
Jan 22, 2017


https://twitter.com/aaroncikaya/status/1770730388496789595

Toplowtech
Aug 31, 2004

Training sessions, meals, and matches will not be rescheduled for ramadan. The FFF advises its players to reschedule their fasting periods to a later time when it will be easier for them to do so if they don't think themselves able to follow their religion's requirements.

Toplowtech has issued a correction as of 10:13 on Mar 22, 2024

Weka
May 5, 2019

That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.
dtf

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Weka
May 5, 2019

That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.
I get the strangest PMs on social media when I post that

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply