
Why Greece is failing: 10 months of permits to open an online store - barredo
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite2_1_21/02/2012_429208
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pg
"At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the
company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of
all, stool samples."

Can anyone from Greece confirm this? I've learned that when you read something
on the Internet that seems too funny to be true, it often isn't.

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zalew
I may be wrong, but it reminds me of sth called a 'health card' being needed
in my country (.pl) when you are working with food. If it's true, it only
proves their legal system concerning sanitary measures has way to broad
categories and somehow olive-oil (food-based) falls into 'food' while running
an online store falls into 'having a place where you deal with food'.
Providing stool samples of shareholders is just an extreme example what
happens when laws are too general and not in time with modern business models
and current technology. It's easy to figure out that broad laws open to
interpretation are easy to abuse by corrupted officials.

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zaroth
Headline is wrong. Should read, "Why Greece is failing: internet entrepreneurs
waste 10 months filling out paperwork"

edit: to say nothing of playing with their own %$!^

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calbear81
That's a great point. If their target was the non-domestic market, they
wouldn't need a Greek domain and they probably could have hosted everything
except for logistics in the UK or the US.

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marshray
How would they have paid their taxes?

I know, I know, the common belief is that Greeks don't do that, but still they
might want to declare some of the income.

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mahmud
Almost everything I read about the financial woes of Greece blames its
government's inability to _collect_ taxes, and not, say, beauracratic
paperwork. So, excuse me if I'm suspicious of the causal implication of the
article.

~~~
e-dragoev
Greece is #100 out of 183 countries in terms of ease of doing business:

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index>

The only European countries that have lower rank are Russia, Ukraine and
Kosovo.

Greece does better than Brazil, Argentina and India though.

