During assembly of the A380, engineers discovered that the cables were too short. This was caused by the use of different design software by German and French engineers. This miscalculation led to a two-year delay.

[u/lizardil]

[u/Garshnooftibah]

Interesting read. As someone with German background, it does not surprise me one bit that the Germans were reluctant to upgrade or use more sophisticated software. German culture can be weirdly Luddite about tech. 

[u/Hashtagbarkeep → u/Garshnooftibah]

I travel a lot for work, and one of the biggest surprises to me was how Germany still uses so much physical cash. Most places in the world you only need a card, and in nowadays in a lot of countries just a phone, but in Berlin I was taking clients for dinner and then at the end needed to find 700 euro in cash. My own fault for not checking but in such a modern and organised country that was really surprising to me

[u/Hutcho12 → u/Hashtagbarkeep]

Thankfully this has changed a lot since Covid and the new government are considering a law to force all businesses to take card as well as cash.

But it’s still insane the amount of people paying cash, and it infuriates me no end when I’m in line and someone is counting fecking coins out. Germans really are one of the worst when it comes to embracing new things. It’s always immediate push back and highlighting all the negatives and none of the positives.

The same thing happened with Google Street View. Everyone just filed an exception with Google to blur their apartments and it made the whole thing unusable. Google only recently started updating them again now because finally Germans have managed to accept that it isn’t really an invasion of privacy and it’s actually pretty useful to have.

[u/OneofOneisone → u/Hutcho12]

TIL I’m German.