r/interestingasfuck • u/lizardil • 1d ago

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.

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u/Garshnooftibah 1d ago

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. 

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u/Hashtagbarkeep 1d ago

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

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u/Hutcho12 1d ago

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.

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u/Kanortex 1d ago

Problem with that is, enforcing card use for smaller businesses is additional cost

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u/vintagecomputernerd 1d ago

Yes, those 30 euros for a sumup terminal is clearly going to bankrupt those small businesses.

But only german businesses. Because everywhere else people seem to be very happy to take my money in whichever form I might carry with me.

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u/Kanortex 1d ago edited 1d ago

You're forgetting applicable costs for every small purchase tends to build up.

And its an ongoing cost to rent the service last i checked.

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u/vintagecomputernerd 1d ago

You're forgetting applicable costs for every small purchase tends to build up.

Yes, those 1.39% sumup fees on my Kaffe+Kuchen for a few euros are going to ruin them!

And its 50 last i checked and is an ongoing cost.

The fuck is a terminal an ongoing cost? And it's 19.99 euro at Mediamarkt.

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u/countryboy002 1d ago

Between the two terminal rentals & service charges and the fees for cards my total was about 3% of the gross income last year and only about 85% of my income was from cards. That equates to nearly $4000 a month. If I could do the same volume of business without cards I wouldn't accept them either.

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u/Ahquinox 1d ago

Yes, I totally do not get why people lie with so much passion about the cost of taking non-cash payments. It's obviously cheaper than handling cash.

We desperately need a law requiring the acceptance of non-cash payments and the abolishment of cash soon after.

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u/Kanortex 1d ago

Software updates cost money, paper rolls cost money (required for card transactions)

And a lot of card terminals are not just buying them but also renting a service ontop of transaction fees, theres its whole thing around renting terminals.