German trains are absolute chaos. Tickets are sent via PDF for trains running 3 hours late. I was in Frankfurt last year getting to Cologne and back a few times.
Coming from someone who has to commute via South Western railway into London everyday.
German trains have very much to complain about, but honestly, their customer facing IT is pretty good. I've not had to deal with PDF tickets nor printed tickets in years.
The website and app work well, in my experience. It's all pretty sleek and modern, too. It's the one area they do a good job in, to be honest.
Absolutely, it's probably the most consumer-friendly and reliable part of all of the Bahn services. Personnel is usually pretty great too, and that despite them having to suffer the most from all the inept decisions made in the upper ranks.
What? The app is infamous for just "forgetting" tickets and when you get caught you HAVE to pay a fine and no they will not accept screenshots. You will win in court but have fun paying for everything in advance.
> What? The app is infamous for just "forgetting" tickets
Citation needed. I've never heard of this being an issue (certainly not an "infamous" one) and almost everyone I know constantly travels by train and uses the app regularly. Maybe you're mixing things up with Deutschlandticket apps by regional transport associations, but that's not DB's fault.
Tickets get hidden from the default view once they're expired, but that's to be expected and you can press the prominent "Previous trips" button to see them.
The DB App is great. It lets you buy tickets, informs you of delays and possible alternatives especially if you miss your connection, you can file a request for a refund, you can reserve a seat, you can use the comfort check-in and check yourself in, so you wouldn't have to show your ticket. You can even request a refund up to two hours after you purchased your ticket, without any fees.
No PDFs or print-outs or forms are needed.
Yes, you still get a PDF ticket sent to your email, but you aren't required to use it.
What is the issue with receiving tickets as PDF? It is the most flexible yet digital option. PDFs work regardless of the medium. You can show it in the phone or you can always add them to DB Navigator App anyways or if you would like to be old school, just print them.
NFC is limited access for phones. You need to pay Google and Apple tax. Android does allow independent communication but it is not widespread and you'll lose a big chunk of Apple users. You basically tie yourself to a platform that way.
You can scan and add your QRs (or more correctly Aztec barcodes) in DB Navigator app already. If you bought it via your own account (instead of your company buying it), you don't even need to do it. The tickets automatically appear.
DB Navigator is one of the best transport apps and already implements some caching. However you're ultimately tied to cell network or WiFi in train for certain othet apps and the quality of implementation. PDFs don't expire.
> Tickets are sent via PDF for trains running 3 hours late
I agree that the delays are unacceptable, but the official app is great w/ digital tickets + seat registration, you don't need the PDF at all (it's even optional during checkout, so if you don't like them you can just uncheck the box lol)
There are plenty of european hosts (e.g. hetzner) and with payments systems the technology is rarely the problem it's the politics. I imagine EPI will have no problem succeeding.
The major problem Europe has (mentioned in the draghi report) is with industrial competitiveness and strategy and access to cheap energy.
With the former it's not like the US is doing any better though. I dont think anybody in the west even has an industrial strategy.
Yes, it's glaringly obvious to me that they've been actively suppressing their own tech sector. Feels like a lot of EU politicians owned shares of US tech companies.
This effect of politicians making decisions based on what corporate shares they own is ubiquitous now.
In the other direction, I even wonder if US threats about Greenland were related to this trend of Denmark moving off US big tech. I feel like the real game is military coercion dressed up as economics.
I suspect if people knew the real reasons behind each political decision, they'd be shocked. I'm sure it's all 100% about money; about taking as much as possible whilst giving as little in exchange as possible; filling the gap with pure coercion.
It's a racket. The US have provided military protection in exchange for Europe tying itself to the mast of the US empire. Some of it is unspoken, some of it is contracted, especially concerning military hardware.
Yes, I always think it's quite rich for Americans to complain about European defence when the current state is exactly what America wanted for the last seventy years.
Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them when they had some minor issues.
9/10 conversations on things happening across Europe can be thrown into trash bin, as they treat EU, or even Europe as a whole, as a single political entity. I could somehow accept that Americans can display such ignorance, but amazingly pretty often this mistake is being made by people declaring themselves as European. Like, are they blind to the political reality that surrounds them?
I can understand talking about us as a wide group, given how we share many cultural points of view, ways of working are still closer that across the pound, many being polyglot, having seen the same cartoons as kids and so on, regardless of the differences that remain, however we are still quite far away from turning into United States of Europe. The growing rights sentiment, is exactly because many nationals don't want going that far, among other issues.
Also not everything that gets regulated in Brussels, gets adopted by local goverments, and additionally there are plenty European countries that still aren't part of EU organisation.
Yeah, cannot understand this misunderstanding when coming from Europeans, as you mention.
Cynically, my view is that this is actually on purpose and pushed by the EU itself. My is happening in with Russia, Ukraine, the US is used as a narrative tool to push for EU federalisation. This means pushing for more EU control, which we are seeing, and minimising references to individual countries. Even the "sovereignty" push is fully through the lens of more EU oversight (which is oxymoronic but a powerful political narrative).
I don't think that is going to happen anytime soon. First thing the EU is that it needs to be reformed from the ground up and have elections for the general commissioner and its cabinet. Commissioner positions should be handed over to every country just because. The whole of Europe should vote who they want for agriculture, who they want for foreign relations and so on. The way it works now is very very wrong and a big disservice to EU citizens.
We will see. My guess is 5 to 10 years these anti-competitive regimes will collapse as more and more people move away from bad actors like our current administration.
Ripped off? I think it’s more that you are ripping off people from other countries, whilst undermining your own economy and draining your country of meaningful work. It’s nice to pay your neighbour properly for the work they do. How much clothes are you actually buying and why? The clothing industry is a horrible one, riddled with waste and slavery. You been to the factory where they’re making your clothes have you? Wake up man. This shit matters.
Coachcube | https://coachcube.ai | Mid to Senior ML Engineer and CV Engineer | Onsite London
Coachcube is new gym product providing a virtual PT service. We have an experienced senior leadership team and are building a hardware/software product using digital motors, camera vision and ML to design a next-generation weight-lifting product. If you like fitness and ML, reach out for a chat!
The ideal candidate:
- Can ship quickly
- Highly inquisitive but also motivated to deliver
- Comfortable moving across domains
- Understands fitness/weight lifting
- Up for a challenge
mind you that a lot of this outsourcing is also happening inside the EU from high wage western countries to lower waged eastern countries (poland, hungary, romania etc).
Tech giants have no competition in Europe and no capital to do so. In some ways, what Trump is doing is a call to arms for the EU to kick their economies into shape.
We've been stuck in 0 growth for years, the UK is in a 0 growth trap since the GFC.
My view is that Ai companies saw there was a huge volume of code online and decided coding was a text generation problem and easy to replace.
I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.
I think, as software devs, we sometimes kid ourselves with respect to how many of us are working on low brow, chum bucket stuff.
Most of us are not working on GPU based real time physics engines. What most of us do is, well, not rocket science. Even people working in "hard" areas are not really doing the "hard" work. Most game engine developers are using libraries, they aren't developing shaders. Most AI developers are, in actuality, TF or PyTorch monkeys, not real AI experts.
I think devs who move to writing code in areas where problems have not yet been solved will still be necessary. But yeah, not sure devs pushing out another web app will be all that necessary over the next decade.
While I agree we're not all implementing physics engines, there is a spectrum of complexity that is both business and technical between a todo app and a banking system.
Developer brains are still much more efficient at holding the different layers of context involved to build systems.
Maybe, but so far we've been pretty successful in just adding patches/bandaids to capitalism to address the places where it falls on it's face. For example, healthcare doesn't fit into a "free market" model, and most countries have figured that out. Even the US, which imposes lots and lots of regulation and protections in healthcare.
The numbers are bad therefore it will collapse.
reply