(message original en anglais)

traduction par Argos Translate:

Vivaqua a retiré leur machine à sous et refuse maintenant de l’argent. En effet : pouvoir accéder au service d’eau à #Bruxelles dépend désormais de l’acceptation par la banque et de l’acceptation des services bancaires.

  • @CamusM
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    18 months ago

    That is, the invoices need to be generated with structured codes or the whole system falls apart.

    This is to match it automatically with the account number. In the cash version, you need desk people doing that matching for every individual. Otherwise, without those desk people, the whole system falls apart. You could replace it with ATM-like machines where people would be able to deposit the cash and authenticating with a username/password on the terminal, but having those machines everywhere to cover the whole country would have a significant cost.

    • @freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOP
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      8 months ago

      Strictly speaking it’s the invoice number that’s encoded into the structured code, which then maps to an account. That’s how the expected amount is known. It’s a good system so long as there is also an analog option if bugs happen, the grid goes down, or if a cyber attack brings down the bank or invoicing system and the tech fails. You can’t fix those things in a day. Bug hunts can take weeks to find and more weeks to resolve and recover the data. And the engineers are not cheap. When there is an analog option you can always add unskilled workers cheaply and even train them on-the-fly if needed. You can’t just throw more people in to accelerate work on a software problem. But with analog systems you can. You can scale them up quickly with temporary contractors. Even if all the info systems are down you can accept cash and make paper records until the info system is recovered. When a software dev is hired, they actually cost the employer money for training and the time it takes them to understand the complex code and quality systems. Some say it takes 3 months before a developer becomes productive enough to offset their own cost. Some say that crossover point is closer to a year. If a software dev CV shows that they left a job short of working 3 years in a position, employers will often reject them because that’s not enough time to have made the company a worthwhile profit.

      • @CamusM
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        18 months ago

        you can always add unskilled workers cheaply and even train them on-the-fly if needed.

        Not in Belgium, I can tell you ha ha ha

        • @freedomPusher@sopuli.xyzOP
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          18 months ago

          UberEats and Deliveroo seem to be getting away with it. Those workers have been made into independent contractors (something they protest because of the lack of job security it gives them).

          • @CamusM
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            18 months ago

            Yes, but a public organism such as Vivaqua would not use this kind of structure.