181–190 of 348 posts
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Consumers still have to breathe though. I'd be totally fine if diesel engines were completely phased out. In the US we somehow can't even get rid of those idiots that retune their engines for "rolling coal".
Everything you purchase over the course of a day was transported by a diesel truck at some point.
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Is this missing a sentence like 'there is a saying in mandarin:'?
I think they meant: 窃钩者诛，窃国者侯 qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord. Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.
What about major shareholders? Presumably they were blissfully unaware, and were simply pleased when VW delivered more profits, as demanded.
Instead of fines the government should be granted an ownership percentage in companies that break that law (thus diluting ownership and directly impacting owners). That way the punishment impacts shareholders/owners, but in way that keeps corporate protections so that society can continue to function.
I wish someone would give me a chance to vote to repeal the personal death penalty and create the corporate death penalty.
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That seems like a really small number? To compare - total US retail shrink in those years combined was a little over $300B[0] - averaging about 1.5% of sales. $1.5B seems like a rounding error when talking in those terms. [0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-retailers-cite-rising-theft-...
I think their point was that this was all that was recovered, from the approx $20b stolen each year through wage theft. I believe wage theft is one of the largest value crime by $ amount in the US - but is very rarely prosecuted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft Actually it turns out fraud and white collar crime takes more out of the American economy.
EDIT: I'm going to cast more suspicion on the FBI graph. According to a 2022 report[0], the number of robbery offenses reported in 2018 was 1691 cases. The median loss being about $2k. Doing some caveman-math, that's about $3B lost to robbery in 2018. Unless we went through some insane spike of lawlessness between 2012 and 2018, I don't see how $340m in 2012 jumps to $3B in 2018.
[0]: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
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It has been some years since VW had to give up cheating on emission tests. Were they beaten by US competitors during this time? I have not read any news about it.
VW? Everyone who used the Bosch ECU cheated. VW was just the biggest who got caught and had to go to jail therefore. All the others, which were more guilty than the VW execs are still free. And the politicians which sanctioned these special diesel tests were not even named. Nor all the other countries who also choose the European Standard (not testing diesel engines) over the US Standard.
As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?
Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.
It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.
Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.
The wheel keeps on turning.
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Because, for the most part, we aren't doing damned thing about it. "Rolling coal" is inherently a very public act of law breaking, but I doubt a single person has ever been pulled over by any American cop for it. The EPA and certain states were trying through other enforcement mechanisms to fight it, but with Trump in office, it's basically encouraged to "delete" your Diesel emissions equipment if you aren't in comme…
…said deletion, which returns your truck to the state of the regulatory art circa 2009, also results in a doubling of fuel economy and about an 80% jump in horsepower.
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Because with large companies, blame and accountability gets spread thin over a wide area till it evaporates, so everyone gets away with it.
Someone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change…
The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
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Consumers still have to breathe though. I'd be totally fine if diesel engines were completely phased out. In the US we somehow can't even get rid of those idiots that retune their engines for "rolling coal".
Everything you purchase over the course of a day was transported by a diesel truck at some point.
They can buy a brand new truck sans engine and drop some terribly polluting piece of crap from several decades ago and bypass all modern emissions regulations.
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The question is, whether VW as a German company is now going to end up being beaten by US competitors which could do even more nasty stuff unpunished.
We should let our executives commit crimes lest they be outcompeted by other executives committing worse crimes is a terrible argument. It's more a argument for not letting the other company compete as easily in your country
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
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Is this missing a sentence like 'there is a saying in mandarin:'?
I think they meant: 窃钩者诛，窃国者侯 qiègōuzhě zhū, qièguózhě hóu He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord. Yes, it is a Chinese idiom.