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German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

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Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#221

Post by hermitcrab »

alanl wrote: post #211
hermitcrab wrote: post #5

Good for Germany, but it is all too rare to see bad corporate behaviour punished like this. Steal £10k from a company, and you will probably go to prison for a long time. Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it. I believe Iceland was the only country to jail bankers after the 2008 banking disaster. We are still waiting for the British governm…

Ireland jailed a 3 or 4 bankers after the crash. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drumm It took 10 yrs to convict them mind you, and as I understand it they’re all out now.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#222

Post by _DeadFred_ »

speff wrote: post #118
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power. https://www.epi.org/publication…

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-...

You are comparing ACTUAL recovered wage theft numbers to industry trade group estimated numbers and making claims/drawing conclusions off of two totally differently types of numbers?

Why not compare recovered to recovered, which are pretty close to each other? https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

That business appears to steal as much from their workers as criminal theft rings surely is kind of a big deal (based on the matching ACTUAL recovery numbers).

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#223

Post by ratatoskrt »

bhelkey wrote: post #163
jillesvangurp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deutsche Welle has a bit more detail and also discusses the CEO: https://www.dw.com/en/4-ex-vw-managers-guilty-of-fraud-over-... Apparently he has some health issues which caused the case against him to be suspended. That might resume later but unclear right now. He's 78 at this point.

The VX emission cheating scandal came to light a decade ago in 2015. If a 78 year old is too old to prosecute, Germany should have prosecuted him a decade ago when he was 68. Instead, Germany refused to extradite him to the US to stand trial in 2017 [1]. [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...

Many countries do not legally permit the extradition of their own citizens. In Germany, extradition is generally only allowed to other EU countries, which meant the German government’s options were quite limited.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#224

Post by paganel »

joker99 wrote: post #136
paganel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t wage modern war without diesel engines, those trucks won’t drive themselves close to the front-lines (and, no, electric-powered trucks in times of war are a terrible idea, and the ones powered by gasoline are a lot less efficient and don’t provide the same torque numbers).

Valid points you’re making. Let me make a counter point: as a German, I’ve seen tanks on 5/6 occasions in my life, never using their own engines. But at the same time, I’ve seen hundreds of cars every day and breathed their emissions. It’s totally fine if tanks continue using diesel, but cars, trucks etc. not using diesel (or gas) engines anymore will have a measurable effect on my health

But then you'd also lose the capability of making diesel engines for good, and, again, they're not used only for tanks when it comes to warfare.

Just look at the hole the US has dug for itself when it stopped producing civilian sea-ships, nowadays the cost of producing or even repairing its war-oriented sea-ships is way too high. And not only that, but it doesn't have the people with the knowhow to build those ships anymore, no matter the money thrown at the problem.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#225

Post by _DeadFred_ »

throwpoaster wrote: post #121
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power. https://www.epi.org/publication…

Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion. That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and…

The RECOVERED number matches retail theft recovery numbers. So it is AT LEAST on par with organized and unorganized criminal retail theft. I'd say that is significant (I would argue retail theft if much easier to catch and pursued much more often, making wage theft a larger issue) especially as it's happening within the structure of/approved by businesses.

https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#226

Post by jeroenhd »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #218
crop_rotation wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While CrowdStrike was incompetent, this is remotely not the same thing as what VW did. What CrowdStrike did should be best punished by the market and in court by companies who were their customers.

Crowdstrike stock price seems to be close to an all time high.

There are two or three companies that do what CrowdStrike does on a scale CrowdStrike supports. Not necessarily on a technical level, but on a CEO-goes-to-the-same-golf-clubs level of business support. CrowdStrike was probably the worst of the bunch, but any of them can cause the problems CrowdStrike caused.

It'll happen again, though probably on a smaller scale. Software like CrowdStrike's is a massive single point of failure but spending twice the money to have a backup suite on part of the network to maintain basic operations when the primary suite crashes is not very popular. The short hit to productivity is worth the emergency prep in terms of financial output, and the people spending weeks on end recovering systems are expendable anyway.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#227

Post by mananaysiempre »

achierius wrote: post #204
ferguess_k wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

窃(Steal)钩(hook)者(people)诛(gets a death sentence) 窃(Steal)国(country)者(people)侯(gets to be the king)

"He who steals from one citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from all ends them in purple and gold.”

> “Fures,” inquit [Cato], “privatorum furtorum in nervo atque in compedibus aetatem agunt, fures publici in auro atque in purpura.”

A. Gellius, Noctes Atticae, XI, 18, 18.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Gellius/1...

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#228

Post by rightbyte »

rurban wrote: post #131
aeyes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the CEO is responsible. To me it doesn't even matter if the CEO knows about it or not, if not the company has poor governance which is the CEOs full responsibility. Wirecard CEO has been arrested since 2020, will probably sit for another 10 years.

Which CEO? Of the 4 big German manufacturers, which conspired do implement these special cheats, or Bosch which implemented this cheat, and supported it as such? Or the politicians who wrote into law to able to use such a cheating device? That would be 5 CEO's plus at least 2 german politicians, plus 20 more politicians in all other countries which selected this cheating EU standard.

Wanting to use velocity profiles to set exhaust treatment parameters during warm up of the engine is totally reasonable.

Bosh's software is tunable to silly extents to avoid expensive vehicle testing as testing is tied to binaries due to bad processes.

You can more or less make a different program by changing 'parameters'.

I really think it might be unfortunate if this would extend into a crusade versus general computing.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#229

Post by philwelch »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #180
philwelch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t how human psychology works at all.

Wanna share with us what makes you qualified to make such definitive statements on human psychology?

You don’t have to be an expert to know that fear and panic don’t make people hinged, they make them even more unhinged.

In particular, terroristic violence almost always incites spiteful reaction against the perpetrators and anyone associated with them.

Re: German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal

#230

Post by [deleted] »

arthurcolle wrote: post #159
MrDresden wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They jailed 1 banker lol You've been incorrectly informed. As reported back in 2018[0], 36 individuals had already received a cumulative jail sentence of 96 years, with still more cases ongoing when this report was written. [0]: https://www.visir.is/g/20181632401d/36-manns-i-samtals-96-ar...

Thanks for the correction. I incorrectly recalled from that documentary "Inside Job"

[deleted]
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