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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

#291

Post by rurban »

FireBeyond wrote: post #69
wil421 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diesel engines in the US have stricter regulations. I doubt folks in the EU will start buying PowerStrokes, Cummins, or Duramaxes anytime soon.

How so? There is no way any of those engines would pass emissions in the EU. How are US regulations even stricter?

The standard are similar but testing is different. In the US every new engine has to be tested, in the EU only the first R&D engines need to be tested on standard automated test cycles. All subsequent engines not. This makes cheating trivial and manifactoring cheap.

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

#292

Post by blippage »

Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability. It is actually a "good" thing as a legal principle because it's the the employer who has all the dough and is most able to compensate for a wrong.

The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the game.

My view is that more people need to go to jail. Corporations would behave less like sociopathic institutions if this were done.

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

#293

Post by rurban »

DocTomoe wrote: post #101
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VW already is owned by the German state of NRW (20% of the voting rights, 11.8% of the equity)

VW is owned by the Porsche family. Audi also shortly owned it. Audi creates the engines for VW, because VW by itself can create nothing much by itself.

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

#294

Post by try_the_bass »

const_cast wrote: post #246
try_the_bass wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an employee completes all the work assigned to them I don't think this was implied in their statement?

Even if it wasn't, being a poor worker still isn't theft, and it's the companies responsibility to both measure and correct employee performance. If they're bad at that and these things go under the radar, that's still on the employer. The only way employees can steal is if they steal time, like clocking in then going home. Salary employees are not paid by time, so they cannot steal time. Employers want to have their…

Deliberately putting in less than the asked for effort in an attempt to extract more pay for less work is theft in the same way that attempting to minimize pay and maximize effort is "wage theft".

It's a knife that cuts both ways. If companies attempting to maximally exploit their employee's time is wage theft, so too is an employee's attempt to get a paycheck without doing work.

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

#295

Post by dragonwriter »

blippage wrote: post #292

Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability. It is actually a "good" thing as a legal principle because it's the the employer who has all the dough and is most able to compensate for a wrong. The downside to all this is that the bad actors get away with it. They have less skin in the…

> Brit here. IANAL, but there is a legal principle of "vicarious liability". So if an employee does something bad, it's the employer that foots the bill. This is vicarious liability.

More specifically (vicarious liability is correct, but less specific) it is respondear superior, the liability of the principal for harmful actions of the agent within the scope of the principal-agent relationship.

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

#296

Post by const_cast »

try_the_bass wrote: post #294
const_cast wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it wasn't, being a poor worker still isn't theft, and it's the companies responsibility to both measure and correct employee performance. If they're bad at that and these things go under the radar, that's still on the employer. The only way employees can steal is if they steal time, like clocking in then going home. Salary employees are not paid by time, so they cannot steal time. Employers want to have their…

Deliberately putting in less than the asked for effort in an attempt to extract more pay for less work is theft in the same way that attempting to minimize pay and maximize effort is "wage theft". It's a knife that cuts both ways. If companies attempting to maximally exploit their employee's time is wage theft, so too is an employee's attempt to get a paycheck without doing work.

Right, but it's not - because salary paid workers are not paid for their time spent, but rather for their quantity and quality of work. Which is up to employers to measure.

Me spending 5 minutes filling up my water is not stealing. Me taking a nice 15 minute walk is also not stealing. Presumably you're going to draw the line somewhere, but the implication of salary jobs is that productivity is not linear.

Me spending an extra hour working on something does not translate into an extra unit of work done. Me taking that 15 minute walk doesn't translate to 1/4th less unit of work, either. In fact, it might translate to 1 extra unit of work done. Look at that, I am now bending time into the negative. Human productivity is complicated, and we're not assembly line workers.

Also, even the concept of "less work" is dubious. The level of work being done varies from person to person, and nobody actually knows what the minimum is. Everybody should be optimizing for the minimum work necessary to get their pay, because that's just obvious. No hourly worker is going to spend even 1 minute working off the clock. But alas, we have no clock, and we're just kind of... estimating... what level of work really needs to be done, and then calculating that in with our own levels of accomplishment we want, and then convenience. I might work a bit extra to find a nice stopping point, or because I really want to conquer a bug.

If a worker decides to work less than whatever their current level of work is, and they don't get fired or even reprimanded, I have to conclude they were previously working above the level of work expected of them. Which means that, overall, not only is this worker not stealing, they've actually been giving.

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

#297

Post by paganel »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #289
paganel wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn't make much sense as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application. Also, it would imply that we should already have lost the capability of making tank tracks as civilian vehicles don't use them.

> have lost the capability of making tank tracks

Western Europe has certainly lost the capability of making even artillery shells at scale, let alone tank tracks, just look where we're at it now.

> as military technology typically comes first before any civilian application.

Diesel himself wasn't involved in any military thing, as far as I know, so I think you're wrong on that one.

The thing is that without a strong civilian industrial base focused on things adjacent to warfare (like the steel industry when it comes to building ships or artillery shells) any big power is going to come very short-handed in the next big war (assuming the war doesn't get nuclear, which is another discussion). So, if your country can't make diesel engines at scale, for whatever reason, then you can say goodbye to your logistics lines because you need lots and lots of trucks for said logistics as part of a continental war, i.e. forget the tanks.

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

#298

Post by sensanaty »

Wow only took them a decade, and not even all the execs involved have been punished. Plus the terms are pitiful, 4.5 years max in cozy German jails.

This should've happened a long time ago, and we should've made an example out of every single one of these scam artists. If it were up to me all these scumbags would be made destitute and barred from ever being anywhere near managing anything bigger than a mop.

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

#299

Post by watwut »

bhelkey wrote: post #141
johnklos wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think software engineers were independently looking at emissions data and unilaterally decided to "fix" the emissions shortcomings in software. I think they were told by others to do that. It's good that Germany is going after the people who decided that fraud was the answer.

> It's good that Germany is going after the people who decided that fraud When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial [1]. The VW scandal was made public in 2015 [2] and involved cheating since 2009. Sentencing only two executives to jail a decade after their wrong doing made international news does not send a strong message. [1] htt…

Germany does not extradite its nationals to the US at all. They can sometimes extradite to other EU states, but not to USA.

Sending own citizens to foreign country is generally big deal and not something that is done.

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

#300

Post by watwut »

bhelkey wrote: post #126
MortyWaves wrote: post #38

The last time I read any updates on this, everyone on both sides of the legal process were trying to single out scapegoat individual software engineers and rake them over the coals. Did something change?

When the VW scandal broke, the US indicted seven senior executives [1]. Germany did not cooperate. None of these seven were extradited to the US to stand trial. One more mid level engineer involved in the scandal made the mistake of taking a vacation to Florida. He was arrested in the airport awaiting his flight home to Germany [2]. He was sentenced to 84 months in prison but was let out after serving half of that se…

Germany does not extradite its nationals to the US at all. Not sure why would you expect this case to be so special that Germany would break its own laws.
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