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 government to bring any individuals to account for wide scale corruption and profiteering during COVID.
I think that's a pretty different concept being expressed by that one.
The others are about getting away with something by just making the crime big enough that it's evaluated and handled in a totally different arena.
The bank can still destroy the rest of your life, so you didn't get away with anything (setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you).
The banking one is just saying that the bank can not get 100 million from you no matter what they do, because it simply doesn't exist. In that case, everyone still agrees you still owe it and they are entitled to it. You didn't gain anything by going big enough. And it's not really true that it's the banks problem instead of yours. The bank has a problem, but you still also have a problem.
that's really not what it means, it means that if you owe the bank enough money (which is probably more than 100 million nowadays for any significant bank) then it is you in the position of power in relation to the bank, when the bank comes and says hey we need the money sure you have the "problem" that you need to pay it, but let's say you can pay it no sweat, but you'd rather not because reasons so you say hmm, I think I would like to renegotiate the interest and wait a year before paying, and unless things are very extreme the bank will probably have to acquiesce, if they don't they are basically letting the world know hey, we have a 100 million dollar problem, but until they make that announcement that 100 million is just another asset the bank has.
If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
> If you owe the bank enough money, you have the power in the relationship in most cases.
If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you.
The thing about renegotiating a loan is you don't have enough assets, but if the bank takes what you do have, you will never be able to repay the loan. I.e. the bank stands to recover more if you are successful than if you are bankrupt.
>If you have any assets, the bank can take them from you
If you have any assets in the less than a billion dollars range, if you have assets over a billion dollars (which if you have enough of a loan in today's money to match the 100 million quote, you probably have over a billion in assets) then the bank knows its looking at a real fight. Nobody likes a real fight.
People like fights they're guaranteed to win quickly.
"...setting aside bankrupcy and how you can actually usually start over, and that may or may not be all that terrible for you..." You might even be elected president...:-p
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.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
>Start a company and steal billions from your customers and/or the tax payer, and you will probably get away with it.
In this case not only were the managers personally held liable, the company itself also had to pay vast amounts of compensation to customers. Not only in Germany or the EU, but also to US customers.
We’re in the midst of watching Apple get away with criminal contempt for forcing consumers to be as ignorant as possible of their IAP fees - including forcing Patreon to exclusively use them while under court order to allow them to link to their own payments!
“I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”
I suspect you need an actual share in the company to qualify for shareholder protections. A share in a fund is a share in a fund, not a share in each company the fund has shares in.
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.
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.
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.
I skimmed the article - any significant concrete numbers were all sourced to the EPI site linked by the GP. There's an unsourced FBI chart that says >19B in 2012, but I couldn't find the actual numbers when I looked. Frankly - I don't trust this claim if the only one actually putting big numbers on it is one publication.
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.
Caveman math indeed. Thanks for the correction - that's a pretty big error. Though then I'm not sure what to make of the discrepancy between the numbers. They still don't square up w/ the Wikipedia article any way you look at it
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?
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).
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 reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.
If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!
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.
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point? Does it being a small % of the GDP matter to those stolen from? Does it mean we shouldn't attempt to remedy it?
Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.
But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.
I agree, but this point seems to be orthogonal to the matters being discussed here. Your point is roughly analogous to 'providing too much consumer surplus is rewarded with more customers'.
You're adding assumptions that the employee is #1 on salary, and #2 not getting a raise for the additional work. You've changed the assumptions and the situation...
No, the original comment (now flagged) was about salaried employees not working hard enough. The argument was that they weren't working hard enough for their current salary. There was nothing about getting a raise. You made that up.
As far as I can tell, there was nothing about salaries until your comment. There was also nothing (either way) about raises until my recent comment. You asserted that the employees were salaried and wouldn't get a raise.
If an employee completes all the work assigned to them and passes performance reviews then what you're describing is a suboptimal use of the employees on the part of the employer.
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 cake and eat it too - they want to consider salary employees not time based when it comes to OT, but when it comes to day-to-day they DO want them to be considered time-based. Not how it works. Your workers being bad at their job is not theft, it's just incompetence.
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.
When I say "less work", I'm intentionally not specifying how the work output is measured, because, as you say, it's different for salaried vs hourly employees (and those are only the two most common forms!)
However, the point still remains! Moving the goalposts--or trying to motte-and-bailey the difference between salaried and hourly--is just intellectually dishonest, and doesn't really counter my argument at all.
If you want to refer to salaried employees specifically, then yes, "less work" means "consistently getting less done than is asked for on the timescale expected of you". But my argument still holds! This is something I've personally witnessed a handful of co-workers do. You're not wrong that it's up to employers to measure, but part of that measurement relies on trust between the employee and employer.
What you're implicitly arguing for is a complete lack of trust, which leads to an entirely different set of workplace problems
> What you're implicitly arguing for is a complete lack of trust, which leads to an entirely different set of workplace problems
This is already the current situation. This is why your computer is monitored and you badge in.
And, on the topic of badging in, the reason we do this is because measuring output is hard, and company's are lazy. Measuring time is easy, so they just use that as a proxy for output.
That's why a good worker being 15 minutes late every day will eventually get fired, but a bad worker sitting around on his phone will not.
Is this is a good way to measure output? Of course not, it's pretty much the most naive and simplistic way you can do it. But it's the most popular method chosen, so, here we are.
Look, getting less work done than is expected of you relies on knowing that expectation, which you don't. Has it occurred to you that those "stealing" might just legitimately think that they ARE doing what's expected of them? I mean, they're doing it... and they're employed... so what's the expectation?
At the end of the day it would be nice to all hold hands and sing kumbaya. But ultimately, we are all trying to do the least stuff we need to do to get results. Companies are putting in the absolute least amount of effort to measuring performance, and employees are putting in the least effort to get their job done. So, it seems fair to me, and I don't think anyone is stealing.
> This is already the current situation. This is why your computer is monitored and you badge in.
But it's not, and I'm not?
I haven't ever worked under these conditions, and I've worked a handful of jobs over close to 20 years. I'm always confused when people like yourself make these sweeping statements, given I've never once encountered them.
I know I haven't encountered them because I've witnessed coworkers at a few of those jobs do fuck all all day and never get in trouble for it. Their computers clearly weren't being monitored, because they used them to work on personal projects all day.
> That's why a good worker being 15 minutes late every day will eventually get fired, but a bad worker sitting around on his phone will not.
I've had coworkers very infrequently show up to work and just "work from home" while still getting nothing done, so again, my lived experience contradicts your absolute statements? Maybe I'm just not working the same kinds of jobs you are?
> Is this is a good way to measure output? Of course not, it's pretty much the most naive and simplistic way you can do it. But it's the most popular method chosen, so, here we are.
Every place I've worked has measured output in terms of concrete objectives being achieved in "reasonable" timeframes. "Reasonable" is always highly subjective, and I've definitely been the one who hasn't gotten things done within initial estimates because it turned out here there be dragons or some such. I've generally had good managers who understand the work, and are technical enough to understand why it sometimes takes longer than expected.
The coworkers I've seen fired for poor performance were the ones who consistently didn't get things done within their own estimates, and were consistently unable to provide good rationale for why. The ones I've seen who have done fuck all and gotten away with it were the ones especially good at coming up with plausible reasons for the endless delays, and were otherwise on good terms with their managers (or had less technically managers who were easier to hoodwink). Others took the tactic of never taking on solo work, and then always "pairing" on everything (but never actually contributing any real work).
> Look, getting less work done than is expected of you relies on knowing that expectation, which you don't. Has it occurred to you that those "stealing" might just legitimately think that they ARE doing what's expected of them? I mean, they're doing it... and they're employed... so what's the expectation?
Seems to me you are arguing in favor of people doing nothing and getting paid for it? I mean, isn't that what you're saying here?
That's literally stealing, is it not? Sure, they might be getting away with it, but people steal and get away with it all the time, but that doesn't make it right.
You're essentially making the argument that "if you can get away with theft, it's not theft," which really says a lot more about you than it does about me.
> At the end of the day it would be nice to all hold hands and sing kumbaya. But ultimately, we are all trying to do the least stuff we need to do to get results. Companies are putting in the absolute least amount of effort to measuring performance, and employees are putting in the least effort to get their job done. So, it seems fair to me, and I don't think anyone is stealing.
Yeah, no, this has never been the case for any of the places I've worked, and I find it hard to believe I've just "gotten lucky". I think you're just spewing bullshit that isn't actually reflective of reality. It might be true for some companies, but it's absolutely untrue as a general rule, which is what you're putting forth here.
> You're essentially making the argument that "if you can get away with theft, it's not theft," which really says a lot more about you than it does about me.
No, that's not at all the argument I'm making. I'm making the argument that being a poor worker is not theft because it cannot be. Because theft requires you stealing something, and salary employees cannot steal time because they are not paid by time.
> I think you're just spewing bullshit that isn't actually reflective of reality
This has been the case everywhere I've been employed and has also been the case with everyone I know.
Look, I don't really care if you think your company is different and I'm certainly not going to try to convince you that your experience isn't real. That's not productive.
All I'm saying is, if we have a problem where workers aren't doing a good job, that's a measuring problem. Your company figured out the measuring problem. Congratulations! Most haven't, which is why they have so many shitty workers. They just need to put in more effort into measurement.
Ultimately the company is the sole entity responsible for setting expectations. If they're letting people get away with less work, then they're signalling "what you're doing is okay and you should keep doing it". I'm not going to fault random workers who have zero leverage or control in anything because their company and managers decided to be lazy and irresponsible.
You want to measure performance? Yeah, that takes effort and knowledge. Putting in an HID reader isn't gonna cut it.
Sure, but there's inherent latency between detecting the bad behavior and punishing it. Sometimes that latency is infinite, as tends to be the case in many government jobs.
It's not just a "bad management" issue, and trying to blame it entirely on the company is just as bullshit as blaming it entirely on the worker.
Most often an employee caught stealing is just fired. If there's significant value involved perhaps the police would get a call.
Telling an employee to clock out and keep working is a labor law violation, that's not just a civil matter. It happens, but often with the agreement of the employee. I.e. "I know you're about to hit overtime, so if you clock out I'll give you cash, otherwise I have to send you home."
When this conversation comes up it is typically mentioned that employers have mechanisms of enforcement that are tied to their basic accounting required for taxes as well as surveillance cameras that are also meant to watch customers for theft. They also have the ability to contact law enforcement and have their employees arrested for theft.
There is an asymmetry in this relationship however where employees don't practically have recourse when their employers steal from them.
My sister was a waitress at Red Lobster in somewhat of a tourism city and made absolute bank. She still stole stuff like cutlery, salt shakers, etc. Let’s not pretend that most people that are stealing are Robin Hood types.
This comment is so on point, reminds me of the old one about if you owe the bank 500k they own you, but if you owe then 2Billion you own them. Something along those lines, maybe I'm only noticing it more recently but it seems to me that there's also a higher prevalence of "Non class actions" clauses in terms and conditions these days too.
It's amazing how badly customers are willing to be treated but at the same time, you're not obliged to buy a service so I can't really rant too much.
Edit : Found the quote and unironically it's credited as an American Proverb.
> If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb.
His larger problem was doing everything a lawyer would tell you not to do. The world and a sufficient portion of any 12 person subsample could have accepted that these were suckers far more readily than Madoff's victims. But he broke every rule about talking, letting people know he was making up required departments, mixing conflicts of interest, etc.
True, but context matters. SBF was running a disruptive crypto startup that drew intense scrutiny, and his operations were so amateurish that proving misconduct was straightforward. Traditional corporations tend to reduce the risk of prison-worthy exposure thanks to tighter compliance and better legal insulation, even when the harm is just as large.
With the political tensions in the US (I'm not trying to fan any flames - wait to read the full thing), I think that SBF made the mistake to 'bet on both teams - with a smile', and he is punished because teamA that eventually won punished him for funding teamB as well. So a friend of our enemy is our enemy (!?). Also, he may have been seen as a 'traitor' by both teams. I know about the case what I've read in some news sites and Coffeezilla/Voidzilla, and it seems like the guy should be behind bars. And with that said, I rarely celebrate when someone loses their freedom. I mostly feel sorry for them and their life's choices (and the fact that with being in prison he made his own life hell, and put in some very difficult position everyone near/around him).
Most blatant case was when the HSBC bank was found guilty of laundering billions for Mexican drug cartels. Any person found guilty of that, would have gone to prison for years, but nobody at HSBC went to prison, and the bank was fined mere millions for the crime of laundering billions. I'm sure that taught them a lesson.
So I'm glad finally seeing some repercussions for corporate crime.
What US competitors? Tesla is the only single American company that has had any success besides maybe Ford (but Ford Europe has a similar relationship to it's American parent company that Opel and GM used to have i.e. in a large part it's an European company)
Well yes, I of course meant the entire EU+UK market. Regardless besides US and a handful of other countries VW is hardly competing that much with any American car companies anywhere (besides Tesla).
American car makers are still struggling a lot more in relative market share terms (GM+Ford+Tesla barely had over 33% in 2024 in the US). While VW alone had 26% in EU/UK/EFTA (just German companies have 39% of the entire market there)
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.
Indeed, Dieselgate is 10 years ago. If they would've suffered badly from it, we would've seen that by now. Sure, they've had to pay fines and compensations, but that seems to have been dealt with. In fact, you could argue the opposite: Dieselgate forced VW to drop diesel and switch focus to EVs [1, 2], earlier than they would've done otherwise, giving them an advantage over other European and American competitors (except Tesla). Of course, there are plenty of other issues they've faced since them (inflation, Chinese competition, tariffs, etc).
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.
Not just Bosch ECUs, not just European car companies, and this shit has been going on for decades. All the car companies do it and have since at least the 90's. The proof is in the ROM dumps of all the various cars - the tuners can point to two sets of tables of fuel mixture/timing maps, one for when the ECU thinks it's being emissions tested and one for regular use.
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.
They have kind of abandoned diesel engines, which the whole scandal was based around. It became clear that it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards, which is a shame since they are more efficient and it is consumers who are losing out. They are still one of the main automotive conglomerations today. If anything American car companies are losing the market in Europe, Ford for example have abandoned their best selling model - the Focus, and in the UK at least they are the only US brand besides for Tesla.
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".
Which likely was very polluting, because thanks to bitching by the trucking industry, they get a pass on emissions via "gliders."
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.
The SCR/EGR/DPF regime that's been forced upon truck mfrs is at the ragged edge of reliability and maintainability, not to mention its effects on fuel use. So that regulators who've never heard of Pareto optimization can pursue cutting the final 1% of the emissions that a truck from the 1960s would have.
One badly-tuned mid-80s F700 can produce more particulates in a day than a brand-new diesel truck will in its lifetime, but somehow, the priority is not making it easier for the owners of forty-year-old equipment to update to the standard of...2004, but rather to decrease the number of milligrams per tank (at $infinity cost) of soot that a brand-new engine is producing.
Parent was talking about commercial diesel trucks which do not comply with the same regulations as passenger vehicles, and the article talks about stock non-compliance. Why are you changing the subject?
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.
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.
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.
Short version is that you can't rely on the power grid or other centralized generation. Centralized infrastructure may not even be available, but if it is then the enemy can target it.
I'm not a tank expert, but my impression of Wehrmacht tanks vs Soviet tanks is the Wehrmacht tanks used aviation engines. Aviation engines are light and powerful, but don't have much life, were finicky, and require aviation gas. Soviet tanks were simple and used any liquid that would burn.
The US military is starting to use some hybrid vehicles to improve fuel logistics and reduce operating noise. But pure electric ground vehicles are obviously a stupid idea for combat usage due to charging issues.
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 commercial operation.
…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.
These percentages seem a bit high compared to what I have seen. I usually see/hear about a 1-3mpg and 10-30% HP. I understand the point you are trying to make but "doubling of fuel economy and about an 80% jump in horsepower" is far from accurate, especially considering the downsides of a delete on every outside of the vehicle
In all fairness, in the general European perception, with the Cougar, the Puma, and the Focus, Ford is not really seen as an "American" brand. Especially the Focus has virtually nothing to do with what Europeans would consider 'an American car'. It is the quintessential low-to-mid-tier Eurocar: small, cheap, does what it is supposed to do.
Compare that to e.g. Chevrolet, which tried - and failed - to get a foothold in Europe. The failure was mostly them not understanding the local market.
Also it overlapped a lot with Opel which a much more successful brand in Europe. Basically it was an off-brand/cheap Opel, which wasn't exactly doing that great itself...
AFAIK they were selling rebadged Daewoo models which were built on platforms developed by Opel. I suppose they wanted a budget brand and manufacturing and importing from Korea was cheaper back in those days than just using Opel's factories..
I could be wrong but I think BMW and Mercedes still make diesel engines. So maybe it's only impossible at a lower price point? Although the difference isn't that large.
>It became clear that it would be impossible to create diesel engines which would comply with enviromental standards
Absolutely not "impossible" FFS, VW was cheating to avoid using a proper adblue system, which would have been perfectly sufficient. They could also have used a particulate filter and burn off scheme like some trucks but that would require significant engineering and probably doesn't work as well with a small diesel engine.
Orrrrrr they could have just done what the "cheat" mapping did: Run less lean. The entire point of cheating was to run very lean to make artificially high fuel efficiency figures. The cheat map for emissions would then run richer to kill off nox emissions.
I genuinely believe they still "cheat" somewhat. My 2018 GTI has a 2L turbo engine. The MK7 GTIs were the first to be EPA emissions rated at 89 octane gas, even though the power figures are still recorded using 91 octane gas. Previous GTI engines were EPA rated with 91 octane gas.
My tinfoil hat theory is that they run EPA tests on 89 octane so that it runs rich and reduces combustion temp, reducing nox emissions. Using higher octane fuel runs much leaner, and demonstrably produces better miles per gallon. They purposely chose to advertise a lower miles per gallon figure because, IMO, they couldn't pass emissions with the leaner burning 91 octane. Notably, low RPM (and emissions testing RPM) performance is utter garbage with 89 octane fuel, and the car becomes very stall happy, when at 91 octane it is very difficult to stall.
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
Not to mention that it assumes assumes lying, cheating, and corruption is just the price you pay for quality products.
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.
If our companies get destroyed, people fired and US/Chinese crooks win while EU spirals into recession, moral high ground is going to be a poor comfort.
if vw for example would „get destroyed“ it would be more that some other company woulf take over control and do the job hopefully right. The company is the whole thing. production, workes, industrial plant etc… that wont go away if you take away upper management and stock owners.
I feel this also has a lot to do with the use of diesel. The number of passenger vehicles and light duty pickups in the US that actually use diesel is a fraction of what it was in Europe.
The emission limits being for ULEV vehicles, I don't think I have seen a ULEV truck - indeed California classifies most under the LEV banner.
None of this is to change the point around nitrous oxide emissions - the environment doesn't care whether it came from a VW TDI or a F350, just the amount.
But it is also far far easier to implement such low emission standards in the US because we just don't really use diesel like that.
And when you get to the heavy duty pickups (F250, F350, etc.), then most of that goes out of the window.
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.
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.
The question is should the CEO have know. A CEO that trys to set a culture of doing the right thing, with training on what the right thing is, and other such things can still be deceived by someone low level who cheats. It is possible for one person to cover their tracks for a long time if they are trying to cheat. It can be years to track down who is doing the immoral thing even after you catch something is wrong.
The question this is this one person (or small group) operating against their instructions, or is it the CEO encouraging people to cheat? That can be a hard question, but we want CEOs to think if I do "enough" (whatever that is) to ensure we obey the law I'm okay and thus I want to ensure enough is done. There are always crooks in the world, we want to ensure they are not encourged. If the CEO is always at fault their thought is likely to go to how can I ensure that tracks are covered so they nobody can be convicted.
Those golden parachutes and lavish lifestyle comes with a cost. That cost is responsibility and risks it brings.
Whether he knew or nit is a matter for courst, but in any case he is responsible too. Punish crooks harsh and visibly, reward honesty and good engineering massively and also visibly and company as a whole will act accordingly. We dont talk about a single guy hacking some firmware build, but a well known company culture.
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.
> But negligence is fundamentally different from mens rea
It differs in that mens rea is the legal concept of a culpable state of mind, and negligence is one example. More fully, a crime is generally defined by a prohibited act (actua reus) and a wrongful state of mind (mens rea), though there are strict liability crimes with no mens rea required.
For, say, murder (in common law, specific statutory schemes may diverge from this somewhat), the actus reus is homicide, and the mens rea is “malice aforethought”.
While “malice aforethought” is sui generis and seen only in murder, the common kinds of mens rea used in defining crimes, in descending order of the severity with which they are usually treated, are intent, recklessness, and negligence. (The same mental states are relevant in tort liability, though strict liability in tort is more common, and the civil and criminal definitions of negligence, particularly, are somewhat different.)
In this case both the company and the responsible managers were held liable. Of course a lot of blame shifting was attempted, but clearly it did not result in no one being held responsible.
When it comes to criminal offences, they are pretty much within the law, well except they can afford better lawyers so usually get away with minimum legally possible punishment.
Companies and the concept of limited liability exists to make innovation possible. No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails. And, because majority of money businessmen make is the stock worth, company being insolvent and thus it's stock losing all value is in itself a punishment heavy enough for the founders.
> No one will start a startup knowing they will have their house confiscated and go to prison if it fails.
What does that have to do with anything? We're not discussing a case of VW making bad business decisions and losing money.
If you start a company and break the law and harm people, you should have your house confiscated and/or go to prison. If you can't take this responsibility, just don't start the startup, that's perfect.
You are creating confusion about the subject being discussed in order to defend criminals.
We need to balance the benefit and the downside of the limited liability in corporations. If innovation no longer becomes beneficial for the society and only beneficial for a small number of people, perhaps the society may need to reconsider the concept.
Why would you go to jail unless you're doing something illegal? Are you honestly saying startups should be legally exempt from pollution laws and allowed to cheat brazenly on commissions tests by public agencies? It's fair for rich people to just lose some income(and still be rich) for crimes while poor people have to go to jail is honestly a unhinged take
Rich people are above the law precisely because they use corporations and corporate laws as shields to deflect personal liability of their actions as a actions of "the company" which is a faceless entity.
"You see, I didn't steal your money, the company I ran stole your money, but that's actually on you because you didn't read the fine print I put in the contract you signed. And don't worry, justice was served, the company got punished and is now insolvent. Now watch this drive *swings golf club*"
It’s worse than that. Rich-people crimes are often codified as much less severe than regular-people crimes, or are just outright legal.
This is a great example. Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Stab a person in the lungs, go to jail. Kill people by putting toxins into their lungs, well, just stay under this limit.
Walk out the door with a $10 item you didn’t pay for, crime. Fail to pay your worker $1,000 that they earned, that’s a civil matter. Worst case you’ll have to pay a penalty.
> Why is this emissions fakery illegal? Ultimately it’s because pollution kills people. Are these people going to prison for killing people? Not exactly. They’re going to prison for killing too many people. If they had stayed within the limits, they’d still be killing people, just not as many, and it would be 100% legal.
Polluting is not a "rich person" crime. It's very much something normal/poor people do a lot, too. It's common for individuals to burn leaves. It's less common, but also an active problem, for them to burn piles of trash (including plastic, tires, etc.)
As an individual, I'm allowed to do a certain amount of pollution (some because it's legal, some because it's unenforced), and will get fined if I do too much, same as the corporation.
As an individual, at least you can make the argument that your activities result in far less than one death. What’s the appropriate punishment for one micromort? I don’t know the answer to that but it’s probably not too much.
Large polluters don’t have that excuse. I recall that diesel hate alone resulted in dozens or hundreds of excess deaths. How many people do compliant cars kill? How many does a coal power plant kill? And all 100% legal.
No, it isn’t. Limited liability does not shield executives from criminal prosecution. If an LLC defrauds another party, the perpetrators are both criminally and civilly liable; this is true in every common law country you can think of. Limited liability corporations enjoy a limitation of civil liability (i.e. the shareholders cannot be held liable for more than the company is worth). This limitation is not exhaustive in the case of fraud or criminal negligence. In practice it is of course possible that people “get away with” both, but that is a failing of law enforcement, not limited liability itself.
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 ultimately the owners lose ownership.
That sounds like a terrible idea because it would progressively "bribe" the government to be in their interest to take the company's side as they gain more and more of it. Combine it that conflicts of interest with the appearance of improprirety and another conflict of interest of making expropriation of the successful a temptation.
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.
Proof that solutions exist, if we want them. Whatever the cause of the apparent impunity of large corporations and rich people, it is not a lack of workable solutions. See also fines proportional to income, which now exist in multiple countries.
Not exactly. Volkswagen headquarters are located in Wolfsburg which belongs to the German state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). NRW, or officially abbreviated NW, is the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen).
Therefore it's Lower Saxony that owns some parts of Volkswagen.
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.
Porsche Automobil Holding SE owns about 53% of the voting rights, but only about 35% of the assets, so technically they do not own VW, they just control it.
Audi never owned Volkswagen. Volkswagen has owned Audi since 1964. What is true is that there has been an attempt of Porsche AG (the sports car company, not the capital holding) to take over VW in the late 2000s, but got switcheroo'd and instead taken over by VW.
While Audi does build some engines for VW (especially in the higher-tier sector, which arguably is more of an Audi thing to begin with), VW itself produces engines itself (to name a few, the TSI-, TDI- and TGI-series of engines).
Now, does VW build good cars? It's a hit and miss. I personally drive a New Beetle, and will probably continue to drive it for years, the thing is build like a tank and reliable to a fault. Then you have models that are ... not something I would like to drive.
They stole from rich and powerful people. Rick Scott was the CEO of a company that committed the largest Medicare fraud to date and never saw prison time.
Same in USA, tons of corps misappropriated funds that were meant to help keep employees hired. Almost no prosecutionsat all and the records the government kept were abysmal
We would do well to overhaul the banking system by categorically eliminating usury and much speculative nonsense. It is incredible the amount of rationalization that goes into propping up these morally indefensible practices. Criminalizing them will go a long way to eliminate many legitimized patterns of economic exploitation.
At least something came out of it. In 08, all the executives that tanked our economy retired and are enjoying manors in the Hampton and socialize in country clubs on Long Island. Cheney, an oil executive, started a war based on lies when he landed in the highest office of the land, and now owns hundreds of acres in Wyoming based on oil profits Halliburton extracted (and paid him as a consultant for 5years after his VP position, whatever that means). I wish we did a better job in the US sending our criminals to prison, but I guess a neoliberal capitalist society will always favor a) high fines over justice for white collar crimes, b) as little attention as possible, given a supposedly free media can make a raucous encore and draw more attention. It is a facet of the trade.
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.
Well, as everyone knows, accountability really stifles innovation. All my libertarian friends tell me that it’d be better to privatize it rather than trying to legislate morality.
I mean, in the past we used to just hang or bomb rich people that got too close to the sun.
People like Carnegie built 1500 public libraries because he knew the game. He knew that his position as part of the ultra-wealthy made him a target, and he had to toe a line. He need to maximize exploitation but not too much, so as to not cause a stir. He did a pretty good job. Some people didn't do such a good job - we don't hear about them because they and their families were murdered.
Rich people today are much safer, mostly due to people being better people and technology.
I don't think that's accurate at all. It's true that rich people in Carnegie's day had more concern about organized violence against them, but most of them preferred to deal with it by getting the Pinkertons or the military to stop you from organizing anything against them. Late 1800s labor disputes killed a lot more workers than millionaires.
And I think there is a good reason for that. When a company steals billions from customers, the entire company is responsible, and the entire company profits from the crime. So why single out a few executives? Everyone shall be punished: the CEO of course, but also every employee, every shareholder. You have a single VW stock, you are responsible too.
So, how do you punish everyone fairly? By fining the company for a large amount of money. Shareholders lose their value, employees don't get their raise, and execs won't get their bonus, there is a good chance they get fired too. Companies are for profit, it is even more true for public companies, for which profit is their duty to their shareholders. So hit where it hurts, that is profits.
As for jailing CEOs, what will it bring? Don't forget that a CEO is just an employee, hired by the directors to maximize profits for the shareholders. If the entire company is corrupt, everyone will be more than happy to hire scapegoat CEOs if it can serve their interests. Jailing them will solve nothing, it may even be counter productive as those who are most likely to get that job are people who are ready to risk prison to win big, a crime lord profile.
There are still reasons to jail the CEO, but only if he personally deceived the rest of the company and shareholders, but that is effectively the same as stealing from the company.
My issue with your comment is that you're taking the humanity out of it. A person or group of people decided to commit crimes. Go to jail. If a group of people hired a scapegoat, that group still would've conspired to commit crimes. That's a punishable offense. Punish them. You can punish a board of directors. You can persecute a C-suite. They're all humans. That's the way justice is. Nobody is above the law.
Corporate death penalty. I want to see these groups of "shareholder value" get destroyed. Equal to a damage of a normal death penalty to an individual. Spread the organization to the winds.
If that means a "company" becomes smaller, with more isolated crews run by their own leadership, good.
I could see there being an issue with too much forced collusion if companies are too small to operate. Like how a lot of companies put all the blame on a profitless, employee-less "subsidiary" and say "oh no, we can't pay a fine, we have no money. We gave all our profits to Company Inc Ltd, we're just Company Inc." We'd need to fix that first. Then corporate death penalty. Which I believe does exist but isn't used very often. I think some court rulings have forbidden operations in certain states.
No. Decision making authority is concentrated in executives and managers, and likewise so should the lgal responsibility be. Spreading it evenly across the whole entity such that the janitor is punished in the same proportion as the individuals who decide to commit fraud is nonsensical. shareholders should certainly take a hit, but consequences should be administered in proportion to the degree of authority exercised in the commission of the crime.
By punishing those who decided to commit the crime? Indirectly benefiting from somebody's else illegal actions is not a crime (you might be required to pay it back but that's it..).
Generally executives are the ones who benefit the most of these case and then leave the rest of of the company and the shareholders on the hook while they move on or retire.
> and execs won't get their bonus,
What if they already have their bonuses? Generally it might take years for any investigation to conclude, often executives who benefited from it couldn't care less what happens to the company they don't work at anymore anyway.
I don't understand how jailing CEOs doesn't place pressure on CEOs to steer a company to follow the law thereby leading to better long-term outcomes for society as a whole. It also creates an incentive structure where the corrupt systems that currently exist are harder to entrench because there is no bystander effect where everyone can just "blame the system" and go along with things without culpability.
My evidence for my view is basically pointing at all countries with strong rule of law and institutions having less corrupt systems. In so many countries bribery is just considered "the way things are done". Add robust systems for punishments to those with the most authority instead of blaming some abstract entity and watch as all of a sudden the whole system creaks towards accountability. Hasn't this happened reliably in basically every country that enacted and reliably enforced democratic laws?
We should also include neighbours of the CEO and the employees as they have also just watched as their neighbours committed these crimes. As well as the bus driver who enabled them to commit these crimes in the first place by driving the to the crime scene!
