6 ms·

Yes, the defeat device VW employed for emissions is an environmental tragedy, but this is just a symptom of a much more central issue. That is, VW was actively

by mjfern 10y ago

Yes, the defeat device VW employed for emissions is an environmental tragedy, but this is just a symptom of a much more central issue. That is, VW was actively promoting technical and business leaders that lacked any sort of moral compass. How can we have faith in global corporations and their (grossly overpaid) leaders if these are the choices they're making and the examples they're setting?

colechristensen 10y ago
The 'trust but verify' model of your morality was broken. If you give the opportunity to cheat, there will be cheaters. The emissions tests were bad and made it easy to cheat. Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself, and entirely more predictable and preventable. Solve solvable problems like bad testing and not unsolvable problems like unscrupulous businessmen.
- acranox 10y ago
  "Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself" No, it isn't. This is called victim blaming. It is like saying not locking your door is as morally corrupt as the thieves that walked into your unlocked house. We create standards for emissions. And companies should comply with the tests even without the need for tests. We expect people should follow the laws, and we should use the minimal amount of enforcement to get compliance. But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. The vault is with VW for selling cars that didn't comply with emissions standards.
  - mjfern 10y ago
    Well said, and in addition to asking leaders to abide by the law, why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard? I just can't believe that we need laws to prevent executives from choosing to elevate their careers (and companies) by committing crimes against humanity.
    - mikestew 10y ago
      why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard? Because I don't care about their morals. Be as corrupt as you want, as immoral as you want, that doesn't (for this example) make the air dirty. However, if we catch you not meeting the standards put forth, the hammer will fall swiftly and hard. But suppose we publish a moral standard to be met. Who's chosen deity do we use? Because for the majority of people, there's at least a nod to some form of god when aligning our moral compasses. In some cultures, a little corruption is just part of it. From my POV, most of our systems of laws have a little morality baked in, but those systems are more concerned about outcomes. "Don't do this, or punish shall befall you." "If you manufacture these, they must meet a minimum standard, or you will be fined."
  - darawk 10y ago
    The fault lies with both of them. It is VW's responsibility to be moral and comply with laws. It is the EPA's responsibility to catch those who attempt to cheat. They both failed, in easily preventable ways. They are both at fault. VW's management should be jailed, and the EPA should probably be reprimanded or have someone fired for letting this go uncaught for so long.
    - mc32 10y ago
      It wasn't just the EPA which failed, but a number of agencies in other jurisdictions too.
    - tmptmp 10y ago
      Then we can as well say that the whole general public of USA has failed. Because it is their responsibility (indirectly and ultimately) to see that the legal and enforcement machinery works as expected. Let's see how do they (the general public) behave now. Do they push heavily for severe punishment for these criminals (both individual leaders and companies) or not? Or do they keep mum even if the leaders (like the recently resigned VW ceo) who not only got scot-free but also were rewarded millions if not billions of dollars ultimately for such crimes by the company and its shareholders?
      - pessimizer 10y ago
        Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, if we're going to ignore people's job descriptions, and their direct connection and responsibility for the design of all systems involved.
        tmptmp 10y ago
        I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on the EPA too. But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people" even for smaller scale crimes. The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any business in US. What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce. Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The justice has become farce in this case. >>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state. As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned, we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying god failed doesn't get us much far.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >We create standards for emissions. Who creates standards? Equally corrupt and money driven politicians? I certainly don't remember having a debate and getting to vote on what the standards will look like, and why. They seem arbitrary. It's funny, we sit around HackerNews and laugh at the ineptitude of politicians trying to regulate the internet, but yet we assume they know what's best regarding pollution regulation? That's hypocritical.
    - Goronmon 10y ago
      A lot of the issues we face with technology today are pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Companies polluting the environment isn't only a recent phenomenon.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    > But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. Then what exactly are we paying them for? End the agency if they aren't responsible for regulation. We can rely on the morality of random people all over the world, and lament the human condition when multi-billion dollar incentives turn out to dominate the complete absence of reward for doing the lawful thing.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      In general, regulatory agencies like the EPA are grossly underfunded. To answer your question, “we” are “paying them for” doing the best they can with a huge set of problems and limited resources while navigating challenging competing political pressures. If “we” want better, it would take shifting tax money toward those government functions and adjusting the law to give regulators a stronger mandate. If you personally want to see such a change, the easiest first–order action you can take is helping get out the vote or donating money in competitive congress and senate elections, working to replace Republican Party lawmakers with ones from the Democratic Party. (Party affiliation is obviously not a perfect proxy for support of the EPA, but it’s not a bad start, since opposing environmental protection and denying global climate change are a core plank of the GOP platform.) If you want to do better than that, you’ll have to educate yourself more thoroughly, and take on more deliberate activism and/or involve yourself significantly in the political process.
      - pessimizer 10y ago
        I can accept that we don't fund the agencies, therefore they fail; what I can't accept is that they have no responsibility for their tests being so easily defeated because the responsibility of bad people is to not try and defeat them. Funding can be fixed with a change in priorities. That magical worldview cannot. If we're to trust in morality to keep people from defeating tests, we could replace the entire agency with a mail merge: "Do your vehicles comply? If yes, reply to yes@epa.gov, if no, reply to admittingtoacrime@epa.gov"
- mjfern 10y ago
  This isn't just a matter of cheating. VW knowingly manufactured millions of vehicles that polluted at unprecedented levels. These managers and executives chose to destroy the environment, affecting their children, my children, and all future generations in order to elevate their careers (and company). Edit: Deleted text about global warming since it was incorrect.
  - thrownaway2424 10y ago
    Actually the pollutants in question are not greenhouse gases. Quite to the contrary, it is likely that these cars would have used more fuel and produced more greenhouse gases if they had been designed to meet the emissions standards.
    - lb1lf 10y ago
      This is a very important, oft-overlooked point. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Reducing NOx emissions basically means reducing the engine's efficiency, increasing consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce NOx, you'll need to reduce the temperature in the combustion chamber and reduce the excess oxygen levels in the exhaust (Oxygen in the exhaust being a requirement for generating NOx). One common, cheap way of doing this, is to use EGR (exhaust gas recirculation, feeding some of the exhaust gas back to the inlet). This cools the combustion chamber AND ensures less oxygen is available for NOx generation. A more complicated way is to add urea to the exhaust before feeding the mix through a catalytic converter; the hot exhaust converts urea to ammonia, and ammonia reacts with NOx to create nitrogen and water. This latter approach, if I've understood it correctly, is what VW tried to avoid by cheating - presumably to not have to pass on the added cost and complexity to their customers, making their offerings less competitive.
      - coredog64 10y ago
        To expound on your point, in SI engines there is an additional requirement to run richer than at max efficiency as running too lean will burn up catalytic converters.
  - 10y ago
- RodericDay 10y ago
  We could also just punish unscrupulous businessmen.
Sharlin 10y ago
Unfortunately, in the prevailing rhetoric the lack of a moral compass of corporations and their executives is a feature, not a bug. Ethical concerns are often at odds with short-term increase of shareholder value.
- iofj 10y ago
  This is far beyond ethical concerns and distinctly into fraud territory. They planned to generate false data to convince customers to buy their products, and to get governments to approve their shit. And of course, when they get caught, they throw their subordinates under the bus: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/10/vw_boss_engineers_blame/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/10/vw_boss_engineers_bl... > "This was not a corporate decision from my point of view," Horn said while under oath. > "To my knowledge this was a couple of software engineers." Now we find out: 1) It was management that came up with the idea to commit this fraud, and they hired government consultants to find out exactly how the testing happened, and used them in a management-directed project to figure out exactly how to commit this fraud. 2) Martin Winterkorn, the top of VW management, REPEATEDLY prevented project proposals by engineers to fix this issue (reason: "More effective emissions equipment would have made Volkswagen vehicles hundreds of dollars more expensive") 3) Top management actively studied how much they'd be punished for this ("An American law firm hired by Volkswagen to examine regulatory issues, Kirkland & Ellis, told the carmaker in an August 2015 memo that the previous record penalty was $100 million") 4) Senior management asked engineers to study the chances of getting caught ("Court documents filed by Volkswagen indicate that the technicians thought the chances of being caught cheating were slim when the deception began in 2006") 5) Management refused to even stop cheating as a result of getting found out, when the courts weren't involved ("Signs of irregularities in Volkswagen cars were discovered in 2014 by a nonprofit group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, based on testing performed at West Virginia University") At what point do we start talking personal responsibility for these assholes ? This is fraud, plain and simple ... they planned to lie to the government, and to the people buying their products. Then they executed on their plan to commit fraud, involving large amounts of subordinates, then they were discovered and attempted to throw others under the bus. By contrast if you can't be convicted for committing fraud on your customers, and lying to the government to get approval, what's to stop companies from selling Chinese-style "100G" flashdrives ? What's to prevent companies from putting FDA approved stickers on different medicines than the ones that were approved ?

by mjfern 10y ago

colechristensen 10y ago

The 'trust but verify' model of your morality was broken. If you give the opportunity to cheat, there will be cheaters. The emissions tests were bad and made it easy to cheat. Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself, and entirely more predictable and preventable. Solve solvable problems like bad testing and not unsolvable problems like unscrupulous businessmen.

acranox 10y ago
"Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself" No, it isn't. This is called victim blaming. It is like saying not locking your door is as morally corrupt as the thieves that walked into your unlocked house. We create standards for emissions. And companies should comply with the tests even without the need for tests. We expect people should follow the laws, and we should use the minimal amount of enforcement to get compliance. But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. The vault is with VW for selling cars that didn't comply with emissions standards.
- mjfern 10y ago
  Well said, and in addition to asking leaders to abide by the law, why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard? I just can't believe that we need laws to prevent executives from choosing to elevate their careers (and companies) by committing crimes against humanity.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    why aren't we holding our leaders to some kind of moral standard? Because I don't care about their morals. Be as corrupt as you want, as immoral as you want, that doesn't (for this example) make the air dirty. However, if we catch you not meeting the standards put forth, the hammer will fall swiftly and hard. But suppose we publish a moral standard to be met. Who's chosen deity do we use? Because for the majority of people, there's at least a nod to some form of god when aligning our moral compasses. In some cultures, a little corruption is just part of it. From my POV, most of our systems of laws have a little morality baked in, but those systems are more concerned about outcomes. "Don't do this, or punish shall befall you." "If you manufacture these, they must meet a minimum standard, or you will be fined."
- darawk 10y ago
  The fault lies with both of them. It is VW's responsibility to be moral and comply with laws. It is the EPA's responsibility to catch those who attempt to cheat. They both failed, in easily preventable ways. They are both at fault. VW's management should be jailed, and the EPA should probably be reprimanded or have someone fired for letting this go uncaught for so long.
  - mc32 10y ago
    It wasn't just the EPA which failed, but a number of agencies in other jurisdictions too.
  - tmptmp 10y ago
    Then we can as well say that the whole general public of USA has failed. Because it is their responsibility (indirectly and ultimately) to see that the legal and enforcement machinery works as expected. Let's see how do they (the general public) behave now. Do they push heavily for severe punishment for these criminals (both individual leaders and companies) or not? Or do they keep mum even if the leaders (like the recently resigned VW ceo) who not only got scot-free but also were rewarded millions if not billions of dollars ultimately for such crimes by the company and its shareholders?
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, if we're going to ignore people's job descriptions, and their direct connection and responsibility for the design of all systems involved.
      - tmptmp 10y ago
        I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on the EPA too. But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people" even for smaller scale crimes. The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any business in US. What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce. Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The justice has become farce in this case. >>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state. As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned, we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying god failed doesn't get us much far.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >We create standards for emissions. Who creates standards? Equally corrupt and money driven politicians? I certainly don't remember having a debate and getting to vote on what the standards will look like, and why. They seem arbitrary. It's funny, we sit around HackerNews and laugh at the ineptitude of politicians trying to regulate the internet, but yet we assume they know what's best regarding pollution regulation? That's hypocritical.
  - Goronmon 10y ago
    A lot of the issues we face with technology today are pretty new in the grand scheme of things. Companies polluting the environment isn't only a recent phenomenon.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  > But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. Then what exactly are we paying them for? End the agency if they aren't responsible for regulation. We can rely on the morality of random people all over the world, and lament the human condition when multi-billion dollar incentives turn out to dominate the complete absence of reward for doing the lawful thing.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    In general, regulatory agencies like the EPA are grossly underfunded. To answer your question, “we” are “paying them for” doing the best they can with a huge set of problems and limited resources while navigating challenging competing political pressures. If “we” want better, it would take shifting tax money toward those government functions and adjusting the law to give regulators a stronger mandate. If you personally want to see such a change, the easiest first–order action you can take is helping get out the vote or donating money in competitive congress and senate elections, working to replace Republican Party lawmakers with ones from the Democratic Party. (Party affiliation is obviously not a perfect proxy for support of the EPA, but it’s not a bad start, since opposing environmental protection and denying global climate change are a core plank of the GOP platform.) If you want to do better than that, you’ll have to educate yourself more thoroughly, and take on more deliberate activism and/or involve yourself significantly in the political process.
    - pessimizer 10y ago
      I can accept that we don't fund the agencies, therefore they fail; what I can't accept is that they have no responsibility for their tests being so easily defeated because the responsibility of bad people is to not try and defeat them. Funding can be fixed with a change in priorities. That magical worldview cannot. If we're to trust in morality to keep people from defeating tests, we could replace the entire agency with a mail merge: "Do your vehicles comply? If yes, reply to yes@epa.gov, if no, reply to admittingtoacrime@epa.gov"
mjfern 10y ago
This isn't just a matter of cheating. VW knowingly manufactured millions of vehicles that polluted at unprecedented levels. These managers and executives chose to destroy the environment, affecting their children, my children, and all future generations in order to elevate their careers (and company). Edit: Deleted text about global warming since it was incorrect.
- thrownaway2424 10y ago
  Actually the pollutants in question are not greenhouse gases. Quite to the contrary, it is likely that these cars would have used more fuel and produced more greenhouse gases if they had been designed to meet the emissions standards.
  - lb1lf 10y ago
    This is a very important, oft-overlooked point. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Reducing NOx emissions basically means reducing the engine's efficiency, increasing consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce NOx, you'll need to reduce the temperature in the combustion chamber and reduce the excess oxygen levels in the exhaust (Oxygen in the exhaust being a requirement for generating NOx). One common, cheap way of doing this, is to use EGR (exhaust gas recirculation, feeding some of the exhaust gas back to the inlet). This cools the combustion chamber AND ensures less oxygen is available for NOx generation. A more complicated way is to add urea to the exhaust before feeding the mix through a catalytic converter; the hot exhaust converts urea to ammonia, and ammonia reacts with NOx to create nitrogen and water. This latter approach, if I've understood it correctly, is what VW tried to avoid by cheating - presumably to not have to pass on the added cost and complexity to their customers, making their offerings less competitive.
    - coredog64 10y ago
      To expound on your point, in SI engines there is an additional requirement to run richer than at max efficiency as running too lean will burn up catalytic converters.
- 10y ago
RodericDay 10y ago
We could also just punish unscrupulous businessmen.

Sharlin 10y ago

Unfortunately, in the prevailing rhetoric the lack of a moral compass of corporations and their executives is a feature, not a bug. Ethical concerns are often at odds with short-term increase of shareholder value.

iofj 10y ago
This is far beyond ethical concerns and distinctly into fraud territory. They planned to generate false data to convince customers to buy their products, and to get governments to approve their shit. And of course, when they get caught, they throw their subordinates under the bus: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/10/vw_boss_engineers_blame/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/10/vw_boss_engineers_bl... > "This was not a corporate decision from my point of view," Horn said while under oath. > "To my knowledge this was a couple of software engineers." Now we find out: 1) It was management that came up with the idea to commit this fraud, and they hired government consultants to find out exactly how the testing happened, and used them in a management-directed project to figure out exactly how to commit this fraud. 2) Martin Winterkorn, the top of VW management, REPEATEDLY prevented project proposals by engineers to fix this issue (reason: "More effective emissions equipment would have made Volkswagen vehicles hundreds of dollars more expensive") 3) Top management actively studied how much they'd be punished for this ("An American law firm hired by Volkswagen to examine regulatory issues, Kirkland & Ellis, told the carmaker in an August 2015 memo that the previous record penalty was $100 million") 4) Senior management asked engineers to study the chances of getting caught ("Court documents filed by Volkswagen indicate that the technicians thought the chances of being caught cheating were slim when the deception began in 2006") 5) Management refused to even stop cheating as a result of getting found out, when the courts weren't involved ("Signs of irregularities in Volkswagen cars were discovered in 2014 by a nonprofit group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, based on testing performed at West Virginia University") At what point do we start talking personal responsibility for these assholes ? This is fraud, plain and simple ... they planned to lie to the government, and to the people buying their products. Then they executed on their plan to commit fraud, involving large amounts of subordinates, then they were discovered and attempted to throw others under the bus. By contrast if you can't be convicted for committing fraud on your customers, and lying to the government to get approval, what's to stop companies from selling Chinese-style "100G" flashdrives ? What's to prevent companies from putting FDA approved stickers on different medicines than the ones that were approved ?