I'm actually looking at getting a car at the moment so I've been looking into this to better understand the repercussions for consumers.
It's weird, VW say that if your car if affected, they'll fix it. It's a software update that a) won't affect performance and b) won't affect fuel consumption.
So, why did they do it in the first place?
Edit "VW confirmed the fix will not affect the performance or fuel economy of the cars, while Mueller also said the cars will pass the European emissions test (without cheating) after the fix has been installed." - http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/volkswagen/92893/vw-emissions-s...
> It's weird, VW say that if your car if affected, they'll fix it. It's a software update that a) won't affect performance and b) won't affect fuel consumption.
So, why did they do it in the first place?
I think it's safe to say that until someone actually has had their car fixed by this new software, and then tested its performance and consumption after that we can assume that it's impossible. I'll believe it's possible when I see it.
My guess: VW europe will claim to make a performance-neutral fix, but simply cut the performance and increase the consumption of the affected cars. Anyone in the EU who finds that annoying can try to scream with very little chance of getting any compensation from VW because of how EU consumer laws work.
In the US where they are actually scared of being sued into compensating customers they will make more advanced fixes potentially even retrofitting urea systems where possible.
> In the US where they are actually scared of being sued into compensating customers they will make more advanced fixes potentially even retrofitting urea systems where possible.
You don't think there will be class action lawsuits if they mount a diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) tank taking up any cargo or other usable space? Or if they don't provide a lifetime supply of free DEF (or more likely a cash payment to cover the likely DEF costs for the projected life of the car)?
As an EU consumer I'd be delighted if they did that, even if I was paying for my own DEF and it took a chunk of my cargo space. I'm sure there will be class action lawsuits in both the US and the EU regardless.
The reason they are only doing the cheap software changes in the EU is likely because they think they will either win any legal processes OR it's much cheaper to lose them than to fix cars (both of which are probably true).
> As an EU consumer I'd be delighted if they did that, even if I was paying for my own DEF and it took a chunk of my cargo space.
That's very personal thing and it's easy for a lawyer to argue that VW has no longer delivered a car conforming to the original specifications for cargo space/capacity, etc and that the consumer is due compensation to compel them to accept the new specifications. I can't imagine that flying without additional compensation in the US (and frankly, don't believe that it should).
I completely agree - however as an EU '09 Audi owner I have zero hope of getting anything other than a car with 10-20 less horsepower that does a few less mpg than before the fix. This in turn also means that its resale value drops around $1k or thereabouts (hard to tell). In any case, I have zero hope of getting a single penny from VW because the car no longer meets my expectations. That is even if I participate in some class action process. I'd be shocked to even get a 5% rebate on new car.
Interesting. VW is offering TDI owners in the US a $500 Visa prepaid card, a $500 VW dealership card, and to receive, you don't need to release VW from any other claims or liability.
Set aside the VW dealership card, you'd still be getting $500 as an affected US owner. Seems odd that EU (which I find generally more consumer-friendly than the US) would be less generous. (I'm not doubting you; it just mismatches my normal expectations.)
I think one difference is that VW wants to break into the US markets, but is already a dominating brand in the EU market. The number of diesels sold in the US (low) compared to the risk of legal fallout there (high) means they have one strategy there, compared to the EU where the number of diesels sold is much bigger. If VW offer compensation without requiring you to not claim anything in the future - that's pure goodwill/marketing. That's good to hear. They probably can't afford that here, or they don't want/need to because of the market situation.
I am a owner of an affected TDI but did not receive the letter (or threw it away mistaking it for another car warranty junk mail letter) and was unaware of the "TDI Goodwill package"
Any time I go in for service they ask if I've registered for the package yet and bug me to do so (presumably so I get the dealership card and they know I'll be back).
I bought it used with 80,000 miles on it. Second owner.
I'm a big do-it-yourselfer and generally avoid dealerships.
BTW If you haven't changed your serpentine belt lately, do it! Mine broke at 90,000 miles, wrapped itself around the timing sprocket, cause the engine to jump timing and broke 7 valves. Cost me about $3500 for a new head. Apparently it's fairly common.
That would be timing belt, not serpentine belt, I think. (Just in case someone wants to go looking through service records or talk to a service advisor about the job.)
Nope, it actually was the serpentine belt. The serpentine belt shredded, wrapped around the crankshaft and worked its way into the timing cover, caused the timing belt to slip, which, since this is an interference motor, was disastrous for the valves.
There is a design flaw that allows a shredded serpentine belt to work it's way past the timing cover and wreak havok. When I took apart the engine, the timing belt was in-tact.
There is now available a guard that you place behind the main crankshaft pulley to stop this from happening but I can't find it right this second.
What the software actually did was stop the mixing of DEF[0] into the exhaust gases. DEF is a consumable catalyst that reduces NOx emissions[1]. If they had mixed it in properly as they did when the car was under test, then fuel consumption or performance would not change, but the resovwair of DEF inside the car would be depleted more quickly.
My theory is that they reduced the consumption rate of DEF so that it could be filled up during regular services without being depleted before one was due. They could instead just provide a larger reservoir of DEF, or schedule more frequent maintenance. Either solution would not impact fuel consumption or performance but would fix the issue. Remember DEF is injected into the exhaust gases and does not interact with the engine at all.
I used to understand the system fully but have lost some of that as it's no longer important to me. In short, the CBEA engine line has a complex emissions control system consisting of 3 separate catalytic converters that each must be regenerated from time to time, and two exhaust gas recirculation systems. These regeneration cycles reduce performance and increase fuel consumption.
For example, a DPF regeneration cycle closes a valve in the exhaust which increases system pressure and thus system temperature, while also triggering a post-combustion fuel injection -- injects unburned fuel into the cylinder on the exhaust storke -- to increase the exhaust temperature to burn off soot that accumulates in the particulate filter.
It is likely a change in the schedule of these regeneration events that is necessary to bring the vehicle into compliance.
There is a long PDF[2] that goes into detail how the emissions systems work on these cars.
Huh? Some certainly don't, but 2014 TDI Passats like mine use DEF. My reservoir currently lasts about 10000 miles, which is also the manufacturer's service interval.
Maybe that's the case for engines that use DEF, but the cheating was done in engines with no DEF injection systems too.
In those engines at least I doubt very much "the fix will not affect the performance or fuel economy", unless they resort to extremely expensive changes that seem unlikely (like adding said system to cars that don't have it).
So they'd be dumb to say it just for PR reasons - A bunch of people will test it, if their statements turn out to be false, they'll be a massive class action suit that will be pretty easily won.
It's entirely possible, of course, that they are counting on this, and decided by then things will have died down enough PR wise that making the PR statement makes sense.
That's applicable to engines featuring DEF, but for the rest my theory is that they will just increase EGR to lower combustion peak temperature and thus decrease NOx at the cost of engine efficiency. There's no magical software fix that can decrease NOx without affecting the combustion and thus either performance or efficiency. That would be the holy grail of thermal engine research!
My understanding, having owned two TDI vehicles affected by the recall, is that the statement of not affecting performance and fuel economy is based on the fact the EPA numbers were calculated with all the emissions systems active.
Now what will be affected are all those individual reports of ten to twenty percent better than EPA numbers many TDI fans love to rave about. Both my TDIs were like 40 highway / 30 city rated and yet over their lifetime the vehicle average was closer to if not higher than the highway number. Granted I do not drive like most people I see; racing to each stop and such. Still the numbers I had versus what the EPA said cannot all be explained by good driving.
My question is, if it was so easy to slip diesels past emissions testing then how about gasoline powered cars? Worse with the regards to diesels I think a truck manufacturer was caught cooking numbers in the nineties?
More information there, DEFCON talk of someone reverse engineering the ECU and then discovering the actual data that corresponded to the EURO5 emissions test : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSU1FPDiao
So the disassembling confirms that ECU is just not feeding the exhaust with AdBlue/Urea. So what is the advantage for VW in all this?! It does not make your car more powerful, it makes it less eco-friendly, you are just saving money on AdBlue/Urea.
They could easily reverse it back, the power will be the same, pollution levels will be okay, only AdBlue/Urea consumption will increase.
Assuming that both of those claims are correct, my guess is that they did it to make their cars more affordable in EU where road tax is related to emissions. Although I personally don’t know anyone who bought a VW because the yearly traffic fee is lower than in other cars. Generally speaking their cars are stellar in every account which makes this whole situation seem utterly stupid. They didn’t need to do it, they already had the advantage towards the competition.
That is likely a large part of it at least (reaching 120g/km in consumption is very important).
BUT the CO2 emissions is proportional to the fuel consumption. There is (very simplified) only one way to get both better performance and lower consumption from an internal compbustion engine, and that is to increase the temperature of the combustion. This gives higher power output and lower consumption and thus lower CO2 emission.
For diesel engines increasing temperature has the drawback of producing NOx emissions. In order to reduce NOx emissions, the combustion must be cooler/fatter so uses more fuel and/or provides less power. The hack that VW did was to use a profile for the fuel mixture that produces low NOx and low power when it detects that it is being measured. Otherwise it produces high power, and low consumption.
Using the cooler/fatter fuel mixing is a simple way of cutting NOx, but it also gives worse fuel consumption and power. For engines without urea devices, there is (as far as I can see) no possible workaround. They will have to either make hardware changes to the cars or make a software fix that reduces performance and increases consumption.
VW is not in the same situation in the U.S. though. They have a lot of competition (they're not even in the top 10), so if they didn't do it in the the EU, but cheated on the U.S. models, there would be vastly differing output levels, signaling a discrepancy between the two models.
The software before the update was used to detect if a car was being tested for emissions/ fuel consumption. Then it lowered power and fuel consumption.
So it gave skewed figures.
Which means in normal driving it was always giving more than advertised figures.
So the fuel consumption has not changed from before update for normal driving. So you won't see any difference.
Edit: ah my bad.
Ah, it specifically relates to particulate emissions, that is not related to fuel consumption
> So the fuel consumption has not changed from before update for normal driving. So you won't see any difference.
Uh, I think you've got it backwards. Won't the updates mean it drives in 'test mode' (e.g. acceptable emissions that meet the standards) all the time? Meaning that it will result in some downside (which was apparently bad enough that they cheated in the first place)
Specifically, reducing NOx (without using DEF) pretty much requires the engine to burn a richer mixture. This means more fuel injected, so less fuel efficiency and more unburnt hydrocarbons clogging up the particulate filter. Without retrofitting DEF systems onto the older cars, any fix is likely to be a significant hit to efficiency and reliability. I think maybe performance would suffer too but I forget how that would work.
It will still pass, they were just pushing the emissions tests lower so that the car could fit in a lower tax bracket. I don't know about every country, but in the UK you get taxed on how polluting your car is.
I believe that various governments have made a promise not to increase the taxes on existing cars, as the consumers were unaware at the time of purchase.
Getting owners to go in for the fix is part of the problem. Some states will most likely require it to be done before renewing the license plate, or before allowing resale, etc.
So the software used was written in 1999 at Audi, designed to be "capable of turning off certain engine functions", for what purpose? Cheating purposes? Testing purposes? Does not say.
I personally find that not really informative, but ok.
Regarding VW:
Everyone living at Germany the last years and following the news heard that same mantra over and over again... "to be the most successful car maker", every end of the year the story was how far behind they were compared to Toyota or in other words: how much closer they came.
Problem is that they were absolutely obsessed with beating their competitors, especially Toyota, at the same time VW relied heavily on the earnings of their premium brands Audi and Porsche, the margins of VW itself were always somewhat thin, especially compared to Toyota.
Too many models, too much variation, they are definitely pursuing now to shift to less models and (even) more modular platforms, but at the same time closing down plants in Germany and shifting to foreign countries will likely not happen. The state of Lower Saxony holds ~20% of the company, VW has repeatedly pledged to "stay a german company" and doesn't want to cut jobs in their home country.
Under those circumstances, competing with Toyota might just have not been possible. VW heavily made its bet on the Diesel Engine, and maybe that was wrong, as they had to cheat to make that bet pay off. VW needs a change in culture, desperately, that is unlikely to happen though. Interesting times to come, I wouldn't bet on VW though... but then again, what somewhat rational thinking person would, I know.
I work in the industry, but have no knowledge of those particular Bosch/VW projects.
Yes the Tier-1 supplier is responsible for building the final software image that runs on their ECU, and for some smaller OEMs the Tier-1 will write all the application software in addition to the basic platform software. However, it's not unusual for the bigger OEMs (such as VW) to develop parts of the application software themselves and provide it as object code for the Tier-1 supplier to link. This is effectively a black box as far as the Tier-1 is concerned.
Bosch is providing the hardware with a base software which is tuned/modified by the manufacturer.
Think of it like an Arduino with a bit of software to control the opening/closing of your house door. You get in the package the hardware + example/working software and then you are free to improve it to let say, open the door if your own custom made dog detector connected to the Arduino is detecting that your dog is in front of the door.
> Bosch is providing the hardware with a base software which is tuned/modified by the manufacturer.
All the information that I have found so far says that the engine manufacturer cannot change the software, just tweak parameters. Which means that the original test drive curve detection was provided by Bosch. This also makes sense given the fact that Bosch wrote a statement upon delivery to VW that they could not use that detection code for emission cheating.
People did reverse engineer the Bosch software[1]. And it's entirely data driven. In short, you program it by tuning/changing its parameters, or as was the case with dieselgate, loading different drive profiles into the ECU.
that over simplifies it a bit...there are likely hundreds of maps (effectively N-dimensional lookup matrices) and thousands or tens of thousands of variables and parameters. The difference is more akin to firmware/software.
Unless you have inside knowledge of the project, it is very difficult to determine who actually wrote the code.
In a typical modern car, there are probably more than 30 different companies providing software components into the car. Sometimes, in a single black box with complicated fucntions, there could be 5 software companies contributing.
So it is unsurprising of confusing story that Audi has been put foward as the source of the "dieselgate" software whereas before Bosch was the source.
So the manipulations have been going on since 1999 (2005 for VW) and appear to have been deliberate, rather than snuck in by a small group of engineers.
Will be interesting to see how VW and the other brands mentioned here get out of this. Their crisis management so far certainly does not help.
According to this article Audi developed the software in 1999 and never used it. So it's incorrect to say this has been going on since 1999 (assuming this article is correct). I guess they could still claim that this mysterious small group of engineers snuck the code, which Audi developed, into the VW ECUs.
Right before this happened I was looking into getting a Golf SportsWagen Diesel TDI. When the news broke, the dealership I was working with stopped selling them. They tried to get me to buy a gas model instead. I asked them how much they were willing to work with me. They wouldn't even budge saying that the gas model wasn't affected, and that they didn't feel like the depreciation would be affected. Screw you VW!
I believe VW has been running good incentive programs since the diesel scandal broke (for obvious reasons), but losing the diesel models really hurt the SportWagen lineup. The diesel was the upper trim, and carried some of the nicer features (like a 6-speed manual available across the range)
I haven't paid much attention to pricing lately, but they pretty much lost my business because of that. I'm sure the dealership was hurting too but it was bad business all around. The 6-speed manual was the whole reason I wanted it. I can't imagine how angry I would've been if I had just bought one and found out a few weeks after.
It's pretty well understood that government tests are not reflective of real world driving habits or conditions. The test is however consistent and can be used as a basis for comparison of different vehicles.
It's very much like synthetic benchmarks for CPUs. They won't give you a 100% accurate picture but they're a good basis for comparison.
I would wager almost everyone skews numbers at least part of the time. This is one of the main reasons we have regulation in the first place. They simply can't be trusted to do the right thing.
I am German and went to school in Germany. I completed the 11th grade at an American high school in Oregon, as an exchange student.
One of the more unexpected culture shocks I experienced, was how academic cheating was seen as bad even by the American students. In contrast, let me give you a brief, personal account of academic cheating in my school(s) in Germany:
We cheated. A lot [1]. Mostly, it was "cooperative cheating" (copying each other's homework, comparing answers during exams), but sometimes it was cheating to get ahead personally (using cheat sheets). Only rarely did we copy homework off the internet, but mostly, because the internet was pretty new. Having others (parents) flat-out do homework for us was, at least to me, unknown, and would have been seen as "bad" cheating, even by the students.
Our teachers were by no means oblivious to the problem. Quite the contrary! Having cheated in schools themselves, they knew all the tricks. They spotted us. And they mostly let it slide. I guess if all students are cheating, they still have a level playing-field? In any case, the cooperative nature of our cheating, and the "us vs. the teachers"-attitude, created a strong bond among us students, and helped integrate the nerds among us (myself included) into the general student body. Imagine my surprise, as I tried to recreate this bond with my fellow American students at the Oregon high-school!
Most times, the consequences for getting caught cheating in an exam were (from 1st grade to final exams at University, including medical "boards", my wife tells me): You get a warning for being caught the 1st time, a stern warning for being caught the second time, and you fail the exam for being caught the third time. This is per exam.
The only times I ever heard second warnings being issued, was teachers mocking the students for being too obvious. I don't recall ever seeing someone fail an exam for cheating, although I hear, it does happen.
Cheating subsides as you move up in the academic system. Cheating on your PhD-thesis is not seen as a trivial offense anymore, but as a serious offense not entirely unlike fraud.
And here is my points about Dieselgate: I would not be surprised at all if management and the whole engineering team were in on it together - at every German (and possibly European) company simultaneously. With a mindset of: "If everyone is doing it, noone is at an unfair disadvantage." Just like school. Or like quoting fuel-consumption measured by the European standrad such-and-such. Or like giving projected battery-life for a tablet or notebook. Or ...
I have since come to appreciate the American way of treating (academic) cheating, but, at times, I also appreciate the German way. It's simply a cultural difference, and I don't argue for either way as the "right way".
[1]: http://www.zeit.de/2012/34/C-Abschreibestudie-Interview-Satt... (This German article describes a study, in which 4 out of 5 students admitted to having cheated in the last semester, at university. If anything, I would expect the fraction of cheating high-school students to be even higher.)
Addendum: I have also worked with students from countries, where cheating seems to be even more blatant than in Germany. I was (Of course! Certainly!) morally outraged! I only later realized my hubris.
Cheating was rampant at my American high school; teachers were either completely incompetent or were aware of the cheating and didn't care. Penalties were similar to what you describe.
That said, I wasn't in the Pacific Northwest, and my general impression is that people from that region are, on balance, more honest than in the region that I came from. But of course generalizations and grass is always greener and all that.
I've noticed changes in my personality since this scandal happened.
Before it, I strongly believed that it's possible to be just as successful and competitive without breaking any rules.
I didn't go to exams which I didn't study for and refused to cheat when everyone else was doing it.
I had opportunities to earn a lot of money by doing shady things, but I've always refused, because I didn't want to compromise on my moral values.
But diesel gate made me stop and think.
If Germany's largest company does it - then who else does it ?
Add to that the wiki/snowden leaks and now the panama papers (to name just a few) and I'm totally confused:
It seems that the rich and successful are all corrupt cheaters.
Why do I have to part with 30%-40% of my earned income so that some corrupt politicians can spend them on wars and distribute them to their cronies ?
Why do I have to play by the rules when the only advantage of doing so is a "clear conscience" which nobody gives two cents about ... maybe just my 5-year old daughter.. but she also believes in Santa Claus.
So this scandal has really put me at a moral crossroads - will I go on being a "sucker" or play by the "big boys' rules" and be taken 'seriously' - take advantage of the weak, find ways to avoid taxes, steal, cheat, etc ?
What's even more disturbing is that this scandal was provoked by maybe a handful of executives at VW, but now tens of thousands of engineers and workers are going to pay the price - in the form of layoffs, reduced bonuses and so on.
Once again, very unfair, since most of those people, I'm sure, are good professionals.
So yeah, scandals like this generate more than financial losses or pollution. They generate loss of faith and disappointment and encourage others to step over the line to the "dark side" and become corrupt themselves.
Historically when the masses were closer to missing 3 meals in a row on account of bad public policies, or were regularly sent off to be slaughtered en-masse in battle in other countries on behalf of their monarchs, this is the kind of thought process that led to revolutions.
And things generally got better. Not indefinitely. And sometimes they stayed objectively BAD. But better. And change and progress is never a straight line.
But now? With everyone in the Western world well-fed with cheap (relatively) calorie-rich food, and well-entertained with cheap (relatively) entertainment, everyone is too scared to lose what they have to actually question the status quo. As soon as anyone does, there's a reminder that millions of people in the 3rd world will not have enough access to fresh water in our lifetimes, so we should be happy with what we DO have not what we don't. And if that's not enough, many of those people from the 3rd world want to terrorize and kill us, don't you know?
So what's a society to do when the best we can do seems to be Barrack Obama and Justin Trudeau (not bad, but ultimately unfulfilling)
The bolsheviks had it partially right all along, honestly. There's enough wealth in this world for the entire planet to live prosperously in peace. But neither central planning nor the free market is a good enough system on their own to ensure there is some semblance of fairness in the world and yet incentives to innovate and grow humanity forward.
Technologically speaking we are at an extremely exciting time. I feel like I should be optimistic about the next 20 years. Instead I'm terrified of what humanity will actually do with this potential in the short term like watching a toddler with a hand grenade and just hoping he chews on it for a bit, and gets bored of it, rather than figuring out the pin.
What truly interests me is the idea that, potentially within our lifetimes, we will be forced to admit that there is no longer enough gainful work for all humans to have traditional jobs.
Self-driving cars have the potential to remove ALL transportation-related jobs from the job-pool. And there are many other fields which could probably be entirely operated by machines when the technology is sufficiently advanced.
Historically the labor saved by technology has been moved to other fields, but I have my doubts that this is sustainable.
> And there are many other fields which could probably be entirely operated by machines when the technology is sufficiently advanced.
As far as I can tell the technology is sufficiently advanced, just not sufficiently applied. Considering all the tech. involved in autonomous driving there are plenty of jobs that could be automated away with it not just ones involving vehicle use.
This is getting pretty far off topic, but since it's one of my obsessions too, I have to reply. :)
I agree we'll inevitably get to the point where the vast majority of jobs are done cheaper/better by technology (software, robots, etc.). And let's just disregard Artificial Super Intelligence for the moment, which may make this projection moot. So, how does society work when there are legitimately, structurally no jobs for, let's say, 60% of the worldwide adult population?
I think the answer largely depends on how quickly our abundance rises, and a big part of that is energy. I expect/hope we'll one day discover/invent a source of energy that is nearly-free, nearly-infinite, and nearly-zero-maintenance. Now imagine this magic energy cube is relatively cheap to produce and small enough to be transported in the back of a pickup truck, my simple test for its ubiquity.
At that point (free ubiquitous energy + ubiquitous automation), we'll eventually be able to feed, clothe, and house everyone for essentially free – at least at a comfortable albeit minimalistic level. So people don't have to work to survive. Many people would choose to work for the satisfaction it provides and of course the prestige and access to luxury goods. But many people might not want to work – at least not traditional jobs. Assuming virtual reality continues to improve, people might spend their days "working" in World of Warcraft (or its future equivalent) or just enjoying the expanding plethora of entertainment options. Basically, imagine everyone has access to a replicator and lives in a holodeck, to use Star Trek vernacular. Working becomes optional.
I don't know. But I think the situation fundamentally changes when we have the abundance to easily support people who can't find a job or just don't want to work. The big question in my mind is whether we can start moving up the abundance curve before the impending jobs crisis. Throughout history, large numbers of unemployed adults, especially young men, has led to mass upheaval. But if we have sufficient abundance and entertainment, we might break that cycle.
All well and fine, but with this increase in technology.. when everyone is well clothed and well fed -- will people strive to cause suffering in order to "have more" or make others "have less"? Eg. sabotaging your replicator because you didn't support my World of Warcraft political decision
So much propaganda has been targeted directly at the 'middle class'. Be thankful you aren't in a third world country. At least you have a job. At least you live in the USA.
Meanwhile, wages are being cut, they are being bled dry paying for healthcare they can't afford, new entrants have tens of thousands of student debt they cannot pay off, they realize their voting in new people, either republican or democrat gets them the same old shit (see: Sanders and Trump, the outsiders).
I am optimistic for the next stage in US development, but I also think you are correct that people are angry, but don't know which direction to force it. Fascism is just as likely (if not more likely) than a socialist revolution if people uphold strong nationalism, protectionism, and direct their anger at some marginalized social group (formerly Jews, now Immigrants).
This is my #1 fear as someone who just recently moved to Europe from North America to travel and see the world while working.
Europe is NOT dealing well with multiculturalism and immigration. And while the American/Canadian progressive left goes more radical, at least it keeps the extreme right wing in check. The European left is too scared and complacent to either set boundaries or speak up for the benefits of liberalism due to complacency after decades of being in charge. As a result, the conservative/nationalist/fascist wings are DOMINATING the conversation, and are winning hearts and minds.
And yeah, I'm fully expecting at least one Eastern European country to start openly locking up muslims within a decade.
> The European left is too scared and complacent to either set boundaries or speak up for the benefits of liberalism due to complacency after decades of being in charge.
I don't think that's the full picture. First of all I don't think the European left has been in charge for decades, and second of all austerity measures e.g. in Spain have resulted in left movements growing stronger.
I agree with most of your points (I'm one of those well-fed not-ready-for-revolution types, despite being very much a self-confessed leftie) but:
> Justin Trudeau (not bad, but ultimately unfulfilling)
I don't follow Canada very closely, but isn't it a bit early to judge his record? (Totally agree on Obama btw, but that was coming from the day he announced Biden as his running mate...)
> There's enough wealth in this world for the entire planet to live prosperously
No there isn't, really. It's growing and we're trying to figure out ways to feed everyone and help everyone, but levelling down first-world disparities wouldn't free enough resources to really level up the third world. Consumption rates are just too high all across the board. We (well, some) are trying to figure out more efficient ways of producing and consuming (solar etc) but there's a long way ahead if we really want to take billions of people out of poverty.
We are producing ample food for everyone, it's just that we prefer to use most of it for other things because prefer luxury meats and ethanol to feeding everyone.
It's very similar to how we are shooting the next generation in the foot with coal and oil.
There's no tradeoff between "luxury meats" and feeding everyone. The appropriate signals will be perceived by the Big Food Machine and more will be made as soon as there is room on the shelves. Agricultural land goes out of production now, fast. Conservation easements offer the service of allowing people who have inherited family land to be able to abate taxes on it in exchange for taking it out of production.
Excellent points, both of them. I guess my thought process is Trudeau could be the most capable leader in the history of Canada, he can only do so much in charge of 30 million people of a 10th most powerful economy in the world. Canada can and is setting a good example, and I'm supremely happy to have my citizenship, but it won't be what makes or breaks the success of the rest of the world. Least of all our nearest neighbor who'll listen to China before us.
I'd read up on the Bolshies a bit. They were murderous thugs. That's not exactly propaganda, that's a mix of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and various bios of the principal players.
"Toddler with a hand grenade" is exactly right. Thing is, it was ever thus. None of this even remotely compared to the disruption had because of color (organic) chemistry.
Question the status quo all you want, but it's always there for a reason. One need not make a fetish of it to observe that it took all the errors we could muster to get it this far.
Don't fret, you've only been the victim of a loss of perspective. Others replying to you fell in the same trap.
Let's take the VW scandal as the first example.
What happened: VW lied and cheated on gas emission trials.
What happened surrounding this: cars have been improved to emit fewer gas, new hybrid vehicules have been designed, completely electrical cars are now feasible, safety equipment have been improved, new car safety mecahnism like lane change detection added...
On the whole, cars are better and better. They keep improving. The emission scandal was just that, a scandal, a lie, a cheat. Today's VW cars are still much better than they were 10 or 20 years ago. On the scale of world events, it's been given way too much weight.
The same applies to other areas. The same basic underlying rule: any system can be cheated. There will always people evading rules. That does not make the rules bad, not the normal mode of operation useless. Capitalism works because it give decentralized power, has some self-balancing effect of responding to supply and demand, etc. That it can be abused does not eliminates it's advantage. That we can discover scadals is a good things: abuse will always exist, and we're showing that it can be found out and exposed.
I won't go as far as saying that we should train our children to cheat but the moral stigma we put on cheating is completely at odds with the actual practical effect of cheating in society. If you tell your children that cheating is bad, you deprive them of the #1 tool that the majority of successful people and companies have been using ( and the most famous cases of cheating like how Bill Gates tricked IBM are considered legendary genius moves )
Of course you can cheat too far, like we see in China with fake milk and that kind of things, but the Western ideal of "no cheating ever" is not the answer to that anymore than "abstinence" is the answer to unwanted pregnancies.
IMO, you're the one who has lost perspective. Have you heard the expression "Can't see the forest for the trees?" You're climbing along one branch and can't see the rest.
Capitalism is failing the vast majority of the species.
Capitalism is ruining the only ecosystem human's are capable of thriving in.
"Capitalism 4eva!" is used as a bludgeon to keep the masses in line while the powerful steal by expropriating the output of the masses.
And all those things you mention about better emissions were supposedly happening back in 1999. How do you know if they're still not just cheating anyway? And things like Tesla were coming along before this. They're completely unrelated. Electric cars were feasible years ago, except the rich didn't care for them.
Take your words about how yes cheating happens in a system and apply it to the economy as a whole. It's THAT level of cheating and fraud the OP was talking about. You're drilling down too deep.
I don't think it's possible to overstress how important "it's been given too much weight" is. Classify it as a defect that was hard to find, put a patch in and move on.
Funny, because for myself, reading about these events from a marxist perspective, not a single one of them is surprising. In fact, all of them are completely predictable.
The story that we've been sold about laissez faire capitalism and neoliberal economics is a farce, pushed by the epic levels of deregulation during the Reagan era.
There is no "crony-capitalism," it's just capitalism. That's it, that's what capitalism does. It breeds inequality.
Your statement is light on meaning unless you can explain how X avoids breeding inequality. Alternatives to capitalism breed inequality as well. Compare any ruling Communist Party to a civilian in their regime.
Sorry, to answer your question, capitalism breeds inequality because private ownership is a hierarchy.
There are those who own, and there are those are required to pay the owner for use of their property. People who own amass capital at an ever increasing rate thanks to exponential growth. People who pay the capitalists for things like food and housing never amass much money at all, certainly nowhere near the order of magnitude that the capitalists do.
Private property allows people to profit from the surplus of workers labor without having to work themselves. It's Marxism 101.
what I don't understand is how I'm supposed to be satisfied with false equality where the vast majority of power and wealth get concentrated into a few controlling hands as opposed to the situation that exists in capitalism now, with that power and wealth spread out more vastly than at any point in human existence.
> what I don't understand is how I'm supposed to be satisfied with false equality where the vast majority of power and wealth get concentrated into a few controlling hands
You're not describing communism, so I guess that's a straw man. You're not supposed to be satisfied with that situation, and that's what communism, idealistically, tries to address. Whether it's effective in the real world is certainly debatable, but we can't have that debate if you change the definition of communism to essentially mean authoritarianism.
Yes, a member of the communist party cadre in certain historical times was separated from the workers they represented. They were full time revolutionaries, no longer part of the working class. This was one of the main issues (in my opinion) with the USSR.
In modern socialist revolutions, the representation must not be separated from the working class. Though, I am also more supportive of tendencies that uphold grassroots democratic behavior. See Rojava for more interesting ideas on that.
The system you are talking about sounds like a cross between a direct democracy and a post-scarcity communist society, if you've not read the works of Iain M Banks you should check them out, you are pretty much describing The Culture :).
Haven't read the others, but Red Mars is excellent, and better than Culture, in my opinion (though the latter varies in quality).
For another vision of a futuristic post-scarcity anarchist adhocracy, see James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear, which features less "magical" AI and is more of a reflection on cultural conditioning.
But how is that justification any different from the ones proponents of free-market capitalist use to explain why our system is different from what they propose?
There's a difference between debating the merits of communism and the tactics to get there.
I think communism is better for people than free markets because markets run on competition, which is in stark contrast to mutual aid, which is how communism works. There are of course many other factors that go into why I think communism is better than free markets, but there's many other reading resources on that. There are also market socialists who oppose capitalism, but support free markets.
Within the left, there are many different tendencies that people have developed to get to some sort of socialist economic structure. The main one we've experienced in the 20th century is Marxism-Leninism. This was developed by Lenin, and basically issues in socialism by the proletariat seizing control of the state and using it to suppress the bourgeoisie until the class no longer exists, at which point, the proletarian state withers away and tada! Communism.
There are also anarchist movements that involved destroying the state at the same time as seizing the means of production. See Revolutionary Catalonia or currently Rojava for interesting movements in these veins.
There is also democratic socialism, which basically involves communist parties getting elected into the government and issuing legislative changes that move toward socialism. This tendency is not revolutionary, but evolutionary. This is sort-of what has been going on in France and Greece. My opinions on this tendency aren't favorable, but to each their own.
Leninism, Stalinism, etc. (countries you mentioned) are attempts to fix problems with capitalism identified by Marx and Engels.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis and it true that Marx and Engels writing offered scientific/philosophic background for revolutions (which ended up worse than capitalism). But their critique of capitalism is still very much valid.
Which is the perfect example that both republicans and democrats have the same objective. They are both capitalist parties, I wish there was a true left party in the US to represent the working class.
They haven't explicitly come out against capitalism yet. Though, their youth caucus has drafted a proposal to change their platform to come out as explicitly anti-capitalist. Richard Wolff[1], Democracy@Work cofounder helped draft it.
You can't use Marxism because it's critically based on Malthus and Malthus has been completely discredited.
The story is a farce. But actual capitalism - the creation of value for other people - doesn't breed inequality. What we have is a parody of capitalism.
> Before it, I strongly believed that it's possible to be just as successful and competitive without breaking any rules.
Yes. Immunity to corruption can be a bit like herd immunity equivalent to outbreaks of "corruption" if it was seen as a disease. If everyone is more or less honest, those will suppress and flush out those who are corrupt. If there is no-one to pay a bribe to, then it is hard to be corrupt and so on.
However after a certain threshold, it is hard not to be corrupt. Because you fight an uphill battle against corruption (and it will fight back).
For example, in school you didn't cheat. Now imagine 50% of people cheat. They start getting better grades. Teachers think material is a bit too easy, even those that slack off during the year, seem to ace the finals. So they make those harder. You start falling behind. Now you have an incentive to cheat.
Another example. You go to take your driving test. Examiner is corrupt. He tells you to turn at the wrong place. You turn. He fails you. He suggest <wink, wink> to try a different approach next time. You don't understand what he means. You keep getting failed every time. Until someone suggest he meant he wanted a bribe. So you bribe him because otherwise you probably never going to get a drivers' license.
Reminds me of the classic argument against just allowing all drugs in sports.
If Drug A gives you 10% better performance for 20% worse health, you probably wouldn't bother using it. But the opposing team has no such inhibitions and are all on it! So, if you wanted to be competitive anymore, you have to sacrifice that 20% health. And on and on.
For anyone treating this as new information... it's not. The etymology of "defeat device," the term the EPA is using, dates back to the 70s when automakers started pulling similar crap.
Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Caterpillar, Cummins, Detroit Diesel, Mack, Navistar, Renault, and Volvo Trucks have all been caught rigging their vehicles to lie to owners and emissions testers, with varying degrees of plausible deniability.
Why do I have to part with 30%-40% of my earned income so that some corrupt politicians can spend them on wars and distribute them to their cronies ?
We part with 30-40% of our income because we make enough to pay that but not enough to afford accountants that can hide our income or find creative means to reduce our taxes so we can pay less.
Why do I have to play by the rules when the only advantage of doing so is a "clear conscience" which nobody gives two cents about ... maybe just my 5-year old daughter.. but she also believes in Santa Claus.
We play by the rules because we know what the potential consequences are, are unwilling to risk that, and we assume everyone else is playing by the rules as well. Also, we may have created rules for ourselves that perhaps don't need to apply and/or aren't the ones others play by. I think we need to find out what rules they play by (if at all) and start basing our decisions off of those.
So this scandal has really put me at a moral crossroads - will I go on being a "sucker" or play by the "big boys' rules" and be taken 'seriously' - take advantage of the weak, find ways to avoid taxes, steal, cheat, etc ?
Unfortunately this seems to be one of the few ways to get ahead aside from winning the lottery (waste of money) and saving that money.
What's even more disturbing is that this scandal was provoked by maybe a handful of executives at VW, but now tens of thousands of engineers and workers are going to pay the price - in the form of layoffs, reduced bonuses and so on.
They're quick to take credit when something groundbreakingly successful occurs but even quicker to shed responsibility. Again, this seems like another "rule" they play by to get ahead.
I 100% agree that following "moral values" will get your short stick in capitalism. And that is just because there is always that 2% [1] which does not have any moral values.
I really do not have solution for this - the only thing I can suggest is to stick and make connections with people who have moral values.
[1] The 2% (actual number is 1.76%) is percentage of my users who cheat and lie (pathological users). I believe that number is valdi for rest of the population. And it is really hard to pinpoint background of these people. For example, there is professor from famous University who got our service for free and then asked for their money back (I kid you not).
One possible thing to do could be pointing out that the shorter stick can still be long enough. E.g. i can perfectly sustain my lifestyle without getting "smart" with my taxes and more expensive toys would not outweigh the loss in honesty.
Unfortunately, even this has an inequality hidden inside: for the shorter stick to be sufficiently long, a certain level of privilege might be required and then privilege multiplies itself when people egoistically think along the lines of "i don't know if any of those guys are honest, but i'll go with that privileged one, he looks like he could at least afford to be".
Thinking of it, this might actually be the reason why we still suffer from this stupid tendency to trust the salesperson in the flashy BMW more than the one in the skimpy Honda, even if we consciously suspect that he paid for it with money he got for screwing his previous customers.
Given that when the rich get caught they just pay a fine that was a percentage of what they made by doing whatever they got caught for then I don't see this changing.
You get the very rare notable case of a rich person going to prison for this shit (notable because they actually go to prison) of which they serve a fraction of their sentence in club fed.
Not sure what the the solution is but for some of the tricks they've pulled I'm amazed some fucker hasn't climbed the nearest tall building with a high powered rifle.
Given that when the rich get caught they just pay a fine that was a percentage of what they made by doing whatever they got caught for then I don't see this changing.
Unfortunately, you're correct on this and it seems that unless someone commits a violent crime, they just end up getting fined unless they can't afford it (middle class) in which case they get the book thrown at them.
You get the very rare notable case of a rich person going to prison for this shit (notable because they actually go to prison) of which they serve a fraction of their sentence in club fed.
I'm not sure where you read this but it isn't accurate. Federal prisoners serve almost 90% of their sentenced time whereas state prisoners are eligible for parole after serving as little as 25% of their sentence.
So what's going on is an arms race between the rule makers and the people who have to operate things. The people who do things are losing.
I've been waiting for a VW story for a long time. I've heard "fix it in software" most of my adult life. It was only a matter of time.
The only way to have this level of involvement by "regulators" in products is transparency and a collegial relationship. If criminal or civil , or even moral sanctions are in play, there cannot be an open exchange of ideas.
You cannot have it both ways - if there are adversarial relationships as part of people's careers, then this will happen. This, though, is now seen as "corruption".
I mean - really think through all the implications of RJR v. United States dispassionately, without taking a side. So here's one of the largest corporations in America, defined down to racketeer. Yes, I said "defined" - one week they were not, the next they were. That's "defined".
Bottom line? They'd been identified as unreliable already. That should have been enough.
I hate to be that guy, but the Panama Papers also hold no surprise for me. That was to be expected. As Tim Worstall is fond to say, tax avoidance is a normal activity. The hypocrisy of state entities in this is also deplorable. They wish to enjoy the privileges of the state actor while drawing on international resources. How is this not an empire demanding tribute?
Outrage, especially moral outrage, is fun and all but it doesn't accomplish anything. Perhaps ISIS is the bellwether - we'd rather have a sense of moral purity than something to eat and physical security. Because those things require compromise.
If the "right" thing was also the prudent thing, we wouldn't have to make the distinction. Religion and law try to balance out the cost of morality, but in the end, a lot of the world wins by bad behavior, so we will often pay for being good. But we still should.
"The World" is an appeal to some platonic form that doesn't exist. There is no organization of the world that we as a society are tending towards. It's just the system we are under, which currently is capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production (land, factories, machinery, corporations, etc...), which is fundamentally different from slavery, fuedalism, monarchy, etc.
However, there are systems which 'don't allow' the rampant levels of inequality that we have now, in the same way that capitalism 'doesn't allow' for every working person to become a wealthy CEO. Unfortunately, since the red scare, these systems have been absent from the American consciousness. Though, recently they are starting to repopularize.
the system we are under, which currently is capitalism, which is fundamentally different from slavery
When there is an abundance of labour supply and re-training requires huge capital, there's little difference between capitalism and slavery from the labourer's perspective.
oh completely agreed. Though slavery with respect to ownership means even people are considered productive means to be owned. At least people (in general, obviously this still exists in some places in the world) own themselves, and have some illusion of freedom.
> Though slavery with respect to ownership means even people are considered productive means to be owned.
But they are, especially in low-wage or tipped shift work. People are kept under unethical and often illegal rules, pointing out that they're illegal will probably get you fired, and even holding a second job to make ends meet might end up with you being fired from one or the other if both your bosses decide they need you in on a certain shift. The idea of "self-ownership" only applies insofar as you can find someone else who will hire you (likely under very similar terms to your current job - i.e. under constant threat of being fired) for most people.
As people generally in a skilled job with some savings, most people on this site are somewhat buffered from the realities of what a lot of people across most of the world, including their own countries, have to deal with.
Yup, it's despicable. Wage-slavery is basically the system minimum wage workers live under now. They may not be bought and sold like cattle, but they are viewed and treated as such.
Interestingly, in Seattle, with the 15/hr movement, initially businesses were using small business as a shield to argue that 15/hr was unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, they quickly changed their tune when we said that we would levy greater taxes on larger corporations to subsidize small business.
These reasons, among many others, is why I'm involved in 15 Now and other fight for 15/hr minimum wage that's pegged to inflation. Capitalism is increasingly unstable. People continue gaining consciousness of this fact.
I think of it this way: if you are one of the super rich, then you have a special personality which comes with corruption and other weird personality things. I am rather a normal person with much less wealth, but good moral values.
If you have a corruptible personality, and live in a society that incentivizes corruption (most if not all do), then you have a better chance of getting super rich. It doesn't mean anyone who is super rich must be corrupt.
I think you are wildly underestimating people's surprising ability to do the wrong thing without even fully noticing.
Defeat device engineer? Emission levels are obviously O(n), with n being fuel consumption and the small but important twist that in the case of NOx and friends, O is far from constant but highly variable depending on many outside factors. But when the root purpose of the defeat device is to allow more aggressive mileage/CO2 optimizations (at the cost of a much higher big-O) it would be easy enough to conveniently forget all about O even while actively making it a lot more variable than it is naturally. Yay, higher mileage, lower n, planet saved, it's good to be us.
It's incredibly stupid, but according to hanlon's razor, that is how most evildoing gets done.
Still, I fully agree with your conclusion that the loss of trust (and the resulting lower threshold for future evildoings) is even worse than all the NOx/NSA/lost taxes.
It sounds like you have a conscience, so be careful not to make the mistake of thinking two wrongs make a right :) You still have to live with your decisions in your own mind all your life, even if you never get caught. Some people literally don't have that "problem".
I have a friend who is a divorce lawyer for the rich, and basically, yes. Most fortunes are built in illegitimate ways and there is a lot of asset hiding.
Think of the Kennedys who built their fortune rum-running and then went legit with the money pile they built up. Nice work if you can get it.
>Think of the Kennedys who built their fortune rum-running and then went legit with the money pile they built up. Nice work if you can get it.
Not according to wikipedia. It says they he build his fortune in the stock market and real estate, long before prohibition. His profits from alcohol were after prohibition, and were entirely legitimate.
I disagree. I think this shows that if you break the rules with impunity, there is a significant risk that you will be caught. The Panama papers is another great example of this. Overall this is likely to have a net negative impact for VW.
The Panama papers don't, in fact, show that a lot of rich people are scamming tax. Many of those people are likely paying capital gains tax in their countries when they sell their assets (as Cameron did). The few that are evading tax will likely get caught.
As I see it, the majority of the really rich aren't corrupt (at least in the USA/Canada). Other countries maybe, but those countries tend to be corrupt to begin with.
> The VW scandal more generally raised awareness over the high levels of pollution being emitted by diesel vehicles built by a wide range of carmakers, including Volvo, Renault, Mercedes, Jeep, Hyundai, Citroen, BMW, Mazda, Fiat, Ford and Peugeot.[22][23] Independent tests carried out by ADAC proved that, under normal driving conditions, diesel vehicles including the Volvo S60, Renault's Espace Energy and the Jeep Renegade, exceeded legal European emission limits for nitrogen oxide (NOx) by more than 10 times.
I think that's probably a little misleading. The European emissions limits are based on a specific driving cycle that's known to be kinder than real-world driving. If you use a more realistic test cycle with more aggressive acceleration you're going to get worse efficiency and pollution than the NEDC tests.
Exactly. Those are two different, though related, issues.
1. Cheating on the NEDC tests.
2. Emission limits are not coupled to real driving scenarios.
Edit: This is important to distinguish. 1 is illegal, 2 is the law but maybe changed.
Volvo, Renault, Mercedes, Jeep, Hyundai, Citroen, BMW, Mazda, Fiat, Ford and Peugeot have not used fraud to pass the tests. You are citing studies using different test conditions than the official test.
While you are technically correct (the best kind of correct!) - we as consumers have still been deceived into thinking we are purchasing and driving vehicles that we thought were significantly cleaner than what they really are.
But to say that the manufacturers have no fault in the way the tests are structured is a bit... disingenuous. Don't you think?
That's because no benchmark is perfect. You're also being tricked to buy a "twice faster cpu" on your latest phone because it showed twice better performance on a particular benchmark.
But There's a big difference between the company that make engineering decisions that try to improve the results on the benchmark (because after all that's what consumers get fooled with) and the one that would have a "if (benchmark_in_progress) cheat; "
EPA test cycle is different than normal driving conditions. It has been a subject of complaints for a long time, that the paper mileage is divorced from reality (and is especially troubling for corporate owners, when your tax admitted expenses are only up to the paper mileage; everything above it gets taxed).
The Watergate scandal (named after the hotel where things took place) was such a big thing that the press/public developed a habit of relating subsequent scandals to it by giving them a name ending in -gate.
It's weird, VW say that if your car if affected, they'll fix it. It's a software update that a) won't affect performance and b) won't affect fuel consumption.
So, why did they do it in the first place?
Edit "VW confirmed the fix will not affect the performance or fuel economy of the cars, while Mueller also said the cars will pass the European emissions test (without cheating) after the fix has been installed." - http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/volkswagen/92893/vw-emissions-s...