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London's Mayor Wants Volkswagen To Pay $3 Million In Lost Tolls (citiesofthefuture.eu)
dkatana writes: Since the U.K. government has done nothing to make Volkswagen pay for Dieselgate, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is asking VW to come up with 2.5 million pounds ($3 million) to compensate the city and its residents for the 80,000 diesel cars fitted with cheat devices. "I want to see a proper commitment from them [VW] to fully compensate the thousands of Londoners who bought Volkswagen cars in good faith, but whose diesel engines are now contributing to London's killer air."
The money will be used to fund a new air-quality program for London's schoolchildren, and Mayor Khan is also asking the government to create "a national diesel scrappage" program to help replace vehicles.
The money will be used to fund a new air-quality program for London's schoolchildren, and Mayor Khan is also asking the government to create "a national diesel scrappage" program to help replace vehicles.
The tolls were for entering London in a vehicle that pollutes a lot. They weren't paid because VW diesels "don't pollute a lot". Now it turns out that they do, so they're asking VW to pay, since the customers who would normally owe the tolls bought the cars in good faith thinking that they would be able to enter London without paying the toll.
Government official wants money he didn't earn. Says he has good reason why he should be allowed to spend it on his priorities.
More like "government official wants money owed to government because of Volkswagen's deceitful practices." When you're a city with a polluter-toll, and you have a car company lying about their emissions causing consumers to unwittingly increase pollution while not paying said-tolls, I think it's safe to say there are damages. I think the government can spend the money however they see fit. What, would you prefer them to send a bill to the drivers of the vehicles? To me, this is the most legitimate and reasonable money-grab I've seen throughout the VW debacle.
I think in this case the government has a right to it. Volkswagen was very naughty and even worse, they got caught. A very stiff fine is perfectly reasonable here considering the blatant and stupid things that the company did.
I think that it would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate for Volkswagen to have to take each and every vehicle back and refund the full purchase price of the vehicle. They knowingly sold a defective product. Fuck them.
In related news, a spokesman for Volkswagen was heard to say:
"Kaaaahhhnnnn!!!"
-- Alastair
No it's not. The mayor is trying to work in the best interests of his citizens and punish a criminal company that lied.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
it should be paid by the executives who ordered the deceit. If it is paid by the company then future generations of execs will play similar tricks, they will know that it will not hurt them although it might hurt their company — and they can always get another job if the company folds. If their own house is at risk they will be scrupulously honest.
This is the only route to corporate good behaviour, be that: car manufacturers; banks; energy companies; ... NB: I am not talking about mistakes but deceit.
The money is clearly owed by Volkswagen owners. Just like the owners of any other brand of car with high emissions paid. The Mayor is simply saying that since Volkswagen owners were deceived by Volkswagen, and government monitoring devices were cheated, all knowingly by Volkswagen, then Volkswagen should be responsible for paying the fees.
Your post doesn't have any actual argument in it excpt for the implicit one that this has come from the government therefore it must be bad. Government == bad is not actually a fact, though if you treat it as an axiom you can come to all sorts of odd conclusions.
London has a pollution/air quality problem. The local government tries to improv things by providing incentives and levying taxes. That is a pretty reasonable way of carrying on with things. Except that volkswagen gave themsalves a comptitive advantage by a massive amount of lying, and caused a lot of extra pollution.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
id argue a polluter toll is nothing more than a tax to keep out the poor myself ~GD
The poor don't really have to worry about the polluter toll in London. The city has a very efficient public transport system which stands a good chance of getting them where they are going every bit as quickly than the drivers who are rich enough to pay the pollution toll.
That's because you're a bit dim, isn't it? If you had half a brain, you'd know that the vast majority of poor people who live in London don't have access to a car. They travel by public transport.
They should do a trade in scheme for electric vehicles. London has terrible EV infrastructure and it needs ask the investment it can get. The more cars and the more demand the better.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is what is called a strawman argument. Yes, I agree it would be terrible if this official got to keep that $3 million dollars personally.
But the actual situation is pretty straightforward. You're allowed to drive your old, dirty car into the city as long as you pay a little bit extra per trip to offset the costs you're imposing on everyone else. In this case that means the people driving VWs into the city should have paid, but they only were in that situation because VW cheated them. Under the circumstances, asking VW to pony up $3 million to pay their customers fees isn't exactly draconian; after all VW had no difficulty in paying the outgoing CEO who oversaw this mess a $6.26 million dollar performance bonus after all the came out.
Now if it were up to me, dirty cars would be completely banned, and the officials and engineers of a company that cheats would go to jail.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wanting to tax people to support the infrastructure that allows them to earn money is, however, not bad.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Government official wants the money that said government was cheated out of by a scheming corporation that sought to break the law to achieve greater profits.
This is no different than demanding a tax evader pay back the taxes that weren't paid. In fact, that's exactly what it is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then you're free to vote for a government that won't institute such a toll, which will of course mainly benefit people with more money, as the poor in most major urban centers don't drive at all. The poor, of course, must gain some benefit from breathing in more NOX, right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes it is. You can make the case that it isn't (very) bad if it nets out positive for almost everyone. But you haven't made that case.
There's always a huge infrastucture wish list. Someone will always point to a supposed benefit for someone. All the projects seem great if you forget that you took the money from the people who earned it so you could spend it on yourself/your priorities.
Not to mention the benefit of being poisoned by NOX!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The consumer didn't receive what she paid for, so your comment is nonsensical. The only entity that benefited from the cheating was Volkswagen.
Something in the AC water this morning? Murder rates have also been in decline for decades - that mean you should be able to go out, shoot someone and get away with it?
Making a case for public infrastructure to a Randian is like making a case for evolution to a young-earth creationist. Can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Randians: always wanting to live in civilization, never wanting to pay for it.
That's reasonable enough, what I don't get is this:
"air-quality program for London's schoolchildren"
Are the children going to be kept in airtight enclosures? Can everybody else just suck on a tail pipe? What exactly is going to happen here?
Air quality: it's not for the children, it's JUST for the children.
Yeah, poor people can't afford VWs. It's a long time since they were the people's cars.
The VW product was not defective. It worked exactly as expected. The VW product was illegal but that's a different issue than the one you mentioned. As an aside, I would want one of these "defective" VW if I was a VW fan looking for a car. All the VWs that I have owned were good cars plus it's cheaper to run than the "restricted" model.
Well, I can see each individual's liability - they drove a car that pollutes into the centre of London and are therefore liable for a fee. VW's liability is there to each individual since their false advertising made them liable for the fee. London are just trying to cut out the middle man.
I don't even know why I'm bothering responding, but at any rate, London has, historically, and even today, the same problem many large urban centers have, and that is significant air quality problems. The solutions are pretty obvious:
1. Do nothing, and allow air quality to get worse and worse, costing taxpayers ever more money to treat the growing number of health problems that come from breathing in pollution from internal combustion engines, not to mention reducing quality of life of people whose only sin, apparently, is that they have to breath the same fucking air that's being polluted.
2. Outlaw polluting vehicles - This, of course, will have a whole bunch of people up in arms because they can't drive their aging diesel burning car that vomits NOX, carbon monoxide and probably dozens of other equally nasty chemicals in lower ratios.
3. Take a middle ground approach, understanding that many people can't afford to get rid of polluting vehicles all at once, but giving some sort of monetary advantage to those who do use cleaner less polluting vehicles in the urban area you wish to maintain some level of decent air quality, while monetarily disadvantaging those who are driving more polluting vehicles.
You will furthr notice that option 3 tacitly invokes a free market principle, that something that costs less will inevitably overtake a similar product or activity that costs more. Isn't the free market the best way to solve problems? If it's not, then perhaps option 2 is better, and vehicles that don't meet minimum pollution standards are outright banned from driving in the areas in question. Option 2 and option 3 further recognize a rather old adage by now, that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. In much the same way, your right to vomit damaging levels of dangerous compounds out your tailpipe ends at my fucking lungs.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Perhaps the parent is a Volkswagen shareholder. I can well imagine they'd much prefer it if no level of government in any affected country did anything to punish VW, or even better just shrugged and went "Yeah, we don't give a crap about our citizens' health!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In most jurisdictions, the executives in question are already open to potential legal proceedings. Corporations do not confer absolute immunity upon executives or officers of a company. While civil findings would almost certainly paid by the company (and ultimately the shareholders), seeing as the company and its shareholders received a real benefit from the emissions cheating, if it is determined there was criminal wrongdoing, it's very possible that executives could end up in the dock.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's to fund Perri-Air for kids.
They don't work as expected (well, they work the way that a few people in VW expected - privately - but that's not the same thing). The expectation is what was advertised - low emissions. If they are sold as low emission cars and they are not low emission cars then they are clearly defective. You might not particularly care about the defect but that doesn't eliminate the defect.
It would take you not very long at all to discover that this means a targeted program aimed at reducing pollution specifically near schools.
Good thing air doesn't move around much, then.
Oh, wait...
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Free people voluntarily choose to establish a government because it serves their interests. They want a street, or a fire department or a police force, but it actually makes the most sense to pool resources and create these things in common rather than for individuals or small groups to try to go it alone. So governments that are voluntarily established by free people actually serve those people.
The governments we have now serve special interests. Infrastructure projects aren't chosen based on the maximum public good for the minimum cost. Propose an infrastructure project that serves the people paying for it and is constructed to minimize costs rather than to pay off contractors and union workers and I'll support it. But that's illegal in the US when the Feds provide any of the money.
Civilization wouldn't exist ...
Stop stealing from people in the name of "civilization". We can have civilization without paying extra extortion money to special interests.
The civilization is here. The people who built it are long dead. Why should you get paid over and over and over for their work?
Just because you think some tax is "extortionistic" doesn't mean it is, and if you don't like the taxes you pay, then convince enough of your fellow citizens to elect a different government. But quit pretending that your personal objections are universal or that you have some special right not to.pay taxes beyond your fellow citizens. It's "no taxation without representation", not simply "no taxation".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And you're an Illiterate idiot.
Just because you think some tax is "extortionistic" doesn't mean it is, and if you don't like the taxes you pay, then convince enough of your fellow citizens to elect a different government.
Done.
But quit pretending that your personal objections are universal or that you have some special right not to.pay taxes beyond your fellow citizens. It's "no taxation without representation", not simply "no taxation".
I'm going to keep telling people that it's wrong to want to spend money on yourself that other people earned. Thanks for the advice though.
I think that it would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate for Volkswagen to have to take each and every vehicle back and refund the full purchase price of the vehicle. They knowingly sold a defective product. Fuck them.
And fuck all the customers who don't get in before they go bankrupt?
If I am deceived into being liable for a bill, then I have the right to get the person who deceived me into being liable to pay the bill. This is what Khan is proposing. Personally I think VW should be required to pay 3 times what was stolen from the taxpayers of London - the three times multiple being the standard figure in the Hebrew Bible for a thief to repay.
If I can make $1m by legally killing a thousand people, should I be allowed to do it?
So far as I can tell Trump's proposals will end up costing taxpayers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
For example this piece of evidence
http://creation.com/triceratop...
The existence of such material challenges strongly the old earth hypothesis.
The right answer is 'because they've been caught and the others haven't'.
The wrong answer starts with the Dad's Army tune...
https://youtu.be/xfQwHb1pWPE
Why are these idiots still calling them "devices"?
This is a necessary measure, otherwise the message is that the winner is the one that cheats laws and regulation.
TSTRT
And lunar conspiracy theorists make equally facile claims that the landings were fake, because you can't see any stars in the photos taken by astronauts and lunar dust wasn't blown away from the landing site. Facile claims that are easily dismissed by the fact that fast exposure film was necessary (so no stars captured) and there is no atmosphere for the dust to float away on.
How is giving the money to school kiddies going to fix London's "killer air"?
If you had any clue at all, you would know that measured air pollution in London, both particulate and gas, varies over a surprisingly small area.
Like, depending on how hard/which direction the wind is blowing? /facepalm
Don't let common sense get in the way of your eco-fanaticism.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Really.
I wonder if any other car manufacturers build engines that appear by magic, and have ECUs running firmware handed down by God, and absolutely not coded in-house to specs.
How could you possibly believe that VW didn't know, when they are developing a diesel that needs to pass emissions tests, which it doesn't, right up until it magically does without mechanically changing anything on the engine, or adding an exhaust treatment system like every other manufacturer?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It produces too much pollution. That's defective. They managed to hide it for a while but the jig is up and they're busted. They knowingly sold a defective product.
By making older/more polluting cars more expensive to drive it does tend to have a negative impact on those types of cars sales and encourages new cars to come in under those pollution limits in order to achieve more competitive pricing. basically it uses free market to make polluting less attractive without causing mass riots by outright banning them. In the meantime you have a small income to use as desired.
you aint poor if you can afford to drive and park in London!
The interesting thing with the VW case is it doesn't appear to have happened with any exec level involvement, appears to have been a decision made within an engineering team (at least according to everything I have read on, and I read a lot given I owned a VW at the time)
lol sure it does, that is like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat and claiming that that somehow challenges the conclusion that magic is not real. bad science is bad science regardless of who created it and even if what they found was evidence that a triceratops existed 40,000 years ago that in no way challenges the old earth hypothesis any more than finding a living one today would challenge it, it would merely challenge the hypothesis of when a triceratops became extinct.
Your post doesn't have the hallmarks of a regular troll, your reasoning is both well-worded and a lie. VW doesn't have the cult following of fanboys that certain elecronic products enjoy...
I'm beginning to suspect that VW is actually hiring these shills to clean up their reputation.
Tell us AC, how much do you get paid per post?
Civilization isn't a thing, it's an ongoing process. The people who build civilization are all around you. Just because you don't contribute doesn't mean that the rest of us are slacking off. It means that you're a selfish prick.
I'll fuck them if they'e female and pretty.
You're a pretty stupid person. Perhaps you should stand in traffic and let a defective VW hit you on its way back to the dealer.
Facts based on actual measurement have a nasty habit of overriding 'common sense'.
Facts based on actual measurement have a nasty habit of overriding 'common sense'.
Yeah, like that pesky satellite data showing no warming. Gotta 'massage' those pesky facts into the proper agenda-backing curve, don't ya know!
Gawd, you people are hilarious! You know you've jumped the shark with most people in the US, right?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
A better headline would have been "Volkswagen incites the Wrath of Khan"
Sure we do. They run on computers!
To be honest though, I've no problem with an American site using American English, even when talking about Britain.
The existence of such material challenges strongly the old earth hypothesis.
No, it really isn't. There's not a singl piece of actual vidence in there. All there are are references to various "creation" journals and other related things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
... government official wants money owed to government...
I think it is worth pointing out that this is not "some government official" who wants something for himself; this is money owed to society - the government is doing what it should do, namely acting as the representative of society. There is this modern myth, that "government" is your enemy, some entity that is somehow separate from the rest of us, but it simply isn't true. If you have a government that doesn't serve the interests of the WHOLE of the people, then you, the voter, bear a large part of the blame for that. Yeah, the establishment has let you down - but you have the your government down too, by being wilfully uninformed and refusing to engage with real facts; it is as if a large proportion of you guys prefer to be spiteful rather than accepting that some politician, you happen to disagree with, might occasionally do the right thing. If our societies crumble from within and succumb to what are really minor threats, like Daesh, this sort of attitude is the reason.
Hehe, it's not like the wind can move airmasses from one place to another.. Local policies like this are pretty meaningless. Yes, it can be useful to change e.g. a very polluting power station within a mile upwind (in the usual wind direction that is) of a school. But, because cars and their output is pretty spread out, targeting car pollution specifically near schools is nothing more than lip service.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
Yay... now look up the definition of 'fraud'.
If you sell something promising certain attributes of the product which the product does not comply with - then that product is defective under the standard legal definition (throughout most of the world actually off) 'fitness for purpose'.
That there are actually laws that the car failed to comply with AGGRAVATES the defect - it does not limit it as you suggest. It makes the fraud on customers more severe since they were buying, in good faith, a car that they were told complied with the law when it didn't.
The fact that the car violated laws actually makes it even LESS fit for purpose.
And damn straight clients should not be held accountable for this. They had no reasonable way of learning about the deception until governments discovered it. The company that committed the fraud should be held accountable - and the CEO belongs in jail... if we start actually jailing the CEOs and executives of every company that commits large-scale fraud then large scale fraud would become a great deal less common - and things like the 2008 crash won't happen. Nobody would defraud millions of investors and even entire governments if they think they'll actually go to jail for it.
That's the one change in regulations the world really needs to keep capitalism mostly working. If a business commits a crime, the board and executive officers should face the same punishments that you or I would face if we did the same thing. They dump toxic waste in a river -they get the same punishment you would get for poisoning a town's well: death penalties for mass murder. They lie to customers or investors about what they are selling - they get the same punishment that con-artists get: ten to twenty in prison for fraud.
The problem is we only punish individuals when they don't have strong corporate shields. We put Madoff in jail - but the CEO of Goldman-Sachs walks free. So far no country has proposed criminal charges against the executives at VW for this massive fraud. Lots of fines - a few got fired, but no jail-time.
Considering the size of the fraud here, they should get consecutive ten year sentences for each offense... basically they should die of old age in prison.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Yeah, like that pesky satellite data showing no warming. Gotta 'massage' those pesky facts into the proper agenda-backing curve, don't ya know!
No such satellite data exists, you've been lied to.
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Hell even most of the middle class in London do. Americans tend to assume everybody else has their terrible public transport and odd fetish for smog machines.
The rest of us sees a car not as a status symbol, not as a toy, not even as a luxury - it's a device of purely practical worth used to get from A to B and suitable to buy ONLY if it's pragmatically the BEST way of getting from A to B on a regular basis.
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Exactly. The alternative is that London sends a bill for unpaid congestion charge fees to every single VW customer that has driven their car in London under the belief that it was exempt as a low-emissions vehicle. These people then pay the fine and then takes their local VW dealer to the small claims court to get the money back under the Consumer Rights Act. The dealers then take VW to court to get their money back. This will tie up a lot of court time and cost VW a lot more than $3m.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Money made from defrauding people does not count as money 'earned'.
So spending VW's money in this case - does not even meet your (typical crazy 'all tax is theft' batshit-insane) criteria for 'bad'.
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>>Just because you think some tax is "extortionistic" doesn't mean it is, and if you don't like the taxes you pay, then convince enough of your fellow citizens to elect a different government.
>Done.
You think THAT's what you did? You elected a guy who will have to increase your taxes hugely - unless you're already one of the richest 1% - they get massive discounts. Guess who gets to foot the bill ?
Trump will almost certainly keep his promisses to fuck up the lives of every group whose lives he promised to fuck up... EXCEPT the elites. Because he is one of them.
But what you're about to find out is - he's not going to stop with the people whose lives he promised to fuck up - he's going to fuck up YOUR life too, and all your neighbours and friends.
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Because anything that you do NOT constantly reinvest in shrivels and dies. This is /. - so let's use a car analogy.
"The car is bought and paid for. Why should I keep paying for regular services ? Why do I have to keep spending money to put gas in the tank ?"
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I can tell you exactly how it would end.
Very soon afterwards the libertarians discover they have absolutely nobody who can actually produce anything. They discover that the super-rich are not, in fact, capable of producing anything at all without lots of cheap labour, that food doesn't grow on servants (and they don't have any servants anyway)... and they have no idea how to eat, get shelter or take care of themselves.
Very soon, they end up like every real libertarian society has ended up: parasitically surviving by stealing from the other, productive, societies around them - and only just barely managing to keep starvation at bay this way while plague after plague ravages them. It happened in Tortuga, it's happening right now in Somalia.
Every libertarian society in the real world ends up with piracy as it's only industry - with no REAL productive capacity, the only way they can survive is by stealing from the societies that DO produce things.
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Since he has no interest in contributing to the upkeep of society... it really ought to be legal for society to kick him out. Oh wait, it is. If he refuses to pay toward the upkeep of society, some friendly men in uniforms will come collect him and take him away where he can no longer fuck everyone else's civilization for them. A judge and jury will determine if he really did fail to contribute, and if they find he did, he will be removed from civilization and sent to a special libertarian enclave we built where he can live with other people who don't like law and order and taxes.
There he can live for a some time - to see firsthand what a world like that is life, and eventually we'll offer him the chance to come back.
You know it's weird... they ALWAYS choose to come back. Even Wesley Snipes chose to come back and stay. Martha Stewardt came back. Paris Hilton came back...
it's almost as if they don't LIKE living outside of civilization with other barbarians like themselves.
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It's not somebody else's money. It's money that was due, but wasn't paid because of fraud, being recovered from the fraudster.
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Nothing in a corporation EVER happens without executive involvement.
What you've been reading is proof that VW's execs are really, really good at the only thing execs have ever been good at or for: covering their asses.
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If Trump REALLY wants to make America great again - he'd pass a law making it legal to shoot the people who voted for him.
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Because we don't generally punish people until guilt has been proven in a court of law... VW is the only company of whom that is true. Now you may or may not be correct that this is an 'industry wide' problem - but it doesn't matter, because in the free world we have presumption of innocence and sorry but we can't go after BMW or Merc or Opel or Renault until we have enough evidence to prove guilt in a court of law. They are innocent until proven guilty.
That said - if that happens, I promise to be just as pissed at those companies. My previous car was an Audi (owned by VW) a petrol model so I wasn't affected but because of this I swore to never buy another VW owned brand. So now I drive a BMW 320D. A very nice car.
If it was discovered however that BMW cheated the same way -then no matter how much I love this car, it will be the last BMW I ever own.
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False. For a situation like this to emerge it is not solely the executive at fault. This is the result of a deep and systemic culture problems in an organisation which shape the executive. Dishing out a fine at a specific person and calling the problem solved is laughable
London has a congestion charge, which is a con, nothing to do with congestion, it's a straightforward tax, which is why most embassies in London do not pay it. London now has spy cameras looking at number plates to see if you're a "polluter", real reason is just to collect lovely data on drivers for the police and spies etc.
The new London mayor Sadiq Khan is short of money because he made an election promise to freeze public transport fares, that's impossible to keep without slashing services. Then there's the UKP38m (so far) stolen from taxpayer's for a pedestrian bridge nobody wants, and has no use whatsoever apart from to the corporations that want it as their taxpayer funded plaything.
So, instead of thinking about this as getting back at VW for their emissions cheating, it's just a tax rise to plug black holes in the mayors fraudulent spending.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I think in this case the government has a right to it. Volkswagen was very naughty and even worse, they got caught.
Well, I guess we know which of Santa's lists they're on. Unfortunately I think they know what to do with that lump of coal...
Facts based on actual measurement have a nasty habit of overriding 'common sense'.
No such satellite data exists, you've been lied to.
Your tears of impotent frustration and rage are sweet.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
You're right. Other manufacturers are equally guilty.
Where you're wrong is in stating that Volkswagen knew nothing about the defeat device. Clearly parts of VW knew, and if management didn't it was willful ignorance. That's the kind of sophistry that makes me suspicious of your motives.
I'm glad at least one manufacturer is being punished for their transgressions. It's a start.
Smart nations keep their own currency. The worst that happens is you devalue the shit out of it.
Sovereign nations have nukes, the rest, sort of sovereign.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What color is the sky in 'your world'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I agree, we should kick out the parasites.
But people wanting lower taxes are not the parasites. Parasites are easy to recognize. First sign: They don't have any earned or investment income.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's what they're doing here in the US; offering to buy back all the cars. 500,000 of them, and it's expected to cost VW $15 billion.
Worldwide, VW has sold over 10 MILLION cars that are affected by the emissions problems. (That's not counting the Audis that are the subject of the latest emissions scandal.) If the cost of buying them back is comparable to the cars in the US, it would cost the company 300 BILLION dollars to buy them all. I doubt the company can afford to do that; they would probably have to close their doors, and the buyers would only get a partial refund. Might be the right thing to do, but I can't imagine the German government going along.
utter bullshit. You have obviously never worked in the real world. Sure execs are always looking to cover their own arses, but by the same token employee's would sell them out in a heartbeat if they were ordered to do illegal deeds rather than take the blame themselves.
Aah, denial. I love how libertarians always say their ideas have never been tested in the real world. You know an idea is terrible when people will pretend the experiments were never done rather than admit the results !
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You live in society, you get all the benefits of being part of that society - if you're not paying all your due taxes with a fucking smile, then you're parasite on that society.
And no, the people you're thinking off are not the problem. The people getting welfare and such, the ones needing social safety nets because something terrible happened or there just isn't enough labor demand to accommodate everybody (there NEVER is) - their fine. One of the reasons to HAVE a society is to allow THEM to survive instead of starve.
But people who CAN contribute but don't WANT to - THOSE are parasites. That would be you. The welfare recipients you want to get rid of ? Their the REASON to have a society in the first place. You're the reason societies ultimately collapse.
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I've been working in the real world for some 18 years now... I've worked in giant corporations, I've worked in tiny startups...
Frankly - if we assume that the claim is true, that somehow the engineers did something this egregious without any of the executives finding out... then those executives are so utterly incompetent that the board of directors should be suing them for fraud because they HAD to have lied on their resumes to be THAT bad at their job.
In the real world - that's never how it happens. Corruption always goes top-down, never bottom-up. The guys on the bottom are not arrogant enough to think the law don't apply to them, and have nothing to gain by flaunting it. Only the executives can gain from breaking the law, and only they can create incentives to make it worth the risk for employees. Employees don't create their own incentive structures.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
vw didnt make the claim they were low emissions. the uk government regulatory agency did.
it was the agency that certified them that made false claims. not vw. vw just submitted a car for the agency to access.
Black is white...
The people paying the bills are parasites. Those sucking the benes while doing nothing are the ones contributing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
only while hooked to the tester.
The people who don't WANT to pay the bills are NOT parasites according to you ?
You want the benefits of civilization but you complain about helping to pay for it... and you call anybody else a parasite ?
Hell you put 'investment income' in the 'not parasite' column... that alone shows how twisted your values are. People who contribute nothing at all, barely pay taxes - and simply rent-seek of the productivity of others are, according to you, valuable contributors... they are literally the quintessential example of a social parasite.
They like to talk about "not working for your money and letting your money work for you instead" - which is a flagrant lie, money cannot work - everytime you say (even if you really think) that's what you are doing -what you're actually doing is letting other PEOPLE work and taking the fruits of their labour for yourself.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It's not my magic way. It's VW's magic way. You do know they admitted to this don't you?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/v...
http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-n...
You can't be this stupid. VW admitted that they cheated. They got caught and started firing execs immediately. It's a huge scandal in the US and Europe. They have recalled 8.5 million vehicles in Europe over this. Where the hell have you been while this was going on? Tell me where the lie is you fool.
You can't read can you?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
First Paragraph
"Volkswagen AG admitted to systematically cheating U.S. air pollution tests, leaving the automaker vulnerable to billions in fines and possible criminal prosecution.
The company sold diesel versions of Volkswagen and Audi cars with software that turns on full pollution controls only when the car is undergoing official emissions testing. During normal driving, the cars pollute 10 times to 40 times the legal limits, the Environmental Protection Agency said. EPA called the technology a “defeat device.”
Other articles talk about the same thing being done in UK and Europe.
If it's a lie then every news organization on multiple continents and many governments are in on this "made up lie."
You can't fucking read can you. Try using Google, it's all over the internet. Since you're illiterate get someone to read it to you.
You're most welcome.
I proved to you that the product IS defective AND was fraudulently sold. Your failure (by your own admission) to read the post, might explain why you don't know that. So... er... why reply to a post you didn't read ? And what kind of an idiot thinks he could hope to realistically understand things without reading them to the end ? You know -the end of a text is usually where the conclusions are ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Keep living in denial.