>Seriously? Politicians should have acted 30 years ago? What exactly should they have done 30 years ago, that wouldn't automatically make them lose their next election?
And that's why America can't have nice things. Most of the politicians who passed gun control in Australia in the conservative states destroyed their careers in the process (whether you support it or not is not relevant to the subject under discussion). They did it anyway - because they believed it was the right thing to do. They believed it was the best way to serve their constituencies and if it meant never being re-elected then so be it. They had to trust that their constituents would eventually come to agree with them and thus their replacements would not roll it back.
In America - that never happens. A politician would simply never be willing to destroy his career in politics in order to do what he believes is right. If it means not getting another term, it won't get done.
The moral cowardice of American politicians is not something we should be celebrating.
He's going to send a bunch of tankers to drain the ice run off, then refreeze them and use them as building material for the wall. He's just trying to figure out how to make Mexico pay for it.
A skeptic is one who only believes that which has evidence. One who refuses to believe DESPITE overwhelming evidence - and in fact believes the counter-argument with NO evidence is not a skeptic. If this person claims to be one - then that would make him a pseudoskeptic since he is pretending to be a skeptic but does not actually meet the requirements.
Actual skeptics accept global warming as the theory that best fits the evidence.
I'm telling you the likelihood of being hit in the next thousand years is unknowable. We cannot know. We can be fairly certain we won't be getting hit in the next year - since something that big, that close we almost certainly would have seen already. Our skywatching is horrible for what we need - but it would tell us that, the trouble is that's too late. To actually be able to do something we need to see the incoming rock 20 or 30 years in advance and go deflect it when it's still very, very far away. At that distance a tiny bit of energy will do the trick, the closer it gets -the more delta-V you need to do the job - anywhere within 5 years and a nuclear weapon probably can't pack enough punch. Even if we blow the thing to smithereens we'd end up raining the earth with radioactive rocks.
But more than 2 years ? We have no way of knowing. The odds that we WILL get hit again is a certainty. When is a mystery.
And that's all for rocks - which we can at least see. The universe has quite a few things that could wipe out all life on earth that travels at the speed of light and if one was going to hit us we'd have no warning whatsoever. We'd be here, then not here, with no moment in between to even realise it's all over.
So instead of arguing the time (which can't be known) lets stick to what we can know. It's a certainty that another extinction level event WILL happen. They've happened many times before. Within the last 2 decades Jupiter got hit by a meteroid that, if it had hit us, would have been the end of us. We know for an absolute fact that life on earth WILL end. We just don't know when. Considering all the ways we have of bringing it about ourselves - that ups the timeframe a lot, a thousand years is pretty optimistic actually when you're betting on humans not being idiots. Hell, having given Trump the nuclear codes - I'm not sure we have 1 year left.. But even if we can avoid doing it ourselves - we can't avoid the universe doing it to us. Life on earth, indeed life in this solar system, will end. No point in worrying about the sun going red giant, we'll be long gone before that happens.
But we COULD change our fate. We can become perhaps the only species ever to guarantee it's own survival against the unfeeling universe: by spreading out. Teraform and colonize mars, it will be SERIOUSLY hard, there are so many problems we have no idea how to solve yet... but solve them. So that, if one planet gets whacked, there are humans (and the other lifeforms we depend on to survive) somewhere else, that can reseed. The odds of both getting hit at once is much smaller. And maybe it's easier to start with the moon ? Lets find out !
Then make it three - and in due time - get us to places outside the solar system. Whether that means settling extrasolar planets or building generation-ships that become a permanent home, the universe equivalent of a boathouse - our own mobile biospheres, or something we can't even imagine yet. But do something.
We may very well be the first species in the history of this planet to KNOW that our capacity to survive on this planet is shortlived, to KNOW that we can't survive here for ever (or even for very long) - that gives us the opportunity to be the first species ever to do something about it, to ensure our survival regardless of the cold logic of the laws of gravity.
Earlier in this post - I told you never to bet on being able to keep humans from doing something idiotic. Now the counterpoint: we are also capable of wisdom, creativity and intelligence. Our incredible stupidity is not our ONLY attribute. The same species that, 10-thousand years after we learned to write still has wars of conquest - still can't stop doing something so primitive we copied it from fucking ants... is also the species that conquered the skies despite evolution not giving it to us, that figured out how to visit space and even placed some of our members on another world, that has actually eradicated several diseases.
We can be incredibly stupid... but we are also able to be incredibly smart. What's so bad about encouraging people to do the smart thing for once ?
So call it a tie then... two of the biggest mining industries - and among the deadliest (gold alone kills well over 3000 people a year) -... and done for absolutely no useful purpose.
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.
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.
Tough call - but I think more diamonds actually get used for things than gold. Those hard things actually have some practical uses - glass cutting and the like.
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.
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 !
But neither of them claimed these were the official unemployment figures. Both were stating YOUTH unemployment, which I think every sane person knows is a different figure and it's entirely possible for it to vastly differ from the national figure - which includes all the not-yet-retired baby-boomers and all the thirty-somethings and forty-somethings.
Losing credibility with the alt-right is really not something I would be concerned about - it should be a badge of honour if a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists think you aren't credible - because the things they DO find credible are crazy conspiracy theories.
Now it's also worth noting that the two articles are less alike than inferred. Firstly - different authors, meaning that the (rather subjective) difference between 'mostly true' or 'mostly false' was done by different people. Secondly the Bernie statement came later (in July) than the Trump statement (in June). But most importantly - the article contents show a very big difference: The trump campaign gave no indication of where it got the figure - politifact made a sincere effort to see if there was anything that could support it, found something that came sort of close but assessed that the figure really wasn't a valid representation. The Sanders campaign DID respond and provided the source for their statements. Being able to cite your source alone should be a difference between mostly false and mostly true since it indicates that if you are wrong, you weren't INTENTIONALLY wrong, you really believed what you said and had a credible reason for believing it. The Sander's statistic is from a completely different source, is a completely true and valid statistic - but as per the article - he didn't explain it with sufficient clarity to differentiate it from what the BLS statistic tells you -and that's why he only got a 'mostly true'.
The simple fact is - after actually reading both articles I completely agree with those scores. Sander's statement WAS mostly true, and Trump's really WAS mostly false - and the perception of this being incongruous can only exist if you stopped reading at the headlines (very much an alt-right hobby). It's clear from the content of the articles that the two numbers had completely different sources and described completely different issues. The numbers differ because they are completely different numbers describing completely different things. Trump's number appears to be the inverse of the 'workspace participation' rate - and calling that 'unemployment' is flagrantly untrue, while Sander's figure is the official EPI statistic - which differs from BLS unemployment rates and he should have clarified - but not sufficiently so that you can't validly call it 'unemployment'.
That's not bias, it's a completely accurate set of assessments by different authors of two events with almost nothing in common. They only look similar in the super-simplified world of headlines and soundbites, but that similarity completely evaporates in the details. So the event where politifact rated the same statement 'true' when said by Bernie and 'false' when said by Trump - never happened, because it wasn't the same or even a similar statement.
To be fair - these are gold prospectors, and very little mined gold goes into electronics (and less every year). Frankly if we limited gold use to actually doing stuff with it, we could supply ourselves for the next 5000 years or so with what we've already mined. Nearly all the gold they find will get dug out at great energy and cost, smelted down at great energy and cost... then after going to all that trouble to get it out of the ground... locked up in an underground vault and guarded at great energy and cost for ever.
Gold mining is the single most uselessly fucking stupid thing humans do.
>A good-sized heli is far more dangerous than a quad of the same mass because of the inertia of the single rotor.
They are also more fragile themselves. Back in 1992 or so, during the unrest in that phase between F.W. De Klerk announcing the end of appartheid and Nelson Mandela winning the election - there was a front page story in South Africa after a kid brought down a police chopper with a sling-shot. Rock hit the prop - prop broke in half.
You do realize that this example could be entirely reasonable right ? 51 and 50 are MASSIVELY different figures. LIterally the difference is higher than the entire official unemployment number for the whole COUNTRY.
That's not a minor difference - and it's entirely possible that the former is mostly true and the latter is mostly false.
The opposite could also be equally feasible in fact. It's just as possible for it to be mostly true that there is 59% and mostly false that there is 51%. The actual data determines which is which - and it's pretty damn close to Bernie's 51% which is a lifetime away from Trump's 59% (a difference so big that if it was true America would be in the middle of a second great depression -which I know republicans think is happening but it really isn't).
>Back then, he was an animal abusing, woman suppressing, religious nut-job
He still is all those things.
>Today, he's the sane pick for Secretary of State
No... just saner than anybody else that Orange Hitler may choose. He's still all the terrible things he was before. But faced with seeing this terrible person lose - you lot responded by electing somebody who is all those same things (except religious)... only even WORSE. So MUCH worse that Romney would be a fucking mitigating agent !
We'll settle for Romney to keep Trump from appointing the resurrected corpse of Goebels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not summer in the Arctic.
It is summer in the Antarctic.
These are not the same place- they are literally on opposite ends of the earth.
>Seriously? Politicians should have acted 30 years ago? What exactly should they have done 30 years ago, that wouldn't automatically make them lose their next election?
And that's why America can't have nice things. Most of the politicians who passed gun control in Australia in the conservative states destroyed their careers in the process (whether you support it or not is not relevant to the subject under discussion). They did it anyway - because they believed it was the right thing to do. They believed it was the best way to serve their constituencies and if it meant never being re-elected then so be it.
They had to trust that their constituents would eventually come to agree with them and thus their replacements would not roll it back.
In America - that never happens. A politician would simply never be willing to destroy his career in politics in order to do what he believes is right. If it means not getting another term, it won't get done.
The moral cowardice of American politicians is not something we should be celebrating.
He's going to send a bunch of tankers to drain the ice run off, then refreeze them and use them as building material for the wall. He's just trying to figure out how to make Mexico pay for it.
A skeptic is one who only believes that which has evidence. One who refuses to believe DESPITE overwhelming evidence - and in fact believes the counter-argument with NO evidence is not a skeptic. If this person claims to be one - then that would make him a pseudoskeptic since he is pretending to be a skeptic but does not actually meet the requirements.
Actual skeptics accept global warming as the theory that best fits the evidence.
I'm telling you the likelihood of being hit in the next thousand years is unknowable. We cannot know. We can be fairly certain we won't be getting hit in the next year - since something that big, that close we almost certainly would have seen already. Our skywatching is horrible for what we need - but it would tell us that, the trouble is that's too late. To actually be able to do something we need to see the incoming rock 20 or 30 years in advance and go deflect it when it's still very, very far away. At that distance a tiny bit of energy will do the trick, the closer it gets -the more delta-V you need to do the job - anywhere within 5 years and a nuclear weapon probably can't pack enough punch. Even if we blow the thing to smithereens we'd end up raining the earth with radioactive rocks.
But more than 2 years ? We have no way of knowing. The odds that we WILL get hit again is a certainty. When is a mystery.
And that's all for rocks - which we can at least see. The universe has quite a few things that could wipe out all life on earth that travels at the speed of light and if one was going to hit us we'd have no warning whatsoever. We'd be here, then not here, with no moment in between to even realise it's all over.
So instead of arguing the time (which can't be known) lets stick to what we can know. It's a certainty that another extinction level event WILL happen. They've happened many times before. Within the last 2 decades Jupiter got hit by a meteroid that, if it had hit us, would have been the end of us. We know for an absolute fact that life on earth WILL end. We just don't know when. Considering all the ways we have of bringing it about ourselves - that ups the timeframe a lot, a thousand years is pretty optimistic actually when you're betting on humans not being idiots.
Hell, having given Trump the nuclear codes - I'm not sure we have 1 year left..
But even if we can avoid doing it ourselves - we can't avoid the universe doing it to us. Life on earth, indeed life in this solar system, will end. No point in worrying about the sun going red giant, we'll be long gone before that happens.
But we COULD change our fate. We can become perhaps the only species ever to guarantee it's own survival against the unfeeling universe: by spreading out. Teraform and colonize mars, it will be SERIOUSLY hard, there are so many problems we have no idea how to solve yet... but solve them. So that, if one planet gets whacked, there are humans (and the other lifeforms we depend on to survive) somewhere else, that can reseed. The odds of both getting hit at once is much smaller. And maybe it's easier to start with the moon ? Lets find out !
Then make it three - and in due time - get us to places outside the solar system. Whether that means settling extrasolar planets or building generation-ships that become a permanent home, the universe equivalent of a boathouse - our own mobile biospheres, or something we can't even imagine yet. But do something.
We may very well be the first species in the history of this planet to KNOW that our capacity to survive on this planet is shortlived, to KNOW that we can't survive here for ever (or even for very long) - that gives us the opportunity to be the first species ever to do something about it, to ensure our survival regardless of the cold logic of the laws of gravity.
Earlier in this post - I told you never to bet on being able to keep humans from doing something idiotic. Now the counterpoint: we are also capable of wisdom, creativity and intelligence. Our incredible stupidity is not our ONLY attribute. The same species that, 10-thousand years after we learned to write still has wars of conquest - still can't stop doing something so primitive we copied it from fucking ants... is also the species that conquered the skies despite evolution not giving it to us, that figured out how to visit space and even placed some of our members on another world, that has actually eradicated several diseases.
We can be incredibly stupid... but we are also able to be incredibly smart. What's so bad about encouraging people to do the smart thing for once ?
So call it a tie then... two of the biggest mining industries - and among the deadliest (gold alone kills well over 3000 people a year) - ... and done for absolutely no useful purpose.
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.
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.
Tough call - but I think more diamonds actually get used for things than gold. Those hard things actually have some practical uses - glass cutting and the like.
And that right there is how fascism arose in Germany... and is now arising in the USA.
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.
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 !
But neither of them claimed these were the official unemployment figures. Both were stating YOUTH unemployment, which I think every sane person knows is a different figure and it's entirely possible for it to vastly differ from the national figure - which includes all the not-yet-retired baby-boomers and all the thirty-somethings and forty-somethings.
Losing credibility with the alt-right is really not something I would be concerned about - it should be a badge of honour if a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists think you aren't credible - because the things they DO find credible are crazy conspiracy theories.
Now it's also worth noting that the two articles are less alike than inferred. Firstly - different authors, meaning that the (rather subjective) difference between 'mostly true' or 'mostly false' was done by different people. Secondly the Bernie statement came later (in July) than the Trump statement (in June). But most importantly - the article contents show a very big difference:
The trump campaign gave no indication of where it got the figure - politifact made a sincere effort to see if there was anything that could support it, found something that came sort of close but assessed that the figure really wasn't a valid representation.
The Sanders campaign DID respond and provided the source for their statements. Being able to cite your source alone should be a difference between mostly false and mostly true since it indicates that if you are wrong, you weren't INTENTIONALLY wrong, you really believed what you said and had a credible reason for believing it.
The Sander's statistic is from a completely different source, is a completely true and valid statistic - but as per the article - he didn't explain it with sufficient clarity to differentiate it from what the BLS statistic tells you -and that's why he only got a 'mostly true'.
The simple fact is - after actually reading both articles I completely agree with those scores. Sander's statement WAS mostly true, and Trump's really WAS mostly false - and the perception of this being incongruous can only exist if you stopped reading at the headlines (very much an alt-right hobby). It's clear from the content of the articles that the two numbers had completely different sources and described completely different issues.
The numbers differ because they are completely different numbers describing completely different things. Trump's number appears to be the inverse of the 'workspace participation' rate - and calling that 'unemployment' is flagrantly untrue, while Sander's figure is the official EPI statistic - which differs from BLS unemployment rates and he should have clarified - but not sufficiently so that you can't validly call it 'unemployment'.
That's not bias, it's a completely accurate set of assessments by different authors of two events with almost nothing in common. They only look similar in the super-simplified world of headlines and soundbites, but that similarity completely evaporates in the details.
So the event where politifact rated the same statement 'true' when said by Bernie and 'false' when said by Trump - never happened, because it wasn't the same or even a similar statement.
To be fair - these are gold prospectors, and very little mined gold goes into electronics (and less every year). Frankly if we limited gold use to actually doing stuff with it, we could supply ourselves for the next 5000 years or so with what we've already mined. Nearly all the gold they find will get dug out at great energy and cost, smelted down at great energy and cost... then after going to all that trouble to get it out of the ground... locked up in an underground vault and guarded at great energy and cost for ever.
Gold mining is the single most uselessly fucking stupid thing humans do.
>A good-sized heli is far more dangerous than a quad of the same mass because of the inertia of the single rotor.
They are also more fragile themselves. Back in 1992 or so, during the unrest in that phase between F.W. De Klerk announcing the end of appartheid and Nelson Mandela winning the election - there was a front page story in South Africa after a kid brought down a police chopper with a sling-shot. Rock hit the prop - prop broke in half.
You do realize that this example could be entirely reasonable right ? 51 and 50 are MASSIVELY different figures.
LIterally the difference is higher than the entire official unemployment number for the whole COUNTRY.
That's not a minor difference - and it's entirely possible that the former is mostly true and the latter is mostly false.
The opposite could also be equally feasible in fact. It's just as possible for it to be mostly true that there is 59% and mostly false that there is 51%. The actual data determines which is which - and it's pretty damn close to Bernie's 51% which is a lifetime away from Trump's 59% (a difference so big that if it was true America would be in the middle of a second great depression -which I know republicans think is happening but it really isn't).
>Back then, he was an animal abusing, woman suppressing, religious nut-job
He still is all those things.
>Today, he's the sane pick for Secretary of State
No... just saner than anybody else that Orange Hitler may choose. He's still all the terrible things he was before. But faced with seeing this terrible person lose - you lot responded by electing somebody who is all those same things (except religious)... only even WORSE. So MUCH worse that Romney would be a fucking mitigating agent !
We'll settle for Romney to keep Trump from appointing the resurrected corpse of Goebels.
It's not the fact-checking sites that are biassed against the right.
It's the facts.
Those damn left-biased facts, so unfair. Like Colbert told Bush: Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?"