Well that only supports my conclusion: that VW is likely to end up a government owned company much like what happened with GM rather than actually going bankrupt.
Whats your point ? Just because something was done in the USSR doesn't mean it was bad. Even bad governments get some things right. Just like even idiots sometimes vote for the best candidate even if only by accident.
I have no doubt that sometimes engineers can and will do evil things. But people who do evil usually do it for a reason - some kind of incentive. Very few people act evilly just for the sake of it, and when there is definitely profit made from the evil act it's kind of far-fetched to suggest that people who had no benefit from that profit would have done so for the sake of pure malice isn't it ?
So what incentive was there ? If the executives are accused, we would automatically jump to the conclusion that it was greed and probably be right. In the case where it's the lower-staff, that option doesn't exist. In fact - there is no apparent incentive, unless one was created by somebody who DID have one.
I am not saying the engineers were "automatically" acting on behest of somebody else - I'm concluding this on the basis that if they didn't then their crime has no discernable motive whatsoever.
In a world where the largest media company has never produced a single second of media (facebook), the largest video company makes no videos (youtube), the largest advertising company doesn't make any ads (google) and the largest retailer doesn't have any retail outlets (amazon)... that is a fucking stupid question, in this world - it would be weird if the largest cab company HAD owned any cabs !
Actually - this could benefit everybody. There is presumably a non-zero cost in sending out these automated tickets. A high margin of error would cost money to correct (or at least improve) and if everybody just pays there is no incentive to do so. However if there is a mean to cheaply and easily challenge bad tickets, then the cost of sending them is now lost without the guaranteed return. Maximizing revenue now starts to depend on improving the margin of error such that almost no tickets get overturned so you don't pay for tickets that generate no income.
Of course the resulting revenue will be less than it was before, but it will be more guaranteed since it will not include tickets that would be easy to challenge. Forcing law enforcement to be meticulous in who they charge, what they charge with and what evidence they collect is a nett-win for society. A bigger problem is that it is quite uncertain if automated fine systems are any good to begin with. There is significant scientific evidence that suggests they have zero impact on driver behavior.
We could debate whether improving their quality would increase that impact - there are a lot of factors and I honestly can't guess - but it certainly is an argument in favor of scrapping them altogether and rather using those resources to come up with a newer and better way of enforcing traffic laws that, you know, actually makes people obey them.
You're not supposed to enter a crossing when the light is yellow, and you're supposed to slow down as you approach a crossing to a point where you can safely stop if it changes before you are inside. The purpose of a yellow light is to give people who had crossed on green but are still in the intersection time to get out of it before letting cars enter from the other side. It's NOT a last chance to get across the intersection.
There is another factor - the penalties for fucking up is severe and the the assumption of liability based on relative risk. So if a car hits a pedestrian the driver WILL go to jail and WILL be deemed the one at fault. As the one operating a dangerous machine - the liability assumption is entirely on him.
The result is that people actually drive safely. They will stop to let you crossif you are merely walking towards a zebra crossing, long before you actually reach it. If there's a pedestrian on the sidewalk they slow down to about his speed to ensure that there is no risk of hitting him if he were to, for example, trip and fall in the road.
That's how you make accidents not kill pedestrians - you send people who hurt others in accidents to jail and you assume liability on the part of the one with the car.
I've lived for extended periods in about 30 different countries in Africa, South America and North America as well - nowhere was a pedestrian as safe as they were in France.
>The biggest homophobes are islamofascists. See Orlando, Tehran, Saudi Arabia.
Right because Christian homophobes have been so peaceful and progressive over the centuries... oh wait, well the last decade... pay no attention to the man with the trunk full of explosives on the way to the Pride. Pay no attention to Uganda, they've never liked gays anyway... of course until a bunch of American Christian Fundamentalists went to preach there they certainly didn't KILL any gays, disliking them is bad but most of us would considering being murdered worse than merely being disliked.
The only difference between your pethate countries and the US Christians is that the first ammendment means Christians have a harder time making their wishes the law of the land. It's not nearly as hard as it OUGHT to be (in case you were wondering - that would be 'impossible to ever even be concidered and any speaker who appreciates the constitution would refuse to even allow debate on any bill that is inspired by religious views - like Paul Ryan with gun control last week - so should all speakers be to biblethumper laws') but it's still a pretty high barrier. Where that barrier does not exist (as in Uganda) the Christians do exactly the same.
In fact, even where it is absent in Muslim nations it, quite interestingly, they are often more progressive than the USA. The USA has to fight to let people pee in the bathroom they won't get beaten-up in, in Tehran sex-change operations are available free of charge to anybody who wants one.
>Have you even been following the story? You do know that this has little to do with the cars being able to run at *cough* dangerous speeds, right? Just checking.
Because poisoning people is so much better right ? That's what you are missing. Even if you are so anti-science that you entirely ignore the CO2 factor - what these engines mostly put out was extremely toxic gasses (like sulphur-dioxide) which are heavily regulated with damn good reason - because breathing that shit kills people. It's almost guaranteed that quite a lot of people are dead because of this fraud.
The parent seems to conflate "non-violent" with "victimless" the two are radically different things. White-collar "non-violent" criminals like these should be getting the book thrown at them. We can put them in all the jailcells that will be empty if we release (and stop jailing) people for the victimless crimes of smoking pot or selling blowjobs.
The facts do seem to support this. Bosch wrote the original software and included the code which was used to do this cheat. It was a piece of debugging code and Bosch has shown proof of having specifically told VW not to use it in emissions tests as it's purpose was purely to validate code paths.
All VW had to do was add a few if statements and call the debug function when those conditions were met. That said - I find it extremely implausible that a few rogue low-level employees would have done that unless there was some sort of pressure from above. Low level people generally don't get profit sharing and aren't held liable if the car fails the test. So if they don't share the rewards for success, nor the punishment for failure - there is absolutely not incentive for them to do something with such a massive risk to themselves. That incentive had to come from somewhere else, and by far the most likely source is the people who DO share the rewards for success and punishment for failure. The executives had an incentive to pass the tests without making the cars run clean. The software engineers didn't - so the executives must have given them one.
> You could argue that goaling people to perform causes them to act this way, but the reality is just about every company goals people to perform.
And if the performance you reward cannot reasonably be achieved while following applicable laws then management ought to be culpable for de facto inciting criminal actions. There is a similar problem here in South Africa in the gold mines. A team of mineworkers can in theory, mine about 5 tonnes of earth a day. There are huge bonuses paid if they make 15. They aren't paid very well to begin with (considering the danger of the work they are actually paid a pittance), and without consistently making those bonuses most of them would starve. So since almost every team makes the bonusses almost every day - why not just pay them at that rate and simplify the bookkeeping, it's what they cost anyway, what motivates the companies to disguise 2/3rds of their pay as bonuses - clearly the 5 tonne level isn't actually accurate.
Actually it is. The only way to go beyond that is to basically ignore all safety measures and regulations. So in order to survive financially mineworkers need to forego virtually all their protections from dying today. Not letting the sprayers run properly for example, which all but guarantees breathing in mining dust that causes silicosis (but waiting for the sprayers takes a chunk of time that is needed if you want a yield over 5 tonnes). The result is that mining accidents alone kills numerous miners every year, nearly all of them are entirely avoidable and would not have happened if the regulations were followed. But the companies get to say they provided the right equipment and the official rules require the workers to follow the regulations - it's not their fault if the workers broke the rules. The fact that they made it almost impossible to follow those rules without starving really OUGHT to make them culpable for those deaths. The legislature may not agree but so far at least, it looks like the civil courts might - the court recently gave permission for a suit for causing silicosis to become a class action suit, which is likely to have many thousands of members. The case will take some time yet to come to trial but the companies fought very hard to try and prevent it becoming a class action case. Their arguments were that silicosis can be almost entirely prevented it safety measures are followed and they already pay a care fee to miners that get sick - so any cases out there now that are actually legitimate would be a few individuals where it happened despite the regulations being followed. The court rejected that argument and held that, if they are in fact responsible, they are responsible for all cases - and allowed the class action.
It's worth considering though - that the odds right now is that Volkswagen will not exist much longer. This is the first penalty - and almost 15 Billion it's a huge one, for perspective, when the issue first leaked VW set aside 17 Billion USD for handling the legal fallout. They sure did not expect to spend almost all of that on the very first case. Just in the US there are still two more cases to come (one of them criminal) - and the US is the least of their problems here. Only about half a million cars were affected in the US. In Europe it affected nearly 4 million cars, European consumers are livid and multiple civil and criminal trials are ongoing there too - all of which we can expect will have larger penalties than this did (considering they have 8 times as many victims). And while all this is happening - VW executives are being sued by the shareholders who blame this for destroying the value of their equity in the company. The criminal charges could very well still lead to prison sentences by the way - but even if not, when shareholders sue the executives limited liability does not apply (at least, not as much) so the main executives could lose a huge chunk of their personal wealth and assets in settlements or even bankruptcy.
Either way - the very existence of the company is now uncertain - it's entirely possible the company will file for bankruptcy even before all the cases conclude. Their tanked share prices have cost them massive market value and they are being forced to fend of these cases with only cash-in-hand while facing the biggest slowdown in sales in the history of the company (nobody wants to buy from a company that is known to have flat out defrauded their customers). I am usually the one arguing that penalties for violating regulations or deceiving consumers are too light and the law effectively has no teeth against corporations and this is exactly why massive fraud and corporate malfeasance is so incredibly common that not a single company on wall street is NOT a criminal organisation - but in this case, the company really did bite of more than they can chew and the punishment is looking quite severe.
The really interesting question is what will happen to the guilty executives afterwards. Assuming they wriggle out of jailtime and survive the shareholder suit - will they get new jobs in the field ? Have enough money to start lucrative new careers ? Carly Fiorina did not share in any of the suffering she inflicted on HP - but then she didn't get the company covered in civil and criminal lawsuits to the point where it's very existence was at risk. The best case scenario (for them) here is that it ends up like Enron - company bankrupted, a few executives in jail and the rest poisoning other companies.
The downside of that scenario is that it means the executives get very little real punishment for their crimes - the people who actually get punished are the ordinary workers who lose their livelihood over a decision they had nothing to do with, no authority to stop and for the most part no knowledge off. That's usually the trouble with the way we treat corporate criminals - they never have to deal with the consequences themselves, they make ordinary workers pay for it. My vote is that if VW does go under (which is looking extremely likely) the German government should buy it up cheaply and keep the workers employed, then replace it with actual competent staff. Flat out nationalizing it would be politically difficult (despite being, I think, absolutely justified) but they may not even need to do that. Considering that in this scenario the German government will likely be one of the largest creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings - they could almost certainly just do something as simple as agreeing to forego the usual asset auction and take payment in the form of a controlling share, with the agreement to resurrect the company and give a cash injection to pay off the other creditors.
>People probably choose to veer away from hitting people because they don't realize they might kill themselves - they just see what is in front of them and sure to happen, and don't have the time or wherewithall to consider the unknown consequences.
Well that fits my personal experience. The worst car accident I ever had happened when I swerved to avoid a hazzard on a highway while travelling at high speed. I ended up on the traffic island where I crashed into a tree. This is where modern automotive technology makes a huge difference however. Despite hitting a tree head-on at 120km/h I walked away with nary a scratch. Airbags and crumplezones kept myself and my passengers alive and almost entirely uninjured. Car was utterly destroyed, but that's better than humans being hurt.
But thinking back - yes, that's exactly how it went. When you see a sudden hazard on the road at high speed there is simply no TIME to think through a chain of consequences or evaluate multiple possible chains of events. You can do this when you have more time - but modern ABS enabled cars can probably achieve a safe dead-stop in the same time - but when it's a sudden hazard like a large animal running onto the road out of bushes where it was hidden (as happened to me)
there is just no time to do that. You deal with the problem immediately in front of you using the first viable option - you swerve to avoid, trying to regain control and avoid subsequent problems caused by the swerve becomes something you think about *after* you've swerved. You may not have the time to actually process what new problems there are and react to them at all (I sure didn't) but you simply cannot consider them beforehand. Not to mention that the bit of thought you can spare is based on the extremely limited information and judgement calls. Part of why I chose to swerve towards the island was that (1) it meant not crossing other lanes which would potentially cause me to hit other cars and (2) the plants on the island appeared to be small shrubs - unlikely to cause major damage even if I couldn't avoid hitting one. Turns out that despite being pruned low - that thing had a massive trunk capable of turning my engine into something resembling an empty tin can in a vaccuum.
We already have laws around these things - that dictate what a driver is supposed to do in these conditions and what degree of liability he would have towards passengers or pedestrians. Autonomous cars should do exactly what the local law would have demanded a human driver do.
Do that first and maybe then you can talk of using it in sentencing. It would require very heavy regulation with very steep penalties for errors and criminal rather than civil liabillity. Part of why the current system is so broken is because suing compabies is an expensive proposition and everybody who has cause to sue them by virtue if that very cause has great difficulty accessing finance. Do you really think republicans would ever let such heavy handed regulation be passed over an industry that generous at campaign time?
Its an interesting question. A smart democrat would not have wanted the Afghanistan war (and neither would a smart republican in the bizarro world where one could actually get elected) but may well have ended up with their hand forced as you suggest. Even then if all the resources wasted on Iraq could instead have been spent on Afghanistan it would have gone a great deal better and probably be over long ago at a fraction of the cost. It also would have kept Saddam's baatist military command in place and thus they would not have done what they did: form ISIS.
Thats why I said its less silly than my extreme example and even in another post called it a very useful metaphor. But it doesnt follow that a useful metaphor for describing something implies the thing is the metaphor. There is no information in particle movement. Only something that looks like information to an information processor. It doesnt have actual meaning.
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Where do you live ? Somalia ?
Well that only supports my conclusion: that VW is likely to end up a government owned company much like what happened with GM rather than actually going bankrupt.
To be fair, my time in France was spent mostly in the Southern champagn region, I can't speak for Paris.
Oh and those "dangerous" places include San Francisco, USA.
Whats your point ? Just because something was done in the USSR doesn't mean it was bad. Even bad governments get some things right. Just like even idiots sometimes vote for the best candidate even if only by accident.
Okay, clearly US law is different from my country then... and also, completely insane.
Works for me.
I have no doubt that sometimes engineers can and will do evil things. But people who do evil usually do it for a reason - some kind of incentive. Very few people act evilly just for the sake of it, and when there is definitely profit made from the evil act it's kind of far-fetched to suggest that people who had no benefit from that profit would have done so for the sake of pure malice isn't it ?
So what incentive was there ? If the executives are accused, we would automatically jump to the conclusion that it was greed and probably be right. In the case where it's the lower-staff, that option doesn't exist. In fact - there is no apparent incentive, unless one was created by somebody who DID have one.
I am not saying the engineers were "automatically" acting on behest of somebody else - I'm concluding this on the basis that if they didn't then their crime has no discernable motive whatsoever.
In a world where the largest media company has never produced a single second of media (facebook), the largest video company makes no videos (youtube), the largest advertising company doesn't make any ads (google) and the largest retailer doesn't have any retail outlets (amazon) ... that is a fucking stupid question, in this world - it would be weird if the largest cab company HAD owned any cabs !
Nah, the cop was parking in front of his house to go see the woman he had an affair with... obviously the cop was fucking his wife.
Actually - this could benefit everybody. There is presumably a non-zero cost in sending out these automated tickets. A high margin of error would cost money to correct (or at least improve) and if everybody just pays there is no incentive to do so.
However if there is a mean to cheaply and easily challenge bad tickets, then the cost of sending them is now lost without the guaranteed return. Maximizing revenue now starts to depend on improving the margin of error such that almost no tickets get overturned so you don't pay for tickets that generate no income.
Of course the resulting revenue will be less than it was before, but it will be more guaranteed since it will not include tickets that would be easy to challenge. Forcing law enforcement to be meticulous in who they charge, what they charge with and what evidence they collect is a nett-win for society. A bigger problem is that it is quite uncertain if automated fine systems are any good to begin with. There is significant scientific evidence that suggests they have zero impact on driver behavior.
We could debate whether improving their quality would increase that impact - there are a lot of factors and I honestly can't guess - but it certainly is an argument in favor of scrapping them altogether and rather using those resources to come up with a newer and better way of enforcing traffic laws that, you know, actually makes people obey them.
You're not supposed to enter a crossing when the light is yellow, and you're supposed to slow down as you approach a crossing to a point where you can safely stop if it changes before you are inside.
The purpose of a yellow light is to give people who had crossed on green but are still in the intersection time to get out of it before letting cars enter from the other side. It's NOT a last chance to get across the intersection.
There is another factor - the penalties for fucking up is severe and the the assumption of liability based on relative risk. So if a car hits a pedestrian the driver WILL go to jail and WILL be deemed the one at fault. As the one operating a dangerous machine - the liability assumption is entirely on him.
The result is that people actually drive safely. They will stop to let you crossif you are merely walking towards a zebra crossing, long before you actually reach it. If there's a pedestrian on the sidewalk they slow down to about his speed to ensure that there is no risk of hitting him if he were to, for example, trip and fall in the road.
That's how you make accidents not kill pedestrians - you send people who hurt others in accidents to jail and you assume liability on the part of the one with the car.
I've lived for extended periods in about 30 different countries in Africa, South America and North America as well - nowhere was a pedestrian as safe as they were in France.
>The biggest homophobes are islamofascists. See Orlando, Tehran, Saudi Arabia.
Right because Christian homophobes have been so peaceful and progressive over the centuries... oh wait, well the last decade... pay no attention to the man with the trunk full of explosives on the way to the Pride. Pay no attention to Uganda, they've never liked gays anyway... of course until a bunch of American Christian Fundamentalists went to preach there they certainly didn't KILL any gays, disliking them is bad but most of us would considering being murdered worse than merely being disliked.
The only difference between your pethate countries and the US Christians is that the first ammendment means Christians have a harder time making their wishes the law of the land. It's not nearly as hard as it OUGHT to be (in case you were wondering - that would be 'impossible to ever even be concidered and any speaker who appreciates the constitution would refuse to even allow debate on any bill that is inspired by religious views - like Paul Ryan with gun control last week - so should all speakers be to biblethumper laws') but it's still a pretty high barrier.
Where that barrier does not exist (as in Uganda) the Christians do exactly the same.
In fact, even where it is absent in Muslim nations it, quite interestingly, they are often more progressive than the USA. The USA has to fight to let people pee in the bathroom they won't get beaten-up in, in Tehran sex-change operations are available free of charge to anybody who wants one.
>Anyone who pays more for a car because of emissions it is said to produce, is an idiot.
Put your money where your mouth is by putting your mouth over a tailpipe and breathing deeply.
Go ahead.
I'll wait.
>Have you even been following the story? You do know that this has little to do with the cars being able to run at *cough* dangerous speeds, right? Just checking.
Because poisoning people is so much better right ? That's what you are missing. Even if you are so anti-science that you entirely ignore the CO2 factor - what these engines mostly put out was extremely toxic gasses (like sulphur-dioxide) which are heavily regulated with damn good reason - because breathing that shit kills people.
It's almost guaranteed that quite a lot of people are dead because of this fraud.
The parent seems to conflate "non-violent" with "victimless" the two are radically different things. White-collar "non-violent" criminals like these should be getting the book thrown at them. We can put them in all the jailcells that will be empty if we release (and stop jailing) people for the victimless crimes of smoking pot or selling blowjobs.
The facts do seem to support this. Bosch wrote the original software and included the code which was used to do this cheat. It was a piece of debugging code and Bosch has shown proof of having specifically told VW not to use it in emissions tests as it's purpose was purely to validate code paths.
All VW had to do was add a few if statements and call the debug function when those conditions were met. That said - I find it extremely implausible that a few rogue low-level employees would have done that unless there was some sort of pressure from above. Low level people generally don't get profit sharing and aren't held liable if the car fails the test. So if they don't share the rewards for success, nor the punishment for failure - there is absolutely not incentive for them to do something with such a massive risk to themselves. That incentive had to come from somewhere else, and by far the most likely source is the people who DO share the rewards for success and punishment for failure. The executives had an incentive to pass the tests without making the cars run clean. The software engineers didn't - so the executives must have given them one.
> You could argue that goaling people to perform causes them to act this way, but the reality is just about every company goals people to perform.
And if the performance you reward cannot reasonably be achieved while following applicable laws then management ought to be culpable for de facto inciting criminal actions. There is a similar problem here in South Africa in the gold mines. A team of mineworkers can in theory, mine about 5 tonnes of earth a day. There are huge bonuses paid if they make 15. They aren't paid very well to begin with (considering the danger of the work they are actually paid a pittance), and without consistently making those bonuses most of them would starve. So since almost every team makes the bonusses almost every day - why not just pay them at that rate and simplify the bookkeeping, it's what they cost anyway, what motivates the companies to disguise 2/3rds of their pay as bonuses - clearly the 5 tonne level isn't actually accurate.
Actually it is. The only way to go beyond that is to basically ignore all safety measures and regulations. So in order to survive financially mineworkers need to forego virtually all their protections from dying today. Not letting the sprayers run properly for example, which all but guarantees breathing in mining dust that causes silicosis (but waiting for the sprayers takes a chunk of time that is needed if you want a yield over 5 tonnes).
The result is that mining accidents alone kills numerous miners every year, nearly all of them are entirely avoidable and would not have happened if the regulations were followed. But the companies get to say they provided the right equipment and the official rules require the workers to follow the regulations - it's not their fault if the workers broke the rules.
The fact that they made it almost impossible to follow those rules without starving really OUGHT to make them culpable for those deaths. The legislature may not agree but so far at least, it looks like the civil courts might - the court recently gave permission for a suit for causing silicosis to become a class action suit, which is likely to have many thousands of members. The case will take some time yet to come to trial but the companies fought very hard to try and prevent it becoming a class action case. Their arguments were that silicosis can be almost entirely prevented it safety measures are followed and they already pay a care fee to miners that get sick - so any cases out there now that are actually legitimate would be a few individuals where it happened despite the regulations being followed. The court rejected that argument and held that, if they are in fact responsible, they are responsible for all cases - and allowed the class action.
It's worth considering though - that the odds right now is that Volkswagen will not exist much longer. This is the first penalty - and almost 15 Billion it's a huge one, for perspective, when the issue first leaked VW set aside 17 Billion USD for handling the legal fallout. They sure did not expect to spend almost all of that on the very first case.
Just in the US there are still two more cases to come (one of them criminal) - and the US is the least of their problems here. Only about half a million cars were affected in the US. In Europe it affected nearly 4 million cars, European consumers are livid and multiple civil and criminal trials are ongoing there too - all of which we can expect will have larger penalties than this did (considering they have 8 times as many victims).
And while all this is happening - VW executives are being sued by the shareholders who blame this for destroying the value of their equity in the company. The criminal charges could very well still lead to prison sentences by the way - but even if not, when shareholders sue the executives limited liability does not apply (at least, not as much) so the main executives could lose a huge chunk of their personal wealth and assets in settlements or even bankruptcy.
Either way - the very existence of the company is now uncertain - it's entirely possible the company will file for bankruptcy even before all the cases conclude. Their tanked share prices have cost them massive market value and they are being forced to fend of these cases with only cash-in-hand while facing the biggest slowdown in sales in the history of the company (nobody wants to buy from a company that is known to have flat out defrauded their customers).
I am usually the one arguing that penalties for violating regulations or deceiving consumers are too light and the law effectively has no teeth against corporations and this is exactly why massive fraud and corporate malfeasance is so incredibly common that not a single company on wall street is NOT a criminal organisation - but in this case, the company really did bite of more than they can chew and the punishment is looking quite severe.
The really interesting question is what will happen to the guilty executives afterwards. Assuming they wriggle out of jailtime and survive the shareholder suit - will they get new jobs in the field ? Have enough money to start lucrative new careers ? Carly Fiorina did not share in any of the suffering she inflicted on HP - but then she didn't get the company covered in civil and criminal lawsuits to the point where it's very existence was at risk.
The best case scenario (for them) here is that it ends up like Enron - company bankrupted, a few executives in jail and the rest poisoning other companies.
The downside of that scenario is that it means the executives get very little real punishment for their crimes - the people who actually get punished are the ordinary workers who lose their livelihood over a decision they had nothing to do with, no authority to stop and for the most part no knowledge off. That's usually the trouble with the way we treat corporate criminals - they never have to deal with the consequences themselves, they make ordinary workers pay for it. My vote is that if VW does go under (which is looking extremely likely) the German government should buy it up cheaply and keep the workers employed, then replace it with actual competent staff. Flat out nationalizing it would be politically difficult (despite being, I think, absolutely justified) but they may not even need to do that. Considering that in this scenario the German government will likely be one of the largest creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings - they could almost certainly just do something as simple as agreeing to forego the usual asset auction and take payment in the form of a controlling share, with the agreement to resurrect the company and give a cash injection to pay off the other creditors.
>People probably choose to veer away from hitting people because they don't realize they might kill themselves - they just see what is in front of them and sure to happen, and don't have the time or wherewithall to consider the unknown consequences.
Well that fits my personal experience. The worst car accident I ever had happened when I swerved to avoid a hazzard on a highway while travelling at high speed. I ended up on the traffic island where I crashed into a tree.
This is where modern automotive technology makes a huge difference however. Despite hitting a tree head-on at 120km/h I walked away with nary a scratch. Airbags and crumplezones kept myself and my passengers alive and almost entirely uninjured. Car was utterly destroyed, but that's better than humans being hurt.
But thinking back - yes, that's exactly how it went. When you see a sudden hazard on the road at high speed there is simply no TIME to think through a chain of consequences or evaluate multiple possible chains of events. You can do this when you have more time - but modern ABS enabled cars can probably achieve a safe dead-stop in the same time - but when it's a sudden hazard like a large animal running onto the road out of bushes where it was hidden (as happened to me)
there is just no time to do that. You deal with the problem immediately in front of you using the first viable option - you swerve to avoid, trying to regain control and avoid subsequent problems caused by the swerve becomes something you think about *after* you've swerved. You may not have the time to actually process what new problems there are and react to them at all (I sure didn't) but you simply cannot consider them beforehand. Not to mention that the bit of thought you can spare is based on the extremely limited information and judgement calls. Part of why I chose to swerve towards the island was that (1) it meant not crossing other lanes which would potentially cause me to hit other cars and (2) the plants on the island appeared to be small shrubs - unlikely to cause major damage even if I couldn't avoid hitting one. Turns out that despite being pruned low - that thing had a massive trunk capable of turning my engine into something resembling an empty tin can in a vaccuum.
We already have laws around these things - that dictate what a driver is supposed to do in these conditions and what degree of liability he would have towards passengers or pedestrians. Autonomous cars should do exactly what the local law would have demanded a human driver do.
Do that first and maybe then you can talk of using it in sentencing. It would require very heavy regulation with very steep penalties for errors and criminal rather than civil liabillity.
Part of why the current system is so broken is because suing compabies is an expensive proposition and everybody who has cause to sue them by virtue if that very cause has great difficulty accessing finance.
Do you really think republicans would ever let such heavy handed regulation be passed over an industry that generous at campaign time?
Its an interesting question. A smart democrat would not have wanted the Afghanistan war (and neither would a smart republican in the bizarro world where one could actually get elected) but may well have ended up with their hand forced as you suggest.
Even then if all the resources wasted on Iraq could instead have been spent on Afghanistan it would have gone a great deal better and probably be over long ago at a fraction of the cost. It also would have kept Saddam's baatist military command in place and thus they would not have done what they did: form ISIS.
I never claimed they were good at it. Just that compassion has been built into our legal systems for millennia.
Thats why I said its less silly than my extreme example and even in another post called it a very useful metaphor. But it doesnt follow that a useful metaphor for describing something implies the thing is the metaphor. There is no information in particle movement. Only something that looks like information to an information processor. It doesnt have actual meaning.