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Comment by _57bk | Hacker News Reader

In July, France 2 (the #1 public national television channel in France) released a documentary [0] that showed to which extent the French auto manufacturer PSA lied about NO2 emissions.

At 1h19s [1], Pierre Macaudière, head of emission control systems at PSA, admits that the model tested emits 1700 ppm of NO2, after measuring 200 ppm (the legal limit) with their own machines.

At 1h17m11s [2], the researchers commissioned by the EU shows the journalist that not one manufacturer respects the legal limits of 200 ppm. He's frightened to tell the journalist that it's all just a widespread fraud.

* [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JFprj6v37Q

* [1] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h19s

* [2] https://youtu.be/5JFprj6v37Q?t=1h17m11s

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If that's true, then there's no way government officials weren't bribed and need to be prosecuted.

Which is kinda expected, considering the government is the second largest shareholder in VW.

Which calls for decentralized inspection, instead of relying again and again on governments to do the right thing. The only thing they are good at is accepting bribes.

Kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater there, no? I was in and out of publicly-run hospitals as a child, I wouldn't be alive today if not for socialized medicine.

That's incorrect. You wouldn't be alive today without medicine; the fact that it was provided by a socialized system is almost certainly irrelevant. There exist other, better and fairer mechanisms to provide healthcare, especially to those in genuine need.

Edited: to put it another way, imagine if you lived in a country with socialized car mechanics. You could easily make the claim that the only thing keeping you on the road was your good comrades at State Autoworks ...

That's right, the capitalist-libertarian answer is always "Fuck you, pay me", or in this case, "fuck you, die".

We have insurance. Its a great way to leverage the group so that all get a low rate. That given, "socialized" medicine is a group policy population wide: which should give the lowest rates split equally between all. Certainly makes the most sense.

I'm tempted not to reply to such an obvious straw man argument, but: take a look at the way mutual societies worked prior to socialised medicine. That's the sort of approach people opposed to socialized medicine would prefer. It provides cheap health care and looks after those incapable of doing so themselves, all without coercion.

I know a good deal about the Middle Ages, being part of the SCA. And indeed, it did work pretty well.

The problem is now is that it's not just 1 or 2 people involved with health of the area. It's the doctor, the 2 nurses, the 2 receptionists, the x-ray techs, the lab techs, the pharmacist, the pharmacist techs; all for a call to the doctor.

In hospitals, it's so crazy how billing works, that most hospitals do not actually know how much X costs. instead, they just bill exorbitantly to anyone without insurance, and insurance gives them the agreed upon price.

Drug companies are also really messed up: the US ends up subsidizing the rest of the world's drugs, all the while biasing on maintenance based drugs over cures.

The FDA also has its fair share to blame. They control which universities are accredited, and directly control the flow of doctors purely on the say-so from the AMA, a doctor union.

Considering the complicated nature, insurance covering the nation, aka socialized care, makes the most sense. Tearing down systems like I said above really isn't sustainable.

It's not insurance if you're compelled to buy into it. I believe those are more commonly known as 'protection rackets' ;)

But yeah. Lots of problems: opaque billing, medical cartels (AMA), scale, crony capitalism on the part of drug companies and politicians, ... it's quite a list.

The thing is, many of those problems are a consequence of the existing system of socialised medicine, and would be fixed by the de-nationalisation of the industry.

I happen to strongly agree with you that part of the problem is a shortage of medical staff caused, in part, by a cartel (the AMA). Note their position on the matter of genuinely capitalistic medicine. It's not a coincidence.

Further to this, in Rand's words:

=====

“Dear [socialists], our objective, like yours, is the welfare of the poor, more general wealth, and a higher standard of living for everybody—so please let us capitalists function, because the capitalist system will achieve all these objectives for you. It is in fact the only system that can achieve them.”

This last statement is true and has been proved and demonstrated in history, and yet it has not and will not win converts to the capitalist system. Because the above argument is self-contradictory. It is not the purpose of the capitalist system to cater to the welfare of the poor; it is not the purpose of a capitalist enterpriser to spread social benefits; an industrialist does not operate a factory for the purpose of providing jobs for his workers. A capitalist system could not function on such a premise.

=====

> This last statement is true and has been proved and demonstrated in history

On the contrary, that last statement is false, which has been demonstrated in history, and is largely why the system for which the term "capitalism" was coined is no longer the dominant system of the developed world, having been replaced by mixed economies -- which transition Rand was part of the rear guard arguing against, and to reverse -- which retain in outline the property structure of capitalism, but import many aspects of socialism to deal better with exactly those problems than capitalism ever did.

"... which retain in outline the property structure of capitalism, but import many aspects of socialism to deal better with exactly those problems than capitalism ever did."

That's a contradiction. You can't have both the property structure of capitalism, and state socialism. You have to violate the former to achieve the latter. I'd argue that current systems claim to keep the structure of the former, but violate it at will.

In terms of dealing better with the provision of healthcare than capitalism ... have you seen the state of the American healthcare system recently?

Yes, US healthcare sucks, but is still-- despite being less universal and less efficient than that of any other modern advanced economy (all of which are also mixed economies) -- better than anything that existed anywhere when capitalism was the dominant model, and not just due to (non-social) technical advances.

Of course, the US has adopted, in many areas and healthcare particularly, less elements of socialism than other advanced mixed economies. So maybe there's a reason US healthcare sucks so hard, and its not insufficient devotion to capitalism.

"So maybe there's a reason US healthcare sucks so hard, and its not insufficient devotion to capitalism."

The list of problems that the previous poster provided were almost all (especially cronyism and cartels) characteristics of systems other than capitalism.

Is it possible we're using different definitions of capitalism, here? I think you might mean crony-capitalism, a.k.a. fascism.

I think the problem here is that capitalism when played out in a longer term, trends towards crony capitalism, fascism, plutocracy, and/or nepotism.

I mean the real economic system that was dominant in the developed world from the late 19th to early 20th Century, which certain of its socialist critics created the word "capitalism" to refer to, since criticising it without a name was problematic, and it was an economic system by which property arrangements, policy, etc., were organized around the interests of the capitalist class.

Cronyism and cartels were certainly not infrequent features of that system.

Fascism is something different and newer.

... which was also the system that produced this:

http://crfblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/2007112238img1...

Sure, there were problems. Abuses of power, cronyism, etc. But capitalism quite literally rescued the world from poverty, and continues to do so:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/wordpovert...

And who should do it? Universities and NGOs are commonly bribed as well..

You mean like private companies inspecting individual cars on a periodic basis as a requirement for that car being street-legal?

never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence...

I work at the French auto Inspection facility. I'm not keeping up with research done by some people in Brussels because I'm busy living my life. A car rolls in, I check for defeat devices of the kind previously found.

Because the organization is reactive, not proactive, I don't find any newer kind of defeat device (also, I'm not Sherlock Holmes). Car gets approved.

The lack of time and/or resources to enforce these limits: a bug or a feature? Certainly a sin of omission.

This is frequently not bribery. There are a few other mechanisms. One of them is regulatory capture. The other is what I'd call the 'boiling frog'-effect, where, if everyone is doing it and it has been going on since before you got into the business, your moral compass readjusts and you tolerate more wrongdoing than you should.

You should submit your findings to some independent media like mediapart or ASI.

Edit: it is already circulating in some media, but has not been pick up by other yet.

Are there closed captions or transcripts available? Edit: In English?

NB: France 2 will broadcast it again on Monday 28, 23:05 Paris Time.

This needs to be far higher.

Just for Volkswagen - 11m vehicles.

Average price of new car is around $35,000

So, for this recall, we are talking a list price of over 350 billion dollars.

And that is just from what we know of VW.

They're not taking the cars back and destroying them. They'll send letters to all the owners telling them to come in to a VW dealer for some warranty service. A tech will flash the ECU and they'll be back out on the road in a minutes. It will definitely be costly but not $350B.

VW set aside 6.5 billion EUR provisions for the recall.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/22/vw-scandal-germanys-reputatio...

Will that leave the car with less horse power or reduced fuel consumption? If so more lawsuits around the corner

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