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Comment by justsaysmthng | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed changes in my personality since this scandal happened.

Before it, I strongly believed that it's possible to be just as successful and competitive without breaking any rules.

I didn't go to exams which I didn't study for and refused to cheat when everyone else was doing it. I had opportunities to earn a lot of money by doing shady things, but I've always refused, because I didn't want to compromise on my moral values.

But diesel gate made me stop and think.

If Germany's largest company does it - then who else does it ?

Add to that the wiki/snowden leaks and now the panama papers (to name just a few) and I'm totally confused:

It seems that the rich and successful are all corrupt cheaters.

Why do I have to part with 30%-40% of my earned income so that some corrupt politicians can spend them on wars and distribute them to their cronies ?

Why do I have to play by the rules when the only advantage of doing so is a "clear conscience" which nobody gives two cents about ... maybe just my 5-year old daughter.. but she also believes in Santa Claus.

So this scandal has really put me at a moral crossroads - will I go on being a "sucker" or play by the "big boys' rules" and be taken 'seriously' - take advantage of the weak, find ways to avoid taxes, steal, cheat, etc ?

What's even more disturbing is that this scandal was provoked by maybe a handful of executives at VW, but now tens of thousands of engineers and workers are going to pay the price - in the form of layoffs, reduced bonuses and so on.

Once again, very unfair, since most of those people, I'm sure, are good professionals.

So yeah, scandals like this generate more than financial losses or pollution. They generate loss of faith and disappointment and encourage others to step over the line to the "dark side" and become corrupt themselves.

View on HN

Historically when the masses were closer to missing 3 meals in a row on account of bad public policies, or were regularly sent off to be slaughtered en-masse in battle in other countries on behalf of their monarchs, this is the kind of thought process that led to revolutions.

And things generally got better. Not indefinitely. And sometimes they stayed objectively BAD. But better. And change and progress is never a straight line.

But now? With everyone in the Western world well-fed with cheap (relatively) calorie-rich food, and well-entertained with cheap (relatively) entertainment, everyone is too scared to lose what they have to actually question the status quo. As soon as anyone does, there's a reminder that millions of people in the 3rd world will not have enough access to fresh water in our lifetimes, so we should be happy with what we DO have not what we don't. And if that's not enough, many of those people from the 3rd world want to terrorize and kill us, don't you know?

So what's a society to do when the best we can do seems to be Barrack Obama and Justin Trudeau (not bad, but ultimately unfulfilling)

The bolsheviks had it partially right all along, honestly. There's enough wealth in this world for the entire planet to live prosperously in peace. But neither central planning nor the free market is a good enough system on their own to ensure there is some semblance of fairness in the world and yet incentives to innovate and grow humanity forward.

Technologically speaking we are at an extremely exciting time. I feel like I should be optimistic about the next 20 years. Instead I'm terrified of what humanity will actually do with this potential in the short term like watching a toddler with a hand grenade and just hoping he chews on it for a bit, and gets bored of it, rather than figuring out the pin.

So much propaganda has been targeted directly at the 'middle class'. Be thankful you aren't in a third world country. At least you have a job. At least you live in the USA.

Meanwhile, wages are being cut, they are being bled dry paying for healthcare they can't afford, new entrants have tens of thousands of student debt they cannot pay off, they realize their voting in new people, either republican or democrat gets them the same old shit (see: Sanders and Trump, the outsiders).

I am optimistic for the next stage in US development, but I also think you are correct that people are angry, but don't know which direction to force it. Fascism is just as likely (if not more likely) than a socialist revolution if people uphold strong nationalism, protectionism, and direct their anger at some marginalized social group (formerly Jews, now Immigrants).

This is my #1 fear as someone who just recently moved to Europe from North America to travel and see the world while working.

Europe is NOT dealing well with multiculturalism and immigration. And while the American/Canadian progressive left goes more radical, at least it keeps the extreme right wing in check. The European left is too scared and complacent to either set boundaries or speak up for the benefits of liberalism due to complacency after decades of being in charge. As a result, the conservative/nationalist/fascist wings are DOMINATING the conversation, and are winning hearts and minds.

And yeah, I'm fully expecting at least one Eastern European country to start openly locking up muslims within a decade.

> The European left is too scared and complacent to either set boundaries or speak up for the benefits of liberalism due to complacency after decades of being in charge.

I don't think that's the full picture. First of all I don't think the European left has been in charge for decades, and second of all austerity measures e.g. in Spain have resulted in left movements growing stronger.

It all depends on the country, really.

I agree with most of your points (I'm one of those well-fed not-ready-for-revolution types, despite being very much a self-confessed leftie) but:

> Justin Trudeau (not bad, but ultimately unfulfilling)

I don't follow Canada very closely, but isn't it a bit early to judge his record? (Totally agree on Obama btw, but that was coming from the day he announced Biden as his running mate...)

> There's enough wealth in this world for the entire planet to live prosperously

No there isn't, really. It's growing and we're trying to figure out ways to feed everyone and help everyone, but levelling down first-world disparities wouldn't free enough resources to really level up the third world. Consumption rates are just too high all across the board. We (well, some) are trying to figure out more efficient ways of producing and consuming (solar etc) but there's a long way ahead if we really want to take billions of people out of poverty.

We are producing ample food for everyone, it's just that we prefer to use most of it for other things because prefer luxury meats and ethanol to feeding everyone.

It's very similar to how we are shooting the next generation in the foot with coal and oil.

There's no tradeoff between "luxury meats" and feeding everyone. The appropriate signals will be perceived by the Big Food Machine and more will be made as soon as there is room on the shelves. Agricultural land goes out of production now, fast. Conservation easements offer the service of allowing people who have inherited family land to be able to abate taxes on it in exchange for taking it out of production.

This isn't Panglossian; it's just the facts.

Ethanol is just bad politics.

Excellent points, both of them. I guess my thought process is Trudeau could be the most capable leader in the history of Canada, he can only do so much in charge of 30 million people of a 10th most powerful economy in the world. Canada can and is setting a good example, and I'm supremely happy to have my citizenship, but it won't be what makes or breaks the success of the rest of the world. Least of all our nearest neighbor who'll listen to China before us.

There would be if people would stop consuming total crap. See: Chinese toy factories, American Fast Food.

What truly interests me is the idea that, potentially within our lifetimes, we will be forced to admit that there is no longer enough gainful work for all humans to have traditional jobs.

Self-driving cars have the potential to remove ALL transportation-related jobs from the job-pool. And there are many other fields which could probably be entirely operated by machines when the technology is sufficiently advanced.

Historically the labor saved by technology has been moved to other fields, but I have my doubts that this is sustainable.

> And there are many other fields which could probably be entirely operated by machines when the technology is sufficiently advanced.

As far as I can tell the technology is sufficiently advanced, just not sufficiently applied. Considering all the tech. involved in autonomous driving there are plenty of jobs that could be automated away with it not just ones involving vehicle use.

This is getting pretty far off topic, but since it's one of my obsessions too, I have to reply. :)

I agree we'll inevitably get to the point where the vast majority of jobs are done cheaper/better by technology (software, robots, etc.). And let's just disregard Artificial Super Intelligence for the moment, which may make this projection moot. So, how does society work when there are legitimately, structurally no jobs for, let's say, 60% of the worldwide adult population?

I think the answer largely depends on how quickly our abundance rises, and a big part of that is energy. I expect/hope we'll one day discover/invent a source of energy that is nearly-free, nearly-infinite, and nearly-zero-maintenance. Now imagine this magic energy cube is relatively cheap to produce and small enough to be transported in the back of a pickup truck, my simple test for its ubiquity.

At that point (free ubiquitous energy + ubiquitous automation), we'll eventually be able to feed, clothe, and house everyone for essentially free – at least at a comfortable albeit minimalistic level. So people don't have to work to survive. Many people would choose to work for the satisfaction it provides and of course the prestige and access to luxury goods. But many people might not want to work – at least not traditional jobs. Assuming virtual reality continues to improve, people might spend their days "working" in World of Warcraft (or its future equivalent) or just enjoying the expanding plethora of entertainment options. Basically, imagine everyone has access to a replicator and lives in a holodeck, to use Star Trek vernacular. Working becomes optional.

I don't know. But I think the situation fundamentally changes when we have the abundance to easily support people who can't find a job or just don't want to work. The big question in my mind is whether we can start moving up the abundance curve before the impending jobs crisis. Throughout history, large numbers of unemployed adults, especially young men, has led to mass upheaval. But if we have sufficient abundance and entertainment, we might break that cycle.

>I expect/hope we'll one day discover/invent a source of energy that is nearly-free, nearly-infinite, and nearly-zero-maintenance.

The sun? :-)

Fits in a truck? Check!

Twenty billion years isn't forever. In fact, I think there's a story about that. ;)

http://multivax.com/last_question.html

All well and fine, but with this increase in technology.. when everyone is well clothed and well fed -- will people strive to cause suffering in order to "have more" or make others "have less"? Eg. sabotaging your replicator because you didn't support my World of Warcraft political decision

We've been here before. See "The Physiocrats" for this related to agriculture.

If my species is dependent on suffering for its derivation of "value" then it deserves whatever suffering it gets from that.

I'd read up on the Bolshies a bit. They were murderous thugs. That's not exactly propaganda, that's a mix of Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and various bios of the principal players.

"Toddler with a hand grenade" is exactly right. Thing is, it was ever thus. None of this even remotely compared to the disruption had because of color (organic) chemistry.

Question the status quo all you want, but it's always there for a reason. One need not make a fetish of it to observe that it took all the errors we could muster to get it this far.

Don't fret, you've only been the victim of a loss of perspective. Others replying to you fell in the same trap.

Let's take the VW scandal as the first example.

What happened: VW lied and cheated on gas emission trials.

What happened surrounding this: cars have been improved to emit fewer gas, new hybrid vehicules have been designed, completely electrical cars are now feasible, safety equipment have been improved, new car safety mecahnism like lane change detection added...

On the whole, cars are better and better. They keep improving. The emission scandal was just that, a scandal, a lie, a cheat. Today's VW cars are still much better than they were 10 or 20 years ago. On the scale of world events, it's been given way too much weight.

The same applies to other areas. The same basic underlying rule: any system can be cheated. There will always people evading rules. That does not make the rules bad, not the normal mode of operation useless. Capitalism works because it give decentralized power, has some self-balancing effect of responding to supply and demand, etc. That it can be abused does not eliminates it's advantage. That we can discover scadals is a good things: abuse will always exist, and we're showing that it can be found out and exposed.

How is that bad?

IMO, you're the one who has lost perspective. Have you heard the expression "Can't see the forest for the trees?" You're climbing along one branch and can't see the rest.

Capitalism is failing the vast majority of the species.

Capitalism is ruining the only ecosystem human's are capable of thriving in.

"Capitalism 4eva!" is used as a bludgeon to keep the masses in line while the powerful steal by expropriating the output of the masses.

And all those things you mention about better emissions were supposedly happening back in 1999. How do you know if they're still not just cheating anyway? And things like Tesla were coming along before this. They're completely unrelated. Electric cars were feasible years ago, except the rich didn't care for them.

Take your words about how yes cheating happens in a system and apply it to the economy as a whole. It's THAT level of cheating and fraud the OP was talking about. You're drilling down too deep.

I guess that just reinforce parent's point.

Cheating is not so bad, why aren't you doing it ?

I won't go as far as saying that we should train our children to cheat but the moral stigma we put on cheating is completely at odds with the actual practical effect of cheating in society. If you tell your children that cheating is bad, you deprive them of the #1 tool that the majority of successful people and companies have been using ( and the most famous cases of cheating like how Bill Gates tricked IBM are considered legendary genius moves )

Of course you can cheat too far, like we see in China with fake milk and that kind of things, but the Western ideal of "no cheating ever" is not the answer to that anymore than "abstinence" is the answer to unwanted pregnancies.

I don't think it's possible to overstress how important "it's been given too much weight" is. Classify it as a defect that was hard to find, put a patch in and move on.

Funny, because for myself, reading about these events from a marxist perspective, not a single one of them is surprising. In fact, all of them are completely predictable.

The story that we've been sold about laissez faire capitalism and neoliberal economics is a farce, pushed by the epic levels of deregulation during the Reagan era.

There is no "crony-capitalism," it's just capitalism. That's it, that's what capitalism does. It breeds inequality.

Your statement is light on meaning unless you can explain how X avoids breeding inequality. Alternatives to capitalism breed inequality as well. Compare any ruling Communist Party to a civilian in their regime.

Yes, a member of the communist party cadre in certain historical times was separated from the workers they represented. They were full time revolutionaries, no longer part of the working class. This was one of the main issues (in my opinion) with the USSR.

In modern socialist revolutions, the representation must not be separated from the working class. Though, I am also more supportive of tendencies that uphold grassroots democratic behavior. See Rojava for more interesting ideas on that.

The system you are talking about sounds like a cross between a direct democracy and a post-scarcity communist society, if you've not read the works of Iain M Banks you should check them out, you are pretty much describing The Culture :).

> The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchist utopian society

Woah, yes, that's going to number one on my reading list. Thanks for the recommendation.

IMO possibly the best sci-fi ever written, the stories are incredible and his writing style is sublime.

I envy you getting to read them all for the first time.

I'm reading the Mars trilogy right now. It's also really good.

Haven't read the others, but Red Mars is excellent, and better than Culture, in my opinion (though the latter varies in quality).

For another vision of a futuristic post-scarcity anarchist adhocracy, see James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear, which features less "magical" AI and is more of a reflection on cultural conditioning.

But how is that justification any different from the ones proponents of free-market capitalist use to explain why our system is different from what they propose?

There's a difference between debating the merits of communism and the tactics to get there.

I think communism is better for people than free markets because markets run on competition, which is in stark contrast to mutual aid, which is how communism works. There are of course many other factors that go into why I think communism is better than free markets, but there's many other reading resources on that. There are also market socialists who oppose capitalism, but support free markets.

Within the left, there are many different tendencies that people have developed to get to some sort of socialist economic structure. The main one we've experienced in the 20th century is Marxism-Leninism. This was developed by Lenin, and basically issues in socialism by the proletariat seizing control of the state and using it to suppress the bourgeoisie until the class no longer exists, at which point, the proletarian state withers away and tada! Communism.

There are also anarchist movements that involved destroying the state at the same time as seizing the means of production. See Revolutionary Catalonia or currently Rojava for interesting movements in these veins.

There is also democratic socialism, which basically involves communist parties getting elected into the government and issuing legislative changes that move toward socialism. This tendency is not revolutionary, but evolutionary. This is sort-of what has been going on in France and Greece. My opinions on this tendency aren't favorable, but to each their own.

Sorry, to answer your question, capitalism breeds inequality because private ownership is a hierarchy.

There are those who own, and there are those are required to pay the owner for use of their property. People who own amass capital at an ever increasing rate thanks to exponential growth. People who pay the capitalists for things like food and housing never amass much money at all, certainly nowhere near the order of magnitude that the capitalists do.

Private property allows people to profit from the surplus of workers labor without having to work themselves. It's Marxism 101.

what I don't understand is how I'm supposed to be satisfied with false equality where the vast majority of power and wealth get concentrated into a few controlling hands as opposed to the situation that exists in capitalism now, with that power and wealth spread out more vastly than at any point in human existence.

That isn't true.[1] Honestly, I see absolutely no basis with which you could possible make that claim.

[1] http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/...

> what I don't understand is how I'm supposed to be satisfied with false equality where the vast majority of power and wealth get concentrated into a few controlling hands

You're not describing communism, so I guess that's a straw man. You're not supposed to be satisfied with that situation, and that's what communism, idealistically, tries to address. Whether it's effective in the real world is certainly debatable, but we can't have that debate if you change the definition of communism to essentially mean authoritarianism.

Funny, because Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, Cuba etc are not beacons of equality.

Regulated free market countries empirically have more equality.

Leninism, Stalinism, etc. (countries you mentioned) are attempts to fix problems with capitalism identified by Marx and Engels.

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis and it true that Marx and Engels writing offered scientific/philosophic background for revolutions (which ended up worse than capitalism). But their critique of capitalism is still very much valid.

If you want be successful capitalist you need read "Das Capital": many things will become clear. Or just watch it: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Deregulation isn't exclusive to the Reagan era, how about the Clinton era as well, ie. Glass-Steagall.

Which is the perfect example that both republicans and democrats have the same objective. They are both capitalist parties, I wish there was a true left party in the US to represent the working class.

http://www.gp.org/ ?

They haven't explicitly come out against capitalism yet. Though, their youth caucus has drafted a proposal to change their platform to come out as explicitly anti-capitalist. Richard Wolff[1], Democracy@Work cofounder helped draft it.

[1] http://www.democracyatwork.info/richard_wolff

You can't use Marxism because it's critically based on Malthus and Malthus has been completely discredited.

The story is a farce. But actual capitalism - the creation of value for other people - doesn't breed inequality. What we have is a parody of capitalism.

That is exactly how corruption spreads.

> Before it, I strongly believed that it's possible to be just as successful and competitive without breaking any rules.

Yes. Immunity to corruption can be a bit like herd immunity equivalent to outbreaks of "corruption" if it was seen as a disease. If everyone is more or less honest, those will suppress and flush out those who are corrupt. If there is no-one to pay a bribe to, then it is hard to be corrupt and so on.

However after a certain threshold, it is hard not to be corrupt. Because you fight an uphill battle against corruption (and it will fight back).

For example, in school you didn't cheat. Now imagine 50% of people cheat. They start getting better grades. Teachers think material is a bit too easy, even those that slack off during the year, seem to ace the finals. So they make those harder. You start falling behind. Now you have an incentive to cheat.

Another example. You go to take your driving test. Examiner is corrupt. He tells you to turn at the wrong place. You turn. He fails you. He suggest <wink, wink> to try a different approach next time. You don't understand what he means. You keep getting failed every time. Until someone suggest he meant he wanted a bribe. So you bribe him because otherwise you probably never going to get a drivers' license.

And so on. But you get the idea.

Reminds me of the classic argument against just allowing all drugs in sports.

If Drug A gives you 10% better performance for 20% worse health, you probably wouldn't bother using it. But the opposing team has no such inhibitions and are all on it! So, if you wanted to be competitive anymore, you have to sacrifice that 20% health. And on and on.

For anyone treating this as new information... it's not. The etymology of "defeat device," the term the EPA is using, dates back to the 70s when automakers started pulling similar crap.

Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Caterpillar, Cummins, Detroit Diesel, Mack, Navistar, Renault, and Volvo Trucks have all been caught rigging their vehicles to lie to owners and emissions testers, with varying degrees of plausible deniability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeat_device

The (automotive) world has always been like this, it's just been a little while since the last highly publicized scandal.

Why do I have to part with 30%-40% of my earned income so that some corrupt politicians can spend them on wars and distribute them to their cronies ?

We part with 30-40% of our income because we make enough to pay that but not enough to afford accountants that can hide our income or find creative means to reduce our taxes so we can pay less.

We play by the rules because we know what the potential consequences are, are unwilling to risk that, and we assume everyone else is playing by the rules as well. Also, we may have created rules for ourselves that perhaps don't need to apply and/or aren't the ones others play by. I think we need to find out what rules they play by (if at all) and start basing our decisions off of those.

Unfortunately this seems to be one of the few ways to get ahead aside from winning the lottery (waste of money) and saving that money.

They're quick to take credit when something groundbreakingly successful occurs but even quicker to shed responsibility. Again, this seems like another "rule" they play by to get ahead.

I 100% agree that following "moral values" will get your short stick in capitalism. And that is just because there is always that 2% [1] which does not have any moral values.

I really do not have solution for this - the only thing I can suggest is to stick and make connections with people who have moral values.

[1] The 2% (actual number is 1.76%) is percentage of my users who cheat and lie (pathological users). I believe that number is valdi for rest of the population. And it is really hard to pinpoint background of these people. For example, there is professor from famous University who got our service for free and then asked for their money back (I kid you not).

One possible thing to do could be pointing out that the shorter stick can still be long enough. E.g. i can perfectly sustain my lifestyle without getting "smart" with my taxes and more expensive toys would not outweigh the loss in honesty.

Unfortunately, even this has an inequality hidden inside: for the shorter stick to be sufficiently long, a certain level of privilege might be required and then privilege multiplies itself when people egoistically think along the lines of "i don't know if any of those guys are honest, but i'll go with that privileged one, he looks like he could at least afford to be".

Thinking of it, this might actually be the reason why we still suffer from this stupid tendency to trust the salesperson in the flashy BMW more than the one in the skimpy Honda, even if we consciously suspect that he paid for it with money he got for screwing his previous customers.

There is no moral in our economy it went away after share holder value was the only value that counts.

Look at all the scandals we see over and over again its part of "the cost of making business" as long as you can make a profit in the end do it.

Its a shark pool.

There wasn't more moral when landowner or factory owner or slaveowner value was the only value that counts.

Given that when the rich get caught they just pay a fine that was a percentage of what they made by doing whatever they got caught for then I don't see this changing.

You get the very rare notable case of a rich person going to prison for this shit (notable because they actually go to prison) of which they serve a fraction of their sentence in club fed.

Not sure what the the solution is but for some of the tricks they've pulled I'm amazed some fucker hasn't climbed the nearest tall building with a high powered rifle.

Given that when the rich get caught they just pay a fine that was a percentage of what they made by doing whatever they got caught for then I don't see this changing.

Unfortunately, you're correct on this and it seems that unless someone commits a violent crime, they just end up getting fined unless they can't afford it (middle class) in which case they get the book thrown at them.

You get the very rare notable case of a rich person going to prison for this shit (notable because they actually go to prison) of which they serve a fraction of their sentence in club fed.

I'm not sure where you read this but it isn't accurate. Federal prisoners serve almost 90% of their sentenced time whereas state prisoners are eligible for parole after serving as little as 25% of their sentence.

So what's going on is an arms race between the rule makers and the people who have to operate things. The people who do things are losing.

I've been waiting for a VW story for a long time. I've heard "fix it in software" most of my adult life. It was only a matter of time.

The only way to have this level of involvement by "regulators" in products is transparency and a collegial relationship. If criminal or civil , or even moral sanctions are in play, there cannot be an open exchange of ideas.

You cannot have it both ways - if there are adversarial relationships as part of people's careers, then this will happen. This, though, is now seen as "corruption".

I mean - really think through all the implications of RJR v. United States dispassionately, without taking a side. So here's one of the largest corporations in America, defined down to racketeer. Yes, I said "defined" - one week they were not, the next they were. That's "defined".

Bottom line? They'd been identified as unreliable already. That should have been enough.

I hate to be that guy, but the Panama Papers also hold no surprise for me. That was to be expected. As Tim Worstall is fond to say, tax avoidance is a normal activity. The hypocrisy of state entities in this is also deplorable. They wish to enjoy the privileges of the state actor while drawing on international resources. How is this not an empire demanding tribute?

Outrage, especially moral outrage, is fun and all but it doesn't accomplish anything. Perhaps ISIS is the bellwether - we'd rather have a sense of moral purity than something to eat and physical security. Because those things require compromise.

If the "right" thing was also the prudent thing, we wouldn't have to make the distinction. Religion and law try to balance out the cost of morality, but in the end, a lot of the world wins by bad behavior, so we will often pay for being good. But we still should.

"The World" is an appeal to some platonic form that doesn't exist. There is no organization of the world that we as a society are tending towards. It's just the system we are under, which currently is capitalism, which is private ownership of the means of production (land, factories, machinery, corporations, etc...), which is fundamentally different from slavery, fuedalism, monarchy, etc.

However, there are systems which 'don't allow' the rampant levels of inequality that we have now, in the same way that capitalism 'doesn't allow' for every working person to become a wealthy CEO. Unfortunately, since the red scare, these systems have been absent from the American consciousness. Though, recently they are starting to repopularize.

the system we are under, which currently is capitalism, which is fundamentally different from slavery

When there is an abundance of labour supply and re-training requires huge capital, there's little difference between capitalism and slavery from the labourer's perspective.

oh completely agreed. Though slavery with respect to ownership means even people are considered productive means to be owned. At least people (in general, obviously this still exists in some places in the world) own themselves, and have some illusion of freedom.

> Though slavery with respect to ownership means even people are considered productive means to be owned.

But they are, especially in low-wage or tipped shift work. People are kept under unethical and often illegal rules, pointing out that they're illegal will probably get you fired, and even holding a second job to make ends meet might end up with you being fired from one or the other if both your bosses decide they need you in on a certain shift. The idea of "self-ownership" only applies insofar as you can find someone else who will hire you (likely under very similar terms to your current job - i.e. under constant threat of being fired) for most people.

As people generally in a skilled job with some savings, most people on this site are somewhat buffered from the realities of what a lot of people across most of the world, including their own countries, have to deal with.

Yup, it's despicable. Wage-slavery is basically the system minimum wage workers live under now. They may not be bought and sold like cattle, but they are viewed and treated as such.

Interestingly, in Seattle, with the 15/hr movement, initially businesses were using small business as a shield to argue that 15/hr was unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, they quickly changed their tune when we said that we would levy greater taxes on larger corporations to subsidize small business.

These reasons, among many others, is why I'm involved in 15 Now and other fight for 15/hr minimum wage that's pegged to inflation. Capitalism is increasingly unstable. People continue gaining consciousness of this fact.

I think of it this way: if you are one of the super rich, then you have a special personality which comes with corruption and other weird personality things. I am rather a normal person with much less wealth, but good moral values.

So that's all the YC partners then? PG etc?

Your version sounds backwards.

If you have a corruptible personality, and live in a society that incentivizes corruption (most if not all do), then you have a better chance of getting super rich. It doesn't mean anyone who is super rich must be corrupt.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

Mahatma Gandhi

Drats, you made me look it up, and found this: http://twofriarsandafool.com/2010/06/a-team-gandhi/

Thanks ;-)

I know that feeling, but please reconsider.

I think you are wildly underestimating people's surprising ability to do the wrong thing without even fully noticing.

Defeat device engineer? Emission levels are obviously O(n), with n being fuel consumption and the small but important twist that in the case of NOx and friends, O is far from constant but highly variable depending on many outside factors. But when the root purpose of the defeat device is to allow more aggressive mileage/CO2 optimizations (at the cost of a much higher big-O) it would be easy enough to conveniently forget all about O even while actively making it a lot more variable than it is naturally. Yay, higher mileage, lower n, planet saved, it's good to be us.

It's incredibly stupid, but according to hanlon's razor, that is how most evildoing gets done.

Still, I fully agree with your conclusion that the loss of trust (and the resulting lower threshold for future evildoings) is even worse than all the NOx/NSA/lost taxes.

Please don't forget that this might very well cause VW to have to withdraw from the U.S. market entirely, and could even pose an existential threat.

As far as morals go, by all means skate as close to the edge as you possibly can. Bend the rules when absolutely necessary.

But don't break the rules. The person you are now would not like the person you would become.

It sounds like you have a conscience, so be careful not to make the mistake of thinking two wrongs make a right :) You still have to live with your decisions in your own mind all your life, even if you never get caught. Some people literally don't have that "problem".

I have a friend who is a divorce lawyer for the rich, and basically, yes. Most fortunes are built in illegitimate ways and there is a lot of asset hiding.

Think of the Kennedys who built their fortune rum-running and then went legit with the money pile they built up. Nice work if you can get it.

> divorce lawyer

Using "rich people who are getting divorced" adds a pretty big confounding variable to your analysis.

>Think of the Kennedys who built their fortune rum-running and then went legit with the money pile they built up. Nice work if you can get it.

Not according to wikipedia. It says they he build his fortune in the stock market and real estate, long before prohibition. His profits from alcohol were after prohibition, and were entirely legitimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.

The principal root of the fortune was Joe Sr. pulling out of the stock market into cash in 1929. Massive information asymmetry in his favor.

Rumrunning was just something people did.

I disagree. I think this shows that if you break the rules with impunity, there is a significant risk that you will be caught. The Panama papers is another great example of this. Overall this is likely to have a net negative impact for VW.

The Panama papers don't, in fact, show that a lot of rich people are scamming tax. Many of those people are likely paying capital gains tax in their countries when they sell their assets (as Cameron did). The few that are evading tax will likely get caught.

As I see it, the majority of the really rich aren't corrupt (at least in the USA/Canada). Other countries maybe, but those countries tend to be corrupt to begin with.

Do the correct thing because it is the correct thing to do.

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