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Comment by andrew_eit | Hacker News Reader

How is it that, in a country which values precision and 'doing things right' to the extent that you will be told off by bystanders for crossing an empty road at night on a red light, there could be such brazen, unethical and scaled corruption at a corporate level.

Like, at a community level, the average German citizen takes it upon themselves to speak out when they feel anyone is acting anti-socially. Which I admire!

But then Dieselgate, the Wirecard scandal, and a bunch of other non-nonsensical activities (immense coal energy industry, buying gas from Russia and general lack of large scale green policy) just seem so far removed from the Germany I know.

I really don't understand how something like Dieselgate can happen at the scale that it did. And Wirecard too - with BaFin even stepping in to harass the investigative journalists from the FT.

Is there something I am missing here?

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Easy answer. Three things: * Money * Lobbyism * Job security

We party of Merkel is great for "stability". But this stability also means everything bad will stay bad and stuff like policing lobbyism is not a priority for those politicians, because they are good enough to hide it and profit from it so much, that they don't want it to change at all. Worse, we even have one party FDP which is really small, but openly pushes against policing lobbyism and they are the second or third largest benefactor of huge lobby donations.

The powerful want to stay powerful. If you ask the normal citizen they would want things to change at least to make everything more right.

The third point is also quite critical. The biggest industry in Germany is car manufacturing. And because of this every change here might disrupt millions of people, potential voters, and harm the industry. The reason germany did not come up with a great Tesla competitor or even Tesla itself is because of that. Everything moves so slow in these companies, they depend on so many other companies to get you some part of your car and then in the end assemble it all, that any change will disrupt too much and gets killed before it can bud.

What makes Germany so different than Canada? Sheer population?

In both countries there is a marked willingness to do the right thing, but I'm struggling to remember corruption anywhere close to the size of what goes on there.

Greater ability to detect corruption? I always presume that for every case that makes headlines there are dozens that don't get reported, that ratio may be higher in Canada.

Deutsche Bank have repeatedly been caught doing highly questionable things. I don’t think German capital considers itself subject to those same cultural constraints — quite the opposite in fact.

Which doesn't mean other banks didn't. Just haven't been caught that much. (For now)

Also, since 2008 the point is mostly moot. See Bad Banks.

And there we have politics. Let them crash and burn, or try for another turn, in the game of boom and bust?

What is to earn, who is to trust?

Nobody knows anymore. It's all yearn and lore.

Observation: If you are a multinational company that has the resources to buy entire countries, your cultural origination becomes secondary. Another commenter made a comparison to Canada, but they recently had the snc-lavalin affair that shuffled the cabinet and is still vaguely a topic in their upcoming election.

I'd make the argument that in these countries there are fewer of these incidents and that they become public at a higher rate, and that the public shame is greater than in countries like the US where we know it happens but there will never be any actual public dialog, let alone recourse. Mental exercise: If either of those scandals had happened in the US, what would have been the outcome? For comparison, notice the way that Monsanto managed to export their "trouble" over glyphosate to Bayer, where it escalated into a scandal.

You have a caricature of Germany in your head if you believe people yell at you for crossing at red on an empty road.

No, it's pretty accurate in my experience.

DE has strong vigilante culture

Yeah and pedestrians still cross red light I the night fairly regularly.

FFS, do you even understand that word? DE has the opposite of vigilante culture.

People always rely on some governmental authority. When it affects them, that is. Otherwise, no one gives a shit about anything.

I don't think it's vigilante culture. People value order and organisation and this coupled with the direct nature of communication, feel completely within their right (I would say feel duty bound) to say "hey, you're not supposed to do that".

It is also custom here to voice one's opinion in extreme precision or detail. "Hinterfragen" question things, criticise, always down to the details. Not in an emotional way but very in a very matter-of-fact sense.

So think of it from the perspective of "if the rule is that you don't cross on red, then why are you crossing on red? It's against the rule". It's not personal at all.

I actually have been yelled at and told off in the streets for various mistakes such as this one. And this is not just my personal experience but my German friends also verify such stereotypes.

Cause telling someone off when "crossing an empty road at night on a red light" does not imply no corruption. It is just someone petty feeling good about little power or irritated over minor rule breaking.

That being said, in fact in Germany, pedestrians cross an empty road at night on a red light fairly regularly. Or they just cross at random place, not through the pedestrian crossing despite that one being fairly close and being red. I have seen that both. And I have done both, no one told me anything.

It's all fake, "doing things right" etc are rules for the plebs.

It's like in Saudi Arabia, where of course nobody drinks alcohol, it's haram! But then the sheikhs have the craziest parties with hookers and 10k usd champagne etc.

I bet you not one of those model citizens would say a word if you slip a few hundred euro in their pocket before crossing that road on red.

Well it is quite easy actually. Your biggest customer request a bunch of features, some for test purposes. You find something fishy, you ask your boss and he tells you orally to just do it because this customer is the most important, or he takes the matter seriously and gives the feature directly to your colleague in India who doesn't raise an eyebrow.

The SW is done and millions of vehicles have the feature. Don't count on other engineer to spot the cheat because everyone has a specific area of expertise, and the software is closely related to the engine hardware. It is very difficult to understand the purpose of each piece of code.

Remember that at that time, noone was ever tried for cheating the exhaust norms and the compliance team only cared about financial fraud.

Those who rise to the top are less likely to be influenced by social norms? Its perhaps supportive of the adage that more CEOs have psychopathic tendencies than the average population. It makes absolute sense that is the case, often to get ahead you must make decisions that hurt others. If you emphatize with others you are less likely to want to be in such a position.

One plausible answer I heard was that emissions regulations were an EU thing, but the car industry is still very firmly national.

No national government was interested in rigorously enforcing the regulations to the detriment of their own nation's industry.

This is a core issue with the political structure of the EU in general, and isn't even specific to cars.

Why wasn't George Bush Jr. tried at the the Hague? At George and Martin's level in the global elite, you don't go to jail for almost anything, maybe you pay big fines. I certainly don't approve of them, but these understandings predate me and are made above my pay grade.

Power corrupts? And Germans aren't immune to it.

I don't know where you got that red light thing. Except for downtown or other locations with heavy traffic, stopping at red seems to be an optional thing nowadays.

The same for indicating lane changes, or turning of wheeled traffic.

With the exception of a few so called hidden champions german engineering is a myth now.

It can't be any different, because shareholder value and time to market rules,

the prekariat has neither time nor ability for deep thought,

which isn't tought anymore, or not as it once has been.

It's mostly all superficial pretense now.

Learning to forget, only to get some paper which says so.

But we can be fantastic fanboiz!

Cheers! :-)

edit: make that something like 80/20 or 90/10, or anything in between.

edit: also regional variations, as always, but the trend is there.

Everywhere.

> Is there something I am missing here?

Yes: the fact that many other automakers all over the world were caught as well, but you only remember VW. And my guess is that for the ones that weren't caught it was just that: they weren't caught.

Basically, European politicians had created every tighter fuel and emissions standards that really couldn't be met (the leaner you burn the more NOx and other nasties, if you want to burn cleaner, you need a richer mixture). So enforcement of those standards was "wink wink, nudge, nudge", and everyone was in on it.

Except the pesky Americans.

Buying gas from Russia is sensible, see "Ostpolitik".

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

Phasing out nuclear and increasing coal is just nuts. Nuclear should, if anything, be expanded, but it's the third rail of German politics. The populace has been so brainwashed on this topic that logic just doesn't apply. Kinda like guns in the US.

The financial class in most countries sees itself as above the law. Cumex was worse in many ways, but what the banks have been doing in the US, Japan or the UK is hardly better. In fact, the US legal system officially declined to pursue HSBC's brazen money laundering, because going after the bank might lead to financial instability. Carte Blanche. And don't get me started on Goldman Sachs.

Heck, the moneyed classes in the UK took the country out of the EU, never mind the enormous economic, social and political damage, in order to avoid EU transparency laws.

The did a in depth review of basically every car maker in Europe after that. For a while BMW was the only German one that seemed to come out almost clean. until they didn't. Peugeot and Renault were fined in France. As was Fiat in Italy if I remember well. The German OEMs were the worst, with VW leading the pack and Mercedes being a distant second. VW did something clearly illegal, most others thaugjt the just skirted the edge of legality. Maybe that skirting would have worked if it wasn't for public pressure after VW was found of having crossed line of skirting deep into cheating territory.

VW wasn't the only having tweaked emissions, VW was the only one having clearly cheated. that's why they are remembered for it.

Because German society, like most others, is divided between those to follow the rules and those above the rules.

Yeah, that's what worries me. Every time there's a story like this, and someone asks "what, why did the employees buckle over and implement this evil scheme?" you get a torrent of answers about:

"Well obviously they cared about losing their job, we need strong worker protections and unions."

"We just need a culture of calling people out on anti-social behavior, whether or not that specific transgression is already codified."

"We need strong regulations that penalize corner cutting."

But ... Germany is really good on all those points! So, if this kind of thing slips through there...

There needs to be law enforcement against the company itself. Penalties should take away the same proportion of income as they would be for a median citizen. If a crime is severe enough for a person to do 1 year in prison for, that's about 2% of their lifetime income taken from them plus loss of freedom. A crime of comparable severity should cost a company 2% in perpetuity. If they are outcompeted or forced into restructuring so be it. The threat of non-negligible financial consequences is the only thing that will compel change.

The individual low level employees are about as culpable for the emissions cheating as the muscle cells of a serial killer are for murdering someone. They hold no meaningful decision making power within the organization and operate according to the local incentive structure. The executives responsible for shaping the incentive structure are the ones who should be individually penalized. Market forces would help with this if illegal practices were appropriately costly.

Don't forget the decade-long debacle of Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

Lol, don't buy into the stereotypes. Germany is like USA with better social policies.

As long as you pay your taxes you're free to do whatever you want.

No one will help you, no one will get in your way.

The occasional cranky old guy calling the cops on a party is not representative of the whole society.

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