I think the only way to stop the white-collar crime problem (which I think is a bigger problem than the physical crime problem) is by holding people accountable.
A French government report in 2016 investigated 86 different cars, and about 1/5th of those were found to comply with emission laws. Most did not.
He talks about how it is possible that the cars achieve the low results in the testcycles but produce much higher emissions on the real road. The reverse engineering in the beginning of the task is also very interesting.
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8131-dieselgate_a_year_later#vid...
I simply don't believe anymore there are any clean athletes in first 3 places in any sport where there are significant money involved.
And most people are happy to support this indirectly via their support of things like Olympics which became lately just hunt for sponsors. (I don't watch those anymore, rather will spend the time actually training, with friends, in the nature etc.)
Same for cars.
The funniest thing was the Ford would sell you a software update to defeat skip shift under the guise of a "performance tune", at least that's how I defeated it while still keeping my warranty.
When a poor black man in America is arrested for a rape, it's racism and classism because a rich white man is far more likely to get away with that crime. But it's also justice. I don't think you would argue that we should let poor black men get away with rape just to make things more fair.
Ethically, were he to enforce the law to the letter with an egalitarian approach, the first person he saw as he got on shift exceeding 65 should have been pulled over. As soon as that ticket was issued, he should have done so for the next person, ad infinitum until he was off-duty.
In actuality, if every single arrested individual stopped one day and decided to exercise his or her constitutional right to see his day in court like that prep school[1] individual did, we'd see what would amount to be a DDoS on the system incapable of handling a caseload of such magnitude. Pragmatically, an ADA will use a very effective method - known colloquially as "charge stacking" - to intimidate the accused into pleaing out a charge he would likely beat[2].
Though I'm totally with you on the classist component - should Michael Jordan's son commit a crime, he'd be far less likely to be convicted than whitey-mc-Kentucky-Meth-Mouth Tim's son due to the same lack of resources afforded to him.
[1] RE: your rape scenario -- Compare this aggressive attorney http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/28/us/new-hampshire-prep-rape... vs these less fortunate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
[2] Even more compelling is the motion for dismissal those defense attorneys could raise in aggregate on 6th amendment grounds. In the state of California, the 45 day cap could be breached fairly easily if all of the defense attorneys concurrently suggested to their clients to enter a not-guilty plea. You'd also see a marked decline in arbitrary traffic stops, as arresting officers would be forced to spend the day in court rather than in speed traps.
At some level I agree with you that justice unevenly served is not justice, but I guess what I'm arguing here is that justice is a spectrum rather than a binary. Justice served unevenly is less just than justice served evenly, but more just than justice not served.
Is it really? All the diesel manufacturers cheat and VW cheats the least:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/30/wide-ran...
http://www.theicct.org/news/press-release-vehicle-tests-show...
Is the implication here that causing economic harm is the same as murder?
> According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early.
https://news.mit.edu/2015/volkswagen-emissions-cheat-cause-6...
Great compilation of California pollution regulation that applies https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/us/ld_ca.php#leviii
Which the government hasn't done for decades, so it is a little hypocritical to make a big thing of the VW scandal.
The FBI's actions have nothing to do with the MIT link.
Unfortunately doing that in today's world would render them unelectable.
Emissions regs are the best our defective system can do, hence slow changes. That even those aren't being honoured makes it a big thing.
Of course many would rather see them start with fraudulent banking than fraudulent car makers.
So yeah, billion-dollar white collar crimes are, IMO, definitely worse than murder.
If a wasteful project is government, then you have the additional complication that the government ultimately uses police and SWAT teams to enforce the tax code. So $20 million / ($50,000 total taxes paid in a year) = 400 man-work-years wasted. Multiplying by the 22% time spent working above gives 90 years, which is close to the lifespan of an average person. So you could say a waste of $20 million is equivalent to wasting a software developer's life(assuming his taxes are $50k).
Murder removes the remaining lifespan from someone, so there is a sense in which it is equivalent to time spent on pointless labor, which is equivalent to money.
Though, you'd want to specify how the Volkswagen incident is a 'multimillion dollar catastrophe':
* Is it from the fines imposed? That's an arbitrary number in the law or from some judge. You can't blame Volkswagen executives for causing economic damage here; the judge or lawmaker seems like the responsible party.
* Is it from environmental damage? It's tricky to get a dollar number from this. You can try, but I'd have low confidence in the result, and chaining that with the low confidence in the 'murder<=>wasted labor' equivalence makes an unpersuasive argument.
* Is it the forced recalls? Here, the Volkswagen executives could be said to be responsible for wasted consumer time driving it to a dealership for repair, wasted employee time fixing the cars, wasted lawyer's time defending their case, wasted judge's time fining them, wasted regulator's time preparing endless reports, etc. But, the economic cost of just the recall is probably smaller than what the OP was thinking.
* Is it damage to the Volkswagen brand? I was recently shopping for a car with a friend, and one criterion was "Anything but a Volkswagen". Even if I don't care about the pollution, cheating makes them untrustworthy. This reduces consumer choice, which has some economic effects.
In what other senses can you say that the Volkswagen executives caused an economic catastrophe(and hence, robbed people of their precious little life cleaning up the mess)?
I think you made a math error there. Instead 500 work-years should equate to about 12 lifetimes (most people's working life is about 40 years)
50 work years or 11.4 years of time are wasted per $1 million.
What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label.
You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.
Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.
Is it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...
> Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans.
I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.