Thursday 24 September 2015

The Volkswagen Scandal


Is this the Volkswagen scandal or the scandal of Capitalism, where to win regardless of the cost is seemed justified.
I have never owned a diesel car. They always seemed too noisy and I always thought that the methodology behind the Diesel engine must, by the nature of its design, produce harmful particulates in the atmosphere which would damage all of us breathing in those particulates.
It was not VW alone which set out to convince the motoring world and the world in general, that we had nothing to fear. The manufacturer had tamed the beast and made it clean, efficient and less noisy. They, the collective industry had a product to sell and the truth has never got in the way of a sale !!
What is striking is that so many people could be induced to lie.
The team of electronic experts who designed the "software" to alter the engine performance when undergoing a test, not an MOT test but a test being carried out by the "regulators" who's job it is to protect the health of general public.
The cars performance is now controlled electronically for so many of its functions and wouldn't have needed any hardware adaptation. We rely on the clever university trained software designer 'boffin' just as we relied on the mathematical wiz kid in the banks to design the "Derivatives" which would disguise debt so we would not have to be faced with the downside of a financial trade.  
There has been voiced recently a worry with "artificial intelligence" creeping in to define much of what previously we had some control over and over by applying a reasoned ethical consideration a control now hidden away in a piece of software.
These things don't happen in isolation and one must assume a whole raft of executive management must have had some inkling of how a potentially dirty process, combustion caused by the compression of the fuel by pressure alone, that this process had been wondrously cleaned up. The word around the boardroom table amongst men and women, seeped in automotive engineering know how must have asked the question, how ?
Well now we all know. Never mind the struggle to clean up our air on the planet, especially in the major cities, never mind the people who are increasingly suffering from respiratory problems due to the poor quality of the air, we have a car to sell !!
How many people at the top table must now be squirming and proclaiming their innocence.
The flaw in business has always been the greed attached to the competitive, market driven capitalistic model. There can only be winners, losers are cast out and have no value but it's this question of who values "value".
If the financial giants such as Goldman Sacs and the Libor rigging Banks are now joined by Volkswagen. If the major drugs companies who sit on drugs which could cure but are not brought to market for financial reasons. If the only consideration that is tabled for a vote at the Boardroom Meeting has doubtful ethical questions hanging around it but these are deemed worth ditching because the Finance Director has such a powerful voice. If this is the modern, nay always was, the face of Capitalism then we should ask ourselves is Capitalism all it is made up to be ?

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