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Comment by pastrami_panda | Hacker News Reader

You do realize they literally bought monkeys, put them in cages, piped the exhaust from their "clean" diesel cars right into the cages to desperately try to justify their lies. This was a reactionary response and a last ditch effort to try to spin the story after they were caught cheating on the emission tests. These people are straight up psychopaths and deserve punishment.

Edit: Now I'm being downvoted, we live a society where companies do so devious acts that people sound crazy when they point them out. Yes, this sounds too heinous to be true, but the sad fact is that it is true, watch the documentary for full story: https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1FI0VR

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Well, the exhaust in reality is much more clean then presented in some media. It's not a perfect way of showing that, but I get their point. We need to keep our risk awareness calibarated to the issue at hand and with relation to other risks in our life.

You are applying "psychopath" label in a very liberal way. They cheated. They tried to hide it. It's a fact. It still doesn't make them psychopaths.

Please look for universal solutions.

VW devised software to detect when an emission test was being performed and blatantly cheated the testing system so more people would buy their cars in the belief that they were environment friendly when they clearly were not. They got caught but instead of admitting fault they showed a complete disregard for animal life by piping diesel exhaust into monkeys for several hours. It's one of the most sickening business practices I've heard of, it's outright evil and sets a dangerous precedent. I will never understand how people can defend these kinds of actions and resort to trivialising their heinous acts. Have we become so calloused that we freely make up excuses for this kind of behaviour? What message is that sending to these companies? Sorry for being so judgemental but I find this awful. I really recommend watching the documentary to grasp the nature of how terrible the people calling the shots on this were.

,,We need to keep our risk awareness calibarated to the issue at hand''

I completely agree with you in this, I was writing the same thing. That's why I wrote that the total amount of time taken away from people must be estimated. If it turns out to be less than 100 lives, I agree with you as in that case the cost savings are justifying switching to newer cars, even if they are not hybrids. The problem here is that we're talking about a much higher number of man years taken away.

> Well, the exhaust in reality is much more clean then presented in some media.

And yet they bought monkeys to prove their point, rather than breathing it in themselves.

You're right about the psychopath thing, though. They could simply be cold and cynical.

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