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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

More recently, he has been released on parole after roughly half his term served.[1] Interestingly, the article says:

In Germany, inmates can be released after serving two thirds of their term. Parole after only half of the time is rare, but can be granted to first time offenders who demonstrated good behavior and are deemed unlikely to commit crimes in the future.

I don't doubt he exhibited good behavior. I'm not sure I believe he's unlikely to commit a crime in the future. I wonder if he thinks he was singled out for something everyone in the industry was doing, and thus it wasn't his fault. He wouldn't be wrong about the first thing, but he would about the second. It's admittedly speculation on my part though.

1: https://www.autonews.com/executives/ex-vw-manager-schmidt-ge...

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A close associate is an engine designer at a VW group company.

VW is not some bottoms up startup. It has a clear micromanaged road map for virtually everything. Data is gathered, sheds are biked ad nausuem.

this person was jailed because they were the last one holding the hot potatoe. There is no way (according to said associate) that upper management were not aware of what was going on. as any decision like that has to have approval.

It is/was a wide spread practice, well known in the industry. I know that ford used to routinely re-map the ECU after the warranty period, which boosted the miles per gallon at the expense of various pollutants.

> re-map the ECU

Sorry, what does this mean in layman's terms?

Change the parameters used to calculate the fine details of how the internal combustion engine operates, e.g. how much fuel to inject into each cylinder, when to send a spark to trigger ignition, how much pressure should the turbocharger provide, etc.

I can only recommend watching this 2015 talk at German Chaos Communication Congress about the technical details of the scandal. It's in English and really worth watching if you're technically interested. They reverse engineered the ECU configurations and showed how the manipulation works.

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

The higher-up executives are also in hot water - Martin Winterkorn, then the CEO, is under indictment in both Germany and the US, and is likely to face prison time after his (more complicated, because his involvement worked through deniable cutouts) trial.

> sheds are biked ad nausuem

What does this mean?

It's from an old parable, also called Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Basically, simple things get discussed more because everyone can understand them. It goes something like this:

"If a committee designs a bikeshed, they will spend five minutes discussing the structural requirements, half an hour on the size, and the rest of the available time arguing about what color to paint the shed."

Oh ok. I wonder why he didn't just say "bikeshedding."

It wouldn't fit grammatically.

Spot of literary flair

because art

because I'm a flashy git, but you're right to question it.

It is still quite likely he won't be repeating the mistake though. Prison is something else than just money.

I think that depends on what he thinks the mistake was. To him, was the mistake cheating, getting caught, or being in position to be made an example of? He may no make the mistake again, but I'm not sure that means he won't cheat again in a similar way, given the chance.

can I prosecute ex parte the rest of the taxpayers and citizens and asthmatics the administrators supposed to have been in charge of ensuring compliance with emissions standards for failing so incredibly to do their jobs?

or is there no responsibility held by whoever we place in office responsible for seeing our futures aren't squandered?

how is it possible to ignore that obligation and duty when we've only just started to admit that we have to act against such universal polluting?

or has the last encumbant of 2000 Pensylvania Av. just pulled off the brilliant trick of assuming all the blame for the failure of government future and past as well?

(brit with American family and too embarrassed to speak of our politicians presently)

I’m not sure if the downvotes here are because of your Trump allusions or not, but you do raise a pretty important point.

Where was the oversight? How was it that an open secret of this magnitude didn’t incur the wrath of environmental agencies in the countries affected? Is it possible that no-one outside of the industry knew about this and that everyone in the industry, even in competing firms, just kept this secret for years without anything leaking out?

It doesn’t seem plausible that this wasn’t known about and ignored by regulators in at least some regions.

I agree, the people enforcing these laws are just as negligent. Why did the let the manufactures anywhere near the testing process.

I would like to think that now, after the scandal, they are selecting and testing cars that have recently been sold. The cars that are actually being driven around.

Is the rest of the world as harsh as the U.S. in that a prison sentence is basically the end of your career? Would this guy have a shot at being an executive again?

Is there evidence that white collar criminal convictions are career ending in the USA?

Depends: given that one can easily google his name and find out about this, it's a bit unlikely he'll be appointed to such a prominent position again. But in general, a prison sentence would not be the end of your career here in the EU. Anecdotally, when I was hob-hunting last time, not one company (out of ~ a dozen) asked for a criminal record before making an offer, and only one company informed me that I'd be required to hand one in afterwards. Of course, the others might've asked for it at a later stage, but at least at the company I went with (as well as all my previous employers) hired me without knowing whether I had any priors. As far as I understand, this depends on the industry, though.

I’m sure it’s awful for normal folk like us but in his case (and again this is uninformed speculation), where he’s essentially the fall guy for a scandal that was supporting one of the world’s largest economies (and a large component of several others), it’s not that hard to imagine his experience being just a bit different than what a normal inmate should expect.

He also likely knows a lot about how many of his superiors were in the loop on this, so I assume he was well compensated for his inconvenience.

He was in "Offener Vollzug" (~open prison). That means he sleeps in a normal prison cell (that usually looks like [1], so not all that bad) in a regular prison, gets breakfeast, leaves prison to go to work, then goes straight back to prison to participate in the prison's evening activities (sport, recreational, educational, etc). He might get vacation (from staying in prison), and can visit his family on weekends.

It's not that unusual in Germany, at any time about 16% of prisoners are in "offener Vollzug", and it is a great tool to reintegrate prisoners into society. It is limited to first offenders with no flight risk and no risk that they use their time out of prison to do crime.

Of course no matter how useful of a tool it is generally, it does make the prison sentences of some well known people look like a bit of a joke.

1: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/knast-in-deuts...

What are the 84% that aren't in open prison? Poor people who don't have a corporate apparatus to hide their crimes behind?

Volkswagen emissions killed people with smog. VW are homicidal.

Corruption is a real problem in Germany and auto makers have a lot of influence on politicians, so the corporate and the political apparatus are interested in hiding these crimes, because a large part of our economy depends on them.

Meanwhile we hear how abusive and inhumane American prisons are. If we had these country clubs in America, what would happen? (Serious question)

Pretty disappointing that my comment above was a wild and utterly uninformed guess that was (from what you're saying here) bang on the money.

Turns out that it's almost universally true everywhere that enough wealth and power puts you above the law.

> I'm not sure I believe he's unlikely to commit a crime in the future.

I don't think many car companies hire ex-convicts in upper management.

As a non violent criminal, who will never get a job where he can even try to commit a similar crime, that sounds reasonable.

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