Thursday, April 21, 2016

Thursday Morning: Come on Now

Come on now,
who do you,
who do you,
who do you,
who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul.
You really think you’re in control.

— excerpt, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley

The kids are all #TBT on Twitter — posting throwback material from their youth, which seems like just yesterday to me. I’ve got socks older than most of the stuff they share. But I have fun with it anyhow, like this Gnarls Barkley song. Perfect to sing at the top of your lungs in the office if you can get away with it.

Speaking of crazy…

Deadline today for Volkswagen
A deadline for a “concrete proposal for getting the polluting vehicles off the road” was due last month on March 24th after U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer gave VW a 30-day period to develop this solution.

That deadline was not met; Judge Breyer offered another 30-day extension as he felt progress was made. Today’s that second deadline, and it’s not clear a technical solution fixing the vehicles will be included in the proposal.

Reports suggest a combination of vehicle buy-backs and financial incentives may be offered along with funding for remediation. But no reports indicate development of true clean diesel technology to replace the emissions control units programmed to defeat emissions testing. Note from LAT’s article:

…The agreement would give some owners the choice of having Volkswagen repair their cars or buy them back, but it does not include plans on how to repair the vehicles, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the deal hadn’t been made public.
[…]
… But some owners of newer models who get just a software fix may receive little. About 325,000 owners of older cars that require more extensive repairs likely will get more, because the repairs could affect mileage and performance.

In other words, some of the emissions test-defeating software may be replaced with software that actually meets emissions tests, but it may make the vehicles much less fuel efficient.

This is the crazy, right here: Barring a surprise announcement today, there is no commercially-viable clean passenger diesel technology. There never was — not even years after the first so-called clean passenger diesel was sold. That’s the fraud at the heart of Dieselgate.

Well, I had much more written about Google, but I had some sort of techno-burp and lost it all. I’ll post it here after I figure out the best way to recover it.

Talk amongst yourselves in the meantime.

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