Thursday: Family Stoned

Yes, it's all that, a family affair today. Looking forward to the return of calm tomorrow once my family resumes its seasonal migration.

So...what's up with YOU, emptywheel family? Anything exciting going?

If not, you should take a look at these:

Clean food
General Mills recalls flour for possible E. Coli contamination (GM) -- Do check your pantry. I've got a bag of the stuff, damn it. Fortunately no one here has been sick, probably a precautionary measure, but if anyone is immune compromised in your household, don't take the chance. Check that link.

Indian government set to ban some flour additives (Rediff) -- Speaking of flour, much of what we use in the U.S. contains dough conditioners like potassium bromate and potassium iodate. These will likely be banned in India. Why isn't the U.S. banning them? And why can't we replace the bromate -- labeled a class 2B carcinogen -- with ascorbic acid (a.k.a. vitamin C)?

Clean air
Owners of older vehicles may expect financial incentives to replace their cars with newer ones (Rediff) -- India looks to reduce air pollution by ditching older cars which generate more pollutants. Only problem with this program: no mention of VW Group's emissions controls defeating vehicles.

Ditto for Paris: get your pre-1997 cars off the streets during the week (Newsweek) -- Air pollution in Paris has rivaled that of Beijing; removing older cars from weekday traffic is a means to support an Ultra Low Emissions Zone. Yet again, no mention of the VW Group's Dieselgate cars.

Toyota unhappy about limits on passenger diesel sales in India (Rediff) -- Expect a lot of complaining like this from the makers of from the makers of passenger diesel vehicles as countries attempt to reduce toxic particulate, CO2 and other greenhouse gases. But there's no clean diesel technology, no matter how much carmakers have sunk into what technology they do have. They'll have to eat the sunk costs and work toward cleaner cars. Hello, Toyota, what's wrong with sell more Priuses?

Clean up
(Yeah, I couldn't think of another category that fits here.)

Nice overview post-Google win over Oracle in re: Android (The Guardian) -- The chilling effect on development relying on software always intended to be open source would have been catastrophic. Oracle needs to focus on its traditional software business instead of chasing after this; their lunch is slowly being eaten by cloud-based SaaS.

The Deployment Age (Reaction Wheel) -- Fascinating long read analyzing the maturity of the Information and Communications Technology Revolution. But what's next after ICT? In the past, the next revolution was emerging as the last wave reached Deployment. What are we watching for?

Tomorrow I'll look at May's breaches and a few discovered this week. Have a good one!

Wednesday Morning: Lüg mich an, Lügner

I admit freely my facility with the German language is poor. I hope this post’s headline reads, “Lie to me, Liar.” Which is about as close as I could get to “Lying Liars” because I can’t conjugate the verb ‘to lie.’

~shrug~

It’s not like anybody’s paying me for this, unlike the lying liars at Volkswagen who’ve been paid to deceive the public for a decade. This video presentation featuring Daniel Lange and Felix Domke — a security consultant and an IT consultant, respectively, who reverse engineered VW’s emissions control cheat — is a bit long, but it’s chock full of unpleasant truths revealing the motivations behind VW’s Dieselgate deceptions. The video underpins the cheat outlined in a 2006 VW presentation explaining how to defeat emissions tests.

The one problem I have with this video is the assumption that the fix on each of the affected vehicles will be $600. Nope. That figure is based on how much has been set aside for the entire Dieselgate fix, NOT the actual cost to repair the vehicles.

Because if VW really fixed the vehicles to match the claims they made when they marketed and sold these “clean diesel” passenger cars, it’d cost even more per vehicle. I suspect one of the motivations behind inadequate reserves for a true repair is a reluctance to disclose to competitors how much emissions standards-meeting “clean diesel” really costs.

And of course, avoiding more stringent calculations also prevents an even bigger hit to the company’s stock price, which might affect the pockets of some board members and executives rather disproportionately to the rest of the stock market.

Just how closely that figure per car hews to the agreement with the court this past week will be worth noting, since the video was published in December last year.

But now for the much bigger, even more inconvenient Lügner Lügen: This entire scandal exposes the fraud that is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris agreement.

We know a small nonprofit funded research by a tiny group of academics exposing VW’s emissions controls defeat. We know this set off a cascade of similar analysis, exposing even more cheating by more automobile manufacturers.

But why are we only now finding out from nonprofits and academics about this fraud? Didn’t our elected representatives create laws and the means for monitoring compliance as well as enforcement? Why aren’t governments in the U.S. and the EU catching these frauds within a year of their being foisted on the public?

These questions directly impact the Paris agreement. We’re not starting where emissions standards have been set and where the public believes conditions to be, but at real emissions levels. In other words, we are digging out of  a massive pollution hole.

Our elected officials across the world will avoid funding the dig-out; they’ll continue another layer of lies to prevent removal from office. And we can reasonably expect from them only what they’ve done so far, which Dieselgate has proven to be little.

For that matter, Flint’s water crisis has much in common with Dieselgate, relying on academic research and nonprofit entities to reveal mortal threats to the community. Flint’s crisis showed us government at all levels can be even worse at writing laws, monitoring compliance, and subsequent enforcement.

If the public cannot expect government to do the job it believes it elected them to do over the last several decades, how ever can they expect their government to enact the terms of the Paris agreement? How can we expect third world countries to reduce carbon emissions to save the world from the devastation of climate change while we and our governments continue to ignore corporations’ ongoing deceptions?

No roundup today, gang. I strongly recommend watching the video above. Thanks to BoingBoing for linking to it.