Yeah the outlook of a crook who only sees laws as quid pro quo vehicles for enriching those in the know.
I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.
I understand that imposing the restrictions may have involved great amounts of wishful thinking as to the outcome. Even this is not so certain because certain politicians were able claim a victory for having Done Something by writing words on pieces of paper. It may even be against their interest — and they are self-interested actors despite claims to being detached public servants — to solve an issue that is evidently so effective at getting people so worked up.
Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs.
Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis.
>Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary.
Maybe I'm missing your point, but the vendors non-compliance is documented fact in a court of law. Multiple individuals were indicted and the company itself pleaded guilty to multiple felonies (including fraud). Further, as with most collective action problems of this type, relying on individual choice to correct the problem all but ensures it won't be corrected. This is one area where the extreme libertarian mindset (which seems to be overrepresented on HN) tends to miss its mark.
While I'm not sure I agree that the quote is applicable here, it is generally an incredibly useful way to analyze systems.
Reality doesn't care what you're hoping to achieve with a system, the outcome won't change based on thoughts and ideas. Since reality tends to be fairly complicated, we usually won't design perfect systems on the first try - instead we have to analyze the outcome, and make changes to nudge the results into the direction we want.
But what if we don't do that? What if we stick with the initial approach even after we measure that the outcome doesn't align with our initial intentions, maybe even introduces unwanted side effects?
It would be fair to say "well, we tried our best" if nobody was able to have hidden intentions, but that's not the world we live in. People can be very, very happy about our systems not aligning with our intentions & introducing unwanted side effects because this misalignment advantages them in some way. These people can then block changes to the system to keep these advantages alive.
I believe a small fraction of decision makers is enough to keep most systems fixed in such a misaligned state, and we'd never do anything about it if we followed your logic.
"Purpose" and "hope" (hell let's through "telos" in there) are inherently subjective terms. Conflating this with empirical observation of effect is simply not useful outside of certain political situations where you intentionally want to disregard intent. It's asinine unless accompanied with persuasion that intent is working against collective interests.
In most situations disregarding intent is not useful for getting things done unless you have unilateral power to override intent.
A better explanation is that John Deere, like the massive truck corporations that make pickups, was happy to take advantage of blatant loopholes.
I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.