Lawyers Killed Common Sense

[Bible_Belt]

My grandma bought a new mower. I was using it to mow her yard, and the fvcking thing has a kill switch on the engine if you try to mow in reverse. It also has the turn radius of the Titanic and thus takes forever to mow a small yard. You also have to keep disengaging/engaging the blade over and over again, which is going to wear out the belt and pulleys 10x faster.

So I was trying to find out how to re-wire it and defeat the safety switch (apparently the tractor forums delete posts about such a thing because they are scared of liability) when I found the story of why the mower has that feature:

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/...-disengage-mow-reverse-switch.html#post940239

In summary, a day care provider left one of her little kids unsupervised in the front yard and her husband backed over him with the lawn mower, killing him. They only had $100k in insurance, so the lawyers sued the mower company for the negligence of not having included a safety feature that had not yet been invented. The day care provider and her husband both got dropped from the suit before the final judgment was awarded - $2 million.

A fundamental theory behind tort law is that of loss compensation. The idea is that when there is a loss, we must find a way to compensate the victim. There is no exception for stupid people doing stupid things...because when there is no lawsuit, there is no money for lawyers. That's our future - a nerf world where everything has so many safety features that it is impossible to hurt yourself even if you have no common sense at all.

 

[DJ Bax]

Sadly it seems true, its pathetic in America how you have to walk on egg shells to keep from getting sued.

 

[Who Dares Win]

Is that true that story about cofee glasses with the sign "pay attention its hot" because some cvnt burned her lips and then sued the place?

 

[taiyuu_otoko]

I live in Japan. Last winter I was out after fresh snowfall. Only happens once or twice where I live.

The kids in the local kindergarten were having an absolute blast running around playing in the snow. I took a short vid, and sent it to my niece, (JHS) who lives in socal.

she said that when it rains, the kids aren't allowed to go outside, and they have to eat in the classroom.

 

[goundra]

a lawn is a great luxury, it used to be reserved for kings, nobody else had the resources to waste, having a pasture that was not used for feeding goats and sheep, having land that was not used to raise a garden. Do you begin to see how much we just take for granted here in the US? almost half of the world has no electricity or safe water to drink, much less hot and cold running water in their homes!

 

[Bible_Belt]

The hot coffee case was against McDonald's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm

That case actually had more merit than the lawn mower one, but the mower case had a dead baby. A jury is going to be half female. And if anyone here has ever been subjected to Grey's Anatomy, the show is 90% crying women screaming "my baby!" over and over again. Obviously that is the easiest way to get an emotional response out of women.

And yes, a lawn is a luxury, aka a giant waste of time and resources. If you added up the cost of all the lawn mowers, fuel, fertilizer, and irrigation water in just the US alone, it would amount to a staggering sum...which we spend to accomplish nothing productive, other than a way to judge people by looking at their house from the street. If the lawn looks like green carpet, then they must be good people. Everyone knows scum bags have shaggy lawns.