Re: Are you becoming softies over the pond??
Reply #16 –
We are way too litigious, and that may make us appear as "soft"
Right now, if I buy a cup of coffee-- either at McDonald's, 7-11 or at my favorite truck-stops, there is a warning that the coffee is hot printed right on the cup. Reason: an old woman burned herself at the drive-through at a McD's and sued the place because the coffee was too hot. Now, as we all know coffee is SUPPOSED to be hot, if they sell it to you lukewarm you'll probably reject it and complain that the coffee is not hot enough.
I have some power tools here, partly because of hobby interests and partly because of professional interests. Every last one of these tools come packed with warnings that they are dangerous, and the warnings are usually worded in such a way that you would think they were warning the mentally incompetent-- who shouldn't be allowed around such tools in the first place. These warnings are pure legal BS, designed to protect the toolmaker in case a mentally incompetent person-- meaning you, the person using the tool-- do something remarkably stupid and get hurt, then try to sue the tool maker.
Everything these days seems to come with some sort of warning-- when we're allowed to have some things at all. Seriously, if you look at the legal landscape right now, you'd wonder that we're allowed to feed ourselves. It's all because people will sue at the drop of a hat, hoping to get rich in court because, of course, they couldn't have gotten hurt due to their own incompetence-- it had to be the fault of the tool maker, the person serving them coffee, the playground equipment makers and so on.
RJH brings this up about soccer-- and at the moment it's hard to argue with him. Everybody around the world plays the game and they don't get hurt--- here, we have to bundle our children in body-armor before even thinking of sending them outside because they might get hurt-- and if they do, we'll probably sue the pants off of anybody we think we can stick it with.
(Geeezzzz. Did I actually ride a bicycle on a 60-mile round trip, no helmet or any other protective gear, and somehow I survived? My parents didn't even know where I was much of the time. How did we ever survive in my generation?)