Just awful..Girl disemboweled in pool

I understand your point.

But if a street sweeper "doesn't do his job" and misses a banana peel on the side of the road, and a little girl slips on the peel and breaks her skull, do you "sue the bastard for every cent"?

This was a terrible, terrible accident. Preventable? Well, sure. But then, had airport security (and tons of other people) "done their job" 9/11 wouldn't have happened, either.

 

Yeah, and most of the people who failed to do their jobs on 9/11 faced no professional consequence at all. The greedy bastards who ran the airlines -- and, lest we forget, airpline security -- responded by laying off a bunch of machinists and baggage handlers when they should have responded by hurling themselves out windows.
Lawsuits hold people accountable for negligence, for willful blindness, and for outright fraud. I'm glad we have them. I don't trust The Market to sort this horrible stuff out.

 

And the sad thing is, people who make an honest mistake with no malice intended get their lives ruined when folks with your outlook win, FB. Two or more lives get ruined then.

 

If a drain cover was missing on the kiddie pool, that's more like a mechanic taking off your brake pads and giving you your car back. You think the mechanic should be held accountable when you go off a cliff?

 

But the mechanic just forgot. He didn't mean to.

 

Tell that to the women who used the Dalkon shield.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy, none, for most of the people who get socked with huge jury verdicts, because most of them are American corporations, and most of them don;t have the social and civic repsonsibility god gave a goat.
I'm genuinely tired of corporate propaganda that tries to hide behind small business owners for the purposes of getting away with making shoddy products that kill people.

 

I'm not referring to the specific, Ace. I'm referring to the generality. I'm guessing you know this and you just wanted to make a point.

And of course, you too are barreling past the original point to push your political agenda. This, I am not surprised by.

 

The original point being?
That some people believe that, when a small child is disemboweled by shoddy work, that the people responsible for the shoddy work be held responsible, and some people don't? Please explain.

 

My point is that some things are just accidents. Some things you assume responsibility for what happens. In this case, I think country club dues are about to go way up.

 

I would agree that they should.

But I'll go back to that example of the street sweeper neglecting to sweep up a banana peel. You're not going after "big business" there. You're going after the little guy. It just sounds better to wax poetic about going after the bullies.

 

I'm not normally in the business of defending lawsuits, but most people only hear the bad and not the societal good lawsuits do, not just compensating victims, but also as a deterrent.

When corporations sit around and debate how they can make their products safer, their motivation is avoiding product liability lawsuits. Whenever a corporation gets tagged with a product liability judgment, everyone else in the industry jumps to fix the problem so the same doesn't happen to them. The end result is a safer world for everyone. But if the right to bring those suits is restricted, as the "tort reform" crowd wants, you'll immediately see a lot more corners being cut on safety to improve profit margins.

As horrific as this case was, I doubt its enough to ensure that other lazy pool workers won't continue to leave drain caps off. But throw in a million dollar judgment on top of it, and damn sure you'll see more attention and diligence nationwide to avoid that error being repeated.

It's a flip side discussion of the tort reform issue that usually gets drowned out by all the Republicans screaming about greedy trial lawyers.

 

That's different.

Now if the street sweeper had somehow hit a curb and moved a big chunk of concrete into the street and ignored it and the next person hit it and went into a telephone pole, street sweeper is in trouble.