We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

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Nick - A2A
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Nick - A2A »

It sure is a tricky one: getting that correct balance between 'freedom' and 'regulation'.

Taking Scott's example of car airbags, it's understandable that he might be uncomfortable with their explosive nature. Airbags can cause injury and even death, particularly to kids in inappropriately-placed child seats. However, in spite of scary recalls, the fact is that they save many more lives than they cost.

Here's the thing though. In the US, airbags are actually more dangerous than their equivalents in Europe because they're designed to protect unbelted occupants; not just ones wearing a seat belt. (This means they have to be bigger and inflate even more explosively.) What this means is that the comparatively larger number of US drivers who exercised their 'freedom' not to belt up prompted a design decision which made airbags a bit more dangerous for everyone.

Scott also mentioned the DH.110 prototype crash at Farnborough in 1952 and this is another good example of the fine balance between 'freedom' and 'regulation'. As was mentioned, there was very much a "business-as-usual" mindset in post-war Britain and the airshow went on. However, as a direct result of the crash which killed 29 spectators along with the 2 crew of the aircraft, regulations were introduced to separate the display flight line from the spectators. The result? In spite of many fatal airshow crashes over the years, no spectators were killed in the UK until the tragic crash at Shoreham last year. Airshows were probably a bit less exciting for the crowd, but undoubtedly lots of lives have been saved.

My point is that it's always easy to take a swipe at regulations, legislation and 'red tape', but we can't really have a modern, civilised and safe society without them.

Don't get me wrong though! I hate the ambulance-chasing lawyers too and my job (marine survey) is certainly overrun with lots of excessive health and safety rules and an 'everything, all the time' policy with PPE (personal protective equipment). 15 years ago I was judged competent to make the decision about whether I needed to wear a life jacket, hard hat, safety boots and so on, but the way things are going, soon I'll have to wear them even when I'm in my bunk at night. :roll:

Like I say, it's a tricky balance.

Nick

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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Roadburner426 »

This point certainly is a testament to the type of community we have here. I think on any other site this easily would have turned in to a flame war and would of had to be closed down. I definitely think the values people were raised around play a huge part in this though. Where I was raised in South Carolina like others have stated common sense and personal responsibility were one of those things instilled in you early on. If you mess up you own up to it, and accept the responsibility and accountability that goes with it. Obviously we do need common sense laws as I believe that no one has a right to harm anyone else in any way (whether that be physically, financially, theft, etc) other than in self defense. All we can do is our part though and participate in our processes to have our voices heard.
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Aymi »

Godd afternoon everyone. Very interresting points here.

Please don't hate me for disagreeing with you here. I speak as a 20 years old french student in the field of aeronautical safety and MRO.

I think that freedom loss is a consequence of a bigger, more devastating effect and actually, in the current state of our society, is a necessary evil for the stability and our own safety. Major changes happened since the 50's, we can't compare them side to side.

About the bicycle analogy: Let's use another example. It's night time, Bicycle driver does not want to wear a visibility jacket. You are in your car going home after a hard day of work, going 55mph, in mediocre visibility conditions like in the following image:
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You can't see the cyclist until too late, and kill him.

By default the car driver is responsible for the accident. He should have been more careful, etc etc. Even if given the conditions, the accident just could not have been avoided by any other way than making the cyclist visible. Do you make visibility jackets mandatory in night time ? Or is it better to let reckless cyclists dress the way they want for the sake of freedom, occasionally turning average drivers into murderers because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time ?

Now a more aeronautical example.

I'm the first one to hate the way planes have more and more automation (especially in Airbuses where the pilot's job is to manage the computer), and that drones are becoming a reality. Before studying aeronautical safety, I did not really understand the reasons behind that. I felt it more secure to have control over everything rather than trusting a box of electronics to do the job. But I have to admit I was wrong. Even if an A320 cockpit is boring and dull etc.

Here is a quick list of some of the major commercial air transportation accidents in the last few years.

Asiana 777, Polish Tu-154, possibly MH370 and MH17, Germanwings A320, Air France AF447. All of them were caused by a human error and failure to respect / apply a procedure. Before hitting the ground, those planes were fine, with all engines running. A computer would have "listened" to the alarms (AF447, Asiana, Tu-154) and applied the correct procedure to stop stalling or gain altitude. A computer will not have the idea to kill itself (Germanwings) or fly low to stay out of sight of ATC radars (MH370).

You see my point ? Statistically, the computer is becoming more and more reliable than the human.

I'm sorry I'm lacking time to finish my post and my spelling is terrible, but I wanted to share my opinion.

Thanks,
Aymerick :)
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AKar
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by AKar »

Of course, certain rules should be there, followed and enforced. I'm not an anarchist to any extent of imagination. :mrgreen:

But the rules should not replace common sense. The bicycle example above kind of underlines the point: Blaming and punishing a car driver when an accident, by itself implying non-intention, occurs because a cyclist rides in among highway traffic failing to utilize his survival instinct to remain visible, only shows how twisted this society has gotten, IMO (this and similar cases I know have happened where someone has been punished unjustly - we just need to find a guilty one). I don't use high-visibility jackets when riding a bicycle, but it would not even occur to me to go riding into car traffic at night not equipped with one, or equivalent means of remaining visible.

When it comes to aviation, it often gets even worse: the amount of "procedures" is so exorbitant that often the hard part is only to be aware that this and that is actually regulated somewhere, and very often by some very poor rulemaking, leaving much up to interpretation. One needs to be a goddamned lawyer-wannabe basically to be a mechanic under EASA. Must it really be written down that don't collide with an airplane so that ramp worker knows not to collide with an airplane? This procedure-dependency gets as far as to some companies reportedly discouraging hand-flying, as it typically results in less accurate following of the desired path and parameters, meaning that the pilots that cause the Excel followups to print red get summoned into the quality & safety's office. I've seen the company operating policies for different ground support equipment to be significantly lacking for some of them because they wanted to harmonize the procedures for different types of units! Seriously, this illusion of control by procedures has gotten so far that managers believe the world out there to shape into their writings.

And sadly, it leaves less and less room for true professionalism, where it is ensured and expected that the operator of said GSE knows his tools to the extent required to utilize them to the best effort. Or the pilot exercising his basic flying skills with his machine to the extent practicable, even if that results in less-optimal flying as per parameters, but so that the stick feel is there if the rule book hits the fan one day.

Interesting discussion indeed! And I can see only good points in the thread!

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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Warbirds »

Don't get me started -

About personal freedom, lawyers have made sure we are now very limited in that respect. Need I say more?
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Alan_A
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Alan_A »

An excellent discussion all around and yes, another tribute to the quality of this community.

I agree completely with NickM about the need to achieve a sensible balance. I'd also point out that Scott's original post covers three very different scenarios - airbags, which are a regulatory requirement; self-locking car doors, which are a safety feature provided by the manufacturer even though they're not required, and the hot tub regulations, which are an attempt by a company to forestall litigation by individuals - strictly a private matter.

You could make the case that there's some freedom available in each scenario - maybe not enough to be satisfying, but it's still there. In the case of the airbags, you have the least freedom since there's a regulation involved, but you as an individual can take your complaints public and try to get the regulation changed. It's not easy but it's possible, and in the process, you're at least exercising your right to free expression. In the case of the door locks, you can start a conversation with the manufacturer. If enough people are dissatisfied, the feature might be changed. That's the marketplace in action.

The hot tub might actually be an example of people exercising a freedom - the right to sue a corporation. Now, lawyers are unpopular and we mostly don't like the idea of a litigious society (though some of the more famous examples, like the McDonald's hot coffee case, aren't as clear cut as the popular mythology makes them seem). But on the other hand, if individuals can't sue a company, how do you hold the company to account? Litigation adds costs, but on the other hand, companies try to get away with stuff. Lawsuits put boundaries on what they can get away with. The idea of corporate liability is pretty recent. Just over a hundred years ago, the White Star Line, in spite of a poor safety record, was able to run the Titanic at full speed into an ice field, kill 1500 passengers, then argue successfully that it owed nothing to the victims or their families because a clause on the back of the ticket said that passengers assumed full risk. This was only overturned in a couple of select cases. The company, meanwhile, charged families for the return of their loved ones' bodies, and invoiced the families of dead band members, who weren't White Star employees, for the cost of their lost uniforms. All crew members were considered fired at the moment of sinking (their contract was specific to the ship), and the company wouldn't pay transportation home for surviving crew. I'm not sure we'd like to go back to the old standard of giving companies a free hand.

There's also the tendency of some advocates for freedom to argue a bit selectively. People may be opposed to helmet laws, but if they're injured, they'll probably want state agencies (police, fire, EMS, public hospitals) to come and take care of them. I have a very smart friend who's a thoughtful libertarian, and who argued that, in place of helmet laws, there should instead be a requirement that a non-helmeted motorcyclist carry a card that says, "I chose not to wear a helmet. Please do not hook me up to life support at public expense." Of course, that is (and was meant to be) a cartoon example, but the point he was making is that people often stop short of carrying their arguments out to the full logical conclusion.

All of which leads back to NickM's point that it's all a balancing act. We all make certain compromises and give up certain absolute freedoms in order to live in a society. The question of which freedoms to give up, and how much, and when to push back, is a constant, important, and very healthy discussion that we all need to keep having.

This plays out in my household, by the way. My clients are companies, some of them big ones, and my work often involves trying to keep them from going off the rails by doing things they think might be a good idea. My wife is an enforcement lawyer for a US federal agency, and she gets to see what companies do even when they're regulated. And on the other hand she comes home and complains because, every time you get on the DC Metro, there's a taped announcement playing telling you how to ride on the escalator, and she'll hear that and say that, really, this nanny state business has gone too far.

So that's my very length $.02. Looking forward to more points, maybe some pushback, definitely more excellent conversation.
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Jacques
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We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Jacques »

Well, I think it goes a bit further towards juries not exercising good judgement when it comes to assigning responsibility. Lawyers are only providing a very necessary service, navigating the path and positing the argument.
Last edited by Jacques on 23 Oct 2016, 14:35, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by bullfox »

What regulation does is move around risk and freedom. A good example is food safety regulation. Food safety regulation reduces my risk of buying food with unsafe ingredients, and reduces the freedom of food producers to sell unsafe products. My freedom is increased because my risk is reduced, and the risk of litigation is reduced for producers. The net result is freedom is transfered from one of the parties to the other, but freedom is not lost and overall risk is reduced.

However, regulation introduces complication. The problem arises when due to complicated and poorly conceived regulation there is no transfer of freedom and risk is not significantly reduced. The argument is about where and when that happens

I should also add that even very smart people can do very stupid things. If you are reading this its because you haven't done anything yet stupid enough to result in your death. Some people are not reading this because they have.
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Alan_A »

Funny you should mention food safety. Something I'm currently dealing with as an individual, not in a professional capacity - there's a (US) national company that operates in my local area, that enables you to shop online at high-end food stores like Whole Foods Market. You place your order, the company sends a shopper to the store to assemble the order, then drive it over to you. A couple of months ago, on a really hot August afternoon, a shopper delivered my order, which included two portions of fish and also a couple of frozen items, all of which were warm to the touch. I called customer service to ask how the order had been handled, and was told that while the company encourages its shoppers to use insulated food storage bags, it can't require it, since the shoppers are contractors, not employees of the company. Needless to say, this got me a bit cross, and I've been following it up ever since. Things I found out: the company may or may not require the contractors to use storage bags - I got several different contradictory answers. To get the answers, I had to file a formal complaint with my county's consumer affairs department - the company had stopped responding to me after an initial e-mail. But the real issue has to do with inspection and oversight - it turns out that there are no regulations at all covering Internet food delivery companies - no inspections and no enforcement. The food store itself is under the authority of the health department because it operates under a license, but the minute the order gets picked up by the delivery company and leaves the food store, the health department has no authority over it. Neither does anyone else. The Internet food delivery companies are of course quite new, and they're operating in an empty space where the regulations don't yet cover them. So now I'm talking to my local government reps about the need to close the gap and establish some kind of inspection and enforcement routine. Investors love these companies because they're very low cost - they have hardly any full-time employees, contract shoppers supply their own cars, the company doesn't pay any health benefits - so the profit margins are extremely high. On the other hand, food handling is a pretty high-stakes business, and the consequences of mishandling food - say, by failing to control the temperature - are extreme. So here's a situation where, to your point, the freedoms aren't yet balanced and the risks fall almost entirely on the public side of the ledger. I'm trying to exercise my freedoms to get that changed. A balancing act, yet again.
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

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Warbirds wrote:Don't get me started -

About personal freedom, lawyers have made sure we are now very limited in that respect. Need I say more?
I have a different view of the lawyer issue. Yes, for sure it would be nice if there were more honorable lawyers in the world. However, maybe it's the persons with the frivolous suits? In my mind it comes back and falls in societies lap for the blame of the state we are in. Frivolous suits should never see a court room. Judges and juries should be tossing most of them out.

I work at a concrete production/delivery, roads and utilities construction company. OSHA has many many rules that must be followed. If you've ever been involved in an OSHA or MSHA walk through you will realize how much power they have to dictate what you do. Ok, most of these rules are written is blood. Somewhere someone got hurt and a knee-jerk reaction happened. Some rules are good and common sense. A walk through with OSHA will teach you that there is no such thing as commons sense when it comes to some of these rules. I've actually had an agent tell me, "Someone could reach around this guard and if they tried hard enough they could "maybe" touch that trough roll and pinch their finger". My thought was that maybe they should not do any breeding if they are that dumb. And so we spend thousands of dollars attempting to protect the colossally stupid. :roll:

If I trip on a neighbors steps the last thing I think about doing is suing them for me not being able to walk. Or if I spill hot coffee in my lap and sue the coffee company. That is terribly dis-honorable and would be the farthest thing from my mind. Yes, we would hope that we have learned a few things about keeping ourselves safe in the past 2000+ years and safety precautions should be in place to protect us. But where do we draw the line. Do we regulate ourselves to the point of living inside rubber bubbles? Think, and take responsibility for your own stupidity!
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Dogsbody55 »

My issue with the ways of the modern world is this; why should I be able to do whatever I want, and expect someone else to suffer the consequences of my actions? I'm old enough to have been brought up by parents who made me understand that my actions have consequences for others. So this should be the fundamental question for all the lawyers and politicians in the examination of these issues. If I choose not to wear my seat belt, or my cycle helmet, or a high vis jacket at night on an unlit bicycle, etc etc, then any injury I sustain is down to my stupidity. But if I'm flying in a plane which unbeknown to me is piloted by a drunk on a cocaine high,(it almost happened this week on an Emirates flight Perth to Dubai!!), or a ship captained by a maniac, or I'm consuming food prepared by a filthy chef, then I need the full protection of the law in seeking reasonable restitution from these negligent incompetents.

But alas the world is full of greedy litigation lawyers and self serving politicians who have to Be Seen To Be Doing Something About This Issue. There is far too much subversion of justice by crafty lawyers who attempt to suppress evidence pertinent to a criminal case, and way too much weight attached to "emotional distress" in litigation cases. Such emotions tend to sway juries in the verdicts when they need to consider actions and consequences. Our fearless leaders in Congress or Parliament pass laws and regulations often in an effort to satisfy vocal lobby groups, based on the advice of academics. Have you ever noticed how academic people have a knack of solving a problem, only to find 6 other problems are created by their "solution"?? So many of these people are "experts" in fields that should not be subject to tertiary education standards but because they can wave a qualification paper about, we believe any rubbish that comes out of their mouths. If I mix two parts of hydrogen with one part of water, I can confidently say I will get water. This is science and is verifiable. It is exact and provable, time and time again. But we get too many people pontificating about things that are, at best, inexact sciences. Have you ever observed how accurate financial forecasters and advisers are, for example?? Or even the weather forecaster? There are too many uncontrolled variables in their fields to consider them experts, and yet we give them such credence today? Why, when they're no more reliable and accurate as my daily horoscope!!!!


Alas common sense is now uncommon. Rant over. Please resume normal service.
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Nick - A2A
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Nick - A2A »

Dogsbody55 wrote:[...] Or even the weather forecaster? There are too many uncontrolled variables in their fields to consider them experts, and yet we give them such credence today? Why, when they're no more reliable and accurate as my daily horoscope!!!!
A bit off topic Mike, but you must have some crummy forecasts Down Under if this is really the case. In the UK I'm often amazed at the accuracy of our short terms weather forecasts: these are the ones that can really preserve the lives of aviators, mariners and others of us who work (or play) out in the elements. In fact, as science goes, I can't think of any more valid or relevant example than meteorology. Just because weather forecasting is difficult, doesn't mean it's not science. :)
bullfox wrote:What regulation does is move around risk and freedom. A good example is food safety regulation. Food safety regulation reduces my risk of buying food with unsafe ingredients, and reduces the freedom of food producers to sell unsafe products. My freedom is increased because my risk is reduced, and the risk of litigation is reduced for producers. The net result is freedom is transfered from one of the parties to the other, but freedom is not lost and overall risk is reduced.
That's a very good and logical way of putting it. However, I suspect many of us (myself included) will immediately tend to think of 'freedom' in terms of our freedom to exercise our will.

If I were to pick one area where I fight an internal battle between wanting that freedom and accepting what I know is less risky, it would have to be when I'm driving. Increasingly, I find my free will to do what I want is hampered by devices such as average speed monitoring schemes (which are becoming increasingly common in the UK). I know these schemes make roads safer and they make driving less environmentally damaging (and a bit cheaper too), yet I still resent them. I have a strong suspicion that it won't be too many years before GPS-based telemetry is used to monitor and enforce traffic violations in some nations. Drivers would slow down, roads would become safer, emissions would be reduced and we'd gain an awful lot more freedom from risk. However, that's not really the freedom we're talking about here, is it?

Nick

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Alan_A
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Alan_A »

A discussion like this wouldn't be complete without a little philosophy... so... a rabbi I knew in New York did me the favor of introducing me to the distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to." In formal philosophical terms, this is the distinction between negative liberty - the removal of a constraint - and positive liberty - the voluntary exercise of a human capacity, sometimes thought of as a more evolved and beneficial one. Negative liberty takes away the speed limit. Positive liberty means you decide voluntarily to drive at a reasonable, safe speed because you understand the implications of driving too fast.

The relationship between negative and positive liberty is, of course, controversial.

The Wikipedia entry on the subject is short and quite well done - worth reading in full.

An excerpt:
In "Recovering the Social Contract", Ron Replogle made a metaphor that is helpful in understanding positive liberty. "Surely, it is no assault on my dignity as a person if you take my car keys, against my will, when I have had too much to drink. There is nothing paradoxical about making an agreement beforehand providing for paternalistic supervision in circumstances when our competence is open to doubt."[4] In this sense, positive liberty is the adherence to a set of rules agreed upon by all parties involved. Should the rules be altered, all parties involved must agree upon the changes. Therefore, positive liberty is a contractarian philosophy.[citation needed]

However, Isaiah Berlin opposed any suggestion that paternalism and positive liberty could be equivalent.[5] He stated that positive liberty could only apply when the withdrawal of liberty from an individual was in pursuit of a choice that individual himself/herself made, not a general principle of society or any other person's opinion. In the case where a person removes a driver's car keys against their will because they have had too much to drink, this constitutes positive freedom only if the driver has made, of their own free will, an earlier decision not to drive drunk. Thus, by removing the keys, the other person facilitates this decision and ensures that it will be upheld in the face of paradoxical behaviour (i.e., drinking) by the driver. For the remover to remove the keys in the absence of such an expressed intent by the driver, because the remover feels that the driver ought not to drive drunk, is paternalism, and not positive freedom by Berlin's definition.[5]

Erich Fromm sees the distinction between the two types of freedom emerging alongside humanity's evolution away from the instinctual activity that characterizes lower animal forms. This aspect of freedom, he argues, "is here used not in its positive sense of 'freedom to' but in its negative sense of 'freedom from', namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions."[6] For Fromm, freedom from animal instinct implicitly implies that survival now hinges on the necessity of charting one's own course. He relates this distinction to the biblical story of man's expulsion from Eden:

Acting against God's orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom. [...] he is free from the bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.[7]

Positive freedom, Fromm maintains, comes through the actualization of individuality in balance with the separation from the whole: a "solidarity with all men", united not by instinctual or predetermined ties, but on the basis of a freedom founded on reason.[8]
Seen this way, the question behind our thread is, "do we have too many constraints on individual action, and would we act freely to be better people if those constraints weren't there?" Obviously this is something we can and do disagree about. But for the sake of clarity, when we talk about "balancing acts," this is what we're trying to balance.

@NickM - agree with you about driving - something I enjoy, so I have mixed feelings about self-driving cars, and even about our local population explosion of speed cameras. On the other hand, automotive tech pushes the other way, too - there are all those stability enhancement devices that make people think they're much better drivers than they actually are. I regularly drive a local road called the George Washington Parkway that's quite scenic and literally worth your life - it's scenic, quite twisty, and lots of my neighbors drive it flat-out, which is extremely exciting for them right up 'til the moment when they get out of the envelope, cross over the median and kill someone who's minding his own business. Happens regularly. I used to enjoy driving it and I took pleasure in how well I did it. Now, more and more, I hunker down in the right late, right at the limit, and watch the opposite lanes for SUVs flying in my general direction. Seen through the lens of this post, I'd call my conservative driving a positive liberty, and accuse the other guys of excessive exercise of a negative liberty. Their mileage, of course, would vary... 8)
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by Lewis - A2A »

Ron Attwood wrote:Scott, welcome to the world of old farts. I warn you now, it gets worse! :D
Best and most relevant response in the whole thread, pat on the back for Ron :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
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Re: We should be careful not to lose too much freedom

Post by b2vulcan »

You should be used to it Scott, after all the US started all this "it's someone else's fault" :wink: and then exported it to us in the UK.

IMO the people responsible are your lawyers and "no win no fee" and your judges who award insane damages to idiots who don't know what they are doing and/or can't read.

I remember decades ago reading of a woman who sued a furniture manufacturing company for injuries she sustained while using one of their products.
She had a chest of drawers and opened the drawers to us them as a ladder to get to something higher up. Now I'm not sure if the chest of drawers toppled over on her or she fell of the drawers but she won her case and the judge awarded her a considerable amount of money. Her lawyer's case was that the manufacturer had not put a warning label on the chest of drawers stating that they should not be used as a ladder!
If common sense was applied (and it still existed back then) the judge should have thrown the case out and told the woman she was an idiot.

The more you legislate about what people can and can't do the less responsible they will become.

I could go on but it will only push my blood pressure up :D

Dave

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