On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 17:19:17 -0600, "Wolfgang" wrote:


"Lazarus Cooke" wrote in message
news:020320042219395749%lazarus@stonecurlewfilms. com...
In article , riverman
wrote:

Anyone want to sponsor me in a lawsuit, I'll split
it 50-50. If this advertising isn't negligent, not much is.

I'm shocked. "Wicked" is the word - in the old sense. Really, really
bad.

With all due commiseration for Myron's loss, it is hard for me to understand
how any normal adult can be unaware of the inherent danger in standing up in
small watercraft, regardless of what a manufacturer may claim for a product.
It is particularly difficult for me to grasp why anyone who is afraid of
water (and thus, presumably, a poor swimmer at best) would do so without a
PFD.

I don't doubt that some sort of legal action might be undertaken
successfully against the manufacturers and/or whoever else may be
responsible for portraying such an activity as being safe. Frankly, I don't
have much of a problem with it either. But it does raise some interesting
ethical and common sense issues. Just how much responsibility should
manufacturers or promoters of products and activities that are inherently
unsafe, to one degree or another, assume? Does anyone really believe that
adults need to be warned about the risks associated with sky diving,
smoking, hot coffee, pyrotechnics, running across flaming coals, wading in
streams, guns, electricity, hypothermia, or a virtually endless list of
other hazards? Well, yes, of course they do. And they are right.....to a
certain extent. Some dangers are not so obvious. Others are unmistakable.
In fact, most of the things that kill people or cause grievous bodily harm
are not mysterious secrets.

If anyone can find a way to suck a few million dollars out of McDonalds,
Microsoft, GE, Phillip Morris, GM, etc., I say more power to 'em. It
appears that the majority of Americans agree with this stance, and there can
be no doubt that many a jury has. But no one should labor under the
misapprehension that winning a damage award necessarily validates a specific
grievance from a moral point of view.

Wolfgang


The last product I designed has a 3v coin cell battery, about the size of a
stack of three US quarters. We had to put a label over the battery with the
international "do not eat this" pictograph - otherwise we had to include the
moral equivalent of an EIS in 16 different languages...

/daytripper (pre-emptive engineering: it ain't all skittles and beer ;-)