They're not the law of the land, but they are immensely useful in understanding the original meaning of the Constitution. But there's good reason that John Marshall refused to cite to them in Marbury v. Madison.
I was, however, not bringing up the Federalist Papers, directly or otherwise. I was simply pointing out the well-regarded theory that federalism protects liberty.
"Federalist" is a word that's become just as tortured as "liberal" (and "personal computer," eh?:P). Here, I meant federalism to mean the presence of a relatively weak national government over a confederation of relatively strong state governments.
As to the Federalist Papers, I have a full copy but admit I haven't read the entire set. Those that I've read have focused mostly on military and international trade issues. It is possible that the idea that federalism protects liberty was advanced in an issue of the Federalist that I've not yet read; I can't remember the exact source that I'd like to cite here but there were Founding Fathers involved in the theory.
The funny thing is that the Federalist advocated a stronger national government; while the idea of federalism is that of a weaker national government. Double-speak is no newer to this country than Independence Day.
Libertarians have hurt themselves by being the party for selfish redneck gun lovers and marijuana smoking potheads.
They've hurt themselves more by virtue of those two groups being virtually mutually exclusive.
But the major hurdles are selling brainwashed people on a new idea. Very few Americans are at a point where they can accept that you have rights that bother them but don't hurt anybody. Marijuana is, again, our paradigmatic example. Assuming that the Libertarian hype that marijuana doesn't hurt anyone but the user when used responsibly is valid, then it should be legalized by any government but a statist one. Try convincing the American right of that on a large scale. And guns of any sort in the hands of law-abiding citizens do not hurt anyone, but try convincing the American left of that.
There is a problem of perception, and it has produced a dichotomy of idiotic viewpoints. There are some real issues out there, such as abortion (one side believes it kills living babies, the other believes that it eliminates unwanted tissue from the mother), where at least a rational debate can be held at some level, but the main focus of a libertarian is distilling liberties into those that don't hurt others (all of which should be protected from government interference; whether they actually are protected becomes a matter of constitutional interpretation) and those that do hurt others (which should be regulated so as to prevent that harm).
A major overhaul and some hardcore campaigning on issues that people care about could go a long way for the Libertarian Party.
I can't get along with the Libertarian Party, either. Although most of their views are consistent, they do two things wrong as far as I can tell:
1. They don't understand economics and don't seem to understand states' rights, although I may just not be reading enough of their material to know their stance on states' rights. We need to get away from a "Win the Presidency, Win the Country" political system and back to the way the United States were (note the plural) meant to be: a confederation of states with their own powers. Ever since FDR, we've eroded one of the key protections of our civil liberties, more important even than the Bill of Rights according to the people who wrote the documents: federalism.
2. They tend to focus too much on controversial issues, and it gives them a public image of being a special interest group for illegal drug users. If you ask someone off the street what the Libertarian Party's platform is, they'll either not know of the LP at all or they will answer "Aren't they the dudes for the legalation of hemp?" (Futurama, A Head in the Polls.) Nobody knows the answer to "What will a Libertarian President accomplish for me and for the country?" That needs to be fixed.
Because I can't agree with the Republicans or the Democrats, because the Libertarians are reading the same book as I am but are on the wrong page and are reading it upside-down, and because all the other minor parties are named in Newspeak (the Constitution Party has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with state establishment of religion, for instance), I'm going to have to start my own political party. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the politics.
Hillary is just another modern American liberal. The contrast between that and a classic liberal is that a classic liberal wants everyone to have the same rights and liberties, while a modern liberal wants to decide for you which rights you should and shouldn't have, with an emphasis on being hypocritical.
Modern conservatives also want to decide for you which rights you should and shouldn't have, but they make their selections using different criteria. Conservatives shoot for traditional moral values, whereas liberals shoot for progressive think-of-the-children moral values. They're both wrong, and the classic liberals and libertarians (lowercase ell) have it mostly right. Your rights and liberties are yours to choose, as long as they don't actually and directly harm those around you.
Classic examples: Legalize marijuana, but make it illegal as hell to drive while intoxicated by marijuana because it's the intoxicated driving that directly injures other people, not the actual intoxication. Or let me own whatever gun I want, but punish me severely if I shoot someone with it other than in legally justified defense of myself, my property, or others. The list goes on, but just these two work to show that modern conservatives and modern liberals are guilty of the same hypocritical, self-important decision-making about which liberties you and I should have.
Fortunately, this hack isn't even nifty, so you haven't really disqualified it. How about: This isn't a site for boring posers, it's a site for stuff that matters.
You brought them in by suggesting that the abbreviation PC means IBM-compatible by virtue of being capitalized. I just pointed out that the lowercase version doesn't help things at all.
That may be true, but that doesn't make it the only acceptable definition of the term. You were blasting someone for using another acceptable definition. The backlash is because yours is not the only definition of the term. Had you been somewhat less belligerent in correcting the ambiguity (not incorrectness) in the original comment, nobody would have bothered you about it.
When not capitalized, "the pc abbreviation" means "parsec." When capitalized, according to Merriam-Webster, a far more reputable dictionary than Webopedia, PC stands for "personal computer." Now, even if we go to Webopedia's definition, to which you linked, we get "Short for personal computer or IBM PC." (The definition later concedes: "In recent years, the term PC has become more and more difficult to pin down." Why are you basing your entire argument on a definition that itself admits it isn't authoritative?) Anyhow, I've put in bold the word that you seem to be having the most difficulty with. If I were to ask you "Are you a Democrat or a Republican?" you certainly wouldn't believe my question to be whether you are both.
Try learning how to read before you speak authoritatively on a subject. You'll find yourself on the losing end of fewer semantics arguments that way.
I know that you've been able to buy a powder that does the same thing, I think called Insta-clot, for a while now. I read about it in use by our military - one soldier was shot through the neck, and his comrades applied Insta-clot along with other first-aid measures, and survived. I bought some for my dad, who is on blood thinners and is somewhat accident-prone. He hasn't had to use it yet, but that's a corollary to Murphy's Law: if it can't go wrong anymore, it won't.
I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect anymore, but has anyone noticed that when you fire off a comment really fast without doing a preview or proofread and you have an embarrassing typo in the subject or you spelled someone's name wrong or something like that, it gets modded up?
I wouldn't worry about it. Contract formation under common law (and probably under civil law, as well, but if you're in a civil law country like France or Louisiana I'd just suggest you move instead of finding this out:P) requires a few things, one of which is mutual assent. I can't imagine that any jury is going to see the evidence in such a case (namely, the evidence of you freaking out about the other guy changing the contract after you signed it and the fact that the contract was on electronic paper) and make you abide by the altered contract.
My problem with Drupal is that every CMS lets me throw together a personal site in a matter of minutes, but none of them let me, in a matter of hours or even days, make things truly 'personal' with a format other than the "static pages, forums, calendars, and blogs" philosophy that most CMSes seem to share and a style that is uniquely my own.
I've read poems written by 10-year-olds, and they all sucked. Really bad. Now you're telling me that she has written "plenty of C#" code. I've also read poems written by C# developers, and they all sucked. Really bad.
I'm sure that Bill Gates was pleased beyond words to hear his life story summed up in a few lines of Vogon poetry.
There was a professor in our CS department, from whom I fortunately never took a class. Besides being both incompetent and insane, she was downright stupid about markers. She would start circling something on the white board while she lectured, and just keep circling it over and over again. There is still a mark on the white board from the time she used a permanent marker instead of dry-erase for that purpose.
Of course, a friend of mine once showed up for her class, and he was the only one there. She lectured anyhow. I told him that he should have excused himself to use the restroom for about 10 minutes, to see if she continued lecturing, paused the lecture and waited for his return, or just left. We may never know.
Which Simpsons is that a reference to? I'm pretty sure it's a reference to Futurama, but I can't remember which episode. Either Anthology of Interest I or Anthology of Interest II, as part of the "What if I never fell into the freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy?" question that Fry asked, which "was less stupid, but... asked... in a profoundly stupid manner."
You continue to use conclusory language, and continue to ignore the points I'm making and instead simplify them beyond meaning. Nonetheless, I will make one final comment on this thread and will read whatever response you have to it. Please try to answer my questions - I'll do my part by making them as simple and clear as I can. I won't respond, but if you do as I ask then you can rest assured that I will read it and agree. Just a couple of general pointers: be clear (resolve any potential ambiguities with a thorough explanation), be objective (and in the case of any possible dispute as to the objectivity of a statement, explain why the statement is objective), be verbose, choose your sources carefully, and cite them thoroughly. How can I disagree with something that is clear, objective, verbose, and well-researched?
1. The 10,000 figure was just a random number. Can you explain to me why the actual ratio matters? What percentage of people have to be injured by your negligence in order for you to be held accountable? Give me an exact number.
2. If the World Trade Center had been built to withstand terrorist attacks of the sort that occurred, would it have been destroyed on 9/11/01? If you answer 'yes,' then my point is invalid. If you answer 'no,' then one of the following must be true. Tell me which one or, if you feel none of them to be true, then for each of them explain why it isn't true. (1) No reasonable person would perceive a risk of terrorist attacks like the one that occurred. (2) A reasonable person would perceive such a risk and plan for it, and the people who built the WTC failed to do so, and are therefore partially at fault for its destruction.
3. If you do feel that being 20% at fault for something should bar any recovery for your injuries, please explain why. If you feel that there is a particular percentage of the fault that you must have (in the WTC example, if you go with #2 above, the percentage is obviously extremely small, I think we can agree on that) in order to be barred for recovery, what is that number? Be exact.
4. Objectively and clearly define "reasonable temperature" in a way that includes temperatures capable of causing third-degree burns to 6% of a person's body. Do not refer to any "recommended serving temperature" without clearly describing the process by which that recommendation was reached.
5. Tell me where I can download the trial transcript so that I can know the full set of facts, or clearly explain to me why the information about the case which "can be found all over the place" is equivalent to the transcript.
6. Clearly and objectively define "frivolous lawsuit."
7. Considering only civil lawsuits filed in federal and state courts with a jury in the United States, and with F being the number of frivolous lawsuits that result in a jury verdict in the plaintiff's favor, L being the number of frivolous lawsuits that result in a verdict in the defendant's favor, P being the number of non-frivolous lawsuits that reach a verdict for the plaintiff, and D being the number of non-frivolous lawsuits that reach a verdict for the defendant, demonstrate by some objective and statistically-sound method (and describe that method) following ratios: F to L, F to P, L to D, (F + L) to (P + D), and any others that you think will be useful to support your statement that "[i]t is very common" for juries to award enormous verdicts for frivolous cases. Please be verbose and clear about the logical connection between the real-world data you demonstrate and the conclusion that you draw.
Regarding the extremely low burn risk, would you say that, if I made a product that severely injured 1 out of every 10,000 people who used it, I should not be held liable for that one person's injuries?
Regarding 9/11, that was no attempt at any call to emotion, and I apologize for the obviously-unreasonable hope that anyone would take it as anything but the same. Rather, it was an example of something where more than one person was at fault. Let me explain: If a reasonable person had expected terrorists to attack the World Trade Center, then he would have built it differently to account for that attack. And if a reasonable person knew that spilling McDonald's coffee would cause third-degree burns to 6% of their body, then she would take greater care in not spilling it so as to account for the severe injuries that a spill would involve. But a reasonable person no more expects a terrorist attack than she expects to receive that severe of burns from spilling coffee on herself, as was the main point of my earlier comment regarding dumping an average cup of coffee on yourself.
Stella was a mostly reasonable person. She spilled her coffee, out of what the jury found to be her own negligence. But the jury found that her injuries would never have happened if McDonald's had served coffee at a reasonable temperature, and that her negligence was only 20% of the cause of her injuries.
Under a legal system where 20% of the fault is the same as 100% of the fault, you wouldn't have fixed anything, and indeed would have made some things much worse. The train goes by your farm and starts your crops on fire - but it's 20% your fault for planting crops that close to the rails so you can't hold the railroad responsible. You fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and a car going 100mph over the speed limit hits you from the side and kills you, but it's your fault because you were 20% in the wrong, so you can't hold the more negligent driver responsible.
I emphasize: Neither you nor I was present to hear the evidence in this case. There are facts that neither of us knows nor can know. We only have what the jury tells us the facts were (and even then we don't have a full picture before us in this discussion). What I believe our disagreement really boils down to is two-fold (if you think we disagree on different vectors than these, feel free to point them out):
1. Whether we trust juries to decide anything at all. If you have a better system than a jury for deciding facts in lawsuits, I'd love to hear about it. However, you've offered no alternatives. It's easy to criticize something or point out problems with it, but much harder to actually solve those problems.
2. Whether the McDonald's case and others like it that appear on the surface to be frivolous, but about which reasonable men (which I submit we both are, despite our fervent disagreement about whether this case was frivolous and admittably closed-minded rejection of some of each other's logic) disagree, should be thrown out of court without showing the jury any evidence. The word "frivolous" itself has a dictionary definition rife with subjectivity. I no more trust a legislature to broadly define it than I do big business (which stands to gain so much in unaccountability from a change in the tort system in America), whereas I do trust juries to decide facts in lawsuits. If you presume all lawsuits to be frivolous (for in no other way can you really make a decision about whether or not a particular case is frivolous, short of hearing evidence and having a trial to decide if it's frivolous or not, but juries do that already when they enter verdicts for the defendant (which they do far more often than the media would have you believe, as discussed elsewhere among the comments on this story), then there is no point to having a civil legal system at all. What would you gain from that? Do you have other alternatives in mind that I'm overlooking?
Slashdot Mirror
Eat & Run
They're not the law of the land, but they are immensely useful in understanding the original meaning of the Constitution. But there's good reason that John Marshall refused to cite to them in Marbury v. Madison.
I was, however, not bringing up the Federalist Papers, directly or otherwise. I was simply pointing out the well-regarded theory that federalism protects liberty.
According to these articles, it seems that "speed" is a slang term for either methamphetamines or amphetamines.
"Federalist" is a word that's become just as tortured as "liberal" (and "personal computer," eh? :P). Here, I meant federalism to mean the presence of a relatively weak national government over a confederation of relatively strong state governments.
As to the Federalist Papers, I have a full copy but admit I haven't read the entire set. Those that I've read have focused mostly on military and international trade issues. It is possible that the idea that federalism protects liberty was advanced in an issue of the Federalist that I've not yet read; I can't remember the exact source that I'd like to cite here but there were Founding Fathers involved in the theory.
The funny thing is that the Federalist advocated a stronger national government; while the idea of federalism is that of a weaker national government. Double-speak is no newer to this country than Independence Day.
Libertarians have hurt themselves by being the party for selfish redneck gun lovers and marijuana smoking potheads.
They've hurt themselves more by virtue of those two groups being virtually mutually exclusive.
But the major hurdles are selling brainwashed people on a new idea. Very few Americans are at a point where they can accept that you have rights that bother them but don't hurt anybody. Marijuana is, again, our paradigmatic example. Assuming that the Libertarian hype that marijuana doesn't hurt anyone but the user when used responsibly is valid, then it should be legalized by any government but a statist one. Try convincing the American right of that on a large scale. And guns of any sort in the hands of law-abiding citizens do not hurt anyone, but try convincing the American left of that.
There is a problem of perception, and it has produced a dichotomy of idiotic viewpoints. There are some real issues out there, such as abortion (one side believes it kills living babies, the other believes that it eliminates unwanted tissue from the mother), where at least a rational debate can be held at some level, but the main focus of a libertarian is distilling liberties into those that don't hurt others (all of which should be protected from government interference; whether they actually are protected becomes a matter of constitutional interpretation) and those that do hurt others (which should be regulated so as to prevent that harm).
A major overhaul and some hardcore campaigning on issues that people care about could go a long way for the Libertarian Party.
I can't get along with the Libertarian Party, either. Although most of their views are consistent, they do two things wrong as far as I can tell:
1. They don't understand economics and don't seem to understand states' rights, although I may just not be reading enough of their material to know their stance on states' rights. We need to get away from a "Win the Presidency, Win the Country" political system and back to the way the United States were (note the plural) meant to be: a confederation of states with their own powers. Ever since FDR, we've eroded one of the key protections of our civil liberties, more important even than the Bill of Rights according to the people who wrote the documents: federalism.
2. They tend to focus too much on controversial issues, and it gives them a public image of being a special interest group for illegal drug users. If you ask someone off the street what the Libertarian Party's platform is, they'll either not know of the LP at all or they will answer "Aren't they the dudes for the legalation of hemp?" (Futurama, A Head in the Polls.) Nobody knows the answer to "What will a Libertarian President accomplish for me and for the country?" That needs to be fixed.
Because I can't agree with the Republicans or the Democrats, because the Libertarians are reading the same book as I am but are on the wrong page and are reading it upside-down, and because all the other minor parties are named in Newspeak (the Constitution Party has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with state establishment of religion, for instance), I'm going to have to start my own political party. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the politics.
Hillary is just another modern American liberal. The contrast between that and a classic liberal is that a classic liberal wants everyone to have the same rights and liberties, while a modern liberal wants to decide for you which rights you should and shouldn't have, with an emphasis on being hypocritical.
Modern conservatives also want to decide for you which rights you should and shouldn't have, but they make their selections using different criteria. Conservatives shoot for traditional moral values, whereas liberals shoot for progressive think-of-the-children moral values. They're both wrong, and the classic liberals and libertarians (lowercase ell) have it mostly right. Your rights and liberties are yours to choose, as long as they don't actually and directly harm those around you.
Classic examples: Legalize marijuana, but make it illegal as hell to drive while intoxicated by marijuana because it's the intoxicated driving that directly injures other people, not the actual intoxication. Or let me own whatever gun I want, but punish me severely if I shoot someone with it other than in legally justified defense of myself, my property, or others. The list goes on, but just these two work to show that modern conservatives and modern liberals are guilty of the same hypocritical, self-important decision-making about which liberties you and I should have.
Re:Recipe (Score:0, Offtopic)
where are modpoints when I need them!
Evidently, they have fallen into the wrong hands.
this isn't a site for little nifty hacks
Fortunately, this hack isn't even nifty, so you haven't really disqualified it. How about: This isn't a site for boring posers, it's a site for stuff that matters.
You brought them in by suggesting that the abbreviation PC means IBM-compatible by virtue of being capitalized. I just pointed out that the lowercase version doesn't help things at all.
That may be true, but that doesn't make it the only acceptable definition of the term. You were blasting someone for using another acceptable definition. The backlash is because yours is not the only definition of the term. Had you been somewhat less belligerent in correcting the ambiguity (not incorrectness) in the original comment, nobody would have bothered you about it.
The PC abbreviation, especially capitalized
When not capitalized, "the pc abbreviation" means "parsec." When capitalized, according to Merriam-Webster, a far more reputable dictionary than Webopedia, PC stands for "personal computer." Now, even if we go to Webopedia's definition, to which you linked, we get "Short for personal computer or IBM PC." (The definition later concedes: "In recent years, the term PC has become more and more difficult to pin down." Why are you basing your entire argument on a definition that itself admits it isn't authoritative?) Anyhow, I've put in bold the word that you seem to be having the most difficulty with. If I were to ask you "Are you a Democrat or a Republican?" you certainly wouldn't believe my question to be whether you are both.
Try learning how to read before you speak authoritatively on a subject. You'll find yourself on the losing end of fewer semantics arguments that way.
...and formatted to fit our primitive screens.
I know that you've been able to buy a powder that does the same thing, I think called Insta-clot, for a while now. I read about it in use by our military - one soldier was shot through the neck, and his comrades applied Insta-clot along with other first-aid measures, and survived. I bought some for my dad, who is on blood thinners and is somewhat accident-prone. He hasn't had to use it yet, but that's a corollary to Murphy's Law: if it can't go wrong anymore, it won't.
I wonder if it's the same chemistry.
I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect anymore, but has anyone noticed that when you fire off a comment really fast without doing a preview or proofread and you have an embarrassing typo in the subject or you spelled someone's name wrong or something like that, it gets modded up?
For anyone who harbors any doubt, read about who wrote the Constitution.
I wouldn't worry about it. Contract formation under common law (and probably under civil law, as well, but if you're in a civil law country like France or Louisiana I'd just suggest you move instead of finding this out :P) requires a few things, one of which is mutual assent. I can't imagine that any jury is going to see the evidence in such a case (namely, the evidence of you freaking out about the other guy changing the contract after you signed it and the fact that the contract was on electronic paper) and make you abide by the altered contract.
My problem with Drupal is that every CMS lets me throw together a personal site in a matter of minutes, but none of them let me, in a matter of hours or even days, make things truly 'personal' with a format other than the "static pages, forums, calendars, and blogs" philosophy that most CMSes seem to share and a style that is uniquely my own.
I've read poems written by 10-year-olds, and they all sucked. Really bad. Now you're telling me that she has written "plenty of C#" code. I've also read poems written by C# developers, and they all sucked. Really bad.
I'm sure that Bill Gates was pleased beyond words to hear his life story summed up in a few lines of Vogon poetry.
There was a professor in our CS department, from whom I fortunately never took a class. Besides being both incompetent and insane, she was downright stupid about markers. She would start circling something on the white board while she lectured, and just keep circling it over and over again. There is still a mark on the white board from the time she used a permanent marker instead of dry-erase for that purpose.
Of course, a friend of mine once showed up for her class, and he was the only one there. She lectured anyhow. I told him that he should have excused himself to use the restroom for about 10 minutes, to see if she continued lecturing, paused the lecture and waited for his return, or just left. We may never know.
Do they not use paperless toilets in Europe?
You misspelled Montana.
Paper that changes what's written on it to suit what the reader wants? We've had that for over 200 years in the US. We call it the Constitution.
This must just be news because it's color.
(This satire brought to you by Daniels, Walker, and Beam, LLP.)
Which Simpsons is that a reference to? I'm pretty sure it's a reference to Futurama, but I can't remember which episode. Either Anthology of Interest I or Anthology of Interest II, as part of the "What if I never fell into the freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy?" question that Fry asked, which "was less stupid, but ... asked ... in a profoundly stupid manner."
You continue to use conclusory language, and continue to ignore the points I'm making and instead simplify them beyond meaning. Nonetheless, I will make one final comment on this thread and will read whatever response you have to it. Please try to answer my questions - I'll do my part by making them as simple and clear as I can. I won't respond, but if you do as I ask then you can rest assured that I will read it and agree. Just a couple of general pointers: be clear (resolve any potential ambiguities with a thorough explanation), be objective (and in the case of any possible dispute as to the objectivity of a statement, explain why the statement is objective), be verbose, choose your sources carefully, and cite them thoroughly. How can I disagree with something that is clear, objective, verbose, and well-researched?
1. The 10,000 figure was just a random number. Can you explain to me why the actual ratio matters? What percentage of people have to be injured by your negligence in order for you to be held accountable? Give me an exact number.
2. If the World Trade Center had been built to withstand terrorist attacks of the sort that occurred, would it have been destroyed on 9/11/01? If you answer 'yes,' then my point is invalid. If you answer 'no,' then one of the following must be true. Tell me which one or, if you feel none of them to be true, then for each of them explain why it isn't true. (1) No reasonable person would perceive a risk of terrorist attacks like the one that occurred. (2) A reasonable person would perceive such a risk and plan for it, and the people who built the WTC failed to do so, and are therefore partially at fault for its destruction.
3. If you do feel that being 20% at fault for something should bar any recovery for your injuries, please explain why. If you feel that there is a particular percentage of the fault that you must have (in the WTC example, if you go with #2 above, the percentage is obviously extremely small, I think we can agree on that) in order to be barred for recovery, what is that number? Be exact.
4. Objectively and clearly define "reasonable temperature" in a way that includes temperatures capable of causing third-degree burns to 6% of a person's body. Do not refer to any "recommended serving temperature" without clearly describing the process by which that recommendation was reached.
5. Tell me where I can download the trial transcript so that I can know the full set of facts, or clearly explain to me why the information about the case which "can be found all over the place" is equivalent to the transcript.
6. Clearly and objectively define "frivolous lawsuit."
7. Considering only civil lawsuits filed in federal and state courts with a jury in the United States, and with F being the number of frivolous lawsuits that result in a jury verdict in the plaintiff's favor, L being the number of frivolous lawsuits that result in a verdict in the defendant's favor, P being the number of non-frivolous lawsuits that reach a verdict for the plaintiff, and D being the number of non-frivolous lawsuits that reach a verdict for the defendant, demonstrate by some objective and statistically-sound method (and describe that method) following ratios: F to L, F to P, L to D, (F + L) to (P + D), and any others that you think will be useful to support your statement that "[i]t is very common" for juries to award enormous verdicts for frivolous cases. Please be verbose and clear about the logical connection between the real-world data you demonstrate and the conclusion that you draw.
Regarding the extremely low burn risk, would you say that, if I made a product that severely injured 1 out of every 10,000 people who used it, I should not be held liable for that one person's injuries?
Regarding 9/11, that was no attempt at any call to emotion, and I apologize for the obviously-unreasonable hope that anyone would take it as anything but the same. Rather, it was an example of something where more than one person was at fault. Let me explain: If a reasonable person had expected terrorists to attack the World Trade Center, then he would have built it differently to account for that attack. And if a reasonable person knew that spilling McDonald's coffee would cause third-degree burns to 6% of their body, then she would take greater care in not spilling it so as to account for the severe injuries that a spill would involve. But a reasonable person no more expects a terrorist attack than she expects to receive that severe of burns from spilling coffee on herself, as was the main point of my earlier comment regarding dumping an average cup of coffee on yourself.
Stella was a mostly reasonable person. She spilled her coffee, out of what the jury found to be her own negligence. But the jury found that her injuries would never have happened if McDonald's had served coffee at a reasonable temperature, and that her negligence was only 20% of the cause of her injuries.
Under a legal system where 20% of the fault is the same as 100% of the fault, you wouldn't have fixed anything, and indeed would have made some things much worse. The train goes by your farm and starts your crops on fire - but it's 20% your fault for planting crops that close to the rails so you can't hold the railroad responsible. You fail to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and a car going 100mph over the speed limit hits you from the side and kills you, but it's your fault because you were 20% in the wrong, so you can't hold the more negligent driver responsible.
I emphasize: Neither you nor I was present to hear the evidence in this case. There are facts that neither of us knows nor can know. We only have what the jury tells us the facts were (and even then we don't have a full picture before us in this discussion). What I believe our disagreement really boils down to is two-fold (if you think we disagree on different vectors than these, feel free to point them out):
1. Whether we trust juries to decide anything at all. If you have a better system than a jury for deciding facts in lawsuits, I'd love to hear about it. However, you've offered no alternatives. It's easy to criticize something or point out problems with it, but much harder to actually solve those problems.
2. Whether the McDonald's case and others like it that appear on the surface to be frivolous, but about which reasonable men (which I submit we both are, despite our fervent disagreement about whether this case was frivolous and admittably closed-minded rejection of some of each other's logic) disagree, should be thrown out of court without showing the jury any evidence. The word "frivolous" itself has a dictionary definition rife with subjectivity. I no more trust a legislature to broadly define it than I do big business (which stands to gain so much in unaccountability from a change in the tort system in America), whereas I do trust juries to decide facts in lawsuits. If you presume all lawsuits to be frivolous (for in no other way can you really make a decision about whether or not a particular case is frivolous, short of hearing evidence and having a trial to decide if it's frivolous or not, but juries do that already when they enter verdicts for the defendant (which they do far more often than the media would have you believe, as discussed elsewhere among the comments on this story), then there is no point to having a civil legal system at all. What would you gain from that? Do you have other alternatives in mind that I'm overlooking?
Do you really think that a 12-person cross-sectio