[OT] Lawsuits vs. sales (was Re: Lethal computers? (was: Goodwill Computerworks Museum is open)

Marvin <marvin(a)rain.org> wrote: People always seem to think that reasoning like this is bad, and that safety should always come first. But everything in life is a tradeoff. I'm all in favor of corporations (and everyone else) being held liable for actual damages. But I don't believe that insanely high punitive damages should be awarded just because the jury doesn't like the tradeoff. When you sell millions of cups of hot coffee a day, there's literally NO way to prevent a few people from being burned. I don't see how that makes McDonalds negligent, even if there WERE some prior complaints about it. When the Challenger blew up, some people criticized NASA for having dropped plans for an emergency escape system that might have saved the astronauts in an accident on the launch pad (but not in the actual Challenger disaster). NASA had dropped those particular plans because the escape system would have cost about 40 million dollars, and added substantial weight to the shuttle, reducing its cargo capacity. The critics claimed that NASA should install every conceivable safety system no matter the cost. The end result of such reasoning is that the Space Shuttle would never get built. Applied on a larger scale, that reasoning would cause many common things we use everyday to be unavailable, such as automobiles.