fatdad wrote:BTW, to respond to your "lawsuit silliness" claim, there are less lawsuits filed per capita today than there were in Colonial Times.

Got a source for that? I love it.

(And it doesn't surprise me.)

fatdad wrote:

esmith wrote:These days the problem is the opposite - because of this lawsuit silliness, it is very hard to find good, properly brewed tea in this country.

Egad, that is a tragedy. You're right. We should roll back all consumer protections in this country so one can find a proper cup of tea. Point well taken..

Which part of my post had anything to do with consumer protections? There are no consumer protections here. You can't protect the consumer from getting burned by spilled coffee (unless you lower the temperature below 140 F, at which point nobody will want to drink it - which is the reason why the British equivalent of McDonalds lawsuit was laughed out of court.) Nor can you reasonably protect a hiker from being eaten or from falling down a waterfall. All you can do is make things sufficiently annoying for the customer by silly moves such as aforementioned liability waivers.

I don't know if the statement about the number of lawsuits per capita is true (does it include or exclude criminal cases?), but I'm pretty sure that, in colonial times, a single frivolous civil lawsuit wasn't capable of ruining access to good tea for 300 million citizens.