Our generation has warning labels because their generation actually did it. Buncha lead addled boomers acting like we're fools for learning from their stupidity.
Taking away the instructions on how to service and repair a car was a result of capitalists wanting to make more money by forcing you to get your car repaired by them.
Adding instructions not to drink battery acid is likely for companies to avoid getting sued because people will always argue that there was no warning about drinking battery acid so the company owes you compensation.
This is a false comparison.
Also helps them get away with hiding shoddy/cheap parts.
~2018-2020 Hondas have defective air condensers. They aren’t rated for the refrigerant. They are basically guaranteed to fail. You also have to go to a dealership to get your AC serviced. There’s a warranty for the AC, but it’s that dealer that checks whether your AC meets the warranty or not (amazing how easy it is to find bits of debris and deny the warranty when no third party can double check.)
You could crack open an original Xbox and do a lot of modifications with it. The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
The Xbox 360 was designed to be as annoying to take apart as possible, possibly to hide the cheap components that lead to the red ring of death…
actually, this was probably to fit it into the very weird and particular form factor that microsoft wanted it to fit in.
The red ring of death issue was actually due to faulty chip manufacturing, rather than bad cooling, it was an inevitable flaw due to manufacturing defects, rather than design failures. The heating and cooling cycles just greatly exaggerated the effect of the problem, that's why it's so closely linked.
Also you could've mentioned the update fuses in the CPU, IIRC there are fuses that are blown when the system updates, to prevent you from going back, no matter what you do.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
But also, fixing a car from 70's is very different than trying to fix a car from this millenium.
As technology improves and becomes more detailed, it might also get harder to repair. This isn't to be taken as a defense of companies which have used planned obsolescence. But even if there was a very user friendly car company, I think it would be more complex to adjust your valves today than it was 30-40 years ago.
I mean I do agree with you. Planned obsolescence and whatnot is very real.
it's complicated, a good example, actually probably the ideal example, of planned obsolescence is airpods. Designed to not be repaired, thrown away, and then replaced.
It can also apply to things like "lifetime" designed products, you may design something to mechanically wear out, before it needs to be maintained, or perhaps, require no maintenance, until you need to replace it. It's harder to say whether this is strictly planned obsolescence, or just cost cutting engineering, which in the long run, probably doesn't change much.
i think the most semantically accurate version of this would be releasing a product that is 100% good, and then a year later releasing a product that is 200% good, surpassing and replacing the previous product entirely, removing the previous product from the product line up, and only supporting the most recent product. I.E. it's planned to become obsolete, shortly into the future.
Vehicles are also a weird market segment, they've gotten considerably more reliable since the early days of the automotive industry, they've gotten significantly more comfortable, they've gotten significantly more safe. They've also gotten several orders of magnitude more complicated since than as well. To deal with the aforementioned advances. Though there have been a lot of issues in recent manufacturing leading to parts that are just, bad.
My dad would print this meme out and mail it to me if he knew how to rightclick
He can always mail you a manuscript
No more boomerposting
There was a time when everyone had common sense
Oh, OP, you're such a merry jester!
Is this the terrible facebook memes community now?
If you want to play relative knowledge, 50 years ago they used asbestos as bathroom waterproofing
And painted the whole room with a pretty green colored lead paint.
And also asbestos as cigarette filters
Back in my day we drank from the hose if we got thirsty and lined up in the street to get sprayed with DDT and painted our homes with lead. Those were the days!
::sigh:: Old cars had instructions on adjusting valves because you needed to. Improvements in manufacturing processes means that valves and valve seats simply don't wear the way that they use to. You may still need to change valve shims if your clearance is out of tolerance, but on most cars that's going to be well over 100,000 miles before service is needed. It's also a really tedious, long job, and takes tools that most people aren't going to have. (I have done it multiple times on a motorcycle; that's a 10,000 miles service interval b/c the engines on the bikes I ride redlines at 18,000rpm, which means significantly more wear on engines, and higher chances of thing like valve flutter.) Cars are vastly more complicated than they used to be, because they're also far, far more efficient, and last far longer; it used to be a big deal if a car made it to 100,000 miles, and now a car that dies at 100k is considered an unreliable lemon.
Well, they don't last far longer as a whole, but the advances in machining tolerances and material science, the mechanical internals can go far longer without anything more than fluid changes.
As far as longevity, soy based wiring harnesses, poorly shielded ECUs, and borked software updates are what are killing cars these days.
As a whole, they def. do last longer. I can look on FB Marketplace right now and find cars that are in fairly good, operational condition with 250,000 miles. The issues you're talking about aren't the kind of major mechanical things that become improbably expensive to repair, e.g., a broken timing chain with high interference valves & cylinders. Although yeah, replacing a main wiring harness on a car is a PITA and very expensive unless you can find a functional used one on eBay.
Also, there's not great empirical evidence that the soy-based insulation is significantly worse than its petroleum based counterpart. There's a ton of anecdotal claims about it attracting rodents, but no direct evidence AFAIK. The class-action lawsuits over rodent damage have been dismissed. And, TBF, I've had older cars that had wiring chewed by mice. Part of the difference with newer cars seems to be that there's just more wiring packed into smaller areas, areas that look like great nests for rodents; you didn't see that kind of wiring density 20 years ago.
if everyone had common sense back then we wouldn't be in the middle of this shitshow today
/boomerhumor, because every generation that comes after is stupid.
And who are the people that are the reason for this having to be in the manual. Its the people that were born 50+ years ago...
This implies it was the previous generation that drank the content of the battery
Right, or that back then they just didn’t care if you drank the battery because there wasn’t a hugely well-developed culture of lawsuits like we have now. Those fuckers in 1914-1950 were definitely down for a battery party, no doubt. The ones that made it now think that everyone had common sense because only the ones that did made it through.
Torpedo juice.
They drank anything that would get them intoxicated
50ish years ago, back when people actually read Popular Science, they told people to dispose of their old motor oil by digging a small hole in your backyard, filling it with gravel, and pouring the motor oil into it.
Oh and don't forget all the advertisements for your Doctor's favorite cigarette.
Also, there are two main actual reasons why far fewer car manuals nowadays include instructions on valve adjustments:
-
A whole lot more modern cars use hydro-compensators, which greatly reduces the need to manually adjust the valves.
-
Car companies really, really want you to go to a dealership or officially certified maintenance shop so they can overcharge you on maintenance.
But pray do tell me, what generation is responsible for car manufacturers discouraging repair and forcing you to go to certified dealers?
Or just pour it along the fence where the tall grass grows (before weed whackers)
-
And who put lead in the gas? Cars aren't that simple anymore anyways.
Which generation can't let go of power?
Nah. I call bullshit.
And asbestos in the walls? And said cigarettes were healthy?
Last I checked, my generation didn't put Reagan into office.
no, just trump
If you want to get technical it was largely folks who were adults during the regan presidency who trump in.
My generation wasn't much of his support but great job with the "voters who voted against this are also to blame" bullshit!
Downvote because OP is just a boomer, not a shitposter.
Make an alt account and do both
Or just don't vote and move along
If I’m not gonna quickly form an opinion on something I just saw for the first time and immediately proclaim it to millions of strangers in a way it can never be deleted, then what’s the point?
This isn’t the flex you think it is. The reason why they warn you not to drink the battery is that someone did it.
I assume that's why it's posted in shit posts. So one doesn't know whether to upvote for it being shit, or downvote for it being dumb.
Exactly, and it probably took several instances of this happening going back to 1950 before they finally decided to make that warning label.
Don't drink the battery warnings fall into the cover-your-ass listings of all the stupid things people have done that might lead to litigation.
But around a century or so ago, Boy Scouts learned to build a bungalow and a tool shed which were part of their bear badge.
When I was a cub scout I had the option of building a pinball machine. Of course it didn't say how and a basic pachinko machine was easier if more tedious.
Note I didn't do any of these things, being a latchkey kid and no internet, nor libraries in walking distance. I flunked out of boy scouts.
That all said, most appliances we buy have a lot of instructions we don't remember, and the ones that are not obviously dangerous tend to require multiple infractions plus wear and tear before they're actually hazardous. But the US is a litigious society.
I mean, I could absolutely imagine someone doing this. They're probably a well meaning person, but probably not of great intelligence. They're driving through the desert one day, absolutely thirsty. They're desperate for a drink, about to pass out. Then they remember in their delerium - "Wait! There's some water in the car's battery! I could drink some of that and be fine! I'll just drain it while the car is running (so I don't have to restart it), keep the engine running, and be able to make it to the next town. My God, I'm a genius. I'm saved!" They then proceed, in the manner of unique creativity only the ignorant possess, to find a way to drain the fluid from the battery of a running car engine. And they have a big old swig of that battery water.
What would be required for this? All that it would take is for someone to just have very poor chemistry knowledge. Someone sees a fluid that looks like water, and they assume it's water. Maybe they figure a car battery works like a potato battery and there's just water in the cell. Even if the "water" is clearly foul, maybe someone would assume it's just dirty water, but still water. (As in, not an acid.)
Or, maybe they even know it's not something you should regularly drink. They know there's some fluid called "battery acid" in the battery. But they also know that soda is acidic, and that is safe to drink. So maybe battery acid is OK in small amounts? Just how strong does an acid have to be before you can't safely drink it? Maybe they could just try a small quantity, maybe about a spoonful? Surely that would be fine....
Those on the bottom 10% of the IQ distribution don't deserve to die. Those who failed high school chem don't deserve to drink battery acid.
When planning public health or public safety interventions, you have to balance between cost and effectiveness. For example, imagine some new car widget that will increase automobile safety. You're a regulator trying to decide whether to mandate them on all new vehicles. You run the numbers; you want to balance the increased vehicle price against the projected lives saved. You run the numbers and find that this will cost $1 billion per life saved. Probably not worth mandating them. It's not that those lives aren't worth saving, but there are more cost effective ways to save lives. We could tax everyone the same money they would spend buying these devices, and then use this money to expand Medicare eligibility. Or we could mandate some other vehicle safety device. The number of lives saved is always balanced against the cost of an intervention. The value of a life is infinite; the number of dollars available to save lives is finite.
But printing on a battery? The manufacturers already print a labels on them. It costs tiny fractions of a penny per battery to add the safety warnings. Even if it only prevents a handful of deaths or serious injuries over a decade, the cost is so low we might as well do it. There's something like 14 million new vehicles sold in the US each year. Imagine over ten years that's 140 million vehicles. Let's say it costs a penny to include a warning label on each battery. That's a cost of $1.4 million over an entire decade.
I would say in that case, if even a single life is spared over that decade, if only a single living person is saved from the reaper...Then it is worth it. Hell, that's probably even a fair amount to prevent a life-altering injury. If even one person per decade is stupid enough to drink battery acid, and this warning will prevent it, then it is worth doing!
Sometime, you grab the manual of some old piece of junk, there's all the electronic schematics, parts list, all adjustable things that should never face end user, etc. described in it.
Now, it's just "push button. if led not go vroom vroom, call support".
Great point. Think of how incredible it would be if you could go on line and get manuals to fix any part of anything you own from a PS5 to a Refrigerator, to a Rivan Truck including all the protocols, chip sets, ect... Or just explore them to see how things work, I'm sure a lot of great inventions and ideas came about from people tinkering with and exploring manuals like these. Anymore these are considered "top secret" and you have to reverse engineer anything to figure out how it works. I think this speaks more to the fact that the things you "buy" these days aren't really considered yours. You are borrowing the IP to use for a fee and if it breaks, tough shit. Throw it out and get a new one.
This is an established cool community ran resource for all kinds of schematics, repairs, and breakdowns of all kinds of devices for manufacturers that suck at telling you how to fix their stuff.
There's owners manuals and there's repair manuals.
They where the same thing. That's the point.
Are we boomer posting today?
Boomer-est image I’ve seen in a while
To paraphrase an answer I once read: yes, we tend to introduce warnings against bad behaviours we detect and deprecate obsolete information.
In this case: I don't need to tinker a valve in an engine nowadays. The fuel injection is done through an incredibly precise system, controlled by a computer. Even mechanics require specialized tools and equipments to fiddle with that part of an engine.
Car batteries have been built more and more to be maintenance-less; you buy it, run, when it dies you replace it and that is it. Battery acid is a thing and it is dangerous, hence the attempt to divert people from messing with it.
But because less and less people are prone to go into mechanics, the need to advise against tinkering with your battery really needs to be reinforced.
Warning labels are often first written in blood before taking form of paper and ink.
PSSSHT
BACK IN MAY DAEEEYY
Proper fucking boring boomer banter that.
Old cars could actually have their stuff adjusted, though. You'd have to tinker with the carburator if the weather was significantly colder/hotter, etc. to get it to run properly.
Even cars in the 90s started getting too complex - electronic fuel injection, variable valve timing, and more. There's no need to adjust the valves because the computer does it, and better than you could.
I wouldn't say the computer adjusts the valves, variable valve timing serves a completely different function than an old fashioned valve adjustment.
It's true that most lifters are hydraulic nowadays, and self-adjust by filling with oil. So your point still stands, it's just mechanical, not computer controlled.
My 2017 Honda V6 does require valve adjustments, but I doubt many people actually do it themselves though. And most people probably don't have it done at all.
(I'm a hobbyist, not a mechanic, so anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
You’re correct.
Also, cars became pointless after they removed distributors.
honestly, im at a point where i've become anti-humanist.
The political satire is strong this year, and it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Perhaps the world will crash and burn, who knows, exciting times we live in!
Ive been voting giant meteor for a while now and it has not showed up.
Who's job is it to teach common sense? If you find the future generation lacking, that's probably your fault.
When I was a teenager, my dad gave me shit for not knowing how to change brake pads, and my response was "Who was supposed to teach me?". Like, it's not like I could afford a car working weekends, and he was always too busy to have me around whenever something went wrong. So next time he changed the brakes, he actuality taught me.
I just want to point something out: Knowing not to drink battery fluid is not common sense!
Common sense is something that anyone would "just know" by instinct. Like not running out on to a highway with vehicles traveling at high speed. No one needs to teach that because it's obvious from a glance.
If someone had never encountered a highway and never heard of such a thing they might wander out onto one when there's no traffic. Would that be a failing of common sense? No! Because that type of decision-making requires some education/experience.
Lead tastes sweet! I haven't tried it (haha) but there's a reason why loads of children get lead poisoning by eating it every year. If you didn't know that it's poisonous and haven't been educated about not eating/tasting random things you might just try the lead acid of a car battery! Especially if it's really old and has become less acidic (that's what sulfation does: Reduces the acidity).
"Common sense" is actually just a practical form of, "basic education". Not everyone gets it and everyone always has gaps in their knowledge. What's common sense to one person isn't to another.
TL;DR: Common sense is a myth. We're all born ignorant.
Common sense is limited by the population size that shares the same way of thinking.
What's common sense to one group, isn't to the other. Common sense is people specific, not global.
That's an interesting observation I'd never thought about before. You're right, "common" just refers to the common culture around you. The common sense approach to something in Germany might be entirely different than common sense solution in Japan.
Like taking off your shoes before entering someone's home. Why bring street dirt into a living space? Common sense in many asian countries, non-existant sense in the netherlands.
Yeah and the last generation keeps sending money to the prince of Nigeria.
Of course, how else could he reclaim his throne and pay you back 10x more than you gave him?
That's just because they're old though, people our age will probably be getting scammed when we're old too.
Its not that we're smarter than the previous generation, we just have access to more knowledge than they did. (and maybe less exposure to lead 😅(but maybe more exposure to microplastics, and who knows what cognitive effects that might have 😅))
Arrogantly calling out the intelligence claims of others works better if you know when and how to use punctuation.
There are, many different kinds...of intelligence
That seems like an even better reason not to call out the intelligence claims of others.
Ah yes, when basically the only electronics in a car were the head and tail lights. I can assemble and disassemble a Willy jeep or VW Beatle by just looking at it and going with the flow, I have no fucking clue how to disassemble a modern car's door panel without breaking anything.
But if we're comparing us to boomers, let's see who's better at building a simple web scraping tool in python which runs on a raspi without any knowledge of python, Linux, AI and how to setup a raspberry pi. It took me a day to figure out.
That's the thing that hasn't changed: Some folks have a DIY attitude/initiative and others have a defeatist mentality.
I have no doubt that if you took someone from 50 years ago who could disassemble their car's engine and put it back together again and raised them up in today's environment they'd be the ones learning Python and how to fool around with Linux.
Maybe amateur radio folks (from 50 years ago) would be more appropriate for the analogy but you get the idea. Smarts and ignorance are orthogonal concepts.
Yeah, whatever we do differently now is because of new knowledge. Not because we're smarter. It's so annoying when conspiracy idiots say "how was this ancient primitive civilization able to build a pyramid, it must have been aliens" while the people back then were just as smart as we are now, but with less knowledge and technological advancements then we have today.
My previous comment is what I usually say to boomers who claim "the new generation is so dumb, they can't even use a rotary phone anymore" or anything like that. Yeah grandpa, because we have smartphones now. In ancient Rome they built massive aquaducts, I'd like to see you try building one, with a chisel, which still stands over 3000 years later. You're so dumb, you don't even know how to do that while ancient Romans built them all across Europe.
It's just grumpy old farts who are stuck in their midlife and now feel left behind and so much smarter and better than younger people while in reality being so extremity stubborn and ignorant.
I'd make a "print a pdf" joke, but honestly, that's already an unnecessary "skill".
Sadly, technology has moved towards single finger usability and thrown out features in the process. Printing a PDF is now easy, because there's a big button (that sells you a cloud subscription for some reason), but it's also the only thing the app does.
top 10 reasons I have my printer firewalled from the WAN network
PDFs are designed to be printed, that's why they're formatted as pages instead of continuous text like HTML. "Portable Document Format". Unless I'm missing some reference you're making here.
The joke to counter "you can't even write cursive" and other boomer bs is "well at least I know how to print a PDF", alluding to the abysmal tech intuition of some boomers, usually those in controlling roles like managers or CEOs.
And i still miss those old manuals... Just let me fix my car mate
You can't, because the previous generations allowed capitalism to ruin consumer goods with regulatory capture and planned obsolescence.
It's time to resurrect the corolla in the backyard.
I mean, I'm pretty sure cars' lifespans have generally increased over the years, despite not being able to easily tweak valves or what have you. So many older cars don't have a 6th digit on the odometer because it was so common for a car to die after about 100,000 miles anyway. Now you might hit some issues, but that kind of mileage is basically your car's equivalent of a person's 40th birthday.
You totally can. It's just usually not cost effective. Buying the tools you need to do major mechanical work is a few thousand dollars, a full service manual runs 400+ pages (if available; i think that the manual for my GTI is only on-line, and is a subscription from VW; IIRC it's several thousand pages), diagnostic electronics are $200-2000, and so on. Plus, you need a good place to work, like an enclosed garage. I've replaced an engine in a Civic after bending valves (timing chain failure), and yeah, a k-swap is def. in the realm of something you can do on you own if you want to spend more than the value of your car getting a shop set up for yourself.
You can find service manuals online. I found the full blown 1,397 page OEM service manual for my '97 Prelude. For free. And failing that, there's probably a YouTube video for it, especially if it's not something incredibly rare.
The keyword is right there: 97. Anything after ~2014 and it's a mess to find manuals, for older stuff i was able to easily find manuals and fix them no problem
I’llbe 100% honest, bud, but if you can’t find a service manual on the internet or simply ask at the dealership I probably wouldn’t trust you to do the work. They’re available, just try even a little. And boy if you trust what little information may or may not be in an owner’s manual…
Besides, the only reason that info was in there was because the valves needed much more frequent adjusting. You really shouldn’t miss not needing to have that information so readily available.
The problem are the shitty modern cars that are partly hard to repair so you have to pay for parts and service, partly because they want to sell you bs "features", while they also break constantly, because they are made to be as cheap as possible. Brought to you by the generation that now makes fun about people stuck in the system they helped to create
Well guess why we have those warnings, they came from somewhere.
Stupid people always existed. The difference is now they have TikTok and twitter, so we can see their stupidity more.
Any time my father brings up stuff like this, I remind him that he and his brothers drove their car onto a frozen lake and almost broke through the ice, and more than once they bought tennis balls, soaked them in gasoline, and threw them at each other with welding gloves.
I know for a fact that he and his brothers did tons of dumb shit, and I won't let him forget it even if he finds it convenient when comparing generations.
I'd ask how many people of his generations drank the battery acid that they had to make a warning about it.
Isn’t this more of making sure to cover all bases in case someone gets an idea of doing something dumb so they can sue? Especially in the US because it’s the most litigious country in the world.
Litigation isn't what you think. A local lawyer had a radio program where he explained our "sue happy" culture.
You only hear about crazy shit, because it's crazy shit. How many people suicided on New Year's Eve? Bet you can name at least one! Because blowing yourself up up in a Cybertruck, with fireworks, on New Year's, in front of Trump Towers, is crazy. Apply this to everything you see and read in the media.
Judges do not have to hear every bullshit case, plenty gets tossed. Most lawsuits have merit and are boring as paste.
Also, lawyers won't take your stupid case to court. They're happy to charge for time and advice, but they will not bring legal scat before a judge.
For one, they know these judges, have to work with them for years. Want to piss those judges off with frivolous bullshit? Retain a lawyer and go to court. He'll tell you how to act before that particular judge.
For two, lawyers want to win, low risk tolerance. Think they're taking every dumb case to court just for a paycheck? No, they have a reputation to think about. Who's hiring a lawyer that loses all the time or has a rep for taking losing cases?
tl;dr: Neither judges nor lawyers are stupid and frivolous lawsuits are rare.
Only hearing about the crazy shit is the same reason Florida seems so crazy. "Sunshine Laws" in Florida mean arrest records are public information in Florida. A cottage industry has sprung up around scouring arrest records for ludicrous arrests or weird things that happened around them. It's not that Florida is any more crazy than the rest of the country. We just hang our dirty laundry in the front lawn for everyone to see. Don't believe that crazy ass shit isn't happening in your neck of the woods, too.
That said, Florida is kind of crazy, though. At least some of it is imported crazy from other areas, though.
The problem isn't the lawsuits it's the cost. Litigating anything is prohibitively expensive. Nobody but the rich and businesses can afford that so what you end up with is some huge percentage of cases being settled out of court without anyone (other than the parties involved) knowing about it.
It's a big reason why settlement figures and jury damage awards are rising... You have to pay for the lawyers!
...which is interesting because lawyer pay is actually dropping and has been for some time now. The biggest firms are collecting all the money and most of that is flowing to the top. So most lawyers are in the same boat as the rest of us where wages aren't keeping pace with inflation so they're getting poorer and poorer every year.
That's happening despite the fact that litigation costs are rising. Something is severely broken in regards to the economics of our criminal and civil justice system.
many engines do not require this procedure. It depends on whether the engine is equipped with hydro-compensators: these are devices designed for automatic adjustment of the thermal gap. They work at the expense of the oil entering them from the engine (that is why, actually, and are called “hydro-compensators”) and completely exclude the necessity of periodic manual adjustment of valves.
I've never met an engine that doesn't need valve adjustments, even with hydraulic lifters.
Now the adjustment period is far longer today, like in the 100k miles range.
Just be glad you rarely see shim/bucket adjustment these days. Boy was that a bitch.
The engines I've seen with hydraulic lifters do not have anything to adjust.
Unless you're talking about cleaning out the oil ports when they start to stick, but I wouldn't call that an adjustment.
Could you give an example? I'm curious
(Not a professional, just interested in cars)
I never met an engine.
I don't think any generation is "smarter" than the last at any given age.
I think each generation is less "ignorant" because they are more "informed" by the learnings and failures of the generations before.
I also think people stop adapting as they age, and intellect declines medically, leading to the impression that the younger are "smarter".
I think each generation is less "ignorant" because they are more "informed" by the learnings and failures of the generations before.
One has only to point a finger at the previous generation to figure out who is responsible for, "kids these days."
I don’t think any generation is “smarter” than the last at any given age.
I think the latest generation is smarter in some technological aspects because they learn them in school. Older generations didn't have that opportunity because those technologies didn't exist then. When I have a technical question related to things like Iphones I always ask the youngest person that I know.
One advantage of older generations is that they actually lived during historic events while the young can only read an author's interepretation of those events
The generation that fought fascism in the West is almost completely dead. And so, here we go again.
Generation war is nonsense.
Older vehicles easier to work on, go out of spec more often.
So electric cars don't have valves. Oh, you didn't even think that far ahead with your boomer brain? Try to figure out why they put the warning in the manual. With all that leaded gasoline fogging up the brains, it's fair to assume grandpa drank from a battery on a dare.
Ouch, the edge!!
OK Tucker
Maybe the previous generation of manual writers didn't have the common sense to realize that a certain subset of people out there are stupid enough to drink the battery juice if you don't warn them not to.
The label isn't there to prevent people from drinking battery juice. The same people who would drink it would never read a manual, let alone the warnings in it.
It's only there to limit liability.
Please do society a favor and remove the warning labels.
I see this sentiment a lot, but honestly I think it would actually do the reverse of what people suggest. "Common sense" isnt really some inherit knowledge that everyone not stupid knows, its actually just stuff that we expect everyone to have learned at some point, presumably in fairly early childhood. But learning stuff requires being taught, and its easy enough for something to just have never come up for someone when they were a kid, because there are so many things to know. Having an explicit warning somewhere is both another source of information in case someone just never got the memo and a prompt for someone unfamiliar with the danger, be it a kid or some ignorant adult, to potentially ask someone why that thing is dangerous. Obviously this is a bit of an extreme example since drinking unknown things is a foolish thing to do in general, but it makes more sense to just apply the labels when in doubt than spend effort making a judgement for every dangerous thing and potentially missing something. I'd bet that having warning labels on stuff actually slightly increases the amount of common sense in society.
Before Reagan
This is the best way I can put it.
Before Reagan was elected, middle class was defined as one income supporting a family of four. In those days $1 million was still considered a vast fortune. By the time Bush Sr. was voted out, middle class had been redefined as two incomes to run the house, and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
That's because in the last 50 years someone somewhere was stupid enough to drink the battery. You can't blame that on the latest generation.
OK boomer
We've actually been misunderstanding the phrase this whole time. It's not "common sense" and referring to things everyone should know; it's actually "common cents" and is about those take-a-penny-leave-a-penny things. As in "when you're just a little short, use some common cents." 😌
Okay, Dad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_sense
The origin of the term "common sense" is in the works of Aristotle.
Right, I'm sure Aristotle knew a lot about take-a-penny-leave-a-penny and cents... Unless you're just memeing, in which case ignore me
Ok, lead boy.
And for what it's worth those are the people you now have to argue with over whether or not drinking the contents of the battery is a good thing just because the manual told you not to.
father i cannot click the book
It’s there because someone stupid fuck did it, and the car manufacturer don’t want to be legally responsible next time it happens.
It’s actually because valves were shit way back when and they are no longer something that the owner’s manual needs to explain. Many car manufacturers suck but this one is actually because they don’t anymore.
And who decided to change the manual to include warnings to not drink the battery?
It sure as hell wasn't my generation.
No there wasn't.
Some one made the KEY comment about lawsuits. Today people sue over anything. Like you are so stupid you spill hot coffee on yourself. (coffee is hot) and then blame the people that you bought the coffee from. In earlier days simple logic was accepted and dumb people wouldn't be able to find ambulance chasers to file lawsuits for them. Today "instructions" to guide the dumber people are actually to prevent lawsuits.
The story with the hot coffee is a capitalist trope. Serving 88°C coffee to someone who than suffers third degree burns (prognosis: Scarring, contractures, amputation (early excision recommended)) due to a spill is a valid law suit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants
Thank You! They intentionally served the coffee hotter than their cups were even rated for all to minimize people getting refills and it was well documented by their own employees that people were getting hurt as a result.
The person filing the lawsuit only wanted their medical bills covered. The JURY decided to go punitive and instead gave like 2 days of coffee profits instead (NOTE: The judge then said 'fuck that' and reduced the punitive amount down to ~25% of the amount the jury decided on ... or 3x what they medical bills came out to because actually _punishing _ a company isn't allowed).
McDonalds' smear campaign against this poor woman has been so disgustingly successful.
Ok boomer
As someone else pointed out, it was a justified lawsuit. Additionally, they were told the coffee was too hot and should lower the temperature and they refused.
The woman had to sue, and only asked for her medical bills to be paid, around $18k. Again, McDonald's refused. They then hired people to act like this was an attack, when they knew they were wrong.
It was the jury who decided that $2 million was what the woman was owed. Also, I heard that was 2 days of hamburger sales. The fact McDonald's is still around makes me think they recovered.
The lawsuits are not about being stupid, theyre about money. Lawyers won that lawsuit, and they didn't do it by being stupid.
