well, pointing out more than a couple of the most likely - or miscalculating the risk/benefit with a thumb on the scale towards imagined catastrophe beyond a reasonable measure of caution, is disruptive, actually. Certainly discussing them all is a power play and waste of even your time.
Disruption is not perfectly valid. It’s valid at times, but so is consensus and so are cooler heads.
Whenever I imagine someone making an argument based on special unique knowledge of the future (or an ability to read minds) I imagine that person speaking to me from the back of a unicorn.
Okay, this isn’t made to sound snarky, I promise, but you really, really don’t want to put the word “actually” in bold. It makes you look like one of those “well actually” people, and that doesn’t look good. Take it from someone who kinda is a “well actually” guy.
And yes, fine, pointing out all the things that could reasonably have gone wrong is perfectly valid in evaluating someone’s decision. Better?
I’ve noticed @One_Brown_Mouse tends to use a lot of bold text in general (similar to how I often employ italics), so I kinda doubted that the was the point, but I could be wrong.
That being said, I felt my disagreement was perfectly legitimate in this case. @Melz2 made a statement (i.e. As long as the result was okay, considering the other hypothetical possibilities is outside the point) which I disagreed with (i.e. The ends alone do not necessarily justify the means used, so considering other possible outcomes seems sensible in evaluating the means.) While a comment thread isn’t just for arguing with strangers, I generally feel it to be a valid place to go “Wait, a minute, back up, because what you said doesn’t parse and/or has disturbing implications” provided it doesn’t turn into a full on flame war (Which is why, while I have opinions on that other thread about the Iranian woman, I’m not saying a damn word on that powder keg).
I am, and, again, this isn’t sarcasm, or means to be snarky, open to hearing why you consider my disagreement inappropriate. Private message is fine if you don’t want to do so in this thread. Or, if you have better things to do than educate me, I understand that as well.
Then that’s all that matters then; isn’t it?
In fairness, Mr. Astl didn’t take a stand. He just made the first steps.
Not really. I felt that was the case, but I’m open to hearing about why I might be wrong, and it was either not legitimate disagreement, or not legitimately conducted. Which probably has something to do with why I wind up arguing with a lot of people, I admit, and perhaps that’s a fault of mine.
In any case, to clarify my viewpoint, the stairs turned out well. If they were a good idea or not depends on how well thought out it was, and what their intended purpose was. Doing something stupid and lucking into it turning out well isn’t particularly laudable in my book, but doing something smart and subtle that turns out well is.
I’m not saying you’re right, or wrong.
I honestly don’t care.
I’m just saying that maybe you come off sounding like a “well, actually” kind of dude to some people.
Especially after your comment deigning to tell someone else how he ‘should’ write his own posts.
They should have given him community service where he had to build stairs…
I don’t want to get into the discussion about whether this chap should have built these stairs or not or whether the city should be building stairs here at all (I did that enough in the other thread - how many threads do we need?).
I do think there are a few points you (and others) make here which are worth unpicking.
The basic assumption on the part of a lot of people seems to be that the city had some sort of duty to do something to stop people injuring themselves going down this slope and were failing in that duty until shamed into it by the guy.
There is also an assumption (to be fair - pretty much instilled by the article) that the city was concerned enough about it to “seek out quotes for the construction costs.”
That does not appear to be the case. The $65k figure appears to have been plucked out of the air as wait_really said.
Whether that makes anything better…?
Well, no there isn’t.
There is also no way to prove that the city would have been successfully sued.
If we’re banning hypotheticals, lets ban them both ways, please.
What one can say is what the law as it stands requires.
In a situation like this where there is a reasonably obvious danger all the city has to do is take reasonable steps to draw that danger to people’s attention.
In this case there is a barrier which people had to clamber over in order to walk down the slope.
That is almost certainly enough.
Possibly after the first person injures themselves and tells the council about it, they might be expected to put up a sign as well.
That really is it.
Despite what lots of people like to tell us, the requirements to avoid being sued for injury in those sort of circumstances are not that onerous.
Would that stop some idiot still trying to sue? Certainly not.
You can’t run your life (or your city) in such a way as to avoid every possibility of being sued.
This kind of thing really bugs me because a:
and b:
The pervasive view that people can sue for all sorts of stupid things and win causes all sorts of problems, not least the backlash which comes up against any attempt to make some actually dangerous and tortious thing safer.
TLDR: The law is an ass but it’s not as big an ass as most people think.
You mean that Rob Ford wasn’t Eric Pickles? We couldn’t tell after Grant Shapps/Michael Green/Sebastian Fox.
The problem was people were already falling, which caused the desire to create the stairs… Could theoretically sue the town for not having stairs…
I think the issue is that before it wasn’t a pathway, but the grass had worn away because people taking a (potentially) dangerous short-cut instead of the paved pathway. So there was no “pathway,” there was just the flattened area people walked on despite there not being a pathway. Pretty common, and something the government needed to fix in the public’s interest because it is public land.
That might be where the disconnect in communication is. Now that there is a structure in place, there is an “official” pathway where before the only “official” pathway was the cement path from the parking lot to the park. While the stairs were built by a private citizen without approval, the legal responsibility always goes to the property owner (at least in the US, but I think it is the same in Canada). So the stairs not being up to code is generally, legally, put on the land-owner’s shoulders.
It’s like that woman who got huge medical bills from a syringe that she got stabbed with in a Target parking lot from ages ago - Target was legally at fault because their parking lot had dirty syringes from someone else putting it there, just like if a skateboarder fell and cracked their skull open in any US parking lot the owner of the parking lot is responsible.
I think the original contract price probably included cement pathways and stairs and handicap access, and I imagine the $10K price was simply scaling back the project to the bare minimum. I highly doubt this was a case of political action against a corrupt government.
I wonder why I put “well” and “actually” in bold in my reply to you, then?
Intelligence and wisdom, not linked traits.
Good guesser, right there.
What does that look like aside from your saying so about it? Is there a behavioral change that follows?
… Pardon?
Fair enough. I had been mistaken because I figured I had a decent objection to a statement. You had replied to it with what I would consider to be a somewhat pedantic objection because I said “all possible” instead of “all reasonable”. Which, I admit, was a mistake on my part, but little more than a slip of the tongue, so to speak. So perhaps you can understand why your “well actually” seemed lacking in self awareness.
It’s possible this might be the case. But going one further, if the cost was too much for the city to take immediate action as far as making a new up-to-code pathway then they should have blocked off that area to stop residents from continued access to the park from there as it was causing injuries. Instead they threw the quote out there, decided to do nothing and were forced into addressing it after someone else did something. The city didn’t even have to build the stairs, they could have altered the landscaping in the area to encourage residents to access the park elsewhere.
That’s a lot of assumptions and ifs, but the stairs are being built and while it may not have been the city’s wish i am glad to see action on their end.
I’m happy with the result too, at least as happy as can be for a place I’ll never be and such.
I do disagree on the landscaping, that would immediately result in destroyed landscaping, it would have had to be a pretty substantial physical wall - and even then I bet people would still try to get past it by cutting a hole in the fence or whatever. It’s what people do. The only good solution was building stairs, and if stairs are being built then that’s really what matters.
