Agreed, and I’m not convinced about the “most parents” part. I’ve seen parents get their kids away from knives and other sharps, and they universally acted very calm, even bored, so that the kids decided to set the item down. Then the parents might have freaked out, but not before.
“Swatting” a dangerous item could just as easily lead to the kid getting hurt. And this kid was eight – old enough to talk to.
Come to think of it, what the hell is an eight-year-old doing picking up crap like used needles from the ground?
I loved that article, but it skipped over one important thing: I don’t think Target ever really understood they were setting up shop in a different country. There were a few very popular sections in the Zellers chain (sniff) that they didn’t even bother trying to replicate. The article gets into that tangentially when it mentions that the shelving was in metric and the stock measurements were in Imperial, but never looked at it in detail.
It’s not just invited guests. Swimming pools expanded that to attractive nuisances covering the uninvited. Heck, even burglars (or their estates) can successfully sue for injuries they get on your property.
No, I didn’t. Then again, everyone in my family does needlework, or construction, or mechanics, or some combination of those three, so “crap on the floor/ground might be dangerous” is something you learn early. I did jump on a sewing needle when I was three.
That the needle came from illicit drug use and not something else. Granted someone taking insulin probably is more likely to police their needles, but shit happens. One could have dropped from a purse or car, or fell out of a bag. The CDC says 25% of the 18.8 Million people with diagnosed Diabetes are using insulin. So that is about 4.7 Million, compared with under 700,000 heroin users in the US.
Assuming that if it was from illicit drug use, is the Target parking lot is a hot place to shoot up, or was one guy doing it there. Did they have reason to believe this is something going on and need to watch for?
Given the complaints of how much police harassment and unfair targeting is already going on, do we want more rent a cops and off duty officers wrapping on windows if you are sitting your car more than 3 minutes? And even if they do have such patrols (as I see at my local Walmart) they can’t stop everyone nor can you necessarily spot every bet of hazardous trash.
Does every goddamn thing have to be someone’s fault? Can’t we just accept that things happen and we don’t have to make someone else pay for it?
Well I hope your turf is hazard free for everyone’s sake.
Not to argue about the amount… but there is a whole host of shit you can get from a needlestick injury. The biggie being HIV and the second biggie being HepC. Plus pretty much every other bloodborn pathogen on the planet… and tetanus.
The schedule for treating needlesticks is 6 months of some rather heavy duty meds, antiretrovirals and vaccinces. Plus tests to see if any diseases show up. And 6 months of stress and anxiety.
As someone said up thread the actual chance of getting these diseases is very low. But if you had a 3% chance of contracting HIV vs. Taking 6 months of treatments to prevent it wouldn’t you take the trratment?
To your or I, 4.6mil is an incredibly high number. It’s a punitive damages thing, though. Think of it as a sliding scale to make the value actually of significance to the offender. In this case, that’s Target, a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
You really think being able to have a one to two sentence conversation that basically amounts to “dude, we’re legally and financially liable for anything that happens, including you even minimally hurting yourselves missing a trick” is a complex legal understanding? This is fucking life skills 101 in 21st Century America, man. Yes, most people, despite their educational level, actually do understand this concept. Maybe not kids though, and my comment was about respecting the intelligence of kids, by actually taking a moment to explain the reasoning behind the law.
The ability to explain it in more detail, if it helped, would indeed be aided by increasing the salary paid to security guards. Not really necessary, though. You’re the one who seemed to start this whole idea of “THIS IS HARDCORE LAW, WHO COULD REASONABLY BE EXPECTED TO UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS?!” I’m saying really, you’re a dunce for having that opinion.
The thing is, despite all of that, hospitals and medical facilities go FAR out of their way to avoid accidental contact with sharps. There’s even a special scary label for the containers we see for them. So normal people have every reason to want to avoid them, especially nasty needles left in a Target parking lot. And there is a risk. There could still be drug in it. And viscerally, what parent is going to weigh these statistics in the heat of the moment, other than a nurse, who might very well also react in a similarly quick, strong, and maybe less than ideal fashion, when it’s their kid?
I was wondering about this on Friday, thinking about the recent Wells Fargo scandal. They got hit with a total of $185 million in fines. However, according to Helaine Olen at Slate:
The Los Angeles Times investigation piqued the interest of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office, which filed a lawsuit against the bank in 2015. That, in turn, attracted the attention of federal authorities, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The $185 million fine is divided between the three groups. The CFPB receives $100 million. That’s the largest such fine ever issued by the CFPB, which should give you some idea of how serious this misbehavior is.
That struck me as odd: that the CFPB gets a cool $100 million, and the City of L.A. gets a sizable chunk as well, but as for the victims, all I hear about is refunds:
Wells Fargo says in addition to paying the fines, it will revamp its sales tactics and issue refunds to any customer who suffered financial harm.
WTF? The CFPB issues a record fine. And what does it do with the money it reaps from the malefactors? Distributes it among those who were taken advantage of by Wells Fargo? It would seem not.
The CFPB’s role is not to act as a class-action proxy for victims, just as the Police don’t distribute the proceeds of parking ticket fines. The fine goes into their coffers to help with their budget, as it is additional and separate to Wells Fargo having to refund those customers it defrauded.
A government agency imposing a fine on a corporation is a completely separate scenario to a court action resulting in punitive damages against a corporation. In fact, one of the reasons Wells Fargo got hit so hard is because its arbitration agreements prevented any of the affected people taking them to court.
Well, that is the assumption behind the prophylactic HIV drugs she was given. I don’t suppose anyone saved the syringe? It would be so easy to check for residue.
See above, also a diabetic isn’t going to carry unsheathed dirty syringes in their bag. Unused syringes are in sterile packaging. If they are really irresponsible they might drop one after injecting.
Heroin addicts usually don’t throw out needles after one use, that is why they get diseases. Since losing a valuable needle is a lowish frequency event, finding one needle implies a good chance of multiple injections in that parking lot. Alternatively, if you sit on a proverbial haystack and get a proverbial needle in your butt, do you assume that you have found the only needle or that there were probably multiple needles in that haystack?
If you inject heroin in your car, you don’t accidentally drop the needle in the parking lot; you would drop it in your car. People sitting in parking lots outside of cars and injecting themselves should expect to attract attention.
I get that those are two different vehicles for punishment, but it still strikes me as imbalanced. @Brainspore mentions how awarding the punitive damages to the plaintiffs incentivizes plaintiffs to 'plain in the first place. Also, it kinda makes sense, in a Cosmic Justice sort of way, for those damages to go to those who were adversely affected by the crime.
I just wonder how the CFPB will spend its windfall. How much will it fatten the bureau’s annual budget, percentagewise? The size of the fine isn’t particularly stiff for a company with (ahem) $1.849 trillion in assets. The bad press will do far more damage to Wells than the fine will.
I wonder, given that the CFPB isn’t exactly a judicial entity, if they couldn’t have stuck Wells with any kind of penalty requiring the bank to repay each defrauded customer with significantly more than just interest.
I know getting that money is a different matter than being awarded it, but damn. That’s a heck of a payout for what they can look back at as a veritable non-event.
Realistically, we’d need one security guard for every couple of parking spaces. That would help a lot with unemployment, but then we’d have to pay $10,000 for a roll of toilet paper. And we’d have the problem of millions of bored security guards with nothing better to do shooting up in the parking lots…
Yeah. The realistic approach is that there will be junk on the ground, kids will play with it, and people will occasionally get hurt. Our social safety net could cover the medical expenses and time off work much more cheaply than our legal system does…except for the minor issue of the fact that we don’t have one.
That’s the crux of it. Our social safety net is that anyone has a lottery-like chance of getting a windfall payout from the ultrarich megacorporations. It’s kinda stupid, but it’s what we chose.
