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Dangerous Playground of the 1900's rare photos

green papaya

One Too Many
Messages
1,261
Location
California, usa
interesting rare photos of turn of the century playgrounds from the early 1900's

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/dangerous-playgrounds-1900s/

Ju4dvuf.jpg
 

3fingers

One Too Many
Messages
1,797
Location
Illinois
Interesting. Some of that stuff was still around when I was a child. We had monkey bars that you climbed a ladder to get on, swings and slides that would cause hyperventilation these days and a merry go round and ocean wave mounted on concrete. If that wasn't enough, we had the haylift rope and pulleys in the barn at home. Casts were more common on kids then but we had a lot of fun.
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
25,081
Location
London, UK
When Little Brother was about four, he fell eight feet from a climbing frame at s caravan park in Scone, Scotland. My right front tooth is a crown, after smashing it on the steel ball in the middle of a roundabout. The eighties... Before anyone thought to sue.
 

3fingers

One Too Many
Messages
1,797
Location
Illinois
The eighties... Before anyone thought to sue
One of our friends was at a playground with her children and her daughter fell off of one of the rides. She had a dandy split lip which of course was bleeding profusely as such things do. Before she had hardly had a chance to get her daughter calmed down and try to stop the bleeding park staff appeared with a packet including contact information for their attorney to begin proceedings for the lawsuit. She said they seemed surprised when she told them she had no intention of suing them. What a world.
 
Messages
17,215
Location
New York City
One of our friends was at a playground with her children and her daughter fell off of one of the rides. She had a dandy split lip which of course was bleeding profusely as such things do. Before she had hardly had a chance to get her daughter calmed down and try to stop the bleeding park staff appeared with a packet including contact information for their attorney to begin proceedings for the lawsuit. She said they seemed surprised when she told them she had no intention of suing them. What a world.

So much of what we see in business today - in the US anyway - has been reverse engineered from a potential lawsuit. In finance, the investment products, the process, the recommendations, the guidance, the documents, the websites are all either created by or redesigned by legal necessity. In my investment banking and wealth management roles, I saw, especially in the last twenty years, that most companies, in almost every single field, work the same way.

Every business / industry has been sued in almost every way conceivable, so they respond in the only way rational: they work backwards from all the potential lawsuits when they build out their business model. Like everything - there's good and bad to this. The good is companies are thinking more about the potential downside and risks to the goods and services they sell and trying to prevent bad things from happening (clearly, they are not always successful); the bad is a lot of goods and services that could help many people aren't brought to market as the lawsuit risk is too high. It's a balance that's not easy to strike.
 

31 Model A

A-List Customer
Messages
484
Location
Illinois (Metro-St Louis)
A very hard job for anyone today that serves the public, either business wise or government entity wise. The threat of lawsuits is just a minute away and another big payday for the lawyers.
 
Messages
17,215
Location
New York City
I have often wondered what the cost of many products would be if lawsuits only went forward based on actual liability or negligence of the seller.

The objective answer is less as it's all priced into the cost structure. The easier it is to sue and the larger the payout overall, the higher the cost structure for the rest of us. It's all a societal balance.
 
Messages
12,017
Location
East of Los Angeles
One of our friends was at a playground with her children and her daughter fell off of one of the rides. She had a dandy split lip which of course was bleeding profusely as such things do. Before she had hardly had a chance to get her daughter calmed down and try to stop the bleeding park staff appeared with a packet including contact information for their attorney to begin proceedings for the lawsuit. She said they seemed surprised when she told them she had no intention of suing them. What a world.
While we were still dating my wife and I frequented a local indoor roller skating rink. One night our feet got tangled during a "couples" skate, gravity took over, and down we went. We were still laying on the deck laughing about it when one of the employees ran up to us, quickly asked if we were okay with no obvious actual concern for our well being, then shoved their "C.Y.A." legal document in our faces as soon as we confirmed we were unharmed and wanted us to sign it. o_O In the moment that made us laugh even harder, but thinking about it after the fact his complete lack of tact really ticked me off.
 

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