The Onion has a great interview with P. J. O'Rourke.

...I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian?and, indeed, many conservative?ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways. I'm not screaming about injustice here, or gulags. I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. The tractor itself is covered with stickers: Don't put your hand in here. Don't put your dick in there. And in that manual, I found out?and it cost me a thousand dollars?that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. A thousand dollars worth of wheels have to be replaced because I didn't re-torque after 10 hours. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual." You f***ing read that manual! You go through 40 pages of how not to tip over! Anyway, that's the world that we seem to be moving into. And just because a society has absorbed these ideas and pays them lip service, anyone who's talking about libertarian ideas and certain basic conservative principles will get people who nod politely and say, "Oh, yeah, we knew that already." It's a pain in the ass.

Go read the...well, you know the drill.

They need to put the bullshit in a seperate section or a seperate book and keep the mechanical stuff seperate from the 'legal leeches go away' stuff.

I once purchaed a piece of SCUBA equipment and the manual had this disclaimer:

"WARNING! Misuse of this equipment can lead to drowning and death!"

You can drown while SCUBA diving if you are stupid?!? Why, I never would have figured that out without the help of U.S. Divers legal department!

And those people standing beside me at the time I read this wondered why I spontaneously erupted with a gigantic "No Sh*t, Sherlock!"

Being one who write's technical manuals for tractor companies I can explain why that crap is included in most technical manuals. It's because stupid people have seriously hurt or killed themselves and have sued (or remaining family has sued)the manufacturer.

Examples:
1. Two drunk neighors decide that they will trim the bushes between their yards. They remove the handle from the lawn mower, start the machine and pickup the mower in order to trim the sides of the bushes. The mower drops to the ground because these two morons have cut all of their finger off less their thumbs. They sue and win because the manufacturer did not have a warning sticker stating that the mower shouldn't be used in that manner.

2. A man removes the hose from his vacume cleaner. He starts the machine and sticks his private part into the hole. Guessing that his member is of average size (6.0")and knowing that the spinning blade of the induction fan is about 1.5" below the opening, this man how has a 4.5" member less the working end. He sues the manufacturer because they didn't have a sticker stating that you shouldn't put anything into the hole. He wins.

If you have a 10 year old tractor, look at the manual. You'll find a few warnings and the remaining information will cover the operation, service and repair of the unit.

Don't blame the manufacturers for the added crap. Blame the sue happy morons that will find a way to hurt or kill themselves no matter what warnings are added to a unit or manual.

The added cost of adding the legal protection crap and stickers to equipment had caused the price of the machine to increase not to mention the law suit costs.

The way I heard it, the idiot who picked up the lawnmower to trim his hedge was a surgeon who sued for loss of future earnings. OTOH, I also heard that a search of the various legal databases failed to produce any record of a lawsuit involving lawnmowers and fingers.

Steb's right but he's only showing half the picture. The legal departments throughout the US have been attempting to outguess stupid customers for the past decade hoping to avoid potential lawsuits.

If they want to put the Legal CYA crap in the manual then that's fine, just seperate it out into it's own section.

If they do that they'll lose a suit by some moron claiming that he didn't read it because it was only in the moron section. It may be that there's no solution, short of killing all the lawyers.

I hate to defend lawyers, but it's not the fault of practicing lawyers, but judges and juries. Suits like that have always been filed, they just used to get laughed out of court. See here.

"It may be that there's no solution, short of killing all the lawyers."

I won't go that far as I am dating a lawyer.

I saw an interesting TV episode where a civilization on a distant planet "solved" its "lawyer problem" by requiring the losing attorney to suffer the same punishment as the defendant if he was convicted.

So I'm wondering how this might be translated to cdivil lawsuits. If the guy who cut off his own fingers with the lawnmower had lost, his lawyer's fingers would have been amputated...?

Hmmm...

> I won't go that far as I am dating a lawyer.

Or, to paraphrase Woody Allen in Manhattan (talk about art predicting life), you're trying to do to her what lawyers do to the rest of us....

Everything I write must be run past the lawyers before it's published. These people aren't engineers but they can smell a situation that may cause the manufacturer problems with the text. I've had many changes to things I've written based on legal issues, not mechanical issues. It's a fine line that these companies must walk. Has anyone priced a simple ladder lately? Do you think that it costs $80.00 to build a 6 foot ladder? 80% of the cost is for liability insurance. I'm not responsible for the things that I write as an independant writer. I write it, the company approves it and they except responsiblity for the document. However, I carry 2 million dollars in insurance just in case. Scary stuff! Remember Murphy's law!

"I saw an interesting TV episode where a civilization on a distant planet 'solved' its 'lawyer problem' by requiring the losing attorney to suffer the same punishment as the defendant if he was convicted."

Heh. Funny the way you can run into Justice League fans in the strangest places. That, or a couple of different writers have shared the same idea. ;)

"Or, to paraphrase Woody Allen in Manhattan (talk about art predicting life), you're trying to do to her what lawyers do to the rest of us....

..or simply allow her to do to me that which comes natuarally!

At least she works for the prosecutors office and is not some ambulance chaser.

Jay, you caught me.

I liked in the conclusion of the first episode when Superman suggested they all work together, and the Flash asked, "You mean like a bunch of 'Super Friends'?" Nice touch.