Engagement bait.
I went and checked Facebook for notifications the other day and saw this exact post.
This is all over the place: Posts by people who are confidently wrong in some obvious way, just begging for some smart internet person to come set them straight and get their wimpy dopamine hit.
It is really enlightening, in a depressing way, to scroll mainstream social media like that and see the level of enshittification that people are conditioned to accept and keep scrolling through. It is so much worse than even ad-driven legacy media like live TV.
Problem is, we cant stop this.
Yep. It works.
It caught my attention before I decided to ignore it, and even some of the early replies in these comments correctly pointing out the stupidity of the driver’s ways have hundreds of upvotes, which is a lot for Lemmy!
I don’t like it one bit. But please do have my upvote because you are sadly spot on.
This is actually very funny tho
Reminds me of that dude that fashioned a concrete reinforced steel mailbox pole and got sued after paralysing a dude that hit it.
Homeowner won though.
Reminder that the word “homeowner” is the only English word with the word “meow” in it (except for all the different derivations of “meow” like “meowing” etc of course)
Thanks I didnt know but will spread this message IRL
The world needs to know
Wtf is that article? The first 6 paragraphs literally keep repeating the same info???
Sorry, maybe you’ll like one of these better.
https://www.matassinilaw.com/fortified-mailbox-results-in-personal-injury-lawsuit/
https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/0/2021/2021-Ohio-4113.pdf
https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2021/SCO/previews/0615-16/0615-16.asp
https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2021/SCO/1124/201057.asp
Cannot access the first one but these are much better
Cletus Snay was driving to work in December 2016 when his Ford pick-up truck crashed into Matthew Burr’s mailbox after losing traction on black ice.
What a very American sentence.
Do other nations not have ice or work in December?
The “Cletus driving a pickup into a mailbox part.”
Agree on the first two, but dumbasses/drunks hitting shit is a global tradition
I thought roadside mailboxes were mostly an American thing. No? All the places I’ve lived in Europe had them at the door or in a common area like a lobby.
That just means you have never lived rurally
Correct, my friend.
The guy’s page is full of trolling and rage bait. It’s not serious
It still appeared serious enough to be upvoted by 700 people. I guess this speaks more on how the sanity of linkedin users is perceived than it speaks on the validity of the situation. And yeh, linkedin users are a bit fucked in the head.
I mean, it’s the internet, it’s like a 70/30 chance of it being someone who’s really that entitled and stupid or just being troll bullshit
We do not know, and therefore should abstain from deducing fallacies out of air. I only commented on what was actually observable and relatable.
If you plow through a snowman with your car, you’re an asshole. If you do it with your brand new sports car, you’re a stupid asshole.
Let me add one more: he’s done this several times already which is the reason the kids added bricks in the first place.
Its like a honeypot for assholes.
Reminds me of my grandfather, these kids kept knocking his mailbox down with baseball bats. After the second time it was hit, he put up a new one filled with concrete. The very next morning there was half a wooden baseball bat on the ground and a dent in the mailbox. They never did it again.
I’ve heard basically the same story before from a local incident, but with the added bonus of the other side: they used a metal bat and the kid dislocated his arm and was almost pulled right out of the car.
Where are these snowmen situated?
To make it worse, if they set a boobytrap on purpose that’s illegal ( in in the US) and the kids could be liable.
Putting a brick in a snowman is not a booby trap lmao.
Depends on intent but yeah
the blocks were just there for support so the snowman stands better.
Yes
Same type of person would drive through a pile of leaves not thinking if there were kids in it.
I don’t agree with driving into snowmen, especially if they’re not in the street.
Sometimes you can’t avoid leaf piles tho.
Many kids play in leaf piles, even in the street.
Even if it was just a snowman, that would damage your pretty car.
This was my thought, you don’t need cinder blocks in the way. Ice is hard and heavy, that shits gonna fuck up pretty much anything but a bulldozer or tank.
Knew a guy who tried to drive through a snowdrift, totalled his car due to the ice buried in the snow
Sometimes kids do it as a prank in the middle of the road
I’d have thought a snowman would do a fair bit of damage to a car anyway.
You could just use water to make the surfaces hard ice and it might be enough to hurt a front bumper.
A) I don’t believe this is real.
B) Back in the ‘70s, there was an article in National Lampoon where a guy liked to put a cinder block in a paper bag and watch people swerve to hit it.
So Mark Majeski purposefully crashed his car into a static object and blames someone else for the consequences of his own actions?
Great example of american values.
Validity of his anger depends on where the snowman was placed before the hit: if it was on the road…
If you can’t stop for a snowman, you can’t stop for a child.
Hmm. Put cinder blocks in kids?
I’ve just been adding powdered lead to their eggs. They’ll be a dead blow hammer if someone tries that shit!
How?
Snowman has about the same visibility as a child. So if you can’t avoid hitting a snowman, you’d also hit a child on the road.
I suspect he was clearly seeing that it’s a snowman and hit it deliberately.
Quite beside the point, don’t you think?
Reminds me of a short story.
“What’s it for?” Princess asked.
“It’s a lie detector,” Cross said.
I enjoyed that story, thanks
Thanks for sharing.
Funny
Damn that was good! I’ll have to read some of the author’s other works
Even in case of a “usual” snowman, you can easily crack plastic bodyparts or dent metal ones. This is not GTA, where you just have to remember which items are breakable and which are not
A large pile of uncumpressed snow can fuck up a car. Compressed snow used to make a snow man? Yeah you’re smashing into basically a wall of ice.
Uncumpressed
I wanna be Cumpressed uwu
There’s a website you can order a cum press.
I’m sure you do
I’m honestly wondering if he made up the cinder block to try and make this someone else’s fault.
Good point. Hitting cinder blocks would probably leave scratches on the bumper, no? I don’t see any scratches in the photo.
Looking at that bumper, it really looks like the work of something soft but heavy.
Also notably absent: a picture of the cinder blocks.
Come to think of it, has anyone seen that guy and a cinder block in the same room together?
I can confirm that hitting large objects can sound like hitting straight concrete or cement. I hit a black bear one night when I was going about 70mph on the freeway. Would have sworn some truck lost a load of cinder blocks or something. There was at least one fur tuft on my car.
Oh no, was the bear okay? Tell me you saw him scamper off!
They took the body to central park (or whatever weird thing RFK did)
Look, I TOLD you what to tell me!
Its ok it scampered off! -source: I was the bear
It went to live at a farm upstate.
Fun fact if you hit a living animal in the road it would only be covered under comprehensive insurance. If you hit something like a bear, just to use a completely random animal, because that bear had already been hit by another car (possibly as little as mere minutes before), then it’s covered under collision insurance. Ask me how I know.
When you say “it,” do you mean repairs to the car or to the animal? Like, if I hit a dog, I’m certainly going to get it to a vet if I can, (although the owner would probably rather take it themselves than trust my driving) is my insurance going to pick up the vet bill?
Oh wait, we’d want more help to the dog than “slap a coat of paint on it.” I better just get out my credit card.
Not sure how a dog would be handled. Pretty sure it would fall under property, but might have some extra legalese around it. The it I was referring to in this case was the car. The bear was very unlikely to survive, but it did in fact scamper off. If you recall I said it sounded like I hit a bunch of cinder blocks. Well I got out and went back to try to see if the other driver was alright. Never saw anything in the road. The state troopers didn’t see anything either. The first driver that hit it said it must have been about a 500lb black bear.
or he had buyers remorse and tried to get it totaled, by saying it was blaming someone else. because he was stupid enough to buy an expensive car.
Yeah I involuntarily hit a small boulder of snow on the road and it cracked the plastic of my front bumper
FAFO
What would make you think driving through a snowman is a good idea to begin with? You’d have to be driving through a yard or at least jumping a curb. Take the guy’s license away for reckless driving.
it’s a Mustang, it has to be satire
I’d hope so, but reality and satire are becoming indistinguishable.
Satire can be rearranged to spell “It’s Rea”. We are only missing the L.
saltire?
Satirical can be rearranged to spell “It’s racial”
Prolly cuz they took it
more importantly, you are going to damage your car even if the snowman is not reinforced. what moron would do that?
It’s the same people enjoying destroying mailboxes with their car.
Its why mailboxes destroying cars never gets old. My favorite are the ones where they know someone in the utility companies and put a whole ass telephone pole so far into the ground that only the top meter is above ground then mount a mailbox on it. You can wrap a whole snowplow around those!
Maybe they made tough snowman in the street?
Don’t be an ass trying to wreck some kid’s fun. Could just as well do the same if it melted and refroze a bit to turn it to ice. FAFO
Really. Just a small chunk of ice off a passing car or truck can do some serious damage. A whole ice/snowman? Might as well hit a tree.
So kids, use blocks of ice inside the snowman to reinforce everything. Ice can reasonably be expected inside of snow.
“But your Honor, there was ice in the snowman!”
Judge: “…”
“Frozen water within frozen water? How unexpected.”
FAFO
This. I hope whichever neighborhood group he posted this to told him in no uncertain terms.
Believe it or not if they did it on purpose to cause injury or damage, that’s illegal.
He’s wrong though, this is objectively funny. I would love to hear the conversation with insurance, bet that’s funny too.
“So you intentionally drove off the road to hit a snowman that was, unknown to you, filled with bricks?” “Yes” “Okay, were there children present near this snowman?” “Uhhhhhhh, no” “Okay, you do see how stupid this was, right?” “Uhh no” “Okay, well your claim is denied for reckless driving, to start”
I’d be surprised if there were any legal consequences for something like this. It’s not a “booby trap” in the traditional sense where it poses a danger to legitimate visitors or emergency responders entering a property. It is a solid structure inside another (seemingly less solid) structure. You should already not be trying to ram into it. It poses zero risk to anyone that doesn’t already intent to maliciously destroy the apparently less solid structure.
And it plausibly helps support the snow. There is a legitimate purpose.
we have issues in the UK with something like this. if you pay road tax you can park anywhere that isn’t parking controlled, including outside peoples houses (so long as you’re not restricting their access to the highway). some homeowners started putting traffic cones out to “reserve” the spot outside their homes (you cant legally do this btw).
People would just push them out of the way with their cars so homeowners started filling them with concrete.
Putting one of those in the road absolutely can and does get you in trouble
Doesn’t it depend where the obstacle is, though? I’m assuming these are cars parking on the road, or at least a shoulder or driveway. If the cars are pulling up onto a front lawn and parking under the kitchen window of a house, that’s entirely different. I’m pretty sure filling a traffic cone with concrete and placing it in a path a car is expected to drive on is going to get you in trouble anywhere. I doubt building a snowman with a stump or concrete core in the middle of a lawn on private property would get you in trouble in most places.
It would be illegal for others to park if it was actually on the property people want to own the public road next to their property
Yeah, so if a snowman was built on their lawn, on their property, and not on the street, and that snowman happened to have a solid core, whoever built the snowman should not be liable for any damages
Yes
The post itself is just clickbait, but legal consequences are not all that clear. It’s honestly mostly about intent.
Here’s a case where a guy’s mailbox kept getting run over so he rebuilt it with a railroad tie and an 8" pipe burried 3 ft in the ground packed with concrete, and the guy who smashed it destroyed his car and paralyzed himself. https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2021/SCO/1124/201057.asp#.YaUu6xZOnDs
It went all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court where they found with a lack of intent to harm, the owners were not at fault, but that’s a near miss. He said he filled the 8" post with dry concrete mix so if it rained it might ‘firm up’ which is sus and then buried it 36" in the ground testifying he was confident it would ‘lay over’ if struck. I’m not saying he wasn’t morally in the right, but there’s no way those to statements were factual accounts of how that went down. of course, the driver seeing an 8" post under a mailbox would have been equally insane trying to run through it. I’m thinking with a different set of lawyers, intent wouldn’t have been all that hard to prove.
Also, could you imagine needing to employ a lawyer through several court cases, an appeal, and ultimately state supreme court hearings to keep from being responsible.
could you imagine needing to employ a lawyer through several court cases, an appeal, and ultimately state supreme court hearings to keep from being responsible.
The “I would sue”/“you should sue!” crowd isn’t listening!
It couldn’t have been considered a booby trap, legally speaking, because it was a mailbox and was harmless for normal operation and traffic. It could only harm someone vandalizing the mailbox, so that’s why intent came in.
If it was truly a trap, intent wouldn’t have mattered. You are always liable for damages from a booby trap. That’s why you set them up so they can’t cause damage.
It couldn’t have been considered a booby trap, legally speaking, because it was a mailbox and was harmless for normal operation and traffic. I
But it kinda was a booby trap. Guy was tired of his mailbox getting smashed, concrete, 8" steel pipe, railroad tie head, I don’t think he was going to killing the guy or even hurting, but it had happened many times and he knew it was a matter of time before it happened again.
They driver was clearly in the wrong. the box owner imo clearly had intent.
don’t get me wrong, i’m not mad it went down that way, fucking driver was a dickhead and playing stupid games, I would rather the mailbox just destroy the truck and taught him a lesson.
The definition of booby trap requires it to be harmful to anyone who interacts with it, even innocently. Since it was only harmful to someone intending to knock it over by driving into it or who loses control of their vehicle, you need to determine intent to harm.
I wanna see the zoom video of that court hearing. I don’t think a judge is gonna be on your side, buddy.
