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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I wish there were some way to remove enough from large defenders to make their bad decisions hurt, but not give a windfall to victims far in excess of even the most generous view of the harms.

McDonalds really should lose a significant multiple of their annual coffee profits for keeping their coffee too hot to drink for years to reduce waste, but that doesn't mean that it's right for the burn victims and their attorneys to get several years worth of coffee profits, either.

But that's the mechanism to get people to invest time and effort in these lawsuits. For individual cases, giving the lawyers a shot at a huge payoff is what enables them to fight big companies with lots of resources to spend on defense. And in class action cases, especially those where most of the class members end up with $20 gift cards or a year of credit monitoring, most of the money goes from the defendant to the people who did all of the work putting together the case.

I don't mind a reward even a share of the punitive damages. I just wish it were smaller. I think punitive damages should be sized to harm defendants who deserve getting a huge judgement, I just don't like all of it going to plaintiffs whose harms are far smaller.

So when Weyland-Yutani kills a crew through extreme gross negligence l'd like them to eat a billion dollar fine. But I want the crews estates and attorneys to get damages and costs plus something more like 50 or 100 million enough to provide a good return on the suit but not all of the fine amount, then I want the rest of the money to disappear.

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