This is actually very funny tho
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!
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.
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.”
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).
Good luck not reading homeowner as ho-meow-ner from now on
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???
FAFO
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.
i thought something was up. a snow man made of the fluffiest powder would absolutely totall my car. ain’t no way i would just hit snow men
I wanna see the zoom video of that court hearing. I don’t think a judge is gonna be on your side, buddy.
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
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.
Sometimes kids do it as a prank in the middle of the road
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.
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
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
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.
Reminds me of a short story.
“What’s it for?” Princess asked.
“It’s a lie detector,” Cross said.
Thanks for sharing.
Damn that was good! I’ll have to read some of the author’s other works
I enjoyed that story, thanks
Funny
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?
I’m mad because a child’s creation caused damage to my newly bought, overpriced 2026 Redneck Sports Car™ and I’m going to resort to litigation! /s
The defendant has been found guilty. The plaintiff is awarded $4.37 to be paid directly from the defendants allowance over the course of the next year.
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”
more importantly, you are going to damage your car even if the snowman is not reinforced. what moron would do that?
Maybe they made tough snowman in the street?
My cousins used to live on a street with massive trees that dropped tons of leaves every autumn. The city would have special service days where everyone rakes the leaves into big piles in the street and street sweepers would come vacuum them up.
Hooligans liked the drive through the big piles in the middle of the night. I honestly kinda see the appeal, who could resist. Anyway, they started to doing the same thing. Piles of cinder blocks under some of them. I was staying with them one night and we heard some horrible carnage, came out to find some sedan high centered on a pile of cinder blocks with the bumper hanging off.
There was a news story some years back about a little girl who was killed when her father did this. She was playing in a pile of leaves and her dad was unaware of that. He drove through the pile of leaves and … yeah, that was that. :(
Trying to find the original news story, I’m finding multiple instances of this sort of thing happening. Which is even more heartbreaking.
Here’s the story.
What’s wild is it’s only one of several I found like this. People out there, train your kids to not lay in leaf piles AND not to drive through them.
Not the first shitty dad to kill their child and definitely not the last.
This rules.
This is good revenge. But what happens when the street sweepers come to pick them up?
If someone died, that would be murder charges. Putting cinder blocks in the street under leaves is a boobytrap and those are usually illegal. What if it was an ambulance coming to pick up someone up next door? Or someone swerving to miss a cat?
I don’t think you’ll get far in court
I probably wouldn’t. But the paramedic crawling from the burning wreckage of an ambulance screaming “MY LEGS! I CAN"T FEEL MY LEGS!” probably would.
Get off your high horse Karen
It would be manslaughter for the stupid driver driving into something obscured that they can’t know is safe, at speed.
I’m not judging. I’m just telling you guys what would happen. So you probably don’t want to try this at home.
But you’re wrong Karen. What if a kid was playing in the leaves and they drove over them? The driver is at fault.
I urge you to talk to a lawyer before you try this stunt.
Tbf they’ll do neither, they just want to be angry and feel self righteous for a minute. They’ve probably forgotten about this convo already (or will soon). Sad really, I always assume things aren’t right at home for them, like playground bullies.
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
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.
