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
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”
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.
there was a CSI episode about this
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
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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?
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?
They use blower vaccums I assume and large cinder blocks wouldn’t move anyway.
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.
Reminds me of a short story.
“What’s it for?” Princess asked.
“It’s a lie detector,” Cross said.
Thanks for sharing.
I enjoyed that story, thanks
Funny
Damn that was good! I’ll have to read some of the author’s other works
This is why you don’t ever drive on anything but clear road.
The roads I drive on are asphalt or concrete I’ve never driven on a clear one before.
I have. We call it black ice around here. Nasty stuff but sometimes you get a new car.
black ICE
Bizarro universe.
Why do you call it black ice if it’s clear though?
Not OP but I think it’s because it’s just difficult to spot it. It’s also possible that the clarity of this kind of ice shows the often-black (asphalt) road surface through it without any obvious sign that there’s ice there. Could also be a connection to black/evil/cursed.
Probably a bit of all three, depending on who you ask and how they think about it.
The opposite/corollary of black ice is white ice.
Prior to asphalt - paved roads the term was used for clear ice over deep water.
Black ice is stronger than white ice, which is important if you’re deciding whether it’s safe to drive over or put an ice-fishing shelter.
It’s also a hazard for rock climbing and scrambling, because it’s just as unexpected on a rock face as on a road or bridge (well, maybe more expected on a bridge because they’re known for it).
We could call it ninja ice
In America, they call everything they don’t like black.
I think it has historical reasons.Because it’s effectively invisible, and roads are black.
I only drive on rainbow road
It is a road that you go
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.
Assuming you can drive through any kind of obstacle already qualifies you as a moron. Even if it’s just a cardboard box, you never know what’s inside. Doing this and then acting all entitled qualifies you as a special kind of moron.
When I was a kid, I laughed at people swerving to avoid a paper bag. It seemed silly to me. My dad explained why they were doing it, and then chuckled as my eyes got huge and I said “OHHHH!”
can you ask your dad to explain it to me as well ?
Paper bags often have glass bottles in them. Glass+tires=a bad time.
oh. what’s the correlation between paper bags and glass bottles ? is it a cultural thing ?
In the US you aren’t allowed to drink alcohol in public. So they put the bottle into a paper bag.
so this one time when I was a kid, I was biking through a parking lot and kicking at some garbage, because why not
I kicked at an upright soda cup. it exploded all up my legs and looked like I’d pissed myself for the next couple hours
same idea
Was it because there might be a puppy or kitten inside?
Ah, I’ve heard way more stories about bags of baby animals tossed out car windows than caltrops.
That’s fair
Oh, you mean someone’s bag of caltrops might have fallen off the back of the truck? Yes I like this story better. Puppies and kittens should all be cuddled up on sofas. And only be in bags when they choose to jump in there
Or they just put caltrops in paper bags on the road to be mean XD
There is a house near me that builds a snowman around their mailbox that is on a cemented in post. I would love to see someone freak out after smashing their car when they tried to destroy the snowman.
If you see a snowman just sitting somewhere and it’s not in the road then it’s on you for being a dick and going off-road to smash it.
The snowman alone would do serious damage.
What kind of psychopath purposefully runs over a snowman with their car to begin with?
With their BRAND NEW car too
It surely would have trashed his car even if it was a regular snowman. Dude is a douche.
