The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andrew T:

Concerning the vegetable broth: I am confused.

Is the broth the lightly-salted boiling water that was used to wilt the vegetables?

And when the recipe refers to "further broth" draining off the vegetables: does that mean that fluid will be gradually leaking out of the boiled veggies over the next few minutes?

Sorry for what must be very basic questions... I am unfamiliar with the physics of boiled vegetables.

As I understand it, the damages awarded in a lawsuit often are classified as actual versus punitive damages. So to pull out the old McDonalds-coffee-in-the-lap chestnut, the scalded plaintiff was only trying to recover her medical costs (actual damages), but the court decided to award a very large amount of money on top of that (punitive damages) because McDonalds had been scalding people for years and the court wanted to give McDonalds a spanking.

Now I completely agree with the reasoning behind punitive damages. The only way to make a corporation change its behavior it to kick it in the moneybags. My question is, why does the plaintiff get the money? Going back to the McDonalds' example: The first 999 people to get scalded by McDonalds' coffee got small awards, out-of-court settlements, etc. The thousandth person got the big punitive payoff. Having McDonalds pay out big money is just; having that money go to plaintiff #1000 seems like a lottery.

One of the big items on the tort-reform shopping list seems to be a limit on punitive damages. Would it make more sense to change the way in which punitive damages are applied, rather than their size?

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