George Carlin had a great joke where he said, “Imagine how stupid the average person is...and then realize that half of them are stupider than that!” This is why you will see warning signs all over everything. One of my favorites is the person placing their head in a compactor with the ‘no’ symbol over it indicating ‘Don’t Do This.’ Apparently, at some point in time, some idiot did this and probably got his head crushed.
Another reason these warnings are everywhere are lawyers. The aforementioned man’s widow probably sued his employer and her scumbag lawyer somehow won the case (because after all common sense is not so common) and there was no warning sign indicating NOT to place your head in a compactor.
And I guarantee that if the ‘victim’ happened to be an illegal immigrant who could not read English, then the employer would have gotten shafted for not having the ‘Do Not Put Your Head In Here’ warning sign in Spanish as well. This is why signs, even in Buffalo, NY, have all signs bilingual. Are there really that many Latinos in Buffalo? I recall another good joke - What do you call 1000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
So, rather than let nature take its course and wean out the weak and stupid, like Bill Burr and George himself endorsed, we have to save idiots from themselves so that they can have baby idiots and, before you know it, we are living in the movie Idiocracy. Incidentally, the guy who made it commented in an interview that he thought he was making a parody, not a documentary. So now here we are and we need to make the message part of the tile design in the pool area telling imbeciles of the highest order not to dive when you ought to be able to tell from outer space that the water is far too shallow.
I can imagine eons from now, like the end of Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, when aliens discover our planet and they find the ancient ruins of this rec center, and they see the “Do Not Dive” warning right next to the “0 FT. 0 IN.,” and one nudges the other with his alien equivalent of an elbow and says in his language, “What kind of morons were these beings?”
