The whole McDonald’s coffee debacle is constantly misreported, but I think it’s becoming more known that McDonald’s are in fact the bad guys in that one.
You Americans get so obsessed with picking sides, and finding someone to blame. You miss the point.
In every other first world country, this wouldn’t have been a court case, or even news.
When freak accidents happen we don’t look for someone to blame, we treat any victim’s wounds free of charge.
We have public health departments that study accident trends and make precautionary policies to prevent them from happening again.
Stella wouldn’t have had medical bills to sue over.
This is such a weird “america bad” take; having universal healthcare has nothing to do with wanting to hold corporations accountable for their shitty behavior.
Instead we now have ‘warning, hot’ on cups with coffe in them. (It should be hot when I order a hot drink)
That’s the problem with trying to make it fool proof or add foll proof warnings, there will always eb a better fool. Educate the ones that want to be educated and let nature run it’s course. Problems like thise solve themselves. (Although it could get messy)
Her labia fused together. It was just a little ouchie hot, the coffee was being served near boiling.
There are also temperature limits on hot drinks so the drinks aren’t hot enough to literally melt and fuse skin together.
You might want to google that “fact”
There’s no legal maximum temperature in the US.
Coffee and tea are routinely served at temperatures that can cause severe burns in seconds. Starbucks, today, normally serves their steeped teas at around 200°F. That 10°F hotter than the 180-190°F that was McDonald’s policy at the time of the Stella Liebeck case.
To prevent scalding and burns, the WHO recommends water be no hotter than 60°C (140°F). Most customers would complain if coffee and tea was mandated to be served at a ‘safe’ temperature.
Oh, FFS… Have you ever read what actually happened?
Yes, she politely asked get medical costs covered. McDonald’s told her to go pound sand. The ensuing lawsuit uncovered the fact that McDonald’s was intentionally serving coffee way above a safe temperature for consumption, and that they’d been warned about the potential for injury. The judgement–most of which was overturned on appeal–was because McDonald’s was engaging in bad behavior intentionally that cause injury. Most of the award wasn’t to cover medical expenses, but to send a “fuck you” to McDonald’s so that they would stop doing something incredibly dangerous.
What he is saying is that her initial lawsuit was over medical expenses. Which would have been covered so she would never have even initiated a suit for McDonald’s to say no to.
When freak accidents happen we don’t look for someone to blame, we treat any victim’s wounds free of charge.
We have public health departments that study accident trends and make precautionary policies to prevent them from happening again.
This wasn’t a freak accident and McDonald’s had been warned repeatedly about the temperature of their coffee being dangerous. This is why the victim was awarded so much, McDonald’s was being intentionally negligent with their coffee to save a few pennies per customer. You act like you can just hit someone with a car in a place with universal healthcare and it’s ok because no hospital bill.
freak accidents
At least you’ve made it abundantly clear that your smug little own here is being argued from easily the worst possible position. This was not a freak accident. The event itself was not caused by a lack of government subsidized healthcare.
This event was made an inevitability by a corporation that sees people as barely human. They knew what they were doing, they did not care. Beyond that, expecting the United States government to reign in a multibillion dollar company is entirely unrealistic. Money talks extremely loudly.
And to cap it off - can we talk about how fucked up it is that you read the OP comment, thought about it for a bit, and put that out into the world? Dude. Her fucking vulva more or less completely fused together, and you saw it as a prime opportunity to brag about how great your healthcare is?
If any other first world country had a megacorporation that directly caused traumatic injury to someone? Yeah. It would be news.
This was not a freak accident
I curious what makes you say that?
Yes, McDonald’s did have 700 reports of people receiving burns from their coffee…
The part most people don’t pay attention to is that was nationwide over a 10 year period.
That’s about 1 burn a week, yes some were serious 3rd degree burns, but most were not.
When they were serving literally 10s of millions of cups of coffee a week they we’re getting about 1 report a week.
1 in 10 million meets my definition of a freak accident. There could have been 100x that many reports of coffee burn injuries and I would still call it a freak accident.
I’m not supporting McDonald’s in this case. And I’m definitely not blaming Stella. Her wounds were very very severe.
Part of the reason they were so severe is because the highly absorbent sweatpants she was wearing kept the coffee trapped against her skin for at least 30 seconds. Should we blame the manufacturer of the pants too? I don’t think anyone studied it. But I’m willing to bet that at least 1 in 10 million pairs of sweatpants have contributed to severe burn scalding injuries.
She burned herself by pulling the cup over when she was pulling on a tab to open the lid of the cup, (a cup which BTW did actually have a warning about the coffee being hot printed on it). Should whoever designed the lid be blamed? Cup design has been at the centre of other burn lawsuits.
A younger more able person probably would have been able to remove their pants quickly but Stella was 79 at the time. She wasn’t driving, the car was parked. Most people could have gotten out of the car and gotten their pants off quick, but not in Stella’s case she wasn’t capable of mitigating her injuries. Should we argue that old or mobility limited individuals should only be allowed to drink luke warm beverages?
McDonald’s policy at the time was to hold coffee at 180-190°F. We don’t know the temperature of her cup specifically, but let’s assume it’s in that area. If that’s so dangerous, as her lawyer argued, why isn’t that illegal today? Starbucks holds coffee at that temperature today, they normally serve it a bit cooler, at about 170°F, but you can ask for it extra hot and they’ll serve it at that temperature. Starbucks also serves their tea at 200+°F today. If this wasn’t a freak accident and companies should know better, why is it common practice for franchises today to still serve coffee and tea at these hot temperatures?
The fact is, injuries from overly hot beverages are rare, and severe injuries like the kind Stella had are even more rare. You can’t prevent those sorts of 1 in a million+ accidents. Any precautions you might take to prevent them, tend to create a new extremely unlikely risks of some other injury. Sometimes bad things happen, it doesn’t need to be someone’s fault. If we focus less on who’s fault it is and ensure care for those who suffer from them, regardless of circumstances. You can look at what will actually make a meaningful impact.
Her whole story became national news because Stella needed to sue someone to pay her medical bills. If she didn’t need to do that, no one would even know her name.
If you want to make the argument that McDonald’s should have offered to cover her 20k$ medical bills from the first meeting,instead of making the tiny settlement offer they did make go right ahead. I’m not defending McDonald’s handling of the case.
I’m only arguing that not everything needs to be someone’s fault. This perpetual need to always blame someone when something bad happens makes it more difficult to look at prevention.
American healthcare is bad and yet you are still completely wrong
Huh. We really are screwed on so many levels. Thanks for that realization.
I used to work with this old guy. He was one of those dudes that was insufferable, but at work he was a semi-interesting story teller. But really it was because his desk was next to the back door exit. If you wanted to sneak out, you had to do it past his desk. And you had to be on his good side to avoid any leaky mouths…
Anyway, this one time I was sneaking out, it was summer. And he had the door open to let some fresh air in. In its place he had mounted a makeshift screen to keep the flies out. But this screen wasn’t quite tall enough and left the top foot of the door wide open. I had already seen a fly as I came down the hall, so when I saw his construction job, I’d found the reason…
So I said, “hey nice screen.” He says oh yeah, blah blah. Blah blah. Then I sort of point out the missing gap above the screen… he gets real serious and says:
“Flies can’t fly more than 6 feet off the ground.”
I had so many questions. What about flies on a mountain? What about flies inside a skyscraper? My head was salivating for more chunks of juicy knowledge from this guy… but alas I had my sneaky schedule to keep, and I said wow, cool. And left.
But the confidence from this guy could not be matched.
Trying to remember 100% when I’ve seen a fly upstairs. Pretty sure I must have but now I’m questioning…
Arguably, the “ground” is relative. Second floor? Theres still a floor, which is a ground if you didn’t know otherwise. Presumably this power is not sea level sensitivity.
However, I’ve seen flies walking on ceilings, which are usually 8 ft. So…
Maybe as it was walking on the ceiling it counted the ceiling as the ground as it was below its feet, or it counted the floor on the other side as ground. They aren’t really the smartest of creatures, so who knows.
I’m curious to know why he left the gap. Like, was it on purpose to see who would ask so he could flex his worldly knowledge or?
I can see the possible information he garbled. I can easily see flies not generally flying over a few meters in height. Their food is generally low down, as is cover to hide in. If they flew higher then they would be at risk of both predictors (bats and birds) and cold, for no real gain.
There might have been a scientific paper that noted the fly’s (self imposed) height limit. “Generally like to stay below 2m” became "can’t fly above 6’ via junk science reporting.
I might be completely wrong. But I do find it interesting to try and reverse how the various insane “facts” that some people come out with come from.
That the leader of a bee hive can’t be female because the gods don’t give women weapons, and that the drones can’t be male because they take care of the young.
Not only did Aristotle writing this in Generation of all Animals cause misinformation around this to spread for literally centuries on end, including the presumed gendering of a ‘king’ leading the hive to be used to argue for a patriarchal dynastic monarchy as part of God’s design - the wildest part is he acknowledged that other people were saying that the hive had a queen and the drones were male.
Dude was straight up like “some people say…but this can’t be the case because of my commitment to misogyny which ignores things like lionesses existing.”
Wow they screwed that all up.
Drones do not take care of the young. At all. Literally all the drones do is eat and roam the hive until breeding season, then they get it on and die alone since their hive won’t let them return after they copulated, and if there ever become too many drones the workers chase them out and kill them if they try to return. Different species do it a bit differently but in general the drones are the first to be culled if resources ever get low. The only major exception is if a hive lost their queen, some workers can lay unfertilized eggs which develop into male drones to pass on the genetic diversity of the hive, as they anticipate dying out without a queen and no eggs young and healthy enough to rear new ones.
Drones die after mating, as the act of mating kills them. It’s not the hive rejecting them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)
The process of ejaculation is explosive—semen is blasted through the queen’s sting chamber and into the oviduct. The process is sometimes audible to the human ear, akin to a “popping” sound. The ejaculation is so powerful that it ruptures the endophallus, disconnecting the drone from the queen. The bulb of the endophallus is broken off inside of the queen during mating—so drones mate only once, and die shortly after.
Boy, i sure hope someone got fired for that blunder
2020 election was stolen.
It wasn’t from a lack of trying…
He did literally have a team of lawyers and fellow Republicans trying to help with the lazy coup, but he still could have put in a lot more effort.
/sarcasm/Good news, in 2024 it looks like he’ll get another chance!/sarcasm/
That mechanical watches are more accurate than quartz watches, which is why they’re so expensive. It’s not even a close race.
Like being proud enough of a “chronometer” certification to write it on the front face - congratulations on passing the -4 to +6 seconds per day test, Rolex!
A frog that is gradually heated will jump out the water. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
It’s still a great metaphor / cautionary tale.
That renewables are bad for the environment.
Evidence? These dozen or so dead birds next to a wind turbine.
Pay no mind to those billions of creatures that died due to that oil spill in the ocean.
“Burning wood doesn’t contribute to climate change” - Drax power station, endorsed by UK government
That bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly.
To be fair that’s true if you only talk about aerodynamics. But by the same logic helicopters can’t fly either.
Helicopters can’t fly, silly.
They’re just so ugly that the ground repels them.
You know what’s dumb about helicopters?
They could just remove that giant rotating fan above it and put in cockpit air conditioning.
Think how much quieter and cooler it would be, not to mention the fuel savings!
It’s true if you only talk about aerodynamics, and also don’t know that air behaves differently on smaller scales and turbulence is really fucking complicated and not yet fully understood.
A friend of mine was convinced that the “middle ear canal” goes all the way through your skull in a more or less straight line, connecting your ears. Y’know, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to hear sounds to the right of you with your left ear or vice versa. Maybe HE had such a thing where the brain was supposed to be…
That butterflies technically can’t fly. But that they do proves there’s a god, creating miracles.
Modern aeronautics can explain exactly how a butterfly can float in the sir.
Oh, the one random person from my childhood who said that black men looked like gorillas, which means they’re stupid and violent. Mexican men looked like coyotes, which meant they’re sneaky and conniving. And white men probably had a similar flaw, but since she was white, she didn’t know what it was.
That sir must be very low density and extremely fluid.
I heard the butterfly thing, but relating to bees.
I’ll add another bee one to the pile; I had a lady very confidently tell me that you don’t see bees during the winter because they migrate. I wanted to correct her, but all I could think of was Monty Python. “Are you suggesting bees migrate‽” it’s also hard to explain that they also don’t hibernate, but create a sort of space heater around the queen.
“Fat is carbohydrates and people who don’t eat fat get carbohydrate deficiency which causes obesity. You need lots of carbohydrates to stay healthy, so eat fat!” - old man in my office block
Hmmm… Now my brain hurts
There’s a kernel of truth here. Carbohydrates are most readily converted to fat when you have a calorie surplus, but I’m not a 100% this mess is try to say that.
Bet money that man had a beer gut lol
My neighbor explained to me that fat cells are mostly water, so to get rid of them you should stop drinking water and only drink milk instead.
Christopher Columbus hypothesized that he could reach Asia by heading west, landed on an entirely different land mass, and was so thoroughly convinced he was in Asia to the point of convincing the people who sponsored his first trip to sponsor 3 more trips. This was accepted as fact to the point that when someone else made the trip and acknowledged it as a new land mass, that new guy wound up having entire continents named after him.
Dude not only thought he was in Asia, he took so long that he thought that he had overshot and made it to India, not China or Japan, India! When in truth he wasn’t even halfway there.
Being able to save 15% or more by switching to Geico.
The sun is not a star. It’s a sun.
Sun and Star are synonyms.
Here is the first sentence of the Wikipedia article for
:
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System.
Here are the first two sentences for
:
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun.
If it’s a synonym, then that’s would mean that every star is a sun, right?
Sure. That’s how I understand the English Wikipedia. There are other types of stars in my native tongue at least. But as far as I understand, they are the same in English.
So give me your counter example
Not quite. The sun is a particular star. Specifically ours. Like how Polaris Aa/Ab/B (collectively the north or pole star) are the three stars at the center of their system.
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