I use to work in the store systems group of a major fast food chain. Having the customer order via app and pay via phone reduces the chances that cashier messes up the order, reduces the amount of money stolen because the cashiers handle less cash, and just reduces the need for cashiers.
If you can get 20% of your customer base ordering via an app, thats one less casher you have to train and pay to stand at the counter and take orders (made up the number but you get the point). The orders also come in in parallel, you have to pay more cashiers if you want people to take orders in parallel.
One big problem QSR franchises have is that the people applying for the jobs don't know english. Look over at a McDonalds register, its mostly pictures and numbers on the screen, with very few words. If you can get the customers to order themselves you don't have to pay as many english speakers to be cashiers and thus you can pay lower wages. You don't have to know english to work in the kitchen.
I think the pertinent question is whether Microsoft or Google or Yahoo should responsible for the ads they show.
Take any given major website, turn off AdBlockPlus, FlashBlock (or alternatives), and NoScripts (or alternatives). How many ads can you count that are of the nature: "Learn that 1 wierd trick to lose 10 pounds" or "Enter your age to see if you qualify for money to go back to school" or "blah blah obvious scam".
They are everywhere. Now for me, I think much less of a website and the entity that owns it if they are serving these ads. I actually feel that if you get scammed through one of them it should be the website's fault for being party to a crime, because they served you the malicious ad.
If I had a brick and mortar business, and people paid me to stand inside my business and "demo products" or something, and you came in and got scammed, you would be pissed at my business. The business might also be liable.
Obviously the internet is different than meat space. Obviously you cant fix stupid. So who is responsible for serving a malicious ad?
Yesterday there was a story about a school district spending millions on some shitty tabletsfor students, only to recall them and basically admit compleet failure of the project.
And there are thousands of examples of this kind of incompetence every day that just don't show up on our radar.
Our system of governmental management is broken. It has been broken for decades. The people who are making the decisions, writing the specs, supervising the progress, and awarding the contracts don't actually have any expertise in doing those things nor does anyone on the project have the vision or pride to see a project be done well. It doesn't help that all of the management of these projects can blame the very contractors that they hired when everything falls apart. There is no accountability, no negative repercussions of being part of a hugely over budget and mismanaged government project, because even if you do get fired you can go work for the same few contractors who are experts in getting the goverment contracts that everyone knows are going to be over budget and mismanaged.
We setup a system of goverment contracting that absolves the goverment management of any responsibility and encourages the externalizing of responsibility through layers of contractors and subcontractors. Anyone who would have a clue or give a shit about their job and the quality of their projects and work doesn't work in the goverment bureaucracy.
My friend said it best about these kind of people: Get into the public sector to do good, stay to do well.
regulatory efforts to prevent a Fukushima-like incident in the United States have ceased.
I didn't know the Nuclear Regulatory Commission prevented earthquakes. Japan's government wasn't shut down when Fukushima happened, why didn't Japan's regulators stop it?
How much do you want to bet that no one in the school district will be held accountable for the inept management of this program?
Anecdotally: I did IT for my school district between graduating high school and going to university and I can attest that the administrators were completely clueless about technology. Their job was to sign contracts, so they would go out to lunch/dinner with some sales guy who would promise the sky and then when it failed they would move on to the next vendor who would promise to make all the problems better.
Examples: Entire classroom logs onto machines (30+), of course roaming profile is turned on so everything has to propagate. 30 machines into one switch, one connection from that switch to some other switch that has one connection to the server. No backbone, no QOS, and it never occurred that they didn't need the stupid roaming profile enabled.
So of course all the teachers complained everything was slow. The Admins, not understanding networking and what a bottleneck is (except the ones they had at lunch) threw out all the completely functional machines and bought new top of the line shit from Dell. Problem still not solved, so they got some network vendor to come in and check it out. Result: the school installed fiber to EVERYWHERE. Every classroom had fibre run to it so the stupid roaming profile could propagate. Now there was nothing going on in this school that required the hardware and bandwidth that they had, the most computer centric class was keyboarding. (poverty stricken school district is another issue).
I guess I'm cynical but I hold most school district administrators in contempt. They have no adult supervision, the head IT guy is usually some ex teacher with a information systems cert. You as a vendor, could walk into the room and say "your johnson rod is miscalibrated, it will cost $10,000 to calibrate and all the problems will go away" and they will all say "Yep thats what I suspected, cut this man a check. And they will tell the Superintendent they fixed all the computer problems. No independent oversight, no audit.
Didn't some school district recently find out it bought tens of thousands of dollars of extra equipment from HP or Cisco because no one in the district could tell a IP switch from a railroad switch?
I'm sure now its Chicago and Aurora, A-Town has been growing pretty rapidly and is also a pretty high crime area.
The transition from Washington Park to Hyde Park is just amazing, not because poverty is awesome or anything, the transition is just so abrupt. I use to take 90/94 there when LSD was backed up and man is that depressing.
U of C is kind of this strange island of affluence and academic excellence surrounded by some of the most disenfranchised and poverty stricken areas in the state, possibly the nation. It's weird to think that our president lived/lives there.
Since the U.S. doesn't have a state run oil company, U.S. consumers get no special benefit from oil and natural gas production in the US being at an all time high.
You are quite wrong.
"In 1975, the U.S. government banned crude oil exports with only some limited exceptions".
See: "The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (P.L. 94-163, EPCA)"
While that's interesting I'm not sure what I'm wrong about.
The U.S. does not have a state owned oil company. Venezuela has a state owned oil company, Saudi Arabia has a state owned oil company.
U.S. citizens don't receive special benefits like steeply discounted domestic oil or oil revenues funding government programs like in Venezuela or other nations where there is a state owned oil company.
So, no naughy thinking you will balance the federal budget by taking away their subsidies...but they should be taken away anyhow since last we checked the industry was self-funded.
Yeah I'm not sure who thinks that we can balance the budget or anything by cutting the benefits to oil companies. That is quite silly.
I was trying to highlight that in a lot of oil producing nations, the government makes sure to use some of the oil revenue (especially in the case of a state owned oil operation) towards social programs and inexpensive gas. Then on the other hand we give give oil companies tax subsidies because we (the U.S.) are champions of the free market.
I'm also irked by the misleading narrative around domestic oil production, the average American thinks that if we produce more oil domestically somehow that's our oil and we will have cheap oil like Saudi Arabia. What is left out is that the oil companies will profit handsomely off the domestic production but the consumer will see very little relief if any since oil is a commodity and is sold on the open market.
Russia: $2.10 / gallon
Saudi Arabia: $0.91 / gallon
How many billions of dollars per year do we give the oil and natural gas industry in tax breaks every year? That savings is passed on to the consumer, right? It's not like oil companies are still raking in record profits.
Since the U.S. doesn't have a state run oil company, U.S. consumers get no special benefit from oil and natural gas production in the US being at an all time high. The oil companies sell it on the open market, it doesn't matter where it came out of the ground. Furthermore, production increases in the US will not outweigh demand increases across the rest of the world.
Net result: U.S. consumers still pay the same, the U.S. Government still gives oil companies tax breaks while they laugh their ass to the bank, a lot of people's groundwater is being contaminated, and in the end we will have nothing to show for it.
For years we have known that there is a glut of graduates in the system. I remember my freshman year at university, the attitude of a lot of students was "the Masters is the new Bachelors, you have to have one to get an entry level job" or when I got closer to graduating it was "well I don't want to be done with school and my parents are helping me out so I'm going to go for my Masters". While education is awesome, the fact is that you don't have to be all that smart anymore to get a Masters or PhD.
Even as an undergrad I was pressured to publish. I didn't have the time nor the resources to do anything meaningful but my professors all said that I had to publish to even consider going to graduate school. They said that pretty much no matter what I do, even if its not novel or valuable to the academic community there will be a journal that will publish it. That's the current state of academics now.
Lets be clear: I'm not talking about MIT or Berkley. I'm talking about the thousands of research institutions across the country that while also doing amazing research, churn out Masters and PhDs like a printing mill. When you dilute the pool of researchers there is going to be subpar research. When there is a glut of subpar research there will be journals that see the business opportunity and publish anything you pay them to publish. This is not new.
As much as we all know that corporate IT security is impotent, anything that comes out of the Chertoff group is 100% FUD with the intent to concentrate control over the internet and private corporate networks to the Government which would undoubtedly contract it out to... The Chertoff Group.
What else is the Chertoff Group famous for? Millimeter wave scanners at airports and all the FUD surrounding that program.
Chertoff profits every time the government and public has a knee jerk reaction to some ambiguous threat that his group invents. Did we forget that this is the same guy who always insists that were in a Cyber War and the government needs control over your private networks to prevent the terrorists from doing damage?
Ok, people who are long on stocks are inherently invested in the long-term interests of the company. Most people in the money are not long in the same sense as a "common man" investor is long.
A guy like Icahn is not long. That what I think of when I say "investor".
I would boil water over a fire to create steam, I would feed the steam through a turbine that would turn a rotor in an magnetic field, and then that would charge some caps and other charge storing circuitry and ultimately feed to a VR circuit that feeds the battery. Probably could be done for less than $5.
Disclaimer: I'm not an EE
The problem is not that they renewed all these contracts at the EOY, the problem is that while the asshats in washington are bitching about spending on things like social programs and health care (not saying they are good or bad programs) the asshats at the Pentagon are spending money like a/.er at Frys and no one is discussing that.
I would love the discussion to be about whether or not we need to make these purchases given the state of our government budget and the global military situation.
Do we need to bribe France to buy war machines from American defence companies? Especially when we are sending home kids in Head-Start?
This guy had to convert some of the bitcoin into real $ at some point, he had to eat and live somewhere right? Money laundering investigations might have been the vector through which he was compromised instead of a computer based trace.
I'm certain they want him to step down because they want to focus on short term profits. Investors have no vision, no desire to better the company, no reason to do anything besides focus on short term profits.
Who defines "secure". Who performed the audit to ensure the security? How often will audits be performed to ensure that Azure stays secure? What happens what Microsoft goes bankrupt?
Call me cynical, but I have no confidence that anyone who has the credentials and capabilities to ensure that Azure is secure actually did so for the Government. Sure there are really bright people at the DoD but I'm sure more bureaucrats were involved than engineers.
Also, what's the plan for when Microsoft goes bankrupt? It sounds far fetched but on a 20 to 30 year time frame Microsoft's continued existence seems questionable.
that's trivial, don't connect with any recruiter/headhunter choads. You do have your search-engine friendly resume online on your own website right? with "No Recruiters" at the top?
That's been working for me for 15 years, to hell with recruiters.
Not connecting to "choads" is not a solution because the whole idea of the site is that your profile is visible and that people not connected to you can see it.
How *I* use or don't use the site is irrelevant, I was just pointing out that she's probably going to be playing whack-a-mole with fake accounts: block one and another pops up. If someone want's to stalk you, linked in is pretty much the perfect place.
Why wouldn't he just create another profile? Maybe one that looks like some generic recruiter at some generic recruiting company. I get notifications about people like that all the time. How can you differentiate between a stalker and the normal creepers/hr agents on linked in?
Also forgot to add that she was wearing sweatpants which soaked up the liquid making the injury much more severe because it held the liquid against her body. If you ever see pictures (you might not want to see these pictures) you might be surprised how much damage was done.
The lady was also 79. The burns she suffered would not have been as severe if she was able to move off her seat. However, given her advanced age she was unable to move once she spilled and hence she sat in the hot coffee much longer than a average person would. The jury decided that she was 20% at fault and McDs was 80% at fault. Many common misconceptions are false though: she was not driving, she was in the passenger seat, the car was not moving. The injury was very gruesome, but again it was so bad because she just wasn't healthy enough to react in a normal way that would have prevented injury.
Having bought McDonald's coffee before, I would never try to open it over my body. I think most people know that's stupid. Given that people of that age shake like a minor earthquake I can't believe her grandson let her open her coffee over herself in the car. Her grandson was in the drivers seat.
If people knew half the shit that Wall Street does they wouldn't like it. I think articles like this actually make it harder to have a productive conversation about the fairness of Wall Street because it makes it seem like this type of abuse is the exception rather than the norm.
There is a revolving door between Wall Street, Corporate board rooms, and the Fed. Not only do people go through that revolving door but so does information, so does hits about what might happen in the markets or what might come out of the Fed. Go watch Wall Street, either one, it's dramatic but its accurate enough for the average person to get a idea of what goes on behind those closed doors.
Lots of big corporations fund initiatives in schools to get students on board with their agenda. A lot of high schools require a "personal finance" type of class where you get a pretend monthly salary and have to budget like an "adult". The fucked up part is that the program is sponsored by Comcast, ATT, and other big companies and you are required to budget for cable, land line, cell phone, internet, new car, ect... So we're letting big corporations convince high schoolers that being an adult means buying a bunch of shit that you really don't need anymore. You can bet they aren't teaching that you don't need to buy cable or a land line (especially if you cant afford it), you can drive a used car, you can split internet usually with people that live in your apartment building.
This has been going on for a long time and no one gives a fuck about it. They aren't going to start giving a fuck about it now.
Slashdot Mirror
I use to work in the store systems group of a major fast food chain. Having the customer order via app and pay via phone reduces the chances that cashier messes up the order, reduces the amount of money stolen because the cashiers handle less cash, and just reduces the need for cashiers.
If you can get 20% of your customer base ordering via an app, thats one less casher you have to train and pay to stand at the counter and take orders (made up the number but you get the point). The orders also come in in parallel, you have to pay more cashiers if you want people to take orders in parallel.
One big problem QSR franchises have is that the people applying for the jobs don't know english. Look over at a McDonalds register, its mostly pictures and numbers on the screen, with very few words. If you can get the customers to order themselves you don't have to pay as many english speakers to be cashiers and thus you can pay lower wages. You don't have to know english to work in the kitchen.
I think the pertinent question is whether Microsoft or Google or Yahoo should responsible for the ads they show.
Take any given major website, turn off AdBlockPlus, FlashBlock (or alternatives), and NoScripts (or alternatives). How many ads can you count that are of the nature: "Learn that 1 wierd trick to lose 10 pounds" or "Enter your age to see if you qualify for money to go back to school" or "blah blah obvious scam".
They are everywhere. Now for me, I think much less of a website and the entity that owns it if they are serving these ads. I actually feel that if you get scammed through one of them it should be the website's fault for being party to a crime, because they served you the malicious ad.
If I had a brick and mortar business, and people paid me to stand inside my business and "demo products" or something, and you came in and got scammed, you would be pissed at my business. The business might also be liable.
Obviously the internet is different than meat space. Obviously you cant fix stupid. So who is responsible for serving a malicious ad?
Yesterday there was a story about a school district spending millions on some shitty tabletsfor students, only to recall them and basically admit compleet failure of the project.
On a comment on that story I linked to a story about West Virginia spending way too much on enterprise routers that the didn't ever need
And there are thousands of examples of this kind of incompetence every day that just don't show up on our radar.
Our system of governmental management is broken. It has been broken for decades. The people who are making the decisions, writing the specs, supervising the progress, and awarding the contracts don't actually have any expertise in doing those things nor does anyone on the project have the vision or pride to see a project be done well. It doesn't help that all of the management of these projects can blame the very contractors that they hired when everything falls apart. There is no accountability, no negative repercussions of being part of a hugely over budget and mismanaged government project, because even if you do get fired you can go work for the same few contractors who are experts in getting the goverment contracts that everyone knows are going to be over budget and mismanaged.
We setup a system of goverment contracting that absolves the goverment management of any responsibility and encourages the externalizing of responsibility through layers of contractors and subcontractors. Anyone who would have a clue or give a shit about their job and the quality of their projects and work doesn't work in the goverment bureaucracy.
My friend said it best about these kind of people: Get into the public sector to do good, stay to do well.
regulatory efforts to prevent a Fukushima-like incident in the United States have ceased.
I didn't know the Nuclear Regulatory Commission prevented earthquakes. Japan's government wasn't shut down when Fukushima happened, why didn't Japan's regulators stop it?
"Research firm Gartner recently suggested that IT spending on so-called “smart” devices and associated hardware could eventually reach $4 trillion"
I wish I could make tons of money by telling CxOs anything that they want to hear.
How much do you want to bet that no one in the school district will be held accountable for the inept management of this program?
Anecdotally: I did IT for my school district between graduating high school and going to university and I can attest that the administrators were completely clueless about technology. Their job was to sign contracts, so they would go out to lunch/dinner with some sales guy who would promise the sky and then when it failed they would move on to the next vendor who would promise to make all the problems better.
Examples: Entire classroom logs onto machines (30+), of course roaming profile is turned on so everything has to propagate. 30 machines into one switch, one connection from that switch to some other switch that has one connection to the server. No backbone, no QOS, and it never occurred that they didn't need the stupid roaming profile enabled.
So of course all the teachers complained everything was slow. The Admins, not understanding networking and what a bottleneck is (except the ones they had at lunch) threw out all the completely functional machines and bought new top of the line shit from Dell. Problem still not solved, so they got some network vendor to come in and check it out. Result: the school installed fiber to EVERYWHERE. Every classroom had fibre run to it so the stupid roaming profile could propagate. Now there was nothing going on in this school that required the hardware and bandwidth that they had, the most computer centric class was keyboarding. (poverty stricken school district is another issue).
I guess I'm cynical but I hold most school district administrators in contempt. They have no adult supervision, the head IT guy is usually some ex teacher with a information systems cert. You as a vendor, could walk into the room and say "your johnson rod is miscalibrated, it will cost $10,000 to calibrate and all the problems will go away" and they will all say "Yep thats what I suspected, cut this man a check. And they will tell the Superintendent they fixed all the computer problems. No independent oversight, no audit.
Didn't some school district recently find out it bought tens of thousands of dollars of extra equipment from HP or Cisco because no one in the district could tell a IP switch from a railroad switch?
I was wrong it was the state goverment
I'm sure now its Chicago and Aurora, A-Town has been growing pretty rapidly and is also a pretty high crime area.
The transition from Washington Park to Hyde Park is just amazing, not because poverty is awesome or anything, the transition is just so abrupt. I use to take 90/94 there when LSD was backed up and man is that depressing.
U of C is kind of this strange island of affluence and academic excellence surrounded by some of the most disenfranchised and poverty stricken areas in the state, possibly the nation. It's weird to think that our president lived/lives there.
You are quite wrong.
"In 1975, the U.S. government banned crude oil exports with only some limited exceptions".
See: "The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 (P.L. 94-163, EPCA)"
While that's interesting I'm not sure what I'm wrong about.
The U.S. does not have a state owned oil company. Venezuela has a state owned oil company, Saudi Arabia has a state owned oil company.
U.S. citizens don't receive special benefits like steeply discounted domestic oil or oil revenues funding government programs like in Venezuela or other nations where there is a state owned oil company.
So, no naughy thinking you will balance the federal budget by taking away their subsidies...but they should be taken away anyhow since last we checked the industry was self-funded.
Yeah I'm not sure who thinks that we can balance the budget or anything by cutting the benefits to oil companies. That is quite silly.
I was trying to highlight that in a lot of oil producing nations, the government makes sure to use some of the oil revenue (especially in the case of a state owned oil operation) towards social programs and inexpensive gas. Then on the other hand we give give oil companies tax subsidies because we (the U.S.) are champions of the free market.
I'm also irked by the misleading narrative around domestic oil production, the average American thinks that if we produce more oil domestically somehow that's our oil and we will have cheap oil like Saudi Arabia. What is left out is that the oil companies will profit handsomely off the domestic production but the consumer will see very little relief if any since oil is a commodity and is sold on the open market.
Russia: $2.10 / gallon
Saudi Arabia: $0.91 / gallon
How many billions of dollars per year do we give the oil and natural gas industry in tax breaks every year? That savings is passed on to the consumer, right? It's not like oil companies are still raking in record profits.
Since the U.S. doesn't have a state run oil company, U.S. consumers get no special benefit from oil and natural gas production in the US being at an all time high. The oil companies sell it on the open market, it doesn't matter where it came out of the ground. Furthermore, production increases in the US will not outweigh demand increases across the rest of the world.
Net result: U.S. consumers still pay the same, the U.S. Government still gives oil companies tax breaks while they laugh their ass to the bank, a lot of people's groundwater is being contaminated, and in the end we will have nothing to show for it.
For years we have known that there is a glut of graduates in the system. I remember my freshman year at university, the attitude of a lot of students was "the Masters is the new Bachelors, you have to have one to get an entry level job" or when I got closer to graduating it was "well I don't want to be done with school and my parents are helping me out so I'm going to go for my Masters". While education is awesome, the fact is that you don't have to be all that smart anymore to get a Masters or PhD.
Even as an undergrad I was pressured to publish. I didn't have the time nor the resources to do anything meaningful but my professors all said that I had to publish to even consider going to graduate school. They said that pretty much no matter what I do, even if its not novel or valuable to the academic community there will be a journal that will publish it. That's the current state of academics now.
Lets be clear: I'm not talking about MIT or Berkley. I'm talking about the thousands of research institutions across the country that while also doing amazing research, churn out Masters and PhDs like a printing mill. When you dilute the pool of researchers there is going to be subpar research. When there is a glut of subpar research there will be journals that see the business opportunity and publish anything you pay them to publish. This is not new.
As much as we all know that corporate IT security is impotent, anything that comes out of the Chertoff group is 100% FUD with the intent to concentrate control over the internet and private corporate networks to the Government which would undoubtedly contract it out to... The Chertoff Group.
What else is the Chertoff Group famous for? Millimeter wave scanners at airports and all the FUD surrounding that program.
Chertoff profits every time the government and public has a knee jerk reaction to some ambiguous threat that his group invents. Did we forget that this is the same guy who always insists that were in a Cyber War and the government needs control over your private networks to prevent the terrorists from doing damage?
Check out some of this guys other work:
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/02/19/232226/industry-it-security-certification-proposed http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/14/2130246/chertoff-advocates-cyber-cold-war http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/05/1538225/can-imaging-technologies-save-us-from-terrorists http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/04/13/1830202/us-to-employ-overhead-spying-domestically http://it.slashdot.org/story/07/08/11/1734252/dhs-plans-changes-in-air-passenger-screening
Darn. And here I was pretty sure I invented something without moving from my desk chair.
This oversight might have somthing to do with my lack of "EEness". I am but a lowly firmware engineer.
Ok, people who are long on stocks are inherently invested in the long-term interests of the company. Most people in the money are not long in the same sense as a "common man" investor is long.
A guy like Icahn is not long. That what I think of when I say "investor".
I would boil water over a fire to create steam, I would feed the steam through a turbine that would turn a rotor in an magnetic field, and then that would charge some caps and other charge storing circuitry and ultimately feed to a VR circuit that feeds the battery. Probably could be done for less than $5. Disclaimer: I'm not an EE
The problem is not that they renewed all these contracts at the EOY, the problem is that while the asshats in washington are bitching about spending on things like social programs and health care (not saying they are good or bad programs) the asshats at the Pentagon are spending money like a /.er at Frys and no one is discussing that.
I would love the discussion to be about whether or not we need to make these purchases given the state of our government budget and the global military situation.
Do we need to bribe France to buy war machines from American defence companies? Especially when we are sending home kids in Head-Start?
This guy had to convert some of the bitcoin into real $ at some point, he had to eat and live somewhere right? Money laundering investigations might have been the vector through which he was compromised instead of a computer based trace.
I'm certain they want him to step down because they want to focus on short term profits. Investors have no vision, no desire to better the company, no reason to do anything besides focus on short term profits.
Who defines "secure". Who performed the audit to ensure the security? How often will audits be performed to ensure that Azure stays secure? What happens what Microsoft goes bankrupt?
Call me cynical, but I have no confidence that anyone who has the credentials and capabilities to ensure that Azure is secure actually did so for the Government. Sure there are really bright people at the DoD but I'm sure more bureaucrats were involved than engineers.
Also, what's the plan for when Microsoft goes bankrupt? It sounds far fetched but on a 20 to 30 year time frame Microsoft's continued existence seems questionable.
that's trivial, don't connect with any recruiter/headhunter choads. You do have your search-engine friendly resume online on your own website right? with "No Recruiters" at the top?
That's been working for me for 15 years, to hell with recruiters.
Not connecting to "choads" is not a solution because the whole idea of the site is that your profile is visible and that people not connected to you can see it.
How *I* use or don't use the site is irrelevant, I was just pointing out that she's probably going to be playing whack-a-mole with fake accounts: block one and another pops up. If someone want's to stalk you, linked in is pretty much the perfect place.
Why wouldn't he just create another profile? Maybe one that looks like some generic recruiter at some generic recruiting company. I get notifications about people like that all the time. How can you differentiate between a stalker and the normal creepers/hr agents on linked in?
Also forgot to add that she was wearing sweatpants which soaked up the liquid making the injury much more severe because it held the liquid against her body. If you ever see pictures (you might not want to see these pictures) you might be surprised how much damage was done.
The lady was also 79. The burns she suffered would not have been as severe if she was able to move off her seat. However, given her advanced age she was unable to move once she spilled and hence she sat in the hot coffee much longer than a average person would. The jury decided that she was 20% at fault and McDs was 80% at fault. Many common misconceptions are false though: she was not driving, she was in the passenger seat, the car was not moving. The injury was very gruesome, but again it was so bad because she just wasn't healthy enough to react in a normal way that would have prevented injury.
Having bought McDonald's coffee before, I would never try to open it over my body. I think most people know that's stupid. Given that people of that age shake like a minor earthquake I can't believe her grandson let her open her coffee over herself in the car. Her grandson was in the drivers seat.
If people knew half the shit that Wall Street does they wouldn't like it. I think articles like this actually make it harder to have a productive conversation about the fairness of Wall Street because it makes it seem like this type of abuse is the exception rather than the norm.
There is a revolving door between Wall Street, Corporate board rooms, and the Fed. Not only do people go through that revolving door but so does information, so does hits about what might happen in the markets or what might come out of the Fed. Go watch Wall Street, either one, it's dramatic but its accurate enough for the average person to get a idea of what goes on behind those closed doors.
Lots of big corporations fund initiatives in schools to get students on board with their agenda. A lot of high schools require a "personal finance" type of class where you get a pretend monthly salary and have to budget like an "adult". The fucked up part is that the program is sponsored by Comcast, ATT, and other big companies and you are required to budget for cable, land line, cell phone, internet, new car, ect... So we're letting big corporations convince high schoolers that being an adult means buying a bunch of shit that you really don't need anymore. You can bet they aren't teaching that you don't need to buy cable or a land line (especially if you cant afford it), you can drive a used car, you can split internet usually with people that live in your apartment building.
This has been going on for a long time and no one gives a fuck about it. They aren't going to start giving a fuck about it now.