Not surprising, considering I said that it's not common. But your reply is telling -- you do it.
One thing I wonder. Are you a coffee drinker?
Yes. I used to be a McDonald's coffee drinker. Not only that, I opened the lid -- to cool off the coffee. Otherwise it burned my tongue and throat, though I admit I have a lower tolerance for that than some. Still, most people I know had to let their McDonald's coffee cool. I've spilled McDonald's coffee, but not fresh from the pot, and have only suffered minor burns, as would be expected from home-brewed coffee. I no longer drink their coffee, but not because of this. I also used to be in the same camp as everyone else on this, since honestly it's dumb to sue a company for spilling their coffee and getting burned. However, I've been convinced to read the facts of the case and was surprised at the extent of the damage and the cause for said damage. As a regular coffee drinker, the occasional spill is to be expected, and if I suffered third-degree burns from it that required medical attention, I'd be ticked at the company too. (Unless the thing said it was that hot.) I do have something of a different perspective on these matters, as I'm a safety coordinator at a scientific facility with a wide array of nonobvious ways of seriously hurting yourself. You don't label the obvious ones, like "hammer may cause injury to hand", but you do label the nonobvious ones, like "hard hat area" or "no ladders or footstools". The latter is my favorite. People usually figure it's a stupid rule to keep people from falling. But the consequence of using a ladder in our facility is that you could expose your head to high-intensity ionizing radiation. Usually people shut up about stupid safety warnings after they find that out. They don't use ladders, either.
The hot coffee itself was certainly not the problem (it was supposed to be this way).
The hot coffee was exactly the problem. Stop referring to the cup. It wasn't the problem. The fact that it spilled is not McDonald's fault.
The problem is that it caused damage greater than would be expected by a reasonable individual without warning the consumer.
Even coffee at 160 degrees can burn badly.
Home-made coffee and typical drive-through coffee can't cause more than a good, painful first-degree burn. Especially not in the ~5 seconds it takes 180 F liquid to cause 3rd-degree burns. Really, I live in an area with potholes and drink coffee. I see more than a reasonable share of in-car coffee spills. (I never blame anyone else because unlike in this case, my spilled coffee never seriously injures me.)
At least finally you bring something constructive on coffee serving temperatures. Yet the references I've seen mention 160 F as an appropriate service temperature. Unfortunately I don't think you can compare carafes to served coffee. When you pour hot coffee from a carafe into a mug it cools rapidly. McDonald's coffee is thermally insulated and maintains a high temperature. (Which is why if I'm having a bad day, I'll spill coffee I poured from my carafe into an insulated mug, and it'll hurt much more.) The industry standard, however, was 160 F, and McDonald's had been warned that their higher-than-standard temperatures were posing a burn hazard.
If the customers complain a lot more after the lawsuit than before, then this is "how the customers preferred it". The temperature at question, however, is for serving.
No, it's not. They were told to store their coffee at 80 C to maintain its flavor, and that's what it's served at.
No issue here. They always said it was hot coffee.
Only in the advertising sense that everyone says their coffee is hot as opposed to iced. While they had a reputation for hot coffee, they didn't openly state that it was dangerously hot. (On the other hand, if you were to buy something called "painfully spicy chicken wings" and they cause pain, you should consider yourself properly warned.)
Again, 700 injuries in any number of non-injuries is not zero. It's not safe, depending on the product in question. If the tires on three cars blow out in a normal maneuver under special circumstances... three people out of all the driver in US is *nothing*. Yet it will and has made news, and the tires are indeed defective.
This one statistic is very productive, as it proves that the product was not dangerous.
Statistics can't prove.
To make this comparable to the McDonald's example, it would be a shampoo bottle where I decide to ram the pointed end into my eyes.
You're confusing greater-than-expected damage from a commonplace accident (coffee) with intentional injury (shampoo). If you were to intentionally pour coffee on yourself to see if it would cause burns, you're wholly responsible. If you spill it, a common accident, and it causes greater-than-expected burns, you're only partially liable.
If there is a sign that says "Wet Floor" and I am not careful
Oh, there's no sign that says Wet Floor. You should know that floors might be wet and that any footing is not guaranteed to be safe. Besides, any competent walker will never trip or fall.
I also happen to be the only one doing backflips
You might like your coffee black. I like my coffee black. Survey people and you'll find that the actions (a) opening a cup of coffee (b) adding cream and sugar to coffee and yes even (c) spilling coffee on oneself are all very normal occurences to coffee drinkers. Since you have statistics problems, I should point out that (c) being normal doesn't mean it's common or even frequent, but frankly people are not shocked and amazed if they're handling coffee in a car and spill some.
I assure you if, out of all the millions of people that eat burgers at McDonald's, over the course of a few years 700 of them become seriously ill from food poisoning because the company policy on cooked-food storage doesn't proprly prevent infection, people will not say there is "no risk". For that matter, there were far fewer cases of Kreutzfeld-Jacobs that fueled the "mad cow" scare, and the amount of beef eaten is certainly comparable to served McDonald's coffee. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to convince people there was zero danger.
This was not how customers preferred it; it's because coffee experts recommended it for storage.
You don't seem to understand the concept of reasonable risk versus unreasonable risk. So I'll not pursue this any further. Suffice it to say that a company is liable if its product causes harm beyond that which is to be expected and does not appropriately warn its customers. Third-degree burns are not an expected risk for coffee. Nor do you understand small-number statistics with respect to safety and injury. Nor do you understand the concept of fault. Certainly a person is responsible for spilling their own coffee. The company is responsible if their coffee causes damage beyond what would be expected when it is spilled, a common occurence with coffee.
The person in question was not greedy. She requested money from McDonald's for her medical bills, which were significant. McDonald's had settled a number of similar cases out of court, but denied this one. She then sued for medical costs. She was awarded 80% of medical costs and lost time, with additional punitive damages awarded by the jury to put pressure on McDonald's to address the problem, which they had not yet done.
You've been consistently referring to one statistic, and in a manner that's not actually constructive.
I can only hope that your shampoo manufacturer makes their product so that it blinds you if it gets in your eyes, that you trip on a just-mopped floor, and that you fall onto a conveniently-placed pile of pointed, rusty objects. Then it will be entirely your fault.
Spilling coffee isn't abuse, it's a common consequence of drinking coffee, particularly if you choose to do so in a vehicle. While McDonald's isn't responsible for the normal consequences of spilled coffee, they are responsible for consequences beyond those reasonably expected unless they otherwise inform their customers.
Perhaps you don't understand statistics. 1 burn in 25 billion cups of coffee is not zero. By the same token, you could argue there are no terrorists. Very few people are. Isn't that close to zero? Fortunately the law understands rare incidences. If one tire in a hundred thousand blows out on a turn, it's defective.
If the plastic knives somehow cut off your fingers if you touched them, McDonald's would be liable, as they pose a danger beyond that which was expected. But doesn't everyone know not to touch knives?
It doesn't appear that you know the facts. There are actually much better textbook examples of a frivolous lawsuit. I suggest you have a look at the textbook.
Maybe you're not a lawyer and maybe you don't understand warning signs. Certainly if this is the case in Australia, your system is dumb. It's not the case here.
Of course, if there's a leak in the ceiling, so the floor's not intentionally wet, and all you do to address the problem is put up a sign, there will be problems. You're not maintaining a safe environment. But then, if it's on record that someone reported the wet floor to you and you didn't put up a note, hoping to avoid liability, that's only going to be worse.
If someone comes and mops the floor and puts up a "wet floor" sign, or if people have been tracking in water all day, then you won't end up with any responsibility if people fall.
White, numb skin with deeper-tissue damage, yes. I don't see how reflex is going to prevent this. Liquids that hot cause deep-tissue burns in 2-7 seconds. It wouldn't work so well on bare skin, but if you're wearing pants (especially, say, sweatpants), the liquid is held to your skin. You may find it hard to believe, but it's well-documented.
Molten metal does indeed cause even less than first-degree burns depending on the length of contact and type of metal. Hot solder stings but doesn't cause much damage. But then, the skin contact time is short, that's why. If the molten metal is twice as hot as the hot coffee (meaning some 400 C), it's delivering the damaging thermal energy into your skin only twice as fast.
Hot coffee is hot. If the coffee were hotter than 212 degrees F, I think it would be fair to say that there is a danger beyond normal expectations.
Perhaps you're not familiar with hot liquids? Hot water below boiling is still very dangerous. Burn experts even told McDonald's this. At normal temperatures, burning from coffee is painful but not particularly dangerous. At 20 C above normal (McDonald's temperature), it's capable of causing third-degree burns within seconds, as was the case here.
What's the surprise here?
The extent of the burns and the amount of medical care necessary to repair the damage. It was far beyond what would be expected for hot coffee. (I guarantee you if the coffee was a normal temperature we'd have one ticked old lady but zero lawsuits.)
McDonalds could have adjusted the temperature so that you would get slightly less burned. But then people would be claiming even more gross negligence because they "know their product is burning people".
20 degrees Centigrade, the amount McDonald's coffee was hotter than normal serving temperature, is a lot. Lowering it to a normal temperature, you will get much less burned -- first-degree instead of third-degree, which is a huge difference. They did claim negligence because they knew their product was burning people -- there were already some 700 reported incidences of burns from coffee that McDonald's knew about and didn't act on. This was the primary motivation for the jury's ruling against McDonald's (according to jury members).
Normal people think the lawsuit is stupid because they don't bother to read the facts, the just buy what the tort-reform politicians and media sensationalists tell them. No big surprise there, it's par for the course. It doesn't make you right, though, just ignorant.
"Would you be upset if you walked onto a wet tile floor that wasn't marked as such. slipped and broke your hip? Why? Shouldn't you be responsible enough to check that the floor isn't wet before walking across it?"
Hah! I suddenly envisioned myself walking through the hallways gingerly with some sort of device on a pole to test if the floor is wet.
With the frequency they wash the floors around here and the number of pointy metal shelving units around, that's asking for some nasty injury if they didn't put up signs. Fortunately, as I mention elsewhere, I work in a research facility where safety paranoia is the norm. It is nice knowing which lines carry high voltage and that if you open a door into a radiation hazard area the whole system will be shut off immediately. They even put up "Danger : Ice" and "Wet Floor" signs during bad spots in the winter. Of course, people usually expect the ice, so really the sign is reminding you that one of these days you're going to fall.
As far as I recall, there weren't state safety officials involved, no. The organization is the Shriners Burn something-or-other. I don't do them justice by not remembering their name offhand, but they're reputable. In addition, McDonald's had a number of known burn incidents, settled out of court, yet didn't consult any experts about burn hazards posed by their products. You may not think they should have to, but stockholders who stand to lose money when a lawsuit is eventually filed would disagree.
There's a big difference between the obvious and the nonobvious, something that tort-reform proponents seem to have a problem with.
I don't know if you work in a cubicle or what, but safety warnings are crucial in a lot of places. A lot of things have atypical circumstances -- like coffee that's substantially hotter than a typical serving temperature, to the point that it burns more than one would expect.
I suppose you'd prefer at restaurants, when they bring out a very hot plate (not the ones that are sizzling, but just a plate that's very hot), they not tell you and let you burn yourself.
To cover your examples, rat poison does say that it's toxic to humans. Many poisons are not toxic to species other than the ones they target. Home fans are not terribly dangerous, and you can guess from the rotating blades that it might hurt. On the other hand, some equipment has fans on the inside (where they can't be seen) with powerful enough motors to cause serious injury -- these typically have the "injured hand" logo indicating physical hazard. Conventions about hot liquids are well-known. However, if you went to a hot tub and put your foot in, only to find out the water was not a pleasant temperature but near-boiling, causing serious third-degree burns to your foot, you'd be pretty upset and blaming others. Super glue does carry warnings that it binds instantly to skin. Many glues don't bind to skin well at all. So you see, most of those are both reasonable and already exist (just not in the specific form you mentioned).
Ask anyone who works in an experimental research facility or factory floor about safety warnings. Where I work is plastered everywhere with safety notices and warning signs, as well as complicated lockout systems. Even after the mandatory safety training, there are a lot of things you run into in the course of a day's work that have hazards that you're not familiar with and not obvious, many of which could cause serious injury or death. People will make mistakes, and warning them about potential hazards and preventing from making these mistakes in the first place are important ways to cut back on unnecessary injuries.
The coffee spilled while she was removing the lid, as a passenger in a stopped car, in an attempt to add cream and sugar -- something very common among coffee drinkers. While many jurors did not originally feel that the case was warranted, after seeing the evidence, they were particularly struck by McDonald's callousness in the case. The plaintiff received third-degree burns on 6% of her body as a consequence of the spilled coffee and initally requested compensation for her medical bills, which for such extensive burns are significant. McDonald's knew that the risk existed, as they served their coffee very hot. They'd seen cases of this happening before (from first to third degree burns), settling out of court but not changing their policies.
As a long-time coffee drinker, I frequently have a cup of coffee in the car. It spills. But third-degree burns are not part of any rational person's expectations of the consequences of spilled coffee. If you're going to serve something that carries that sort of danger -- one beyond normal expectations for the product -- to a place where it's well-known that spills will occur, at the very least there should be clear warnings. Maybe you disagree, but twelve people who actually listed to all the facts (and were not predisposed one way or the other) didn't.
Of course, now you often can't get McDonald's coffee that's hot enough and they put warnings on their cups, which isn't necessary (though to do otherwise may make them guilty of not protecting their stockholders). So it seems silly in retrospect, as the beverage is just as hot as you'd expect, but with warnings. Still, warnings never hurt anyone.
You don't comment on the severity of the burn incidents. 700 people is not always an excellent record. Statistically or no, it's not everyone. It's 700 in (whatever you meant by 10). Often a small number of injuries out of a large pool of people can be cause for concern. (Many major news stories about "dangers of X" have many, many fewer than 700 incidences behind them.)
I don't know where you get that the temperature, which was not too much below boiling, is the recommended optimum serving temperature for coffee. Recommended by whom, McDonalds? Not surprising! The reason the coffee was that hot is that it is what McDonald's felt was the optimum storage temperature. Coffee should be made with very hot water, not stored for long, and served at a temperature where one can safely drink it. The latter was certainly not true of this coffee.
The plantiff did not intentionally dump coffee on herself to cause injury. Thus your use of "endeavor" is misleading (as is "dump"). Just because she spilled coffee on herself does not mean McDonald's had no part in causing her burns.
Yeah, I do remember that about calibre increase. I'm not sure that raging, drug-crazed negroes was the reason cocaine was outlawed, but I do recall it being used as a tool (probably mostly in the Southeast) to help further legislation.
Now that we've covered that, though, there might be more parallel than I thought. Drugs were made illegal because of fairly real concerns over addition to certain drugs (particularly opiates and cocaine products). Later, they became very popular as a form of experimentation and rebellion among youth, causing a campaign to demonize drug use, more strictly enforce existing laws, and supplement existing laws with stricter ones -- the War on Drugs.
Now, the concerns over violence in the media (movies, games) was not, perhaps, fuelled by directly observable consequences. However, I think the creation of much of the rating and restriction structure came into place before the major surge in youth popularity of violent games. (I'm not sure on this, as the two are certainly much closer together in time.) Certainly a rating system (the ESRB) was in place before violent games started being demonized as the cause for major social problems.
I think in both cases what ends up happening is that you have actual concerns and a reasonable response to them. (You can argue until you're blue in the face about the details of drug laws and video game ratings, but most people will agree there need to be some kind of controls on both that's at least similar to what's in place now.) Following this, and perhaps made worse by their "forbidden" status, there was a major increase in popularity among youth. At the same time (and perhaps partly made worse because of drugs or video games), there are some very real problems with youth. The easy target -- drugs or videogames -- is made a scapegoat to avoid addressing more thoroughly the problem at hand. They may have something to do with the problem, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that the problems of the 60s were mostly because of drugs, or that the problems among kids today is mostly because of violence in the media. Nonetheless, this is what gets the most press, because it's an easy scapegoat and it makes a good story, without people who are responsible for the problems having to actually take responsibility and address these issues.
Well, for one, there is a fairly good business in edutainment and nonviolent games. Maybe not as much as there used to be, but then, I'm not the age where I would play that any more, so I don't keep up with it. But there are certainly a load of decently-rated sports games, puzzle games, et cetera.
Grand Theft Auto is designed for adults. Really a lot of these games are designed for the 20-30-year-olds who grew up with earlier, simpler videogames and have expanding tastes. The gameplay is not what GTA is usually made out to be. Sure, you can shoot cops, pick up hookers to regain health, then run them over to get your money back, but that's not the point of the game. It is, as the article says, a fairly violent but story-based game. In fact, going around killing cops is one of the worst ways to get anything done, as nastier and nastier forms of law enforcement chase you down. It's entertaining for a bit and a decent challenge, but it's more likely to get you killed than to advance the game. The best solution is usually running from the cops and not getting caught in the first place, which usually means minimizing how often you do things like gun down or run over innocents. Compare it to, say, The Sims, where the oft-repeated thing "everyone does" is devise new and strange ways of making their Sims die. That's not the point of the game, though, and it doesn't stay entertaining for long.
I was probably not quite clear. I'll roll my response to the other reply to my previous post into this.
In short, I don't disagree with the ratings on movies and videogames and I don't disagree with the current status of drugs. (Some particular choices, such as the legal status of marijuana vs. alcohol or the particular choice of 21 as a drinking age I'm not entirely comfortable with, but the system as a whole is decent.) I don't particularly approve of the War on Drugs or how it's being done and I certainly don't approve of the demonization of violent videogames and other media. I'm not a kid, but nor do I have any.
The issue for me is not regulation. This is fine. But things like videogames or drugs are often blamed for great social ills -- demonized and used a scapegoat for problems that are further-reaching. They're even used as a scapegoat for problems that don't exist. (Don't understand your hippie kids' culture? Blame the drugs for making them Communists!)
The idea that if a kid who plays Grand Theft Auto then shoots a cop, the videogame is then blamed for making them violent is preposterous to me. I think deeper investigations into the very few incidents where this has been the case (as opposed to the very many incidents of violence that have been in no way related to video games) have shown that these kids' violent tendencies were much deeper than any media influences on them and were clear to some of the people around them. Kids have problems, and they need to be watched and taken care of when these problems crop up. Violence in children is a great social ill and, often, a problem of poor parenting and a poor society as a whole, but not a problem of there existing video games that are violent.
I would say that no psychoactive drug is without a harmful effect.
You may not like ratings, but people who have kids and want to know the content of a movie do. How the system is implemented might not always be perfect. How studios react to this (eg. by making more "child-friendly" movies as their big-budget productions) is up to them. It's not because of the rating system, it's because they make what people will pay for. If they aren't making movies you like, it's because either not enough people agree with you or you're not complaining to the movie studios loud enough.
However, a lot of people (including myself) would disagree that there's not enough violent or explicit, high-budget movies out there. A better word, I guess, would be "unrestrained", as gratuitous violence isn't much of a goal. Many movies tell a story the way they want to and receive R ratings and plenty of box office power. I would even go so far as to say that the R rating is probably one of the most popular ratings for big-budget movies, outside of Disney movies and a fair number of less explicit PG-13s. The stigma against X rated movies is unfortunate, as in the public mind, an X rated film is pornographic. However, there are many stories that can only be told with a level of explicit detail that is beyond and R rating but in no way pornographic. Oh well. Some bold people take the X rating and the poor box office anyway, and more power to them.
I think the situation with video games would be better if parents didn't buy their 11-year-olds games that are rated M. Some things, kids shouldn't be exposed to until later, but a lot of shoddy parents, grandparents, older brothers, or clueless store clerks ruin this.
I've not heard that drug-crazed negroes were the cause of early anti-drug legislation. It did start first in the Western states, which makes Chinese immigrants and their opiate dens a more likely cause than blacks. However, very shortly after banning businesses selling cocaine (private use was still allowed), California set up public facilities for treating opium addicts, suggesting that the non-violent user was a major concern.
China has had laws against the use and sale of opium longer than America has, due to the effects of British-imported opium on its people.
Nearly all violent video game players don't commit violent crimes.
What you really want is to compare the percentage of people who commit violent crimes out of two groups: those who play violent video games and those who don't. This sort of thing has been done with, say, television before, but it's nearly impossible to construct proper groups, so data is not useful.
Really the problem, in my opinion, is that parents don't like they way their children behave and need a scapegoat. This isn't terribly surprising. The same thing happened in the 60s and 70s, but then the scapegoat was drugs. (I guess it's still one of the scapegoats now.)
His point is that the draw of modern videogames is that you're permitted to act freely. These games don't require you to shoot innocents in order to play.
If you aren't honorable in your life, are you really going to enjoy a game that makes you play honorably? Seriously, you can't take your lessons in life from videogames, whether they're positive or negative. A game that doesn't let you shoot innocents isn't teaching you anything, it's just making you play a certain way.
The dangers that many drugs posed were not just to youth. Around the time that drugs first started being outlawed, drug use was much higher among adults than youth. For example, opiates were used extensively recreationally (not medicinally), often causing serious addiction problems and dangerous side effects.
It's now (well, since roughly the 60s) that illegal drug use is so pervasive among youth. The legislation that's a reaction to that is not that drugs have been made illegal, but our efforts toward persecuting those who deal in or use drugs have been increased (the War on Drugs, it's called now).
Based on the very little I know, you're just going on the basis that the gravitational field can be treated like any of the other fields, with quantum field theory. Developing this leads you to gravitons and the quantization of the gravitational field. However, photons are observable, as are the effects of EM field quantization, so we know that this is a reasonable thing to do. As I understand it, we have been unable to devise effects of a quantized gravitational field that we would observe, so there's no reason to take a graviton theory over another one other than the precedent set by other fields. I don't know to what extent this treatment of gravity even works -- it may certainly be self-contradictory in certain situations or incomplete.
String theory may not be self-contradictory or incomplete, but it's just as baseless as anything else right now, as it makes no predictions that could be verified experimentally.
They're not completely disconnected. Fission and fusion by no means have to be of heavy and light elements, respectively. It's just that those are the ones that are easy and energetically advantageous for us to use for power generation. There's nothing stopping you from breaking Helium into Hydrogen atoms, except for the strong binding between the protons and neutrons in a Helium atom. You can also fuse heavy atoms together -- as another poster mentioned, that's how one obtains the very heavy rare elements.
Also, Helium's mass is roughly 4 times that of Hydrogen (or 2 times that of Deuterium).
Not bad for high school physics, though. Also, you can predict gravitons from the quantization of the gravitational field without knowing terribly much about it and certainly without string theory. You just can't justify it or prove that it's true. It might help a bit if we saw a gravitational wave, but we haven't.
It's not quite that simple, as it should be possible for elements such as iron (and heavier) to fuse (and presumably release energy, if it's going to happen much). Otherwise the heavier-than-iron elements would not exist. Or so it would seem from what I remember from the stellar origin of elements.
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OK, "mr pedantic". The fact proved it.
What fact? You mean the statistic?
I rarely do this.
Not surprising, considering I said that it's not common. But your reply is telling -- you do it.
One thing I wonder. Are you a coffee drinker?
Yes. I used to be a McDonald's coffee drinker. Not only that, I opened the lid -- to cool off the coffee. Otherwise it burned my tongue and throat, though I admit I have a lower tolerance for that than some. Still, most people I know had to let their McDonald's coffee cool. I've spilled McDonald's coffee, but not fresh from the pot, and have only suffered minor burns, as would be expected from home-brewed coffee. I no longer drink their coffee, but not because of this. I also used to be in the same camp as everyone else on this, since honestly it's dumb to sue a company for spilling their coffee and getting burned. However, I've been convinced to read the facts of the case and was surprised at the extent of the damage and the cause for said damage. As a regular coffee drinker, the occasional spill is to be expected, and if I suffered third-degree burns from it that required medical attention, I'd be ticked at the company too. (Unless the thing said it was that hot.) I do have something of a different perspective on these matters, as I'm a safety coordinator at a scientific facility with a wide array of nonobvious ways of seriously hurting yourself. You don't label the obvious ones, like "hammer may cause injury to hand", but you do label the nonobvious ones, like "hard hat area" or "no ladders or footstools". The latter is my favorite. People usually figure it's a stupid rule to keep people from falling. But the consequence of using a ladder in our facility is that you could expose your head to high-intensity ionizing radiation. Usually people shut up about stupid safety warnings after they find that out. They don't use ladders, either.
The hot coffee itself was certainly not the problem (it was supposed to be this way).
The hot coffee was exactly the problem. Stop referring to the cup. It wasn't the problem. The fact that it spilled is not McDonald's fault.
The problem is that it caused damage greater than would be expected by a reasonable individual without warning the consumer.
Even coffee at 160 degrees can burn badly.
Home-made coffee and typical drive-through coffee can't cause more than a good, painful first-degree burn. Especially not in the ~5 seconds it takes 180 F liquid to cause 3rd-degree burns. Really, I live in an area with potholes and drink coffee. I see more than a reasonable share of in-car coffee spills. (I never blame anyone else because unlike in this case, my spilled coffee never seriously injures me.)
At least finally you bring something constructive on coffee serving temperatures. Yet the references I've seen mention 160 F as an appropriate service temperature. Unfortunately I don't think you can compare carafes to served coffee. When you pour hot coffee from a carafe into a mug it cools rapidly. McDonald's coffee is thermally insulated and maintains a high temperature. (Which is why if I'm having a bad day, I'll spill coffee I poured from my carafe into an insulated mug, and it'll hurt much more.) The industry standard, however, was 160 F, and McDonald's had been warned that their higher-than-standard temperatures were posing a burn hazard.
Two mentions in two days.
If the customers complain a lot more after the lawsuit than before, then this is "how the customers preferred it". The temperature at question, however, is for serving.
No, it's not. They were told to store their coffee at 80 C to maintain its flavor, and that's what it's served at.
No issue here. They always said it was hot coffee.
Only in the advertising sense that everyone says their coffee is hot as opposed to iced. While they had a reputation for hot coffee, they didn't openly state that it was dangerously hot. (On the other hand, if you were to buy something called "painfully spicy chicken wings" and they cause pain, you should consider yourself properly warned.)
Again, 700 injuries in any number of non-injuries is not zero. It's not safe, depending on the product in question. If the tires on three cars blow out in a normal maneuver under special circumstances... three people out of all the driver in US is *nothing*. Yet it will and has made news, and the tires are indeed defective.
This one statistic is very productive, as it proves that the product was not dangerous.
Statistics can't prove.
To make this comparable to the McDonald's example, it would be a shampoo bottle where I decide to ram the pointed end into my eyes.
You're confusing greater-than-expected damage from a commonplace accident (coffee) with intentional injury (shampoo). If you were to intentionally pour coffee on yourself to see if it would cause burns, you're wholly responsible. If you spill it, a common accident, and it causes greater-than-expected burns, you're only partially liable.
If there is a sign that says "Wet Floor" and I am not careful
Oh, there's no sign that says Wet Floor. You should know that floors might be wet and that any footing is not guaranteed to be safe. Besides, any competent walker will never trip or fall.
I also happen to be the only one doing backflips
You might like your coffee black. I like my coffee black. Survey people and you'll find that the actions (a) opening a cup of coffee (b) adding cream and sugar to coffee and yes even (c) spilling coffee on oneself are all very normal occurences to coffee drinkers. Since you have statistics problems, I should point out that (c) being normal doesn't mean it's common or even frequent, but frankly people are not shocked and amazed if they're handling coffee in a car and spill some.
I assure you if, out of all the millions of people that eat burgers at McDonald's, over the course of a few years 700 of them become seriously ill from food poisoning because the company policy on cooked-food storage doesn't proprly prevent infection, people will not say there is "no risk". For that matter, there were far fewer cases of Kreutzfeld-Jacobs that fueled the "mad cow" scare, and the amount of beef eaten is certainly comparable to served McDonald's coffee. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to convince people there was zero danger.
This was not how customers preferred it; it's because coffee experts recommended it for storage.
You don't seem to understand the concept of reasonable risk versus unreasonable risk. So I'll not pursue this any further. Suffice it to say that a company is liable if its product causes harm beyond that which is to be expected and does not appropriately warn its customers. Third-degree burns are not an expected risk for coffee. Nor do you understand small-number statistics with respect to safety and injury. Nor do you understand the concept of fault. Certainly a person is responsible for spilling their own coffee. The company is responsible if their coffee causes damage beyond what would be expected when it is spilled, a common occurence with coffee.
The person in question was not greedy. She requested money from McDonald's for her medical bills, which were significant. McDonald's had settled a number of similar cases out of court, but denied this one. She then sued for medical costs. She was awarded 80% of medical costs and lost time, with additional punitive damages awarded by the jury to put pressure on McDonald's to address the problem, which they had not yet done.
You've been consistently referring to one statistic, and in a manner that's not actually constructive.
I can only hope that your shampoo manufacturer makes their product so that it blinds you if it gets in your eyes, that you trip on a just-mopped floor, and that you fall onto a conveniently-placed pile of pointed, rusty objects. Then it will be entirely your fault.
Spilling coffee isn't abuse, it's a common consequence of drinking coffee, particularly if you choose to do so in a vehicle. While McDonald's isn't responsible for the normal consequences of spilled coffee, they are responsible for consequences beyond those reasonably expected unless they otherwise inform their customers.
Perhaps you don't understand statistics. 1 burn in 25 billion cups of coffee is not zero. By the same token, you could argue there are no terrorists. Very few people are. Isn't that close to zero? Fortunately the law understands rare incidences. If one tire in a hundred thousand blows out on a turn, it's defective.
If the plastic knives somehow cut off your fingers if you touched them, McDonald's would be liable, as they pose a danger beyond that which was expected. But doesn't everyone know not to touch knives?
It doesn't appear that you know the facts. There are actually much better textbook examples of a frivolous lawsuit. I suggest you have a look at the textbook.
Maybe you're not a lawyer and maybe you don't understand warning signs. Certainly if this is the case in Australia, your system is dumb. It's not the case here.
Of course, if there's a leak in the ceiling, so the floor's not intentionally wet, and all you do to address the problem is put up a sign, there will be problems. You're not maintaining a safe environment. But then, if it's on record that someone reported the wet floor to you and you didn't put up a note, hoping to avoid liability, that's only going to be worse.
If someone comes and mops the floor and puts up a "wet floor" sign, or if people have been tracking in water all day, then you won't end up with any responsibility if people fall.
White, numb skin with deeper-tissue damage, yes. I don't see how reflex is going to prevent this. Liquids that hot cause deep-tissue burns in 2-7 seconds. It wouldn't work so well on bare skin, but if you're wearing pants (especially, say, sweatpants), the liquid is held to your skin. You may find it hard to believe, but it's well-documented.
Molten metal does indeed cause even less than first-degree burns depending on the length of contact and type of metal. Hot solder stings but doesn't cause much damage. But then, the skin contact time is short, that's why. If the molten metal is twice as hot as the hot coffee (meaning some 400 C), it's delivering the damaging thermal energy into your skin only twice as fast.
This is easy to address.
Hot coffee is hot. If the coffee were hotter than 212 degrees F, I think it would be fair to say that there is a danger beyond normal expectations.
Perhaps you're not familiar with hot liquids? Hot water below boiling is still very dangerous. Burn experts even told McDonald's this. At normal temperatures, burning from coffee is painful but not particularly dangerous. At 20 C above normal (McDonald's temperature), it's capable of causing third-degree burns within seconds, as was the case here.
What's the surprise here?
The extent of the burns and the amount of medical care necessary to repair the damage. It was far beyond what would be expected for hot coffee. (I guarantee you if the coffee was a normal temperature we'd have one ticked old lady but zero lawsuits.)
McDonalds could have adjusted the temperature so that you would get slightly less burned. But then people would be claiming even more gross negligence because they "know their product is burning people".
20 degrees Centigrade, the amount McDonald's coffee was hotter than normal serving temperature, is a lot. Lowering it to a normal temperature, you will get much less burned -- first-degree instead of third-degree, which is a huge difference. They did claim negligence because they knew their product was burning people -- there were already some 700 reported incidences of burns from coffee that McDonald's knew about and didn't act on. This was the primary motivation for the jury's ruling against McDonald's (according to jury members).
Normal people think the lawsuit is stupid because they don't bother to read the facts, the just buy what the tort-reform politicians and media sensationalists tell them. No big surprise there, it's par for the course. It doesn't make you right, though, just ignorant.
"Would you be upset if you walked onto a wet tile floor that wasn't marked as such. slipped and broke your hip? Why? Shouldn't you be responsible enough to check that the floor isn't wet before walking across it?"
Hah! I suddenly envisioned myself walking through the hallways gingerly with some sort of device on a pole to test if the floor is wet.
With the frequency they wash the floors around here and the number of pointy metal shelving units around, that's asking for some nasty injury if they didn't put up signs. Fortunately, as I mention elsewhere, I work in a research facility where safety paranoia is the norm. It is nice knowing which lines carry high voltage and that if you open a door into a radiation hazard area the whole system will be shut off immediately. They even put up "Danger : Ice" and "Wet Floor" signs during bad spots in the winter. Of course, people usually expect the ice, so really the sign is reminding you that one of these days you're going to fall.
As far as I recall, there weren't state safety officials involved, no. The organization is the Shriners Burn something-or-other. I don't do them justice by not remembering their name offhand, but they're reputable. In addition, McDonald's had a number of known burn incidents, settled out of court, yet didn't consult any experts about burn hazards posed by their products. You may not think they should have to, but stockholders who stand to lose money when a lawsuit is eventually filed would disagree.
There's a big difference between the obvious and the nonobvious, something that tort-reform proponents seem to have a problem with.
I don't know if you work in a cubicle or what, but safety warnings are crucial in a lot of places. A lot of things have atypical circumstances -- like coffee that's substantially hotter than a typical serving temperature, to the point that it burns more than one would expect.
I suppose you'd prefer at restaurants, when they bring out a very hot plate (not the ones that are sizzling, but just a plate that's very hot), they not tell you and let you burn yourself.
To cover your examples, rat poison does say that it's toxic to humans. Many poisons are not toxic to species other than the ones they target. Home fans are not terribly dangerous, and you can guess from the rotating blades that it might hurt. On the other hand, some equipment has fans on the inside (where they can't be seen) with powerful enough motors to cause serious injury -- these typically have the "injured hand" logo indicating physical hazard. Conventions about hot liquids are well-known. However, if you went to a hot tub and put your foot in, only to find out the water was not a pleasant temperature but near-boiling, causing serious third-degree burns to your foot, you'd be pretty upset and blaming others. Super glue does carry warnings that it binds instantly to skin. Many glues don't bind to skin well at all. So you see, most of those are both reasonable and already exist (just not in the specific form you mentioned).
Ask anyone who works in an experimental research facility or factory floor about safety warnings. Where I work is plastered everywhere with safety notices and warning signs, as well as complicated lockout systems. Even after the mandatory safety training, there are a lot of things you run into in the course of a day's work that have hazards that you're not familiar with and not obvious, many of which could cause serious injury or death. People will make mistakes, and warning them about potential hazards and preventing from making these mistakes in the first place are important ways to cut back on unnecessary injuries.
The coffee spilled while she was removing the lid, as a passenger in a stopped car, in an attempt to add cream and sugar -- something very common among coffee drinkers. While many jurors did not originally feel that the case was warranted, after seeing the evidence, they were particularly struck by McDonald's callousness in the case. The plaintiff received third-degree burns on 6% of her body as a consequence of the spilled coffee and initally requested compensation for her medical bills, which for such extensive burns are significant. McDonald's knew that the risk existed, as they served their coffee very hot. They'd seen cases of this happening before (from first to third degree burns), settling out of court but not changing their policies.
As a long-time coffee drinker, I frequently have a cup of coffee in the car. It spills. But third-degree burns are not part of any rational person's expectations of the consequences of spilled coffee. If you're going to serve something that carries that sort of danger -- one beyond normal expectations for the product -- to a place where it's well-known that spills will occur, at the very least there should be clear warnings. Maybe you disagree, but twelve people who actually listed to all the facts (and were not predisposed one way or the other) didn't.
Of course, now you often can't get McDonald's coffee that's hot enough and they put warnings on their cups, which isn't necessary (though to do otherwise may make them guilty of not protecting their stockholders). So it seems silly in retrospect, as the beverage is just as hot as you'd expect, but with warnings. Still, warnings never hurt anyone.
You don't comment on the severity of the burn incidents. 700 people is not always an excellent record. Statistically or no, it's not everyone. It's 700 in (whatever you meant by 10). Often a small number of injuries out of a large pool of people can be cause for concern. (Many major news stories about "dangers of X" have many, many fewer than 700 incidences behind them.)
I don't know where you get that the temperature, which was not too much below boiling, is the recommended optimum serving temperature for coffee. Recommended by whom, McDonalds? Not surprising! The reason the coffee was that hot is that it is what McDonald's felt was the optimum storage temperature. Coffee should be made with very hot water, not stored for long, and served at a temperature where one can safely drink it. The latter was certainly not true of this coffee.
The plantiff did not intentionally dump coffee on herself to cause injury. Thus your use of "endeavor" is misleading (as is "dump"). Just because she spilled coffee on herself does not mean McDonald's had no part in causing her burns.
Clearly you are not a lawyer.
Yeah, I do remember that about calibre increase. I'm not sure that raging, drug-crazed negroes was the reason cocaine was outlawed, but I do recall it being used as a tool (probably mostly in the Southeast) to help further legislation.
Now that we've covered that, though, there might be more parallel than I thought. Drugs were made illegal because of fairly real concerns over addition to certain drugs (particularly opiates and cocaine products). Later, they became very popular as a form of experimentation and rebellion among youth, causing a campaign to demonize drug use, more strictly enforce existing laws, and supplement existing laws with stricter ones -- the War on Drugs.
Now, the concerns over violence in the media (movies, games) was not, perhaps, fuelled by directly observable consequences. However, I think the creation of much of the rating and restriction structure came into place before the major surge in youth popularity of violent games. (I'm not sure on this, as the two are certainly much closer together in time.) Certainly a rating system (the ESRB) was in place before violent games started being demonized as the cause for major social problems.
I think in both cases what ends up happening is that you have actual concerns and a reasonable response to them. (You can argue until you're blue in the face about the details of drug laws and video game ratings, but most people will agree there need to be some kind of controls on both that's at least similar to what's in place now.) Following this, and perhaps made worse by their "forbidden" status, there was a major increase in popularity among youth. At the same time (and perhaps partly made worse because of drugs or video games), there are some very real problems with youth. The easy target -- drugs or videogames -- is made a scapegoat to avoid addressing more thoroughly the problem at hand. They may have something to do with the problem, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that the problems of the 60s were mostly because of drugs, or that the problems among kids today is mostly because of violence in the media. Nonetheless, this is what gets the most press, because it's an easy scapegoat and it makes a good story, without people who are responsible for the problems having to actually take responsibility and address these issues.
Well, for one, there is a fairly good business in edutainment and nonviolent games. Maybe not as much as there used to be, but then, I'm not the age where I would play that any more, so I don't keep up with it. But there are certainly a load of decently-rated sports games, puzzle games, et cetera.
Grand Theft Auto is designed for adults. Really a lot of these games are designed for the 20-30-year-olds who grew up with earlier, simpler videogames and have expanding tastes. The gameplay is not what GTA is usually made out to be. Sure, you can shoot cops, pick up hookers to regain health, then run them over to get your money back, but that's not the point of the game. It is, as the article says, a fairly violent but story-based game. In fact, going around killing cops is one of the worst ways to get anything done, as nastier and nastier forms of law enforcement chase you down. It's entertaining for a bit and a decent challenge, but it's more likely to get you killed than to advance the game. The best solution is usually running from the cops and not getting caught in the first place, which usually means minimizing how often you do things like gun down or run over innocents. Compare it to, say, The Sims, where the oft-repeated thing "everyone does" is devise new and strange ways of making their Sims die. That's not the point of the game, though, and it doesn't stay entertaining for long.
We got rid of the X rating and replaced it with NC-17, not the R rating. It's still the same, yes.
I was probably not quite clear. I'll roll my response to the other reply to my previous post into this.
In short, I don't disagree with the ratings on movies and videogames and I don't disagree with the current status of drugs. (Some particular choices, such as the legal status of marijuana vs. alcohol or the particular choice of 21 as a drinking age I'm not entirely comfortable with, but the system as a whole is decent.) I don't particularly approve of the War on Drugs or how it's being done and I certainly don't approve of the demonization of violent videogames and other media. I'm not a kid, but nor do I have any.
The issue for me is not regulation. This is fine. But things like videogames or drugs are often blamed for great social ills -- demonized and used a scapegoat for problems that are further-reaching. They're even used as a scapegoat for problems that don't exist. (Don't understand your hippie kids' culture? Blame the drugs for making them Communists!)
The idea that if a kid who plays Grand Theft Auto then shoots a cop, the videogame is then blamed for making them violent is preposterous to me. I think deeper investigations into the very few incidents where this has been the case (as opposed to the very many incidents of violence that have been in no way related to video games) have shown that these kids' violent tendencies were much deeper than any media influences on them and were clear to some of the people around them. Kids have problems, and they need to be watched and taken care of when these problems crop up. Violence in children is a great social ill and, often, a problem of poor parenting and a poor society as a whole, but not a problem of there existing video games that are violent.
I would say that no psychoactive drug is without a harmful effect.
You may not like ratings, but people who have kids and want to know the content of a movie do. How the system is implemented might not always be perfect. How studios react to this (eg. by making more "child-friendly" movies as their big-budget productions) is up to them. It's not because of the rating system, it's because they make what people will pay for. If they aren't making movies you like, it's because either not enough people agree with you or you're not complaining to the movie studios loud enough.
However, a lot of people (including myself) would disagree that there's not enough violent or explicit, high-budget movies out there. A better word, I guess, would be "unrestrained", as gratuitous violence isn't much of a goal. Many movies tell a story the way they want to and receive R ratings and plenty of box office power. I would even go so far as to say that the R rating is probably one of the most popular ratings for big-budget movies, outside of Disney movies and a fair number of less explicit PG-13s. The stigma against X rated movies is unfortunate, as in the public mind, an X rated film is pornographic. However, there are many stories that can only be told with a level of explicit detail that is beyond and R rating but in no way pornographic. Oh well. Some bold people take the X rating and the poor box office anyway, and more power to them.
I think the situation with video games would be better if parents didn't buy their 11-year-olds games that are rated M. Some things, kids shouldn't be exposed to until later, but a lot of shoddy parents, grandparents, older brothers, or clueless store clerks ruin this.
I've not heard that drug-crazed negroes were the cause of early anti-drug legislation. It did start first in the Western states, which makes Chinese immigrants and their opiate dens a more likely cause than blacks. However, very shortly after banning businesses selling cocaine (private use was still allowed), California set up public facilities for treating opium addicts, suggesting that the non-violent user was a major concern.
1 .htm
China has had laws against the use and sale of opium longer than America has, due to the effects of British-imported opium on its people.
See:
http://www.ibogaine.org/drugmain.html
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/CASEY
Nearly all violent video game players don't commit violent crimes.
What you really want is to compare the percentage of people who commit violent crimes out of two groups: those who play violent video games and those who don't. This sort of thing has been done with, say, television before, but it's nearly impossible to construct proper groups, so data is not useful.
Really the problem, in my opinion, is that parents don't like they way their children behave and need a scapegoat. This isn't terribly surprising. The same thing happened in the 60s and 70s, but then the scapegoat was drugs. (I guess it's still one of the scapegoats now.)
His point is that the draw of modern videogames is that you're permitted to act freely. These games don't require you to shoot innocents in order to play.
If you aren't honorable in your life, are you really going to enjoy a game that makes you play honorably? Seriously, you can't take your lessons in life from videogames, whether they're positive or negative. A game that doesn't let you shoot innocents isn't teaching you anything, it's just making you play a certain way.
The dangers that many drugs posed were not just to youth. Around the time that drugs first started being outlawed, drug use was much higher among adults than youth. For example, opiates were used extensively recreationally (not medicinally), often causing serious addiction problems and dangerous side effects.
It's now (well, since roughly the 60s) that illegal drug use is so pervasive among youth. The legislation that's a reaction to that is not that drugs have been made illegal, but our efforts toward persecuting those who deal in or use drugs have been increased (the War on Drugs, it's called now).
Based on the very little I know, you're just going on the basis that the gravitational field can be treated like any of the other fields, with quantum field theory. Developing this leads you to gravitons and the quantization of the gravitational field. However, photons are observable, as are the effects of EM field quantization, so we know that this is a reasonable thing to do. As I understand it, we have been unable to devise effects of a quantized gravitational field that we would observe, so there's no reason to take a graviton theory over another one other than the precedent set by other fields. I don't know to what extent this treatment of gravity even works -- it may certainly be self-contradictory in certain situations or incomplete.
String theory may not be self-contradictory or incomplete, but it's just as baseless as anything else right now, as it makes no predictions that could be verified experimentally.
They're not completely disconnected. Fission and fusion by no means have to be of heavy and light elements, respectively. It's just that those are the ones that are easy and energetically advantageous for us to use for power generation. There's nothing stopping you from breaking Helium into Hydrogen atoms, except for the strong binding between the protons and neutrons in a Helium atom. You can also fuse heavy atoms together -- as another poster mentioned, that's how one obtains the very heavy rare elements.
Also, Helium's mass is roughly 4 times that of Hydrogen (or 2 times that of Deuterium).
Not bad for high school physics, though. Also, you can predict gravitons from the quantization of the gravitational field without knowing terribly much about it and certainly without string theory. You just can't justify it or prove that it's true. It might help a bit if we saw a gravitational wave, but we haven't.
It's not quite that simple, as it should be possible for elements such as iron (and heavier) to fuse (and presumably release energy, if it's going to happen much). Otherwise the heavier-than-iron elements would not exist. Or so it would seem from what I remember from the stellar origin of elements.