Comment by inefficient | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inefficient | Hacker News Reader

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I worked in an extremely busy coffee shop on campus when I was in university. It made more by lunch than many of the restaurants I worked in made all day. We had 5 large plastic insulated containers the coffee was brewed in. No hot plate at all. They were nice because they were easily moved, held a lot of coffee, and no hot plate needed. They could keep that coffee hot all day without cooking it down making that stale coffee sludge people expect from old coffee. Also made it easy to make them and carry them to an event we catered.

But it also probably meant that they stayed incredibly hot for a good 2 hours.

I've always had mixed feelings about these law suits. I know so many people who had their minds changed after seeing the effect that the McDonald's coffee had on that woman's legs. I didn't. She was balancing it on her legs while driving. Why do people keep putting something they know is dangerously hot in a place that can severely hurt them. Even moreso if they are driving.

It only took me a few (dozen) burns to my tongue before I learned to not drink coffee immediately after purchase. But I wouldn't hold a hot coffee between my legs anymore that I would hold a knife between my legs. At what point does personal responsibility kick in? Knives don't need a warning label, because they are considered to have a knowable danger. Why not something that boils water in the process of making it?

I have to wonder if it would have made me liable when a person wanted his fresh coffee extra hot and I heated it up even more for him (real person, regular customer, like 80 years old).

I am really not anti lawsuit for negligence. The original McDonald's case just always stuck with me. Even if it hadn't been that hot, but was just hit enough that your skin might get red, that's still hot enough that she could've easily gotten into an accident if some spilled on her leg. If something is ice cold, the same thing could happen. We really shouldn't be balancing things on or squeezing them between our legs as if our legs are a shelf and not a part of our body.

> She was balancing it on her legs while driving.

This is not true.

> Liebeck was in the passenger's seat of a 1989 Ford Probe, which did not have cup holders. Her grandson parked so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

Huh. Guess I misremembered that part. Or perhaps what I was told in a class back in high school was incorrect. Good to know the correct information.

Nevertheless, going back to my knife analogy, if she were pulled over using a large kitchen knife cutting up something over her legs I wouldn't blame the people who sold her the knife.

Maybe it was too hot, but we should be treating hot things as dangerous by default.

> but we should be treating hot things as dangerous by default

There's a different between "ouch is hot" and "ouch I have third degree burns", you're parroting the talking points McDonalds aggressively sold the media on.

The point is that hot coffee is not meant to be hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. It should not be so hot that you go into shock if you spill it on yourself.

If you were told about this during the current events cycle all you had was McDonald's mouthpieces talk about how she was an ambulance chaser, and not how she'd asked for only $10 thousand to just cover the hospital bills. The giant lawsuit amount you saw was after the jury applies punitive damages because McDonalds (1) lied about why it need the coffee so hot (saying commuters wanted in, not the actual reality of it saving 20 seconds), (2) this kind of extreme burn had occurred more than 700 times already, (3) was significantly above recommended maximum food temperature, and (4) McDonald's own expert acknowledged that it was physically impossible to their coffee at the serving temperature.

Going to your knife analogy, a better example might be a knife with a handle designed your hand in normal use would easily slip onto a sharp area - lets say a kitchen knife with a sharpened bolster. Your argument would be "knives are dangerous so you should be careful when using them", and therefore despite the design of the knife in standard use being much more dangerous and likely to cause harm than any other knife it would be fine. As the lawsuit found however, if you make a product that in normal use is significantly more dangerous than any other product when used in the same way, it may just be that your design is defective and the resulting harm is due to that defective design and not user error.

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