Always remember what really happened with the McDonald’s lady who sued because her “coffee was too hot”.
McDonald’s themselves started the campaign that the issue was laughable, and seeded the notion that it’s ridiculous, how could she not know coffee hot?
What really happened was that the coffee was:
- Served well above safe ranges to maximize profits, so the coffee could be served longer
- Was served near boiling temperature
- Was so hot that it FUSED HER LABIA requiring extensive surgery to repair.
She sued only for her hospital bills.
They started a smear campaign against her to convince the public that she was a moron and she just wanted a payday.
Don’t trust corporations. Ever.
Not to mention they were warned many times before about serving coffee that’s too hot. The woman got such a huge settlement because the judge was tired of McDonald’s crap
Also they calculated the cost of lawsuits like that and decided they would make more money selling it that hot than they would lose in lawsuits over how hot the coffee was.
What’s that old quote? “A lie can make it around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”, or something like that? I believe that was pre-internet too.
It also happens with politics. I constantly see provocative headlines get lots of attention in one circle, and then the later corrections only get passed around in the opposite circle, if at all.
Look at just yesterday. One clickbait site said Beyonce was going to perform at the dnc, and by the time the truth and correction made it around it was already past time
We desperately need a return of journalistic ethics and bland, just-the-facts news.
This is why in prefer NPR and BBC
I wouldn’t call those the most reliable. Better than some
What’s more reliable than NPR?
Nothing is reliable that’s the problem. NPR is a propaganda machine. There are worse ones to be far
Critical thinking and media literacy. Just 2 days ago I heard NPR try to gaslight me that Gaza wasn’t a genocide.
Plus those corrections only show up as a footnote on articles without it being altered or removed. Its laughable.
That’s weird. Ideally you should put it right next to the title, that there has been an addendum and the following might be incorrect/outdated.
That depends on what your goal is, I think
I’d consider the goal be to:
- Keep the original article for historical and reference purposes
- Make sure that anyone who only cared to read the first sentence, didn’t leave with confident misinformation.
Your goals are too honest for mass media 😅
Its even worse in science. Lots of crazy headlines that are later debunked quietly
those headlines can also be debunked loudly and yet, anti-vaxxers still exist, somehow
I wasn’t talking about vaccinations. I was talking about fusion and other buzzy topics.
Generally that’s news media misconstruing science.
Which directly impacts funding
That’s the big issue. If a project doesn’t have big headlines frequently it is killed.
I think more likely is that the news outlets need the revenue from clicks, and are willing to trade their reputation to get them. Accurate science journalism doesn’t pay, capitalism is a race to the bottom.
Also, she got second degree burns, and she was not the first person to be injured by the coffee, and McDonald’s was told multiple times that they served their coffee too hot.
During the trial, McDonald’s showed zero care for the the people they injured, to the point that most of the fine that McDonald’s ended up paying was punitive damages
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Tbh, I don’t get it. How can a coffee, that can be max 100°C cause such burns? I would have never believed hot/boiling water is that dangerous, without that story.
That’s literally a temperature you would cook meat with
What do you think people are made of?
TIL, videos saying “cook meat at 180°” actually meant 180°F and not 180°C.
Now I have to check what my induction stove means when it reads 180 in deep frying mode.
Afaik it means °C usually, but when boiling meat it will be cooked at 100°C give or take.
But since well done steak is supposed to be 71°C, everything hotter than that would sooner or later cook the meat.
Considering that Google says 350°F - 375°F for deep frying and that I am in a °C country, I would lean more this way.
Of course, I have never cooked meat and have no idea what deep frying meat at 180°C would do.
Hot air/gas, hot water/liquid, and a hot solid behaved very differently. The numbers depend a lot on what’s being measured. There’s also a big variable of time.
The cheap induction stove is not really measuring anything.
Its PWM has been tuned to get to the temperature the user selects, under whatever testing conditions they had while R&D. The displayed temperature is just the user selected temperature.
But setting it to 120(whatever unit) manages to make good enough french fries, so that’s fine by me.
Boiling water is extremely dangerous! Water at 140°F (60°C) will cause a serious burn in 3 seconds. Even water at 120°F (49°C) will cause a serious burn within 10 minutes. Source
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∵ oopsie replied to the wrong comment
Well, scalding hot water, some of the hottest you are legally allowed to have set out of a water heater, is about 130 degrees F, or 54 degrees C. That will scald you in a few seconds.
Her coffee was near double that. So, ice at 0, can burn you at 54, and then around 100 degrees… Yeah.
Are you American? 100 degrees celsius is 212 degrees Fahrenheit
I mean, it’s easy to believe when you consider what might happen if you put your hand into a boiling pot of pasta, for example.
I’m sorry, it fucking welded her pussy shut???
the news did not report on that part
Yes. Yes it did.
No, they did not report that in media.
I knew about the story, did not know about that detail… I can feel my own cunt quivering in pain imagining that.
The media are corporations also.
Of course it didn’t.
I dont understand this, coffee is generally made with near boiling hot water. Many coffee machines make the coffee in front of your eyes. Of course its served boiling hot, no?
I mean her accident is extremely unfortunate, but her needing money for medical bills is a problem with society, not mcdonalds.
Coffee is brewed near boiling, but the hottest it should be served is 60 degrees C, or around 140 degrees F. Basically her temperature was the same as it was literally coming out of the machine, no one takes a big gulp of coffee the second it comes out of the machine.
McDonalds kept their coffee as hot as possible to give the illusion it was fresher than it was. By keeping the coffee at 190-200F then they believed that customers would feel that the coffee was fresher, even though they knew it was unsafe to serve coffee that hot.
Larger places follow the same rules here, while coffee is brewed extremely hot it usually rests for a bit before serving unless a customer explicitly asks for it. In restaurants it’s served for you. Even Starbucks most of their drinks are milk based which cools the coffee, except for Americanos which are just espresso and hot water, and you’ll usually see those with an insulator cup to highlight that
Found this, which explains serving coffee better than I can. https://mtpak.coffee/2022/08/takeaway-cups-coffee-temperature-ideal-serving/
https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts
McDonald’s admitted it had known about the risk of serious burns from its scalding hot coffee for more than 10 years. The risk had repeatedly been brought to its attention through numerous other claims and suits.
Many places here you get your coffee straight from the machine that brews it (as in you press the button yourself), far too hot to drink immediately.
You can legally kill anyone related to someone who has had Disney+.
Iirc, the wife died, the husband sued, and they tried to say the husband can’t sue because HE had had the subscription a long time ago.
Each subscriber loses the right to sue for any of their loved ones.
After all, if they’re dead, they can’t sue you anyway
If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back? I don’t wanna sit here and see these sad articles blow by, what can I do to tell Disney to fuck off. I did not sign up for this, I wanted to watch funny cartoons and superheroes like a normal person, and this is my reward? If suing them is futile, is storming their office and yelling at their corporate head about this any better? I’m pissed, and I can’t sit here and wait for other legal heads to shut this stupid clause down.
If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back?
Historically? Guillotines in the village square, and/or Molotovs through the front windows of the overlords’ house. The rich learned a long time ago that when no other recourse is left, people will eventually turn to violence. And they learned that keeping the poors placated is a matter of life or death. Because money and fame won’t stop an angry mob, and even trained soldiers will get overwhelmed by sheer crowd size.
I believe Sun Tsu wrote something applicable in The Art of War, along the lines of “Always leave a surrounded army a way out. Show them a way to life so they will not be compelled to fight to the death. Because even an exhausted army will fight to the death if they have no other option.” So the rich and powerful set up systems that are heavily skewed in the rich’s favor, but at least attempt to appear fair on the surface. They set up a visible “way to life” so that people could at least feel like they had a viable way of fighting back without resorting to violence.
But recently, the rich and powerful seem to have forgotten that, and have dropped all pretext of fairness. Now it’s just blatant “you’re going to be killed and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Which means that the people are eventually going to be forced to fight to the death, because they’re cornered and see no other option. And I genuinely believe that if things carry on this same trajectory that people will turn to violence as a means of recourse, because it’s quickly becoming the only effective recourse that is within reach.
I love this comment and Sun Tzu reference, thank you so much for posting it!
As time goes on, I am more and more convinced that media piracy is morally acceptable.
Always has been… none of this shit is new, just the audacity is amped up.
I think media piracy is not only acceptable, but something that should be actively promoted by everyone. Piracy is the only way to preserve media for future generations.
It’s a small thing, but for me it’s refusing to support them as much as I can. I don’t use Disney+ and try not to buy merchandise from their IPs. Admittedly this is both difficult since they own so. many. things. while also being a drop in the bucket for such a large company, but if enough folks feel the same, it can move the needle a small amount.
I also shared this message out on all my platforms (that of their shady practices) which influenced at least a few people to say they were distancing themselves from the mouse.
Ultimately though, corporations will always do what is best for their shareholders, and in this case, that means doing anything possible not to pay out, PR nightmare be damned. Meaningful legislation is really the only thing that puts guard rails on this behaviour, so my last recommendation really comes down to being vocal with your representatives that these things matter and voting accordingly. I recognize again this is a small thing but on-mass action like this is how change happens.
My two cents at least.
Stop giving them money is about the only thing the average person can do.
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It is a moral imperative for anyone who considers themselves to be a protector of their family to just pirate Disney shit instead
He only had a free trial which makes it even crazier. Also I don’t know who thought an arbitration demand would apply to food vs a streaming service, but as insane as our court system is with judges siding with money I can’t see a judge feeling a TOS could be THAT fluid is like Nike refusing to return a pair of sneakers because you’re cousin owned a copy of NBA JAM in the 90’s, although you never played it.
This case has awful optics but it isn’t as insane as it is presented here. First, it’s just resolving things by arbitration not dismissing the suit completely. Second, Disney didn’t own the restaurant in question, it was on their property, and they promoted it on their website. Its reasonable that an arbitration agreement for something like disney+ could be extended to the use of their website.
Binding arbitration is terrible for consumers:
“This is not like having judges, who get paid the same no matter what happens,” says Stanford Graduate School of Business finance professor Amit Seru, who collaborated on the study with Mark Egan at Harvard Business School and Gregor Matvos at the University of Texas at Austin. “Here, you only get paid if you’re selected as an arbitrator. They have incentives to slant toward the business side, because they know that those who don’t do so won’t get picked. Everyone knows what’s happening.”
No, it is insane. I don’t know of other countries that allow a corporation to just not allow you to sue them and force you into arbitration.
It is as insane as it sounds. Yes, alternative dispute resolution is perfectly commonplace and indeed in many countries - such as mine - there is an expectation that you attempt ADR before bringing a matter to court, unless there is some reason why you couldn’t.
That’s fine. That’s not an issue.
Disney claimed that due to the terms and conditions of the Disney+ video streaming service, anyone who has or had a subscription agrees to resolve any and all disputes with Disney through mediation and they therefore waive any recourse through the courts. For absolutely any form of dispute, even a wrongful death.
That is absolutely insane and evil to even attempt and there is no justifying it.
it isn’t as insane as it is presented here
Arbitration aside, I think you’re forgetting these are terms from the streaming service.
If tomorrow I attack you, break your spine and you lose mobility for life, then I come back saying in 2011 you purchased an indie game I made and waived your right to sue me in the terms of service, that wouldn’t be insane? Suuure.
They also agreed to a similar arbitration clause again when purchasing the park tickets. It is insane that the disney lawyers even mentioned disney+. They had a more recent and relevant agreement right there.
Either way, I hope they lose. Fuck disney and forced arbitration.
The restaurant in question wasn’t located in the park, so that clause was just as irrelevant.
Agreed but it isn’t as much a stretch as the disney+ agreement and serves the same purpose for their argument. The restaurant is on disney owned property right next to the park.
Always remember it’s morally ethical to yar har Disney content
It is by far the best reason they could give anyone for being pro piracy. Forget the morality of it anymore, when the alternative is signing your life away it would be stupid to pay for it.
we have killed satire and threw a dance party on its corps. How is this whole situation not just a funny article by the Onion
Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead
You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about
I would say its both. You can’t have someone sue for you when you die, but even if you were severely harmed and lived, it implies you can’t sue then either. So I would say we are both correct.
The restaurant was directly responsible for the woman’s death. The husband went after Disney because it was in Disney Springs and the website said the restaurant worked with allergies. It’s more the ghoulish lawyers
It doesn’t change what Disney tried to do to get out of it.
If I recall, Disney Springs is outside of the parks, basically an outside mall-type area with a bunch of third-party shops and restaurants. Disney is plenty evil, but they’re just the landlord in this situation.
A landlord that owns a streaming service who tries to argue that usage of that streaming service allows them to not be sued by fucking up your food order.
Their other legal argument made more sense… They have nothing to do with food preparation done by one of the tenants.
And I can’t think of many things more evil than a landlord
I have less issues with landlords with commercial tenants… A lot of retailers do not want to own real estate or maintain properties. Residential landlords, on the other hand…
I don’t know any other landlords that advertise and vouch their clients on their website.
I bet cafeterias or food courts have gotten sued for the same thing.
You don’t? The malls, outlets, and high-end shopping centers around here certainly maintain a website as well as signage for their tenants.
If someone stopped at a Rest Stop and Baskin Robins errantly put tree nuts in their dish, I don’t of any legal precident making the Rest Stop owner liable.
It’s the fact they vouched for the resturaunt.
I don’t mean having a sign or directory. I mean saying specifically “the BR at our rest stop is allergy friendly” vs “our rest stop has a basken robbins, check their page for details”
You are more physically, financially, mentally, and psychologically safe by pirating Disney content than legally renting it.
I can’t comprehend how they give so few f’s about their image as to even contemplate that in public.
I hate to be a back in my day kinda person, but there was a time at which large family-friendly companies were concerned enough with their image not to pull that shit, at least out loud.
Perks of being a monopoly. Every time someone gets upset with them, their response is just dripping with a “you’ll be back” mentality. Same as u/spez during the reddit third party app stuff.
I am going to be the “back in the day” guy. Huge corporations have never been paragons of virtue, but at least they used to be smart enough to protect their image.
“Back in the day”, I could see Disney firing the lawyer who was dumb enough to suggest such a strategy.
Because they know most people don’t care, and this will blow over in a few more days.
I love my wife too much not to pirate Snow White.
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Why the fuck is it allowed to force arbitration when someone dies? It’s insanity
It’s okay, they didn’t force arbitration. They decided to “waive their right to do so.”
*Disney+ may cause death
Watching Mr. Robot now makes this meme hit hard
I don’t know which of these two situations happened
-
Someone incredibly and insanely out of touch was watching The Boys and thought Vought was a guideline for how a good business operates
-
Someone on a power trip wanted to try to legalize murder for his brand
I’m not sure which scenario scares me more, the incompetence or the evil.
I’m guessing the legal department had been looking for a test case to see how far they could take the forced arbitration clause in the Disney+ ToS, but they didn’t consult the PR department as to whether this would be a good idea.
I’m kind of horrified that someone not only didn’t run that idea by PR, but couldn’t piece together using their own common sense that loudly declaring “Our company is allowed to straight up murder you because Mickey Mouse is bigger than God, and we’re not even kidding!” was not exactly going to fly with…
Anyone at all really
- Realize they bear a large liability for this, and hope to weasel their way out of it.
Some junior unpaid intern was tasked with reading all their agreements to see if there was anything they could use. They pitched this and the rest was history
😊 Well, you might think so, but if that were true then their legal team would have to be unimaginably inept. Even small companies rely on arbitration clauses. A company the size of Disney probably has boilerplate arbitration clauses prolifically spread throughout any agreement they make. I don’t imagine there’s anything their legal team says more often when they are named in a suit than, “can we arbitrate?”
So, yes they were relying on a remote technicality to get out of the suit, but that’s also the only reason they were named in the suit. I don’t blame them. And they know they wouldn’t be found liable. But they also know that people only remember “the mcdonalds hot coffee lawsuit” being about some unintelligent gold digging woman (which BTW is a travesty). So the settlement that they will likely offer is going to be worth far less than the damage from the bad rep of a trial like this.
I imagine the legal team’s hands were tied, this smells like a corporate mandate.
I honestly don’t think they hear ANY liability at all. This would be like saying your friend’s landlord is at fault for your friend feeding you allergens because the landlord introduced you to each other. Like, sure, they’re related, but by no stretch of the meaning of “obviously at fault”. That’s just ridiculous.
If they didn’t, they would have made a motion to dismiss because they bear no liability. They have an army of top tier lawyers, if they decided arguing something other than not having liability, that tells me they do, or, at very least, it would be hard to convince a court they don’t.
Not everything is all or nothing. It’s not that you either are completely liable or not liable at all. That’s not how this works. If you are not liable at all, you should move to dismiss. The way this case was designed, based on the allegations, Disney does bear responsibility. But the allegations only include Disney in the most tenuous of ways. So a motion to dismiss would NOT have worked. But IMO, they are not liable at all. This was a restaurant that leased Disney land that screwed up. I can’t see how Disney had anything to do with this at all.
If they only bore a small liability, they would have just had their legal team reseach what the person suing would most likely get, then provide that information, and an offer based on that information, before doing anything else. You know, like what normally happens when a company gets sued. The fact that they went straight to some hail mary strategy tells me they believe they are on the hook for big money, or will have a hard time proving they aren’t.
Dude, here. Argue with LE about it if you’re just going to rely on your own ill informed conjecture. I have no dog in the race and I couldn’t care less.
Neither happened. The restaurant isn’t owned by Disney, it is just listed on their website as a recommended place for allergy free dining, and they while own the property, it isn’t a part of the actual park, springs, etc. The family signed up for D+, and therefore “read” the terms, including the arbitration, and then used their D+ account to sign up for the trip, and had to “read” the terms again. The whole D+ argument wasn’t that they had to go to arbitration because they used the streaming, it was to show they had to go through the same terms multiple times and should be familiar with them. And basically, this is an issue with the labeling on the website, so would be covered by those rules. Who they really should be going after is the restaurant, if they made the same allergy free claims there. Agreements requiring arbitration are indeed bullshit and should be more limited, but this is proper enforcement of a shitty system, not the batshit insane enforcement it has been memed into.
They are going after the restaurant. The restaurant is whom they are suing. But they know they won’t get much from an allergy lawsuit settlement with an Irish Pub themed restaurant, so they included the deeper-pocket Disney in the suit (which IMO is a less than honorable act, but in a capitalist society I’m always going to give the benefit of the doubt to the person, also you never know if the legal system is going to choose you to fuck with so I dually recognize the spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to damage remuneration).
Even with that said though, since the guy who decided to risk a life-threatening condition on whether a likely not much more than minimum wage employee could or would know if a thing was allergen free decided to rely on a technicality of civil litigation to get more money, then I can’t fault Disney for using a technicality to try to get out of it.
Fuck Disney in general, but kudos to Disney for taking this on the chin just to not make someone even a perceived victim of their greed. I think it’s honestly respectable. They’re still probably not going to be at fault were it to go to trial, but they’re going to settle and give this guy the obvious payday he wanted.
Yeah, my understanding is that SOP is to sue everyone even remotely, possibly, responsible, and the courts will work out who is and isn’t likely enough to have to actually defend themselves. This is just a part of the dance.
You’re probably right. That’s definitely how things are done in building and commercial industries that I know of so it’s probably a standard practice system wide. Sure.
A woman is dead and Disney is happy about it.
I’m guessing that the legal team didn’t have a case, but corporate told them to fight it anyways, so some legal intern just threw some wild shit at the wall and the more senior layers were like “well, we got nothing else. If corporate wants us to fight it, this is all we got”
-
I wonder what the internal discussion looked like after this.
M’fers had a meeting and a lawyer brought up the Disney+ TOS and they all agreed that was a great idea. Corporate nods all around. Idiots.
Just couldn’t stop salivating over the legal precedent they could set
I can’t believe they were only seeking 50,000$ too.
That’s the minimum, they’re seeking damages starting at 50k
Really? Weren’t they a doctor too? 50k seems like it would be next to nothing for what happened.
They aren’t. It’s stated “in access of”. They’re going after more.
Also, the restaurant isn’t owned or operated by Disney. The husband’s lawyers attached Disney to it because of the super deep Disney pockets. But the husband is suing both the restaurant and Disney.
LegalEagle has done a video on the whole thing, here’s a proper explanation of the ordeal.
But for real, shit’s starting to get weird
We may be trending away from the Bell Riots to Starfleet timeline and more into the Corporate Wars to Rollerball (1975) timeline. May want to brush up on your skating ability.
Don’t use Drake memes.
You’ve got the spirit.
Is that Drake?
Excellent.
Shamelessly stolen from @ummthatguy@lemmy.world
Flattering, but I lay no claim to the OG Geordi format. My contribution was that I gave her a bit of a spit shine at one point.
Comments like that are completely useless. Unless you plan on saying why you think that, just keep quiet.
It’s a very long story with Drake. We honestly don’t have time.
If you can’t summerize it shortly enough to post in a comment, ten don’t bring it up. What’s the point?
And I mean doing it in the original comment. I don’t care personally. I just hate when people make statements like that without any context whatsoever.
No amount of defending him is gonna make him not a groomer. Pls consider actually being a decent person instead
I’m not defending anyone.
I don’t give a shit or know a shit about Drake except that his music sucks.
Here is a video if you want some context.
Welcome to the internet?
