I believe it's the guilt of those things we did as children that makes us such restrictive parents. We realize that the things we did were dangerous and we don't want that for our kids.
Also, back then was a different time. You could do stuff like that, get caught, and not pay a huge price. Now, that's not true, in the US, at least. The climate is one of zero tolerance for stuff mentioned in the article. Example: some kids in the middle school my son goes to played a prank in the computer lab: they swapped a bunch of keys of some of the keyboards. The result? They were banned for life from using computers in the school district (yes, this would follow them to high school). A complete over reaction, but the norm for punishment in the US.
I spent my teenage years in a third-world country. I would be convicted of the following if I had spent those years in the US:
1) Trespassing private property
2) Theft
3) Willful and malicious destruction of property
4) Arson
5) Indecent exposure
6) Consensual rape (my girlfriend was 2 years younger than me)
7) Driving under the influence
I consider myself a highly moral individual, and some people consider me the most level-headed and patient person around.
I would argue that being a vandal in your teenage years may have a positive impact on the rest of the life of some people. You have to be smart about it and try not to hurt you or anyone else too much in the process.
> You have to be smart about it and try not to hurt you or anyone else too much in the process.
So theft, destruction of property, driving under the influence, and arson are victimless crimes?
Maybe I'm a stickler for rule of law but when you start fucking with other people's stuff, that's not cool (understatement). Especially if it's just because you're bored.
Although I'm sympathetic to your general view, driving under the influence is in fact a victimless crime. If the crime were "causing damage or injury as a result of driving under the influence", then it would have a victim, but getting drunk then driving somewhere and not hurting anyone is still a crime, but has no victim.
You could say you're increasing the risk for everyone else, but the same can be said for use of PCP or meth or some drug that correlates with higher rates of violent crimes, and those are acknowledged to be victimless crimes.
Its a sliding scale. What's the chance of this 'victimless crime' turning into a real one? And that ranges from property damage to manslaughter to killing whole families.
There's a risk/reward analysis at work here, an driving under the influence has had a very, very bad track record.
Well it just is a victimless crime is all. Clearly the author of the parent post didn't hurt anyone, so it had no victim.
It's probably not worth it to get into it, but I think I'd prefer a situation where you don't get punished for "pre-crime" like driving under the influence, but you get punished extra harshly for anything that causes damage as a result of something like that. So crash into a pole when sober, pay a fine. Crash into a pole when drunk, fine plus 3 months in jail. That sort of thing. Similarly you can imagine a lot of the outrage about jaywalking would go away if jaywalking were legal everywhere, but causing an accident or traffic jam while jaywalking would carry a hefty fine. This allows people to make local risk assessment decisions for which they are taking responsibility (it's 2 AM and there are no cars around - is it worth it to cross now knowing that if I do end up causing an accident or traffic jam it'll cost me $500?). Not saying it's a perfect system, but it seems like a start in addressing the legitimate concerns people have about victimless crimes.
Crash into a pedestrian, and you go to jail for 3 extra months?
I am biased because I lost a parent to this, but unlike, say, smoking weed in your house, driving under the influence has a near 100% chance of endangering people around you. Just like how people need a license to drive a car,it's not unreasonable to ask you to not be so selfish as to endanger those around you just because you got wasted and want to drive home in your 3 ton machine.
I was using crashing into a pole because it's something where you can see where you could plausibly have a huge disparity in sentencing outcomes in relative terms (there are always going to be thorny issues when you kill someone because even if you weren't driving drunk they're going to be picking apart all the different fault and negligence aspects anyway). For killing a pedestrian, you'd presumably make it so that killing someone while driving under the influence is presumptively negligent homicide as opposed to something like vehicular manslaughter.
Additionally, it's disingenuous to say there's a "near 100% chance of endangering people around you". That's saying that there's a 100% chance that you've increased the risk by some amount. There's nothing even close to a 100% chance that you will actually do any damage to people around you, or crash. According to [1] there are 112 million self-reported episodes of impaired driving, and 1.4 million arrests, but 10,000 deaths. Obviously these are not hard numbers, but my guess is that driving under the influence likely triples or quadruples an existing (small) risk that you would kill or harm someone. That's not a trivial thing, but it would still mean that in the vast majority of cases, if you drive under the influence, everyone gets home safe.
And in any case, I'm not in favor of people driving under the influence. Similarly I don't think people should drive while tired (it's a similar rate of impairment), but the simple fact is that these crimes by themselves don't have victims, they are just occasionally the cause of actions which do have victims. You can certainly make the case that drunk driving should be against the law for any number of reasons, but that's a separate issue as to whether that crime actually has a victim.
Don't trivialize those 10,000 deaths. That's one in 11,000 drunk-driving episodes. Deaths, not some euphemistic small risk. Easily worth trying to mitigate. Absolutely makes it worth classifying out of the 'victimless crime' category.
For one thing I'm not trivializing them, I'm saying that saying that "100% of the time you are endangering people" is disingenuous considering there's only a 0.01% that anyone actually dies if you drive under the influence. There's not a whole lot to offer in the "benefits" column of drunk driving, so it's probably not reasonable even for fairly small increases of risk anyway.
And no, it does not make it worth classifying "out of the victimless crime" category, because victimless is not a matter of degree, it's a question of whether or not there is an aggrieved party. Any time there's an accident as a result of drunk driving, then it's got a victim. Otherwise there are only "potential" victims.
Again, I think it's a behavior that needs to be discouraged, because it forces people not capturing any of the benefit (the drinking, the convenience of being able to take your own car afterwards) to assume some of the risk (the chance that a drunk driver will harm them or their property). I'm just saying that driving drunk by itself doesn't inherently have a victim.
Interesting: as mentioned elsewhere, jaywalking used to be called 'walking'. Car companies marketed the idea that pedestrians didn't belong in the road with cars, which up to then had actually been built for pedestrians to walk in.
To be fair, you probably wouldn't have been caught for most of that stuff unless you were doing it during school hours, on school grounds. The knee-jerk massive overreaction stuff is mostly perpetrated by school administrations, whose primary concern is preventing a lawsuit, not contributing to the child's development.
Take into account that "during school hours" and "on school grounds" is a much bigger chunk of kids' lives in the US than it is in most other countries.
In most countries, school is just the place where you have lessons for a few hours, and all other activities, including even lunch breaks, are part of kids' private lives outside of school and outside of school grounds.
Add to that no school buses and no parents driving their kids to and from school in SUV's, and you get a culture in which kids have a considerably chunk of private life outside of either parental or school control.
The problem imho is giving school administrations so much influence and authority over kids in the first place.
>Take into account that "during school hours" and "on school grounds" is a much bigger chunk of kids' lives in the US than it is in most other countries.
Citation needed, my experience has been the opposite (except for Germany). I was getting out of school at 2:45 in the US, 6 in France.
I know there are extracurricular activities, but still.
If I was a 14 year old in school today and did the stuff I did as a 14 year old in the 1980's, I'd be suspended, expelled, or in jail by now. Kids can't even be kids anymore, it's pretty sad.
"Example: some kids in the middle school my son goes to played a prank in the computer lab: they swapped a bunch of keys of some of the keyboards. The result? They were banned for life from using computers in the school district (yes, this would follow them to high school)."
Seems a little harsh. Is there any 'process' available (appeal against ban &c)?
In UK that would be telling off and phone call to parents with perhaps a formal disciplinary depending on age.
I seriously don't know how myself and my brothers survived. The article was more then just familiar it was growing up. Now that I'm a dad it's hard to think of letting my son do the same crazy/stupid things however I know it's better that he does rather then be scared of the world.
In the very early 90s I put a fake virus on the library computer as a prank. The "virus" was in-memory only and would disappear on reboot. It mimicked the real DOS virus that caused letters to start to drip down from the screen. I was contacted as the resident "computer expert" to come in and fix it. In retrospect I realize two things: 1. This virus was probably the inspirations for the Matrix lettering effect. 2. The school must have known it was me that installed that shit on their computers.
I think the trend is common all over the western parts of the world, but most pronounced in the US. It saddens me. People must be allowed to change and better themselves.
The keycaps punishment sounds completely over the top. Surely both administration and parents can see that? It is not possible to have a rational discussion about it?
As a student who's followed the rules and essentially played by the book for pretty much my whole life, part of me regrets not doing stuff that defies norm, but another part of me is scared to think what I would look like if I got caught up in the 'wrong' things and never got interested in something useful.
I'd say this article is not necessarily the biggest advocate for delinquency, rather, it advocates for self-discovery in children, which is rare in modern parenting and educational systems. Sometimes this 'self-discovery' can lead to incidents of delinquency, but I think it's best to do dumb stuff young so you learn bad from good based on experience.
This may not exactly be delinquency, but as kids I and a friend loved to explore construction sites on weekends. We never did anything dangerous really, it was just highly fascinating. But as we grew older, people who saw us started threatening to call the police, assuming we might be stealing something :( So in hindsight, I do wish we had used that "window of opportunity" even more. I have no idea how I would feel about my own children, should I have those; but we personally weren't reckless, stupid or malicious about it, just very curious and creative. The things you can get away with as a child, used well, can be a beautiful thing ^^ Not that we did anything great or learned anything useful, but it sure beat watching TV.
> but as kids I and a friend loved to explore construction sites on weekends.
Hehe that reminds me I did that with my dad, once. Looking back it was very dangerous but it was great fun. It was a new site for a 9 story residential building right next to ours. Once we thought we'd get caught by the guard, as we heard steps, so we hid, and it turns out it was some other people also exploring the site.
Another thing we did was climb a parachute training tower, and also hopped on a slow moving cargo train to hitch a 3 km ride towards my grandparents' house.
Aside from that (which if anyone knows me would totally uncharacteristic of me, but I guess it was more my dad than me), I was a pretty awkward nerd that liked tinkering with electronics (and later computers) and had only a few friends.
> Do you think it might be that your father was trying to toughen you up a bit?
Who knows, it is possible. It was a fun thing to do, I look at it as more of a "hey let's do a crazy thing together" and one of the things I remember fondly.
> Parents of nerds sometimes get worried like that.
He was also a bit if nerd, and I think how I said "people would be surprised to hear I did those things" they would not a lot less surprised to find out my dad did those with me as well.
But as a kid you probably didn't realise that this opportunity was for a limited period and if someone had tried to tell you, you might not have listened anyway.
What opportunities do you have right now? Can you see any of those slipping away? It's really hard to think outside of the box on this one.
Perhaps you'd like for someone to tell you what you should do - but if they did, would you listen? And if you did, would they be right?
There is a constant stream of opportunity. Looking back and looking forward can be useful, but not if it stops you looking in the present.
Exactly why I don't give it much thought. I think my life has turned out pretty great so far, I've become interested in useful/productive things, so I don't have much to worry about.
Seems to be a meme that "back in my day kids just played and that was good!" Yeah, sure I played with Lawn Darts that were basically 12" long pieces of flying death, but I'm pretty sure I was lucky not to get injured. I try and get my son off the computer to do things, but I feel all these articles are more anecdotal than factual. I let my son fire of fireworks and what have you, but having had to rush the neighbor's kid "who doesn't get much supervision" to the hospital, I can say there is no invulnerability shield around children. They should play and have some risks, but as I was recounting just yesterday how I engulfed my childhood best friend in a giant fireball from a a gasoline fire, I was thinking maybe there are some things kids don't need to be doing...
You're right, you were lucky. Kids who do stuff sometimes die. Life is a deeply, profoundly unfair thing, in ways that cannot be fixed. If you want to have a life worth living, you have to do stuff, but that entails risk that something terrible might happen. I was tempted to say "but that doesn't mean you should take stupid risks like playing with gasoline" but then I realized even that was wrong. We took away chemistry sets and only later did somebody ask a bunch of scientists what got them interested in science, and it seems like quite a few of them say things like "burning/blowing stuff up."
"Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”"
Maybe you don't get these great people if you remove their freedom to explore in their formative years. But that freedom also meant a bunch of kids blew their hands off or worse, and if your kid dies in a gasoline accident, it's your fault as a parent and nobody says "well he just wanted his kid to be Nobel Prize material, valiant effort." It's unfair, but reality doesn't care. All you can possibly change is the societal attitude, not the actual fact that freedom means some unsupervised kids always are gonna die and it might be yours.
Either way, it's likely that reducing the child mortality rate down to zero might have more consequences than just having a bigger percentage of children being able to grow into adults.
I think this article argues a bit too strong. I personally prefer Leonore Skenazy's blog[1], which argues for the same idea, but with simpler arguments.
As a side note, Skenazy was called "World's worst mom" for allowing her son to ride the subway by himself[2].
I was very bookish as a child, and rarely did anything quite as exciting as the author describes, so I have a hard time relating. I also wonder if the author would look down on me for that, as the more "adventurous" kids did when I was a child.
In some ways, the most startling thing about this essay is the work affiliation of its author: "John Beckman is an English professor at the United States Naval Academy and the author of 'American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt.'" On my own part, as a parent of four children, I encourage my children to be defiant in applying higher principles to analyzing whether or not to follow arbitrary rules. My oldest son coined the phrase "conform to nonconformity" when he was stifled by some of the silly customs at JHU-CTY camp. But for the most part, although young people try random misbehavior all over the world, there is a lot more personal development to be had from self-discipline in pursuit of curiosity and independence than from mindless thrill-seeking.
"Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world."
Since reading that, I've loved the idea of traversing idea space the way you might look for easter eggs in video games- click all the things, flip over all the stones!
I am the "free range" parent and my wife is more of a helicopter parent–which is weird because my wife got in way more trouble as a teen.
When I was a kid, I took my BB guns places I shouldn't have, I never owned a bike helmet, and trampolines didn't have safety nets. Other than some things like that, I let my kids (ages 6, 8, 9) do as they please during their free time. My over-arching rules for them are "have fun, be kind to each other, and be safe". I'm sure I'll have to set more specific boundaries as they get old but for now it's fun to watch them just be fun, wild, dirty, creative kids.
(on a side note, I'm not sure "delinquency" is the term Id use)
I think it's reasonable to replace "which is weird because" with "which makes sense because" in this remark.
The version of your rules that I grew up with was "trust God and do Good". Religious angst aside, I don't think there's a minimum age for being able to tell the difference between serious, considered principles and ridiculous, unfounded assertions like "If you don't wear a helmet, you will get hit by a car and die."
As a child, I had all sort of dangerous adventures. As a 5 year olds (I don't really remember this one), we built a bonfire and got caught. As nine year olds we snuck out and went canoeing on "borrowed" canoes. At 12 we played around a farm with petrol. We climbed barn rafters hunting pigeons.
At 15-16 I smoked a lot of grass. We misused it and smoked much more than I would now. I had deeply tripy experiences dozens of times. Some of them scary. I don't think grass is bad, but I think it's tricky for kids, especially as it is basically open criminal activity. It create a distance between them and the police/teachers/parents.
I wouldn't take any of those experiences back. I find I like people who had such experiences as kids and that when I meet 19-20 year olds without them, I kind of think it's impoverished.
OTOH, I can't imagine standing by and letting 15 year olds smoke large quantities of grass or 9 year olds go canoeing by moonlight unsupervised.
At the tail end, this goes tragically wrong. The author mentions cocaine, alcohol, and a loaded handgun.
One of my kindergarten friends got drunk one night and started playing with a handgun when he was 14. He'll be in prison until he's 45, without help from any cocaine. [1]
I think getting into a bit of mischief is a proper part of growing up, but I think the author advocates a bit too much.
As a parent of two young kids, I agree - as long as the delinquency does not actually injure them or others badly, and they stay away from red-heads with loaded fucking guns!
Which is the whole problem - the reason we say "dont do that it will hurt" is that it probably will hurt. Yes kids need to learn their own limits, and I want that to happen. I just would prefer not to have the lesson end in A&E.
I think mobile technology will enable a longer "lead" - but then who wants to be on a lead.
I took my kids to play with loaded guns ... when they end up bruised from the kick-back of a shot-gun and see a clay pigeon turn to powder mid-air, they gain an appreciation for why guns aren't really toys. We played with toy guns while growing up, but I never would have considered trying to open my dad's gun cabinet.
Yeah - kid who was presumably abused by parents, sold drugs, beat up other kids, had access to firearms. Kind of glossed over a backstory in the article I felt.
If his path did lead to downfall, I'd say it was because he didn't fit into society's structure. In times past he might have become a great leader or warrior.
Absolutely. One watches people as they move through life and there are 'cusps' (catastrophe theory reference deliberate). Things can go one way or another.
The article fails to realise that in most of the anecdotes retold; today the state would intervene at the behest of a neighbour and "I read it in the New York Times" will not really prevent the investigation into why you allowed your child to play with knives, live for 3 days at the top of a slag heap of rubble or hold a loaded handgun.
Also - teenage mortality has reduced drastically[1]. It's hard to argue that could be a bad thing.
It is probably because we don't let them (wherever possible) carry out activities that might kill themselves.
I am a parent of 3; I will happily take my children mountain climbing, skiing, snowboarding, trekking, wild swimming. In a few years we plan to trek to Everest Base Camp and they are coming with me to the Andes.
We engage in controlled risk. If they break a limb skiing then they break a limb skiing. They pushed beyond their abilities in some way. I don't need to give them wrappers of cocaine from a criminal and a handgun to be a better parent.
There is also a very real risk of the "Tom Sawyer" bias. Each generation thinks their generation took greater risks and had more vivid adventures than the one previous. The cognitive dissonance curiously avoids the higher levels of child abuse, abduction, injury, poisoning, asphyxiation, malnutrition and disease. My father used to have great adventures playing as a child in asbestos riddled houses. You can talk to his friends about it sometimes...well the few that have not died before 60.
Oh look here is a group of kids that used lethal asbestos as chalk. [2] They really learned a valuable lesson about ad-hoc citizenry there.
Right, but the linked articles actually state that the main cause in reduced mortality was reduced traffic accidents. Almost all of the things in the NYT article would not have qualified as traffic accidents. On the face of it, this doesn't really surprise me: many things are "dangerous" yet it's not that easy to kill someone (or yourself) in an accident. Heavy machinery changes that equation, and virtually all heavy machinery we come in contact with are motor vehicles.
In other words: the data doesn't immediately suggest that increased caution has lead to reduced mortality outside of traffic. The NYT article is still plausible from this perspective.
This is probably why your children are much less prone to socially objectionable activities; they get it out of their system.
On the other hand, I think it is the easy access of information and videos on the Internet about everything that help younger people be less curious about what will happen if they do this and that. I don't think it is parents stopping their kids or the neighbours calling the police. Neighbours used to call the police in the past too. Those police were the parents themselves.
If the US were not that culturally focused on suing each other until death for stuff like spilling yourself with hot coffee and then suing McD for damages, kids in the US could be kids again.
The woman in Liebeck v. McDonald's [1] suffered third degree burns to 6% of her body and had to have skin grafts. The coffee was served around 180-190F (82-88C).
On the face of it, it may sound like a frivolous law suit but if you look into the details, it was far from it.
The question is - what is the right temperature for hot coffee to be called hot?
Coffee served by McD (180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit) will give a person third-degree burns in two to seven seconds, while home-coffee brewers normally serve coffee at much lower temperatures (130 two 140 degrees) which won't immediately burn you. Yes, Starbucks and other joints do serve coffee at the hotter temperatures -- because some customers prefer it -- but then again, they get sued for it also.
Also, she attempted to settle for $20,000 at one point, and McDonald's refused
You may have heard that she got millions of dollars, when the final award was $640,000. Then from that you take out the medical bills (hint: skin grafts aren't cheap).
But she has to take some responsibility, right? She may not have been driving, but she was trying to open the lid in her lap so she could add cream and sugar. That's kind of careless, isn't it? Why couldn't the jury see that?
Well, they did. That's why the compensatory damages portion ($200,000) was reduced by 20 percent, because they ruled it was 20 percent her fault.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume it was just 80% the seller's fault, however. Dealing with hot liquids can be dangerous, yes. But you need a good portion of bad luck to suffer burns serious enough to require surgery simply because there's just not that much coffee in a cup (indeed, its conceivable she would have healed without surgery, albeit with more scarring).
That's not to say the seller is faultless - but the verdict still strikes me as entirely disproportionate. Then again, that's the norm nowadays, isn't it?
As a person who used to drink coffee from McDonald's in that era, it was extremely hot, with italics. My surprise about the reaction to that case was that I assumed that the vast majority of the US had had a cup of coffee from McDonald's. I'd been burned by their coffee before; it was just one of the many risks of my morning commute.
I just think that we rationalized the risks to our safety because a company as large as McDonald's must have done a lot of studies on their coffee and figured out a temperature that was the perfect compromise between preventing disease and putting meltdown hot liquids in the hands of people driving cars. I thought that their goal in making the coffee that hot was to lower their net liability (and hence, the public's net danger) rather than what it really was - a way to serve coffee that got very old.
It was a business decision that had a money value for the company. They undertook it in order to make money. Paying for the externalities in court is a good place for McDonald's to learn how to recalibrate how much injury is worth, and see if their price calculation for raising the temperature of their coffee still makes sense.
At the time, the reactionary corporate rhetoric parodied the position of consumer advocates as requiring businesses to cover coffee cups with long elaborate disclaimers about how coffee could possibly be hot. Go buy a cup of coffee at McDonald's today - you'll see nothing of the sort. Turns out you don't need much if you just don't serve coffee as hot as lava to save money.
Without surgery there is a significant risk she would have died.
I understand people get stuck on the 'coffee' aspect, but many acids cause similar levels of tissue damage. There is a huge difference between water at 140f and 190f.
To put things in perspective an autoclave at 134 °C for three minutes is as effective as 121 °C for 15 minutes. Steam at 134 °C can achieve in three minutes the same sterility that hot air at 160 °C can take two hours to achieve. Granted, 249.8F = 121 C, but water can transfer a lot of heat vary quickly.
The amount of liquid in a coffee cup is, however, limited. Furthermore, steam is a lot more dangerous due to the heat freed in condensation. Furthermore, there's a pretty large difference between 134 °C and 90. Finally, I don't think the mechanics of destroying infectious agents is really a great analogy for the mechanics of skin burns: the speed of reactions indeed increases non-linearly, yet the energy increases linearly. The energy in a coffee cup isn't nearly enough to damage the entire body; therefore the amount of damage is likely linked to the amount of energy released. Not that I'm volunteering for an experiment, admittedly.
You mention the amount of time needed for serious burns to occur, yet that amount of time is huge compared to the time needed for water (or coffee) will flow away off or for people will to react. For her to remain exposed to the full load of coffee for around 12-15 seconds requires a pretty odd set of circumstances. For those burns to be large enough to be life-threatening normally requires a large surface area to be burnt, and that requires a large amount of coffee for a long time. (The 12-15 number is from wikipedia which says her lawyers produced evidence that this is the duration t 82 degrees celsius that "may produce third-degree burns").
Of course, there's the complicating factor here that she was quite old; at 79 she would not have been as resilient as younger person. And while that's a terrible shame, it's unreasonable to blame macdonalds for aging. Reading, she weighed just 47kg before her injury, which is low. I don't believe that a healthy person would have sustained her injuries.
It sounds implausible that she could have managed to sustain those kind of injuries given the circumstances - unless some other factors played a role (such as frailty due to aging). It's terrible she suffered as she did, but I still don't see how that could have been reasonably foreseen by macdonalds (and therefore the verdict seems unreasonable).
The point of the lawsuit isn't (just) about what happened to her, but critically also about the degree to which MacDonalds' was taking unreasonable risks. And as wikipedia points out, there have been many, many similar lawsuits, that apparently were not successful. (And note that coffee is still served at that temperature).
Are you trying to argue that 3rd degree burns over 5+% of your body is not somehow a serious medical issue? Or that being younger or heaver somehow adds protection to your skin?
As to water vs steam, steam has effectively a much higher heat capacity but far lower density. 90c water can cause 3rd degree burns in as little as 2 seconds but clothing generally extends the exposure duration significantly.
PS: In the end it was a low cost lawsuit which was settled for presumably less than 600k and well within the cost of doing business. They changed cup design not temperature, but that's about it. As far as their concerned the issue was not the actual cost but discouraging people from suing in the future as it's been 20 years without a repeat.
I'm saying quite the opposite: that the very seriousness of her injury was likely due to her age, not that she didn't have serious injuries. Her age would have made the accident more likely, would have slowed down her response to the accident (her own trial lawyers' evidence suggested she must have remained in the hot coffee for at least 12-15 seconds, not the 2 seconds you mention), and would have hampered her recovery (pretty much any injury is more serious in the elderly, and indeed wikipedia mentions it for burns too).
She didn't just have any old minor burn; hers was huge - she stayed for months in the hospital and lost 20% of her body mass; that's not your typical scalding accident.
Such lawsuits have been repeated, they just haven't been so successful. The fact that it's been 20 years merely underlines how unusual her circumstances were - and perhaps how bad that original cup design was.
McDonalds had been warned about servig their coffee so hot; they had previously settled suits from hot coffee; they were serving coffee hotter than their rivals.
Try making a coffee today and taking the temperature of that coffee ten minutes after making it. I doubt it'd be hot enough to cause full thickness burns.
Also, if you put a lid on coffee (which you'd do when you want it to stay warm as when it's not necessarily for immediate consumption), it can stay hot quite a while.
Personally, I don't believe most people would have gotten third degree burns in a similar situation. Unfortunately, she was old (79), light (therefore likely frail; 47kg), and wore cotton (absorbent) sweatpants, and she must have kept them on for at least 12 seconds according to the evidence her own lawyers presented. Frankly, that's just a bunch of bad luck piled up. Most people would have stood up when the coffee spilled toward them, not sat in it for that long, and most people would have taken off at least partially the hot pants, thereby distributing the heat better, some people probably would have their pants off entirely by that point. (Wikipedia claims scalding rarely results in third-degree burns, let alone third degree burns on 6% of your body's surface area with a lot more second degree burn area).
Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin. That's just not all that likely to happen; and when it does, being old and light make recovery slower and less likely. She simply had the worst circumstances on all fronts.
10 minutes is a pure guess at the time it takes to serve the coffee, pay for it, walk out of the restaurant, get in a car, be driven as a passenger, pull up some place and adjust the coffee.
> Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin.
2% of non-fatal household scald injuries in > 65 year olds needed tranfer to specialist hospitals for specialist treatment. If that's what you mean by rare then I guess we agree, but it's not what I'd call rare.
Aside from certain areas of abuse like software patents trolling and the huge monetary loss of being involved in lawsuits even if you are innocent, as an immigrant I think that the US judicial system works more-or-less.
Specifically, the hot-coffee lawsuit for McD was IMHO a genuine lawsuit that only gets bandied about because it 'sounds frivolous'. The plaintiff sued because McD was significantly overheating the coffee to reduce costs, much more than expected, and all Liebeck was looking for was to cover her medical expenses for third degree burns. There was the usual - "ignore and be dismissive about the problem" perspective from McD officials that led to heavy punitive damages being awarded by the jury. See more details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
You say McDonalds overheated the coffee, but the wiki page you linked to says that is a normal temperature, McDonalds still brews in that range, and Starbucks brews in that range.
Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's policy today is to serve coffee between 80–90 °C (176–194 °F),[28] relying on more sternly-worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[28][29] The Specialty Coffee Association supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[30] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C). Retailers today sell coffee as hot or hotter than the coffee that burned Stella Liebeck.
The National Coffee Association also suggest 195-205F.
Also, back then was a different time. You could do stuff like that, get caught, and not pay a huge price. Now, that's not true, in the US, at least. The climate is one of zero tolerance for stuff mentioned in the article. Example: some kids in the middle school my son goes to played a prank in the computer lab: they swapped a bunch of keys of some of the keyboards. The result? They were banned for life from using computers in the school district (yes, this would follow them to high school). A complete over reaction, but the norm for punishment in the US.