8 ms·

All Children Should Be Delinquents

73 points by jmgrosen 12y ago

mschuster91 12y ago
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.
- rb2e 12y ago
  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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
  - PM_Tech 12y ago
    Did she think it was ice-coffee? Had she ordered an ice-frappe and been delivered hot coffee which is typically made with freshly boiled water?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - param 12y ago
      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.
      - emn13 12y ago
        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?
        Retric 12y ago
        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.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        emn13 12y ago
        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).
    - DanBC 12y ago
      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.
      - PM_Tech 12y ago
        Sure...apart from that is not true. They had never been warned and the coffee was not particularly hotter than their rivals at all. They had settled previously but that is not relevant. Businesses settle things all the time they are not liable for; it's just easier and good cost-effective practice. Coffee today is exactly the same temperature range as it was at the time of the case in question or hotter. No judge has ever ruled a similar judgement. Might be wise to actually research your statements. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-09-16/business/fi-39457_1_hot-coffee http://articles.latimes.com/1994-09-16/business/fi-39457_1_h...
      - emn13 12y ago
        Where'd you get the 10 minute number from? 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.
    - pizza 12y ago
      > [McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton] argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard > at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C) McDonald's coffee was defective
- param 12y ago
  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_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
  - NoPiece 12y ago
    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. http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71 http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71
krrishd 12y ago
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.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  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.
  - krrishd 12y ago
    > So in hindsight, I do wish we had used that "window of opportunity" even more ^ sums up my feelings about this topic almost exactly.
    - aaren 12y ago
      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.
e40 12y ago
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.
- pmh 12y ago
  Not to mention that when you do make a mistake, if it's publicized at all it will follow you for a good while by being Googleable.
- copperx 12y ago
  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.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    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.
mjfl 12y ago
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.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  It's about the FREEDOM to do it. Whether you actually do it or not is irrelevant.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
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 think ultimately - I am my dad :-)
- saraid216 12y ago
  Um. ...red-heads...? Do you mean hotheads, perhaps?
  - e28eta 12y ago
    I believe it's a reference to the article
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      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.
- smoyer 12y ago
  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.
callmeed 12y ago
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)
- menssen 12y ago
  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."
qdog 12y ago
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...
- meric 12y ago
  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.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  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." http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html "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.
PM_Tech 12y ago
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. [1]http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2013/2013-3782-wm.htm http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publi... [2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-24942338 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-24942338
- walid 12y ago
  > We engage in controlled risk. 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.
- emn13 12y ago
keithpeter 12y ago
"There was one notorious kid with invisible parents who, when he was an eighth grader, already wore the blond bristles of a beard." Wonder what happened to him? Sounds like he was on a trajectory leading to problems.
- doctorstupid 12y ago
  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.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Absolutely. One watches people as they move through life and there are 'cusps' (catastrophe theory reference deliberate). Things can go one way or another.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    >In times past he might have become a great leader or warrior. Is it a bad thing that warlord is no longer a thing we put onto our resumes?
    - doctorstupid 12y ago
      I believe so. However, warlords don't write resumes, because they work for nobody.
netcan 12y ago
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. All those things take casualties. Catch 22.
chrisbennet 12y ago
"A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for."
tokenadult 12y ago
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.
- visakanv 12y ago
  Relevant: One of my favorite pg quotes, from http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html: "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!
KMag 12y ago
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. [1] http://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/court-of-appeals/1996/c6952405.html http://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/court-of-appeals/1996/...

73 points by jmgrosen 12y ago

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.

rb2e 12y ago
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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
- PM_Tech 12y ago
  Did she think it was ice-coffee? Had she ordered an ice-frappe and been delivered hot coffee which is typically made with freshly boiled water?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - param 12y ago
    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.
    - emn13 12y ago
      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?
      - Retric 12y ago
        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.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        emn13 12y ago
        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).
  - DanBC 12y ago
    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.
    - PM_Tech 12y ago
      Sure...apart from that is not true. They had never been warned and the coffee was not particularly hotter than their rivals at all. They had settled previously but that is not relevant. Businesses settle things all the time they are not liable for; it's just easier and good cost-effective practice. Coffee today is exactly the same temperature range as it was at the time of the case in question or hotter. No judge has ever ruled a similar judgement. Might be wise to actually research your statements. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-09-16/business/fi-39457_1_hot-coffee http://articles.latimes.com/1994-09-16/business/fi-39457_1_h...
    - emn13 12y ago
      Where'd you get the 10 minute number from? 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.
  - pizza 12y ago
    > [McDonald's quality control manager, Christopher Appleton] argued that all foods hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constituted a burn hazard > at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C) McDonald's coffee was defective
param 12y ago
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_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
- NoPiece 12y ago
  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. http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71 http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71

krrishd 12y ago

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.

PavlovsCat 12y ago
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.
- krrishd 12y ago
  > So in hindsight, I do wish we had used that "window of opportunity" even more ^ sums up my feelings about this topic almost exactly.
  - aaren 12y ago
    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.

e40 12y ago

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.

pmh 12y ago
Not to mention that when you do make a mistake, if it's publicized at all it will follow you for a good while by being Googleable.
copperx 12y ago
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.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  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.

mjfl 12y ago

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.

kstenerud 12y ago
It's about the FREEDOM to do it. Whether you actually do it or not is irrelevant.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

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 think ultimately - I am my dad :-)

saraid216 12y ago
Um. ...red-heads...? Do you mean hotheads, perhaps?
- e28eta 12y ago
  I believe it's a reference to the article
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    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.
smoyer 12y ago
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.

callmeed 12y ago

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)

menssen 12y ago
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."

qdog 12y ago

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...

meric 12y ago
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.
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
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." http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html "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.

PM_Tech 12y ago

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. [1]http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2013/2013-3782-wm.htm http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publi... [2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-24942338 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-24942338

walid 12y ago
> We engage in controlled risk. 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.
emn13 12y ago

keithpeter 12y ago

"There was one notorious kid with invisible parents who, when he was an eighth grader, already wore the blond bristles of a beard." Wonder what happened to him? Sounds like he was on a trajectory leading to problems.

doctorstupid 12y ago
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.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Absolutely. One watches people as they move through life and there are 'cusps' (catastrophe theory reference deliberate). Things can go one way or another.
- rtpg 12y ago
  >In times past he might have become a great leader or warrior. Is it a bad thing that warlord is no longer a thing we put onto our resumes?
  - doctorstupid 12y ago
    I believe so. However, warlords don't write resumes, because they work for nobody.

netcan 12y ago

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. All those things take casualties. Catch 22.

chrisbennet 12y ago

"A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for."

tokenadult 12y ago

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.

visakanv 12y ago
Relevant: One of my favorite pg quotes, from http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html: "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!

KMag 12y ago

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. [1] http://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/court-of-appeals/1996/c6952405.html http://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/court-of-appeals/1996/...