Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3266 to 3270 (18th to 22nd July 2016)
Mordhaus:
Doing your own guest strip during guest strip week is pretty damn Meta!
Eternal_Newbie:
Good excuse to play around with art styles without people acting like it's the end of the world
Stoutfellow:
Stella Liebeck was 79 years old when she received third - not second - degree burns in her genital area from spilled McDonald's coffee. She was hospitalized for eight days and underwent two years of medical treatment afterwards. Comparing blisters on your back to subdermal cell-death in the groin is absurd; talk about "never having to work again for the rest of her life" is silly when applied to a 79-year-old woman; and comparing the wilful act of a conscious (albeit corporate) agent, an agent which had been officially warned about its behavior, to a force of nature is disingenuous at best.
Spoe:
--- Quote from: Stoutfellow on 22 Jul 2016, 09:10 ---...and comparing the wilful act of a conscious (albeit corporate) agent, an agent which had been officially warned about its behavior, to a force of nature is disingenuous at best.
--- End quote ---
And thus the point of "punitive damages." She wasn't awarded millions to cover her sustained losses – those were covered by compensatory damages of $160,000 to cover medical expenses, etc. after being reduced by 20% to cover the assigned division of blame. She needed skin grafts! She was awarded $2.7 million by the jury to punish McDonald's for their wanton acts related to the temperature of the coffee and to deter them from continuing to do so because they had knowledge of prior burn cases and no intention of doing anything about the temperature of the coffee which their own quality assurance representative testified was not fit for consumption at the temperature served.
Penquin47:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 22 Jul 2016, 08:27 ---There are a whole population of people who experience second-degree burns several times during our lives and aren't particularly impressed.
The reaction around Boulder to "Second degree burns" was "what, she got some blisters and now she never has to work again for the rest of her life? That happens to dozens of people I know every year. It's even happened to me a few times. It's not a life-changing experience or even particularly traumatic, how the hell did anybody decide it was worth that?"
And yea, it mostly happens "for the sake of somebody's bottom line." You go up to work, you realize after an hour or two that you forgot sunscreen, you know you'll be fired if you don't fix the damn fences anyway, and you finish the job before you go back. Business as usual, sucks to be you. If you don't want to deal with that kind of thing, don't ever start doing farm and ranch work. I've also gotten stomped by bulls and cut up by barbed wire for the sake of somebody's bottom line. If you don't want to consider second degree burns for the sake of somebody's bottom line to be entirely normal, then lucky for you you weren't born there.
I don't think it's particularly reasonable for anybody to get a million bucks (literally, a living wage for life just off of interest payments!) for anything that leaves them able-bodied and not permanently disfigured. Hell, the guy who lived down the road from me got his arm torn off by a baler and he had to go on disability worth substantially less than what that twit got for her lap full of hot coffee.
--- End quote ---
Still not comparable. You're the one who went up there (three times, apparently?) without sunscreen. Your bosses didn't make you work out there without sunscreen. They did not endanger you, you endangered yourself.
Get some coffee from a place that serves it at the proper temperature, or make your own. Spill it on your arm. Did you get burned? If you did, it's mild. First-degree. This woman had NO reason to expect second (or third) degree burns from a cup of coffee. McDonald's was aware that the temperature at which they served their coffee could cause second and third degree burns, because this was not the first time someone had spilled their coffee and been burned.
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