[unmole]

> She was balancing it on her legs while driving.

This is not true.

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

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

[inefficient]

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

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

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

[olliej]

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

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

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

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

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