Suing McDonald's Over Hot Coffee

Here in America we love to tell jokes and complain about lawyers. Even though, as John Adams said, we are "not a nation of men, but of laws," our public discourse doesn't seem to acknowledge this at times. I don't understand why so many people get obsessed by high profile trials like the OJ or the Casey Anthony case. Recently, someone that I know, personally, went to trial for a fairly high profile case here in Vermont and I was amazed at the on-line discourse about the case. People were following it very closely, people who didn't know anyone involved. Their comments were so vitriolic and outrageous, it is hard to see how anyone can have a fair trial when the court of public opinion is so decisive and powerful. Even after the trial is decided, the cases seem to obtain a life of their own.

The Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants is one of the high profile cases that seems to get brought up time and again for the past (almost) 20 years. The longer in the past the case is, the more distorted the facts get. It comes up a lot in conversations when people bring up how Americans are "sue-happy," ready to bring anyone to court to make a buck. People say that a woman dropped a hot coffee on herself while driving and sued McDonald's for millions. The facts of the case are much more complicated.

• For one, she didn't drop the coffee. The styrofoam cup that was carrying the coffee dissolved in her hand. This is because the coffee was over 170 degrees Fahrenheit (this is the low estimate). The standard cup of coffee is 140 degrees.
  
• She had third degree burns on her thighs, groin and buttocks. She had to be in the hospital for 8 days getting skin removed and repaired.
• She was not driving, she was the passenger.
• The car was parked while she was opening the top of the coffee to put cream and sugar in it.
• She didn't sue for millions. She sued for the balance of her medical bills that her Medicare didn't pay. She was 79 years old. McDonald's only offered her $800 which didn't cover it. The jury moved in her favor awarding her $2.9 million. The judge reduced it to $260,000.00 (about 2 days worth of profit for McDonald's).

She would have gotten more if she wasn't at fault at all. McDonald's was found 80% guilty while Liebeck was found 20% guilty. A good part of their guilt was that they had already been sued for this offense over 700 times. The smoking gun in the case was a fax that they had sent to their chains, over and over, telling their teenage employees that ... whenever you think the coffee is hot enough, think again (I am paraphrasing).

So the next time you hear a Republican claim that we need tort reform, they are talking about stopping the ability of 79 year old ladies from suing large corporations (their contributors) for their organizational negligence. If corporations have the free speech of individuals, surely they have the responsibility of individuals as well. Coffee at McDonald's nowadays are delicious and safe, thanks to the lawyers.

Lamoille

I spent a good part of my youthful summers in a row boat. My father and brother loved to fish so I did get a lot of chances to throw out a line or two, but most of my experience in the boat was just going out and adventuring. While most of the kids I grew up were hanging around the city, bored and/or getting in trouble, I was hanging out at our old roadside camp off of the Pawkatuck River in Ashaway, Rhode Island having myself a grand ole time. I would go out in the boat for hours sometimes looking for turtles, but most of the time not doing much at all. I knew that part of the river very well. I knew where all the good stumps were to find sunning turtles, I knew where to find the swans and where the good rocks were to jump off for a swim. The river was mine.

Of course, I live very far from the Rhode Island / Connecticut border these days. The only river close to me that comes close to Pawkatuck, in regards to me knowing it well, is the Lamoille River. My boat of choice these days is a kayak. Getting the kayak to and from the river is more of a chore than the actual kayaking. It is a short drive but tying the boats firmly on the roof of the car is time consuming and taxing. It is not like having a cabin on the river where you can just leave your row boat there by the river at your beckoning.

The Lamoille is quite beautiful. Yesterday we were heading into a turn and we were looking at a hill (possibly a small mountain) whose reflection was hitting the water just right. With its green reflection almost as livid as the actual mountain, we appeared to be floating into a double mountain. We put the boats in the water in Jeffersonville near Bert's Boats and went up stream until we were hungry. We stopped on an island and had a picnic dinner before heading back. Downstream is my preferred mode of transportation.

The Lamoille was named "La Mouette" by Samuel de Champlain, the French word for gull which he witnessed at the river's source. At some point in its history, the name was changed to Lamoille by accident when some map maker forgot to cross their T's. I haven't seen any gulls on the river yet, but plenty of heron. No La Moilles either.

Bait Dogs

I often refer to my dogs as rescues. This is not entirely correct. My hound was in a no-kill shelter when we got him. My lab as with a family that knew they were neglecting him and had the wherewithal to ask for help. Of my three dogs, only my shepard could actually be considered a rescue. We found her from a classified ad. There was a large litter of German Shepards and she was the runt. Apparently, no one wanted the runt. She was only a few weeks old, her belly was bloated with worms and she was living outside. I don't know what would have happened to her.

This weekend, I met a dog that was a real rescue. Duke is a bull terrier, also known as a pit bull. What a sweet dog! He was once a bait dog. Bait dogs are dogs that used by dog fighters to train their fighting dogs. Their mouths are often taped closed so that they cannot defend themselves from the fighter. They don't need to be skilled, they can use any dog. Often, dog fighters get their dogs from ads in the paper for "free dogs" and some of them are stolen from their owners. (Are you feeling warm and fuzzy about humanity yet?)

Mountain Landis and the Ivory Age of Baseball

Anyone who knows anything about baseball history, knows the name Keneslaw Mountain Landis as the first commissioner of baseball. He is commonly thought of as the man who saved baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal. After the biggest scandal ever in baseball, when the White Sox threw the World Series, Landis took charge of the league with the iron hand of a tyrant and helped usher in what a lot of sports fan think of the Golden Age of baseball. What followed the scandal was the era of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Lou Gehrig and Joe (and Dom) DiMaggio etc. etc. I like to refer to this era as the Ivory Era rather than Golden because it was only half as great as it could have been. Half the players that could have played could not simply because of the color of their skin. We will never know how well such players as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige or Cool Papa Bell matched up against these white players in their prime. This tragedy is in large part due to Landis. He was a staunch opponent of integration and worked very hard against it.

It was not written anywhere in the league's bi-laws that blacks couldn't play with whites. It was what was called a Gentleman's Agreement, an unwritten rule that no one dare challenged. Upon Landis' death ini 1944, he was replaced as commissioner by Happy Chandler (a fiction writer could not create better names). Chandler was approached by many black players and he, in clear conscience, could not tell them to their faces that they couldn't play with the white players. He was open to integration, but the owners were not (the so-called gentlemen). He had all sixteen of them vote on whether to integrate. Only one owner, Branch Rickey (one of my personal heroes), the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, voted for integration.

Branch Rickey went on to do this on his own. He acquired Jackie Robinson and had him play in the Dodgers AAA club in Montreal because Canadians aren't as screwed-up about race as those of from the land of the free are. Every baseball fan knows all about what Robinson went through. Rickey chose him as the first black player not only for his playing abilities but for his personal character. He faced death threats, threats to his family and insults ad nauseum not only from players and fans but sometimes from his own teammates. Rickey continued to acquire black players building his team to playoff berths in 1941, '47, '49, '52 and '53.

The teams that integrated early are the teams that dominated the sport for the next two decades. It is with much regret that I point out that the very last team to integrate was the Boston Red Sox (my favorite team) with Pumpsie Green in 1959. The city of Boston today is still very segregated so this should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever lived there. It wasn't the curse of the Babe that prevented this franchise from winning for so long; it was the stupidity of racism. The team was so racist in this era that you couldn't be on the team if you weren't Irish or Italian at given times. For awhile only Catholics were allowed on the team. I started following the team in 1976, not too long after this era. Jim Rice was my favorite player as a kid. Rice has claimed many times that the specter of racism was over by the time he played at Fenway. I am never tired of hearing that and a little grateful. I don't know how I would have grown up thinking about race without seeing such a spectacular outfielder playing the flies off the Green Monster as Jim Rice.

How To Fix Everything

When I was a kid I thought that all adults were smart. You can say that I am disappointed. I always thought that most grown ups had their shit together or at least, I assumed that most of them could communicate .... um ... like adults. After working as a cog in the corporate machine for the past two decades, I have grown jaded in this respect. My expectations are so low that I just assume that any communication that comes my way is going to be badly written and all too often, incomprehensible. I used to assume that anyone that had a white collar job had the prerequisite communication skills that is required for a job of pushing paper or in my case, pushing data. I don't anymore. I realize in the workplace, expecting perfect grammar in emails is unreasonable. I am sure my grammar is far from perfect as well. But I don't think I am being unreasonable by expecting clear communication adhering to some degree of business protocol, at least as high as the level of the book reports I submitted while I was in high school. On a daily basis, I get emails from people who don't know the difference between "than" and "then" or "your" and "you're" or "since" and "sense" or who think "alot" is a word. How did they get through college? I don't know. But my respect for a college education is getting lower and lower the more I work in IT. I only wish I could grade their emails. A good 50-60% of them would fail. This hasn't been any different any white collar job I have had and I don't expect it to get better any time soon.

It is an on-going problem, not just in IT, but in the workplace in general. Soft skills are very bad everywhere. I have worked with some amazingly intelligent people in my career. Some of them can troubleshoot data networks and write integrated computer code, so quickly and efficiently, it would blow your mind. Yet if you ask them to explain a problem to a customer or to a manager ... to "document" their work ... it is like asking them for their mother board. Blank faces and resistance follows. Managers struggle with this all the time. They want to send their employees to training for writing skills or customer service skills ... but can you really train for these so-called soft skills? You can try, but I have seen no evidence of success. By the time people are in the workplace, these skills are deeply ingrained. You might as well try to teach them to type with their feet. By the time you are a teenager or young adult, you have already acquired these skills or you probably never will. What is the answer? How do we fix this for the future? You can say a lot of things, but one of them is Universal Pre-school.

Economist James Heckman says that if we pay now (for preschool) we'll save later when the kids are adults. Not only does early intervention help create adults with better communication skills but they commit less crime and are less likely to be on welfare. So instead of sitting at home watching television or in some unproductive child care, they are in school, playing, interacting, socializing and learning. Heckman's study followed 120 students in a poor neighborhood in Michigan over a span of 30 years. Half the students, the control group, didn't go to preschool. 30 years later, the students in the control group made, on the average $30k less and were arrested twice the amount of time.

Prisons, courts, crime and poor productivity are extremely expensive, far more expensive than preschool. The ROI (return on investment) is off the wall on preschool. For every dollar we spend as a society on each student, we could get or save from $30 to $300. Similar studies has been done with several results, most recently in California by the Rand Corporation. The basic idea, people who have been to preschool need less training and are more productive citizens and employees.

This make me regret that I didn't go to preschool. Perhaps I'd would be more productive if I had.

Watershed Moments

Probably the biggest watershed moment of anyone alive today are the events of September 11, 2001. Everyone has a story of where they were that day. I was in South Burlington, Vermont on the phone with one of my clients, Michele. She called to inform me that she was going to be late for our conference call because she was stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. During the conversation, she said, in shock, that a plane is "flying very low." She did not see the crash from her vantage point. This was the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. While she said this to me, I could overhear a co-worker, Mike, say "a plane has hit the World Trade Center" (I am paraphrasing). I was confused because I thought if Michele was watching a plane fly low, how could Mike already have that news on the net. News travels fast on the net, but not that fast! Of course, Mike was reading news about the first plane that caused the traffic that was Michele was in watching the second plane.

The events of 9/11 didn't change my life or have any direct affect on me. What did affect me was what happened on 9/12/01 and beyond. Considering how awful American foreign policy has been toward the Middle East in the past century, the attacks did not surprise me. What did surprise was how my government, run by a president that had no mandate, could use the events of 9/11 to justify invasions, torture and violations of our privacy and the American people let him do it. Not only did they let him do it but he gained popularity while he did it. This did affected me. I expected heinous crimes from maniacs and religious zealots, I did not expect it from my government. Looking back at myself prior to 9/11, I feel naive. I used to consider myself an independent voter. I have voted for Republicans in the past (Senators Chafee and Jeffords come to mind). Since 9/11 I haven't voted for a single Republican on any level of government and I don't plan to ever again. I am not an independent now, I am an anti-Republican. Not only for the actions of the Bush administration, but for those who let them do it and for those who defend him ... you will get nothing from me. I just thought my country was better than that. Again, I feel naive.

Prior to 9/11, the only other events that qualified as watershed moments for me were the assassination of John Lennon and Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. Most people older than me will refer to the Kennedy assassination as their watershed moment or of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy. A watershed moment can also be something positive like the moon landing or the Beatles arrival in America. These happened before I was born or when I was very young. Many people say that these events changed their lives as it changed how they thought about the world, made them more bitter, unsafe or paranoid. In the case of the positive watershed, these made them feel more connected or more motivated for greatness. I can related to these. The events of the larger world can certainly affect the inner self. I would hope that this is what motivates us to change the world ... in a positive way.

In the 19th century, for Americans, one of the big watershed moments was the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861. This marked the beginning of the American Civil War. The first shots were fired at around 4am. By late evening news had already hit New York newspapers. This is impressive in the days before telephones and automobiles. The American poet Walt Whitman (my personal favorite) was leaving a theater in Manhattan at around midnight. He stood on the steps of the Metropolitan Hotel reading the special edition news. The street were abuzz with the news. For those who didn't have a paper, some read aloud for them (the 19th century equivalent of Twitter). At this point in his life, Whitman was a muckraking journalist making money by trashing the Irish immigrant and drumming the beat of demagoguery. He was fast on his way to being his generations Rush Limbaugh and a footnote in a history. The events at Fort Sumter, and the war that followed, sent Whitman into service as a male nurse in Washington DC. What he saw there changed his life. He stopped writing hateful trash and wrote volumes of poetry that rocked the literary world. Leaves of Grass is perhaps the first great American collection of poetry and perhaps the beginning of modern poetry in English.

Perhaps I am leaning back on my personal history of liberal naivity by saying that I hope that some Whitman-like conversion is happening in the midst of this cluster fuck that is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps the next great American poet is somewhere in the ranks of the military or another nurse in a field hospital. We can only hope that from the ashes of our greatest barbaric acts can come some contemplative beauty and reflection that will rock our worlds. I await another literary watershed.

Soft Power and the Arab Spring

Whenever I talk to young people from overseas, I am always impressed with how popular the United States is with them. They all want to visit New York, LA, Nashville, Disney World ... American pop culture is king. They are not impressed (or probably informed of) American military might or our Constitution, but they are by the Foo Fighters, Gossip Girl and Ed Norton films. This is what is called soft power. For long term change, soft power is much more effective than hard power. We can trace the originas of the term soft power back to this quote from Lao Tzu:

"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong."

Hard power is more immediate but doesn't cause lasting change. Neo-cons (new conservatives) are proponents of hard power, they believe that the recent events in the Middle East (the Arab Spring) were inspired by the US Iraqi and Afghanistani invasions. Hard power, of course, is the use of force to get what you want. Hard power is synonymous with nation building.

When I think of soft power, I think of a teenage girl (in Tunisia or Egypt perhaps) who somehow acquires a copy of "Sex in the City" or "Gossip Girl." She watches it and thinks to herself, they (Americans) can get away with this, they have the freedom to do this and no one arrests them? And then thinks, why not me? That is soft power. It is revolution from within.

Since the Middle East exploded this past winter with revolutions in the streets of Tunis and Cairo, civil war in Libya, uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and Oman (aka the Arab Spring) a lot of folks, particularly Americans, like to take credit for it. I have even heard some on the left claim that President Obama's speech in Cairo is what sparked it all. Ultimately, no one should get credit for the Arab Spring other than the people involved. It is a tremendously courageous thing they do. The only Americans that really should be patting themselves on the back for the Arab Spring are the folks at Twitter and Facebook. Without social media, the revolutions never would have happened. Social media is just a platform for the cinders of revolution letting the soft power come to a boil.