The five methods I've used to make coffee (ranked from least to most tasty) generate quite different temperatures, and I really should get around to actually measure them, at some point. In all cases, assume that 0,5l of coffee is poured into a ceramic mug with a 4mm wall, with the ceramic starting at 18-20 °C.
Perceived temperature from all but the French Press method is the same, it's WAY too hot to drink directly after pouring. The French Press is sippable straight off, but needs a while to be chuggable. Of these five methods, the only one I would strictly call an abomination is the americano.
]]>Thanks for the info!
Looked up one of their industry PPTs - CUs do make some (small) business loans however personal loans account for most of their business and appear to be of much lower risk. As a sector, looks as though they're also providing more allowance for potential losses, i.e., covering their and their depositors's assets.
https://www.ncua.gov/analysis/Pages/call-report-data/reports/chart-pack/chart-pack-2017-q3.pdf
]]>It is sort of baked in. Credit Union members (you are not exactly a customer) have to have a common bond which creates the "union". Many (most?) were started for employees of a company or members of a union. Many have since broadened their charters[1] but many are still tied to a specific business entity. I'm a member of my wife's airline employer based credit union. Loan payments and savings are almost always payroll deducted which basically makes them first in line for all payments. This makes the risks much lower.
[1]What used to be the IBM Coastal Federal Credit Union (or similar name) is now just Coastal Federal Credit Union. They are affiliated with 100s of smaller groups and it's easy to join one of these groups[2]. And thus get access to lower loan rates and higher savings returns.
[2]My daughter is a member but I can't remember just what group she joined (at no cost or obligation) to be a member. My personal opinion is some of these groups exist just so you can be join the credit union.
]]>So, he's another lying fascist arsehole, oh dear.
]]>From my memory of the explanation, a significant issue was that this particular Macdonald's restaurant was serving coffee well above the Macdonalds recommended temperature.
If you're a guest in my home, and I hand you an insulated mug, I would (as a sensible host) make sure that you either had somewhere to put the mug down, or that the mug was sufficiently insulated to allow you to hold it comfortably. See also "passing the mug handle-first, so that you're the person going ouch rather than the recipient".
If you're selling coffee at a drive-through, and you regularly hand someone a paper cup full of boiling liquid (IIRC over 90C in the case concerned), then the likelihood is high that at some point there will be a spillage. If the lid isn't fully on, or the cup isn't insulated, or the outside of the cup isn't grippy, then you are just asking for problems. If you receive complaints from lots of people that your sales behaviour has led to injury, and you don't take steps to mitigate the risk, then you are just asking for a lawsuit.
]]>Not trying to argue that this particular MacDonalds franchise (or the entire chain) was innocent. But I do worry about precedents being set and expanded out-of-context of the the original case. (An extreme example being the whole "corporations are people with full human rights" thing.)
]]>I wanted to follow up this point when I had time, partly because I think most people responding in this thread misunderstood it. It's an entirely non-controversial statement of cultural history. Many concepts and distinctions that we make are very definitely modern western concepts and distinctions. Some are part of how we deal with the world on an individual level so we're inclined to see them as obvious. The way we define "self" or a "person", for instance, is a modern western understanding of this concept[1]. And any external perspective[2] couldn't fail to note we're pretty inconsistent even with that one. "Nature" is another one, and even less consistent. But people often have difficulty with the idea that ideas have a cultural-historical location.
It's troublesome because this leads to treating socially-accorded assumptions and prejudices as defaults and even as the null hypothesis. It's the same dynamic that applies when a theist questions onus and thinks an atheist must disprove the existence of their deity of choice, so you'd think people would know it better but apparently not.
In any case, we know that for most people for most time, knowledge of entities like gods was intertwined with knowledge of the world around them - things we'd call nature, things we'd call technology, science and social science. It isn't that people thought the latter things were "religious" or that they even had much to do with their "religious" beliefs - they were just more things to know. The idea that these are different kinds of knowledge really is an important one, but recognising that this idea isn't universal, that's it's even relatively recent, is also important. There are straightforward factual things you simply won't understand without it.
Classical Rome is a great example. The modern tendency is to regard it as an example of freedom of religion, that the Romans were by our standards remarkably tolerant of diverse religions. This is a misunderstanding of the way people thought about it at the time. Pratchett has a line about it in relation to beliefs in Discworld. What's the point in believing in god (which god do you mean anyway?) The gods exist whether you "believe" in them or not[3]. The more distance peoples we bring under the Pax Romana, the more gods we discover. They might only exist as ideas in the minds of their devotees, but that is enough to make a concrete impact in the world.
And that leads me to the "religion is the root of evil" theme emerging above. Pratchett can help here too. Granny Weatherwax has a yardstick for evil, which she brings out when discussing religious believe. She regards it as coming up when you regard people as things. My offering on this topic is slightly different, though related. To me it is when you treat ideas as more important than people (though I might need a slightly broader than normal concept of people to make that work exactly as I'd like it). That ideas have, or more usually that a specific idea has, intrinsic value and that value outweighs any misery or murder wrought in its promotion and fulfillment.
This is a consequentialist viewpoint. I could be wrong, but I have the impression that most modern westerns are consequentialists and even essentially utilitarians these days. There's an obvious complication - what if the idea itself promotes some social good which benefits people directly? Then it isn't the idea's intrinsic merit that is at stake, so a balance of the greater good is warranted. And the idea that some people are more worthy of being treated well than other people are - that's only an idea.
Conrad has Marlow talk at great length about the idea of Empire, and how it justified huge sacrifices in lives. This was a real thing that people thought, still in Conrad's day. And it's obviously parallel to all sorts of ideas today.
[1] The first four stanzas of Auden's In Memory of W. B. Yeats is as good a starting place as any for a depiction of the modern western concept of self.
[2] Any Banksian super-entity in orbit above us with a name that's a colour and a space, for instance.
[3] For the ones who'll pull me up on this sentence: of course they don't exist.
]]>Yes. MacDonalds were at fault. But not specifically for serving the coffee too hot — you can't make coffee without the liquid at some point being dangerously hot.
MacDonalds were at fault for serving coffee in a hazardous container; easily crushable between knees, entire lid had to be removed to permit drinking, etc.
We all know that you can serve coffee in a flimsy waxed cardboard cup with no lid. Or you can serve it in a cardboard cup with a corrugated sleeve (for grip, reinforcement, and insulation) and a lock-down lid with some sort of opening for sipping it, and an egg-carton-like tray for holding two or more cups firmly upright. But the former option is cheaper.
So my conclusion is MacDonalds were trying to maximize their profit margin at the expense of the customer's safety by using the cheapest practical containers.
Final note: a couple of years later cup-holders turned out to be a wildly popular (and cheap) accessory and they're now ubiquitous in cars.
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