Didn’t we sign the SALT Treaty with the Soviets back in the 1970s? 
I eagerly await the day when I can go to fancy restaurant, order a fancy meal, and be presented with a collection of raw ingredients that I will be required by law to cook myself so that I may have complete and total control over my health choices. And then I will happily and enthusiastically proceed to liberally dump butter and eggs and salt and sugar and HFCS and MSG and cigarettes and crack and heroin and cancer and AIDS and anything else I can possibly find that’s bad into it because I am just a silly stupid American moron with absolutely no self-control, dignity, or intelligence, and that is my Constitutional right, dammit!
Thank you.
Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory, and by compulsory, I mean salted. Here is the Facebook page, by the way. I posted a link in the Pit but since there are two threads I think it’s worth sharing. His status reads:
This is followed by a press release from his office that includes the same quote. He says restaurants use far too much salt and small reductions in salt intake would stop a lot of heart attacks, etc. He’s only received one reply and I think I need to quote that, too, because it illustrates what happens when you introduce silly legislation to make a point:
The problem is worse than I thought…
Fuck it. All food should be banned.
No, their governments aren’t our government.
Other countries have mass transit, we have Amtrak.
What works in other countries just isn’t feasible here. Sounds great, doesn’t work.
Take a look at “Loser Pays” tort in the British Commonwealth (and most all of the rest of the Western World).
That a bill would ever even be proposed banning salt in restaurants in civilized countries is far more convoluted than thinking that just such a bill would not only be proposed here, but would stand a chance (admittedly slim) of actually passing.
I wonder how a lawsuit in say Italy, home of espresso, where an Italian spilled hot espresso in her lap would have played out there as opposed to here? I’ll bet a triple that they would have thrown it out as opposed to awarding $640,000.
Just a guess.
The only reason I can find for this is that we’re idiots.
The McDonald’s coffee lawsuit? Not a travesty of frivolous litigation.
The More You Know
EDIT: As for “loser pays,” the American legal system, depending on the jurisdiction, has similar aspects. A defendant can be awarded his costs and fees, and a plaintiff’s attorney can be sanctioned.
Maybe, maybe not. She was trying to stabilize a cup of hot coffee between her legs. That was stupid, and even though she had probably done it hundreds of times before, it only took one screw-up.
And, if I had been in that situation, and hot liquids spilled onto my clothes, I wouldn’t have just stayed in them for 90 seconds letting them cook me.
Could you get your pants off in 5 seconds? While sitting in your car? Because that’s how long it takes for 3rd degree burns to develop at 185 degrees.
nope, but i wouldn’t be daft enough to keep something that hot near my important parts… especially in a very crushable and tip-able styrofoam cup.
Which is why you don’t put boiling liquid in a flimsy cup and hand it to customers who are in a car.
And you especially don’t continue doing it after receiving word of hundreds of your customers being injured because of it.
huh? lemme see if i get what you said here… I wouldn’t be stupid enough to put a coffee in my lap. not sure about your vehicles, but almost every car i’ve driven has a cup holder. so because I would not do this, It’s THEIR fault for giving a customer something that the customer is too stupid to use safely.
So if i someone cuts themselves with a knife in my kitchen, that i keep sharper than a normal knife, It’s MY responsibility if they are too stupid to tell that a knife is going to be sharp?
If you gave someone the knife in a flimsy sheath that fell apart and the knife fell and stabbed them through the foot, then yes, that would be your fault.
And this wasn’t simply “hot coffee,” like you’d get anywhere. They were serving coffee much hotter than anyone else, so hot that if anyone happened to spill it on themselves, they were pretty much guaranteed to suffer serious scalding.
This isn’t true, nor is anything about the cup being “flimsy.” I never understood why “BUT THE COFFEE WAS REALLY HOT” is some sort of counter to “she spilled it on herself.” It seems like all the people who robotically defend the McDonalds coffee lawsuit every time it comes up just love being contrarian and thinking they know something the “sheeple” aren’t aware of; it’s akin to 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Some of the time, the truth really is what it appears to be on first glance, and the simplest explanation really is the best one–in this case, that a dumb old woman spilled coffee all over herself and took advantage of a broken tort system to get a jackpot for her own idiocy. You aren’t some sort of special person who sees the nuance in life just because you can come to the defense of someone who got mocked by Jay Leno’s monologue.
So all the expert testimony and investigation that found that McDonalds was serving coffee at 180-190 degrees, that McDonalds’ own market research had revealed to them that most customers consumed their coffee in their cars, that the woman in this case spent a week in the hospital and had to get skin grafts, and that McDonalds knew about 700 other cases of customers suffering 2nd and 3rd degree burns from their coffee and had settled several similar cases previously was all a bunch of contrarian hornswoggle? She was just some idiot who gamed the system because no normal human would ever accidentally spill a beverage?
Whatever you say.
Yes, THE COFFEE WAS REALLY HOT, as you say. Doesn’t change the fact that she spilled it on herself or that the “aha, I have seen through the popular delusion about this topic!” argument reduces to THE COFFEE WAS REALLY HOT.
TOO HOT
INSTANT 3rd DEGREE BURN HOT
You are aware of what “coffee” is, right?
It was served at the same temperature that your home coffeemaker and every other restaurant uses. Cites:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/caffeine-faq/
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/DianaGendler.shtml
It’s COFFEE. It’s HOT. You have no argument besides “but it was HOT!”
Sorry if I burst the bubble of seeming to have special knowledge that you and the other people defending legal-system vultures have been walking around in for the past 15 years, but that’s all that’s going on here.
Yeah, when you’re at home, not when you’re drinking it in your car. And the fact that it wasn’t an isolated incident. And the fact that you wouldn’t put 190 degree coffee fresh from the pot anywhere near your skin until it cooled down. Unless you wanted to risk 3rd DEGREE FUCKING BURNS.
What’s next, people are losing control of their Toyotas because they’re a bunch of overlitigious crybabies?