What are /r/TheAgora's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Wendy's, and Burger King, sell coffee at a similar or higher temperature.

This link doesn't really prove what you say it does, or if it does, I can't find it. Even at lower temperatures it's possible to get burns, it just doesn't happen anywhere near as quickly or as badly.

None of the links there show an actual temperature, they just say "burns happened, so obviously their temperature was just as high and it was equally dangerous". Faulty logic.

> The National Coffee Association of U.S.A. recommend that coffee is brewed at 195-205°F and maintained at 180-185°F.

That's a bit of a misquote. Let me get the actual quote:

> If it will be a few minutes before it will be served, the temperature should be maintained at 180 - 185 degrees Fahrenheit

They don't at any point say what the temperature it should be served at is.

You could also (reasonably, I think) claim there's a difference between coffee that seconds ago was brewed at home by hand then placed in a ceramic coffee mug and put on the table next to you, and coffee that is served for immediate consumption in a styrofoam cup to someone driving. Namely, the second one should probably be a lot cooler than the first one.

umm, if people have intrinsic value, we would spend all our money (literally all of it) feeding the poor. Any time you buy a pack of gum your pretty much saying you value it more than a month of food for an orphan in Africa. Can you even reconcile the last five minutes of your life with the concept that humans have intrinsic value?

Do whatever you feel like with the man and the dog. That's what you do everyday of your life already. Lol, "right answer"

Her initial claim was for $20,000 to help cover medical costs. However, the value of the claim is irrelevant. Either it was McDonald's fault or it wasn't. She bought a cup of hot coffee then, through carelessness, spilled it on herself. The fault was entirely hers. This would be the equivalent of me buying some power tools from a hardware store, then injuring myself while trying to juggle them, and suing the hardware store.

>in part because it was not the first time that someone had been severely burned by their coffee

There had been 700 reports of people receiving injuries (of varying degree) over a ten year period. Given that in that same period McDonald's sold hundreds of millions of cups of coffee this is an insignificant figure.

>was mandate by Corporate to be server at a higher temperature than most other places

This claim was made by Liebeck's lawyer based on a survey he himself carried out on 20 or so local restaurants. In fact other major vendors, including Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Wendy's, and Burger King, sell coffee at a similar or higher temperature. The The National Coffee Association of U.S.A. recommend that coffee is brewed at 195-205°F and maintained at 180-185°F, the same temperature range as McDonald's. Quality home coffee machines such as those made by Bunn or Cuisinart make coffee at similar temperatures.

Who says who is innocent and who is guilty? How is that decided? Sure if it is known I can agree with you, but as humans there are some things that we can't know, but we can find indicators. If there are enough indicators we can be reasonably certain (but never 100%) that something is true. A fair trial is a way to bring out those indicators. Without it it is undecidable who is guilty and who is innocent.

The beyond a shadow of a doubt is saying that we know something within a certain percentage. If we are 95% sure that someone is guilty and 5% sure that they are not, it is easy to just say they are guilty. The problem happens when we are 51% sure if someone is guilty and 49% sure that they are not.

I recommend you take a statistics class. These concepts may be more clear. Here is a good playlist that will teach it to you. http://www.khanacademy.org/video/statistics--the-average?playlist=Statistics

Starbucks brews their coffee and tea with 200°F water, and the temperature is maintained. It may lose a few degrees while dripping through the filter, but not much. The coffee is dumped regularly so it doesn't get much cooler than that. I suppose this so that it will still be warm after adding cream.

That being said, 200° is capable of causing 2nd degree burns if it gets stuck on you (in your shoe, or I imagine in your thigh as well).

Not to establish fault, but those are the facts.

A while ago, a cousin of mine gave me a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called "The Bed of Procrustes". The book is basically a collection of aphorisms and there are a couple of ones to which I took a liking.

Here is the one that is most relevant to the discussion (and its footnote):

"Regular men are certain varying numbers of meals away from lying, stealing, killing, or even working as forecasters for the Federal Reserve in Washington; never the magnificent*."

Footnote: *I had to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics Book IV ten times before realizing what he didn't say explicitly (but knew): the magnificent (megalopsychos) is all about unconditionals.

Now, while I think it's true that most men have their price, I strongly believe that there are men who will never break, who will never give in to temptation. I think for a completely honest man, honesty is infinitely more valuable than any given temptation. Maybe he even wants or needs whatever the temptation would provide, but the cost of breaking his values are simply too high for him to consider the option.

For procapitalist, the easiest to get into is probably Milton Friedman, either "Freedom to Choose" or "Capitalism and Freedom", the latter being older, denser and more theoretical. Most important, but dated and difficult to read would be Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society". These are the essential tomes of modern capitalistic thought, and if you are not familiar with the arguments they make, you cannot be an informed critic of capitalism.

About the anti-capitalist books, well I don't actually have any to recomend. I've read many of them, but, being a dedicated capitalist I tend to think they are all wrong. I could tell you to go read the classics (Marx, Galbraith, Keynes, etc.) but you'll take all the wrong lessons from them. However, if you're going to be anti-capitalist at least quote the giants, not idiots like Klein.

Russia underwent shock therapy as a precondition of getting money from the World Bank. This created the Oligarchy, which has ruined Russia. In the Czech Republic and Poland, the workers unions fought to limit the privatization of many government programs; so these countries actually saw less shock therapy than did Russia, and even then their economies crashed and remained bad for decades. I don't know why, exactly, they subsequently improved, but I suspect it's because many of the privatizations faced regulation after the economic collapse.

The same is true of Chile; a governmental collapse followed by decades of poverty. The reason the country remains so rich now is because of the copper industry, which, interestingly, was never privatized. All of Chile's neighbors also underwent shock therapy, and their economies all collapsed as a result: Argentina, Brasil, Uruguay, Bolivia.

However, please recommend a book I can read on this subject that you think is a good resource from which you have developed your perspective. For one, I'd suggest The Shock Doctrine, if you'd like to see more of my perspective.

it's really the same thing as saying the invalid is no longer human, or the dog is more human than he/she is. Rationality (the ability to do things for reasons) is often the definition given for what is uniquely human. It's a question of personhood. Not all things that appear externally as human classify as persons and it must be that it is possible for something that appears nonhuman to be a person or have person-like traits. Maybe this will interest you

just in case you've never heard of this one, I'd like to recommend a book called: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195374614

This books helps me to get a good understanding of stoicism, I think you'll like it

No, although a counterexample needs only a sample size of 1.

How about this statistic - more than 80% of US millionaires are first-time millionaires, meaning they weren't born into the lap of luxury. (I'll let you look up the statistic, it comes from the book The Millionaire Next Door.)

I think it would be easiest to start by rephrasing your question as a premise: 1) Violent revolutions have merit. I think, however, nestled within this premise is another premise that you have to prove first, which is 0) Revolutions have merit.

To prove this zeroth premise, you need to demonstrate that a revolution is the best recourse in an post-industrialized, modern society like the the United States, since that is what we are talking about. I am of the opinion that it is not, but I would really like to hear an argument to the contrary.

Second, if you have successfully shown that revolution is the best recourse, you need to demonstrate that a violent revolution is better than a non-violent revolution. You might appeal to history, and look at the effects of both violent and non-violent revolutions, the most famous examples being the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Indian overthrow of the British Empire. Some of these were replaced by a better (subjective) government, and others were replaced by a worse one.

I think the linchpin underlying all of these revolutions is that the effect depended on the cause. I think the point was alluded to in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

>Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

If you believe the underlying structure is broken, but don't fix it in your revolution, then building from that structure will still result in something broken.

Can you demonstrate that the best choice for fixing the underlying structure is violent revolution?