[0:00]
We all know that ludites hated technology and that McDonald's was just the victim of frivolous lawsuit culture or do we know that? Find out another episode of my series. Oops, you fell for historical propaganda. There are plenty of myths but I'm really interested in the ones that were spread on purpose to make somebody look like the good guy who wasn't. And in this case it's big corporations. Like in the early 1800s when a group of textile workers was trying to fight back against terrible working conditions, child labor and being replaced by machines that make crappy products, sort of like how your boss can't wait to replace you with AI even though it doesn't work. They started with a lot of letter writing and government petitions 
[0:32]
and this is gonna shock you. But that didn't work so they decided to smash some looms and that did get the government's attention. It sprung to action to protect the machines and because of propaganda from the factory owners, we now use ludite to mean afraid of technology instead of what it really was which was trying to protect children and sick of writing letters. Then there's the woman who sued McDonald's because she didn't know that coffee is hot. What a silly goose. That was the story corporate lawyers put out because it sounded better than a 79 year old woman getting third degree burns and spending eight days in the hospital getting skin grafts. And she wasn't The first 
[1:03]
McDonald's was selling coffee that was 20 degrees hotter than anywhere else in the city. And they had received over 700 complaints of serious burns. And then she settled for a tiny fraction of what she won in court because McDonald's threatened to drag out the appeals process for a decade with a 79 year old woman. And then corporate propaganda turned that into a funny story about how people get too much justice. And that makes me so mad. I wanna get together with a bunch of ludites and smash your McDonald's coffee machine for the children.