121–130 of 139 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's simply a symptom of the wider problem that is a scourge of all our lives: - states are on the side of corporations not the people
The farmer has never been "on the side" of the pigs and cattle. In precise analogy, the state has never been "on the side" of the people.
It's not just the length of the initial contract, it's the lack of a sane "diff" system. Even if someone is willing and able to read a 44 page contract the first time, the next time version 1.0.1 of something comes out you are generally given a 44.5 page contract to re-agree to. "Somewhere" in there, they changed something; good luck figuring it out. So even if the version you read gave you permission to sue, the ame…
We didn't solve this type of thing for the adversarial case. If contracts became easily electronically diffable, then companies who didn't want their diffs comprehensible would randomly move sentences around and substitute words in every version of their contracts.
I have to imagine that the companies would at least be paying more for lawyers to shuffle contracts around like that than to amend them slightly.
I suspect the fine print will eventually be outlawed for use on the average consumer (unless we radically increase the education of the average consumer). It is well established by now that today's average consumer lacks the reading comprehension level required to fully understand these fine print agreements.
I don't know that it's about reading comprehension. I think most consumers could understand them if they put the effort in. The problem is simply that people don't read this stuff in the first place . They simply sign without reading, assuming/hoping/praying that the terms are reasonable. And really, can you blame them? Contracts are so vastly overused and they're made with the assumption that the consumer isn't goin…
I think it would be much better to make these obligatory consumer and employee contracts unenforceable to begin with instead of trying to fix this arbitration issue. They are predatory and exist only to protect the interest of these corporations. Everyday life shouldn't be a legal negotiation.
Probably, a public arbiter would be highly successful. There is great need for arbitration and those who do it best could be rewarded appropriately.
It's not just the length of the initial contract, it's the lack of a sane "diff" system. Even if someone is willing and able to read a 44 page contract the first time, the next time version 1.0.1 of something comes out you are generally given a 44.5 page contract to re-agree to. "Somewhere" in there, they changed something; good luck figuring it out. So even if the version you read gave you permission to sue, the ame…
They should just tell companies if they cannot describe the legal situation in under a page in a clear language for general consumer products then they cannot sell them. Diffs won't help - the aim from version 1.0 is to obfuscate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The farmer has never been "on the side" of the pigs and cattle. In precise analogy, the state has never been "on the side" of the people.
Wow, not many history buffs here on HN. Lots of credulous junior-high civics students, though.
Power begets power. Good power structures redirect that concentration and redistribute power, wealth, and means of production. The question of how to go about doing this is older than civilisation, most recent example I've come up with is from a history of Caesar Augustus, addressing the optimates and populares.
Former are oligarches, latter proles.
Guess which side's plank was "strict property rights and no debt forgivenss", and which was "structured bankruptcies, land redistribution, and affordable grain"?
It's the same strict propertarian vs. living-wage argument we're having today.
It should be illegal to "sign away" legal protections that you're afforded under the law.
It probably should not be uniformly illegal. For example, settling a lawsuit generally involves promising not to sue. Perhaps such agreements need to be supervised, which would take them out of the domain of "click-through" contracts.
I'm going to take a contrary point of view: Class action lawsuits (where a group of customers sue a company that they purchased a product from) are almost always pointless and expensive wastes of money, and we should encourage contracts to forbid them. * Many class-action suits end up with a result of lawyers get $50 million, and everyone who bought a product gets a coupon for more of that product. * The threshold fo…
You're missing the social value of class action lawsuits. There are basically three ways to have reasonably well run open markets: individual action, state action, and collective action. Individual action often makes no sense. If a company shafts me for $10, I'm not going to spent the thousands or millions necessary to prove the error. I'll just write it off and be less trusting next time. But if a company can screw…
My small claim was removed to arbitration against my objections, and they actually mention me in the NYTimes article: https://medium.com/p/faq-citibank-the-aaa-and-arbitration-my...
The NYTimes mentions me but completely skips the small claims removal portion, which is a bit frustrating. Right or wrong, individuals should be allowed to resolve disputes quickly and cheaply.