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Justice Stevens reads the fine print

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#201

Post by ryandrake »

nerdponx wrote: post #111
blunte wrote: post #51

Fine print or not, most people (myself included) rarely if ever read the "fine print". If you did read the fine print, and you were of a problem-solving (pessimist) mentality, then you would never buy anything or do anything. You certainly would never take any medicine, because nothing is scarier than the fine print there. I wonder what the fine print on a Tesla self-driving purchase looks like...

I come from a family of lawyers, and I do usually at least skim the fine print. But it's pretty much all the same and there's nothing I can do about it unless I radically detach myself from society in a way that I would prefer not to do. Binding arbitration clauses and extremely vague/weaselly privacy policies are the most common. Refund policies that are dependent on information that is not available to you until af…

Since you have above-average exposure to the law due to your family being lawyers, maybe you have insight into this question I've always wondered: Why aren't these Terms of Service and EULAs more routinely voided due to them being unconscionable and adhesive? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no ability to negotiate, take-it-or-leave-it terms.

I've never seen a Terms of Service or EULA that could be negotiated. Isn't that a fundamental attribute of a "voluntary" contract?

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#202

Post by daniel-cussen »

amalcon wrote: post #182
krageon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cooks with experience in commercial kitchens never want to eat at a restaurant again. Having done such work, this is absolutely untrue. I got a renewed appreciation for the hard work kitchen staff put in and the stringent requirements on cleanliness that kitchen staff has. I suppose this will change based on the country you are in, if you are in a country with bad sanitary checking you will have a bad time.

It varies a lot. Quite a long time ago, I worked at a pizza place in a regional chain. That location was kept quite clean, as were most of them. However, sometimes they'd give us the chance to pick up a shift at another location if they couldn't arrange one of their own employees on that day (usually because they called in sick). One such location was absolutely filthy . That location was since closed (grapevine says…

That's the system working as intended. Clean kitchens not only don't get their customers sick, but taste better too. Filthy kitchens go out of business. Most kitchens are clean, because the people who work there keep them clean, the rule in a manual does none of the cleaning, the people do all of it. And people know, come on, people are wise to this shit, they've been told not to trust their sense of taste in order to accept medicine that is clearly bad for them, but they don't believe 100% in the gaslighting, get real.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#203

Post by ryandrake »

We need to separate the concepts of "voluntarily purchasing a good or using a service" from "voluntarily agreeing to a document". Just because I voluntarily buy something doesn't mean I am necessarily voluntarily agreeing to its manufacturer's terms. It is a condition of buying the product, not something I am willfully agreeing to.

Today, companies can enforce all sorts of crazy things on you just because some internal counsel wrote it in a Terms of Service document. And when you push back, everyone up through to Congress and the Supreme Court throws up their hands and says "Well, you voluntarily agreed to it." No I didn't! There was no meeting of the minds, no ability to negotiate, and the so-called agreement was not offered from an equal bargaining position: It was essentially take-it-or-leave-it policy written by a corporation.

This needs to end. These things are not like contracts that equal parties sit down and shake hands and agree with each other on. I don't know what they are, but to lump them in with contracts and licenses seems totally wrong.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#204

Post by daniel-cussen »

rectang wrote: post #170
krageon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cooks with experience in commercial kitchens never want to eat at a restaurant again. Having done such work, this is absolutely untrue. I got a renewed appreciation for the hard work kitchen staff put in and the stringent requirements on cleanliness that kitchen staff has. I suppose this will change based on the country you are in, if you are in a country with bad sanitary checking you will have a bad time.

It's legend because of Down and Out in Paris and London , by George Orwell — a book from a different era. https://archive.org/details/DownAndOutInParisAndLondonGeorge... > Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

That legend is true in some products. Medicine, the lower the absolute cost, the higher the quality. Not totally in every way, but in general. Especially for pills, that hot new patented pill that solves all your problems is worthless, it can only compete with the out-of-patent miracle drug because of P-hacking statistics and super super hot pharma reps "calentando la sopa" to the doctors prescribing it. Like if Ratipooson tm brags about being 41.3% effective instead of 40% effective and requires a team of cheerleaders to get your doctors to prescribe it, and the pill from the 50's has a grouchy fatass with a mustache that only goes in person every three years to check up on stock, obviously the old pill is categorically superior. The statistics are lies, and anyway, the doctors ought to think of how good the patient's money is for him, what he has to do to get that money, the impact of that money on his health versus that (fictional) 1.3% improvement.

I suppose I have to translate that. "Calentando la sopa" means heating up the broth. Like sexual innuendo, teasing, they're super super particular about wearing clothes that get the doctors thinking about sex without admitting they want the doctors thinking about sex.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#205

Post by redtexture »

ryandrake wrote: post #203

We need to separate the concepts of "voluntarily purchasing a good or using a service" from "voluntarily agreeing to a document". Just because I voluntarily buy something doesn't mean I am necessarily voluntarily agreeing to its manufacturer's terms. It is a condition of buying the product, not something I am willfully agreeing to. Today, companies can enforce all sorts of crazy things on you just because some intern…

The term for this process is contract of adhesion, in which one party has all of the power.

An Overview of Adhesion Contracts and Clauses

Trembly Law Firm

https://tremblylaw.com/overview-adhesion-contracts-clauses/

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#206

Post by angst_ridden »

paxys wrote: post #5

Related to the opening of this article – it is interesting to see how one can get completely soured on certain products or experiences because, by virtue of their profession, they see the dirty underbelly of how things in that industry actually work. Someone who has read cruise contracts in detail will never want to go on one. Cooks with experience in commercial kitchens never want to eat at a restaurant again. Someo…

"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." - PJ Plauge, Computer Language, March 1983

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#207

Post by InitialLastName »

djrogers wrote: post #193
michaelt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, in reality I am not going to be targeted by competent hackers (who would own me at once), but rather a crude gang of misfits roaming around for an easily burglarised home. The threat isn't a competent hacker targeting you directly. The threat is a competent hacker targeting the lock's vendor, getting their whole database, then selling address, entry code and occupancy times for $20 per home on th…

> then selling address, entry code and occupancy times What locks are you referring to where locally configured entry codes are stored in a cloud DB? That's not the case for any of the ones I've installed.

That you are savvy enough to know this is a suggestion that "locks you've installed" might not be a general sample.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#208

Post by nerdponx »

ryandrake wrote: post #201
nerdponx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come from a family of lawyers, and I do usually at least skim the fine print. But it's pretty much all the same and there's nothing I can do about it unless I radically detach myself from society in a way that I would prefer not to do. Binding arbitration clauses and extremely vague/weaselly privacy policies are the most common. Refund policies that are dependent on information that is not available to you until af…

Since you have above-average exposure to the law due to your family being lawyers, maybe you have insight into this question I've always wondered: Why aren't these Terms of Service and EULAs more routinely voided due to them being unconscionable and adhesive? These seem to tick all the boxes: One-sided, no meaningful choice, no meeting of the minds, significant differences in bargaining power between the parties, no…

My impression is that courts generally do rule that these agreements are voluntary, because you can always just not do the thing with the shitty agreements attached to it, ergo they are not unconscionable nor adhesive. Hence my rant above; in TFA, Supreme Court explicitly ruled that the terms were voluntary. Otherwise stuff like binding arbitration would be effectively illegal.

I can ask one of the lawyers if there are exceptions to this, that I'm not aware of.

What I do know is that if some specific element of the agreement is unenforceable, usually the rest of the agreement remains unaffected and in-force.

As for why, it's easy to blame the "judicial-industrial" complex and "judicial capture". I don't see another plausible explanation, but I am also not an expert. There might be arcane legal reasons for why things the way they are, beyond the "judges generally care more about businesses than people" hypothesis.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#209

Post by kergonath »

pydry wrote: post #52
lordnacho wrote: post #43

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge d…

>At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.

> This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.

Indeed. I really don’t want any tech bro to come and disrupt the legal framework, move fast and break things. It’s probably not the last thing I want, but quite close. I’d rather work under an imperfect legal system than be at the whim of another sociopathic arsehole.

Re: Justice Stevens reads the fine print

#210

Post by spaetzleesser »

lordnacho wrote: post #43

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge d…

“Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex.”

That’s where diversity would help a lot. Congress should be more diverse in terms of background. Laws should be made by people with backgrounds in a variety of professions and not just lawyers and businesspeople as it’s in congress right now. It’s no surprise that they crank out laws that appeal to people with their backgrounds.

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