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. Someone who is familiar with standards of bridge inspections in most towns hesitates every time they drive over one. A computer security expert keeps their most valuable information under lock and key in a physical safe rather than online.
My conclusion ultimately is – everything is running on goodwill and duct tape, and ignorance is bliss.
Most people who work in restaurant kitchens eat far more from restaurant kitchens, not less. I did for quite a few years and I’m still very happy to eat at any diner, drive through, or Michelin star restaurant.
I think the kitchen thing is mostly a myth. Although it's true that often the refrigerators used during meal service tend not to be as cold as they are supposed to be, because the door is constantly being opened.
I think the main thing I learned from my commercial kitchen work is how similar they all are behind the scenes - the equipment and often skill of the line cooks at your local truck stop and the local fancy dining are closer than you expect.
The difference being the type of prep work being done, how good and consistent their ingredients and recipes are, and the presentation. Mechanically, yes they are all similar.
Unless of course, you are at a steakhouse, and they don't have a salmander broiler. Run away!
Agreed. I was going to say that I bet this a myth that endures only because it is repeated endlessly. I've never seen data to prove it and my anecdotal experience is the opposite.
> 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 the chain fired the GM and couldn't find anyone to replace them).
What helps is that there are signs of this sort of thing, if you know what to look for. E.g you should prefer places where you can see into the kitchen (which is most of them these days), places where the customer service workers tuck in their shirts, and places that keep their bathrooms and parking lots clean. Places where police and EMS folks eat really tend to be good bets (they usually also get a discount, but lots of places offer such discounts).
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.
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.
Totally agree, though it seems differ quite a bit between different kinds of kitchens here in Sweden. Producing stuff sold in stores means super-stringent checks where for example you have to swap your clothes before entering and exiting the area where you prepare the foodstuff. Now school kitchens on the other hand... sure they are checked but not at all with the same strictness it seems.
I have ten years in kitchens and while I do eat out I also know how disgusting kitchens are. I have a stomach for it but if you were a regular person and knew what I knew you'd refrain from eating out.
We pay back of house staff as little as we can get away with to work every weekend and holiday in hellish conditions. They just don't give a crap and who can blame them.
They're disinfected literally every day, and during the day all surfaces are regularly cleaned. If this isn't mandatory where you live, you live in a country with bad hygiene laws.
> We pay back of house staff as little as we can get away with to work every weekend and holiday in hellish conditions.
If you spend a little time thinking about the amount of restaurants versus the amount of actual people there are in a country, you will realise one is relatively easy to enforce compared to the other.
Furthermore, the conversation was about the average. It is not the case that the average human being goes around snorting coke in the toilet every day, just as it is not the case that the average restaurant is some bastion of filth. Moving around the goalposts in such a way is not a way to have a conversation in good faith, so please stop doing so.
Having worked in them for a decade I know how it works in practice. Perhaps whatever country you are from has sparking clean restaurants full of well paid, sober people but in the US, they are disgusting as a rule. My peers in the UK reported the same.
We had to call a ambulance for our health inspector once beacuse they overdosed in the bathroom. Check out Kitchen Confidential if you want to see this backed up, and even that's about the highest end restaurants in the country.
Sanitation is enforced at the local level. Making blanket statements about the U.S. carries little information.
Restaurants in New York (county) are spotless. Restaurants in San Francisco, less reliably so. The broader point holds, however--people in the restaurant industry tend to go out to restaurants.
They most assuredly are not. At least the ones I've worked in. I did a few months at a sandwich place where the owner would smoke while assembling sandwiches with his bare hands. I've never worked in SF so I can't comment on what it's like there.
Don't even get me started on those takeout only ghost kitchens. A lot of times they are running out of people's houses, rinsing lettuce in bathtubs.
If you think that's gross you should see how it's handled on the distribution end. Pallets of chicken breast sitting for hours in the summer sun and then served that evening.
We go out to eat beacuse you get desensitized to it after a while not beacuse it's clean.
I'm so relieved to hear you say that, because OP is spot on about anybody with any knowledge of how software is developed not trusting it to do anything right.
As a developer, I was shocked when at a friend's house saw that Alexa not only operated lights, but door locks and blinds. Or when another friend takes hands off the steering wheel to test lane keep assist.
I don't think I can trust any software at that level.
The biggest tech enthusiasts I know are tech workers, though. It's the normies in my life that couldn't care less about this stuff. I've been a developer for 30 years and I love my home automation toys.
But I do make sure that all of it fails gracefully to 'normal' when something interrupts HA. My software can (and does, every day) lock the door. But the deadlock still has a key on the outside and a standard twist knob on the inside. All the light switches work just fine without their wireless connection. Thermostat is indistinguishable from an old school Honeywell if you ignore the Z-Wave logo. etc.
I do keep my hands on the wheel, though ;-). The whole 'dying in a ball of twisted metal' failure mode is pretty convincing.
> But I do make sure that all of it fails gracefully to 'normal' when something interrupts HA.
This is why interest and trust don't have to go together. Sometimes the people who are most adventurous are simply the ones who are comfortable with a lower level of trust, because they can manage their risk.
I'm comfortable playing with new or niche technology because I'm able to keep it low stakes. My most tech-phobic family members, on the other hand, act like they have complete faith in the software they use even when they say they have zero faith. They don't have the savoir-faire to do things that limit their risk, like withholding sensitive data and backing up important data in different places, so they resent technology as chronically treacherous and agonize over whether they can "trust" individual pieces of tech in an absolute yes/no way.
I wouldn't mind blinds so much, but it'd have to be via a button; I dislike talking on a good day, let alone to a machine.
That said, my lights are operated via RF remote(s) (two systems, one working on plugs, the other from ikea), pretty convenient without needing an internet connection. Just an awkwardly sized battery.
Why not just automatic? Maybe plus a button for privacy/needing darkness for a film or whatever depending on the room, but mostly I just want curtains & blinds to open in the morning and close in the evening.
I agree with the IoT stuff, would never trust or want that...
Taking hands off steering wheel. Depends on where done, but straight or slightly curving highway with no significant other traffic sure. Why not try how well it works, just be ready to grab and correct if needed.
I even try how well my car goes straight line in similar conditions...
I presume the Alexa Argument ist against the service and not against automation. Running your whole life on self hosted home automation is Stil awesome and the way to go. Just ensure that data never leaves your home premises and you have enough resiliency.
My problem was not with Alexa specifically, it was a general feeling of "if software controls both locks and blinds it can lock you not only outside but inside as well". Of course I was immediatelly told that there's a physical workaoround in case anything goes wrong.
I cited this example not as something that is objectively bad, but as something subjective, more about my gut reaction.
Funny thing is both my friend and I have electrical engineering education. I went to build software for a living, he more or less moved to sales/management. His job is to hype tech. My job is to make the saussage. There's a popular meme which I heard some time after the anecdote above:
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
I would say trusting any kind of software with door locks(!) is a terrible idea. Yes, if you use home automation you should self host. No, if you secure your home you should not needlessly expand the attack surface.
In what little experience I have with burglars, they aren't exactly the type who will be hacking your smart locks to get into your house. They're just going to break the door or window.
I like being able to check the status of my door locks remotely, and lock them if necessary. I like being able to make sure all locks and garage doors are secure automatically before bedtime. I'm not at all worried about someone sitting out in front of my house hacking the Z-Wave lock. By the time they figured it out, the neighbors will have already called the police anyway.
Connecting all my door locks (and garage doors too) to HA has measurably increased the security of my home.
Unless you have a door specifically designed to withstand burglary a crowbar will always be an easier door hack than figuring out a backdoor to your automation.
There is no perfect security, only risk profiles. I would argue the risk profile of door lock automation is low enough not to be worthy of concern in most cases.
> Unless you have a door specifically designed to withstand burglary a crowbar will always be an easier door hack than figuring out a backdoor to your automation.
If your home is targeted specifically, yes. However, if a group hacks a cloud lock provider and then hits several homes using that without having to do something that looks supicious like physically breaking the door then it could be a lot safter and thus profitable for them.
And so they what, rob a few houses which statistically probably won't be yours before their hack gets discovered? Sounds like way more effort than just breaking the door or picking the lock.
I use a "smart" lock, even with BT/wifi/GPS based automatic unlocking which seems to freak my fiancee out. I see it as stealing my phone is not different from stealing my key. The more sinister ability is to unlock remotely via the "cloud" which I am still a bit shocked that it just seems to work, and no complaints AFAIK from insurance companies. I just happen to know that locks aren't really a deterrent if you really want to get inside a house....
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.
> 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 the darknet.
It boils down to assessing the threat level and the risk level.
Threat: Hacker owning vendor and selling info on darknet
Threat likelyhood: 1%
Risk: All valuables being stolen.
Risk value: High if you keep a few kilograms of gold in your home. But basically depends on your possessions.
When we were burglared while sleeping a few years back the perp entered through a window. It was the last window not switched to a new one more secure. It took him around 15 seconds to enter. He left with the DSLR, a TV, clothes, a few valuables lying around and my SO's purse. Additionally, because traditionally her car keys were by the door on ground level he could grab them and put everything into her car and leave.
Nowadays our purses and keys never stay downstairs when we go to sleep.
I think the risk profile for traditional break ins is way higher than the risk from a smart lock (not that we have any).
Schlage doesn't know where I live, though, nor do they get any status updates from my home assistant. It isn't software that is the problem you're referring to, it's involving a third party unnecessarily.
That doesn't require your lock vendor to know anything about your location. Homekit for example can do this with your bridge doing the work, and any cloud-required data being e2e encrypted.
This reminds me strongly of an ex-employer of mine, whose response to a security vulnerability was inevitably "our customers won't do that". It's one thing to have a threat model, it is quite another to dismiss low-hanging fruit (and trust me, whatever "smart" lock you have is very low-hanging) as not a big concern.
My generic answer (not being the guy who replied to you) is to look at probabilities. AFAIK in most places theft from homes is opportunistic. Garage doors left open, for example, is extremely common. Thieves just drive around looking for them, it's such a reliable occurrence. Other times, they just try the door and walk in if it's unlocked and they think nobody is home.
I.e. automating your door locks may very well increase your actual security rather than reduce it, if it causes your doors to be locked more often than you'd remember otherwise.
Why would you be even a little bit concerned over software door locks?
Most traditional locks can be picked open in seconds. There's no meaningful way to do any worse than that. The only fit-for-purpose way to use locks is in keeping honest people honest. They are utter rubbish at keeping bad guys out of your house.
It's not just trusting the software, but the implicit policy around its implementation and use and even more implicit social norms around what it is expected to do that develop and evolve in interesting ways as products and services entrench further and further into the woodwork.
Say an attacker captures enough of a homeowner's voiceprint to build a language model good enough to get past Google's or Amazon's voiceprint matching, then pipes "<hotword>, open the front door" through a wall or window (possibly ultrasonically).
What happens now?
Who is to blame?
Is it the homeowner's fault for using a product according to the use cases included in the instructions?
"Oh, no, that was just a serving suggestion! You shouldn't use <product> to lock your doors unless the doors were an effectively unnecessary decoration to begin with."
So then you have Buy N' Large and Big Brother getting into the home and contents insurance industry.
No. No you don't. The only reason this use-case got cleared by Legal is because someone figured out the circle of plausible deniability (weaponized portmanteau of "circle of competence") is currently wide enough to fit a lawsuit defence through. :(
It's like with Tesla and the whole self-driving thing. The implementation *happens* to be able to drive asleep "drivers" down highways at 100 miles an hour, and the company has somehow been able to corral itself into the evil-genius legal position of being 50% "always keep hands on the wheel" and 50% "look self-driving AI go brrrt" and somehow combine the liability protections of the former with the societal expectations of the latter. Solely in terms of overpromising and underdelivering and then wrangling the legal status quo to declare that okay, I do think it's a bit... not great.
Crucially, this problem is most definitely not limited to Tesla, Google or Amazon; it's an endemic permeability in the legal systems of ostensibly-developed countries that makes a joke of the proof-of-work foundation of good-faith technical investment, and institutes a fraudulent social contract that the infrastructure we increasingly depend on is fundamentally reliable and trustworthy ("set in stone") when it is not. To adopt these technologies is to adopt the ever-changing tech stacks that underpin them, and the risks associated with upgrading the proverbial engines on ever-larger digital airplanes while they're in flight. I think it's dangerous and irresponsible to dispel the tenuous fabric of social perception around these risks and give unsuspecting passersby the impression things are safer than they are.
<xterm> The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
I don’t know if I agree with this. My experience working for a federal judge made me much more confident in the criminal justice system. In the media we only see the situations where the justice system got something wrong—which is inevitable in a country of 330 million people. Looking behind the scenes made me understand that for every case where there is a conviction on shaky evidence, there are dozens of cases where a conviction or guilty plea is supported by a mountain of electronic evidence.
For example, my wife handled a murder trial where the government prosecutors not only had closed circuit video of the defendant shooting the victim, but of him getting in his car and driving home through town back to his house. They just cut from one closed circuit camera to the next and the next showing the entire journey.
Did your wife's case actually go to trial, or was it also plea-bargained? If the former, why would the defendant not take the plea in such clear-cut case?
One of those hypotheses is easily testable: bridges can collapse and you will hear about it.
And yet.. it rarely happens? There was one in Italy and one in the US recently but, to a decent approximation, it’s a non-issue.
Maybe we should have more trust in people and their work. Maybe our bridges are fine, our food is kosher, but what’s rotting on the inside is society, eaten alive by cynicism and distrust.
I think thus can and perhaps should be refuted as the bridges are not fine. The 2019 report of bridges in WA found 6.6% to be in poor condition and more than half of the approximate 8000 bridges need repair. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/state-item/washington/
Seattle has about 6 or 7 very major bridges. One of the largest, the west seattle bridge has been closed for over a year because it was suddenly in danger of collapse. This is a bridge that carried over 100k cars per day. (https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...)
I think the point of grimacing while crossing a bridge is that the engineers know the problems and how pervasive they are. As a user of websites, you may think some are really solid. Having worked for one (a website virtually everyone has used), when you see the bug queues, all the outages, and all the problems, you realize it's not the steel fortress that it would appear to be from the native outsider
I’d also like to see some evidence that people familiar with bridge construction actually avoid bridges or hesitate before using them. I suspect they might say something like that if the conversation goes in that direction, but I doubt they actually modify their behavior.
We know consumer software has bugs – that can make them unreliable, insecure and slow. They can become worse over time with more usage (more data/state accumulation). Unless we proactively find and fix them, they can continue to hurt users. We know this. We know critical software systems (medical, industrial, infra) have specially hardened software that are more reliable (but not yet secure).
We also know buildings, bridges etc – can weaken over time due to material deterioration, foundation shifting, earthquakes, machinery induced vibrations, excess load etc. and fail (fall apart). They need to be monitored for signs of structural stress/failure (cracks, leaks, tilts etc) and corrected/repaired or else they fail. When these maintenances are not done correctly, due to incompetence or corruption, they will fail, no doubt.
That sounds like the road to complacency. The reality is that there are many backup systems that work much of the time. Have complacency in all of them and forget society.
The bridge has engineers and architects who know material stats and add tolerances. The restaurant has patrons with immune systems that survived worse times in human history, usually, unless the patron is undergoing serious medical treatment or something.
They're only fine until they're not; there's plenty of instances of rotting infrastructure that one day will fail, and it's not like these issues are unknown, there's just not enough money or people to fix it.
Meanwhile the US government is going to spend another trillion on its military.
There was very nearly one in central London a couple of years back (Hammersmith) and it’s still closed to traffic.
But nearly is good, the situation is being rectified before it turned into a disaster. From the noises coming out of TfL this was a little close for comfort though.
Helicopters are subject to single failures causing a fatal crash. Hence helicopters rely heavily on rigid, thorough, and very expensive maintenance.
As my dad (combat pilot) said, an airplane wants to fly. It can suffer considerable damage and still make it home. A helicopter, however, wants to crash. It's a constant struggle to keep it in the air.
I've never ridden in a chopper, but I doubt I'd feel safe in one.
I've never worked near helicopters, but they went on my "never take a job anywhere near these things" list after the third time I accidentally stuck my hands into the whirling blades of the ceiling fan in my living room.
I once had a chance to take a job related to navigation. I got significantly lost on the way to the interview. The job didn't work out, probably for the best.
> 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. Someone who is familiar with standards of bridge inspections in most towns hesitates every time they drive over one...
...someone who writes software for a living is afraid to fly on airplanes (I joke, but only sort of)
On the contrary, as someone with a great interest in aeroplanes and aviation safety, I would choose to travel everywhere by airliner if airports weren't such a depressing experience.
Learning more has made me extremely confident in aviation (737 MAX issue aside but even that is nothing compared to the risk of driving).
> 737 MAX issue aside but even that is nothing compared to the risk of driving
I run the numbers when the second accident happened, and the 737 MAX had a similar risk profile to using a motorcycle in the city. Way higher than driving.
I get your point, but I think your initial conclusions are false. Each of those professions understands that the probability of risk is not 1. Their experience informs them that the risk is quite unlikely and therefore acceptable. They may have a heightened awareness to look for problems, but they don't stop exposing themselves to risk.
Your final conclusion is half-right: ignorance is bliss. But I think it's charitable to say everything is running on goodwill and duct tape. How many people really build systems based on goodwill? And duct tape implies somebody's seen the cracks and decided to patch them. I think everything is running on apathy and incompetence, sitting on the edge of a cliff, waiting for a stiff breeze; over time, the wind wins.
"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
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.
I think you're conflating two issues there. You are suggesting that there isn't a true agreement because one party either didn't read the contract or only begrudgingly agreed to be bound by its terms. Allowing either of those circumstances to void a contract would fundamentally undermine the whole concept. The whole point of contract is that it is a bargain; each side does something they would rather not do in order to gain something they wouldn't have otherwise. I don't want to pay rent; it's just something I have to do because otherwise I would have no place to live.
I think the real issue here is contracts made between parties of unequal bargaining power. They are still contracts but perhaps they should be regulated more strictly. There are plenty of examples of EU consumer legislation taking this approach. Some impose obligations on the powerful party that can't be contracted out of; others imply terms into contracts; still others simply say that in certain contracts between unequal parties, unreasonable terms are unenforceable. Clearly there are many who think that this kind of regulation doesn't currently go far enough in protecting weaker parties, but I think it is the right conceptual framework.
> Allowing either of those circumstances to void a contract would fundamentally undermine the whole concept.
I don't think it would.
> The whole point of contract is that it is a bargain; each side does something they would rather not do in order to gain something they wouldn't have otherwise.
Right, the core of contracts is making a bargain, which isn't happening here.
> I don't want to pay rent; it's just something I have to do because otherwise I would have no place to live.
The part under discussion here isn't the payment, it's the everything else.
Worst of all, those terms tend to be the same across an industry, so if you don't agree to them, an entire class of products become unavailable to you. I bought an external disk that, on its packaging, stated that I agree to resolve any issues through arbitration. I could have returned it, but what are the chances other brands don't have the same clause?
Unless citizens join together and restrict by law what such contracts may contain, we'll be forced to accept whatever our corporate masters decide.
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 disconnect between what people understand their rights and legal positions to be, and what the lawyers can turn it into.
There's other problems as well. At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This leads to all sorts of problems with who gets justice.
Then there's the money. If we're all equal before the law, how can there be lawyers who cost thousands an hour? Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer, in which case they are just good marketers. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but if we cared that everyone had equal access, why wouldn't there simply be a big bench of lawyers from which you get assigned one? The legal system has somehow managed to both be a social good and a tremendous source of profit for its members. (Well, some of its members, they don't all make piles of cash.)
My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ticket.
She got me off; I was speeding, but I had been charged under the wrong section of the Road Traffic Act. "I humbly submit, your honour, that it would be quite wrong, your honour, for my client to be convicted of an offence he didn't commit, your honour".
Isn’t this a great example of what the OP was talking about?
You did not get off because of absolute innocence, but “technical minutiae as if they are source code”.
But it does answer the OPs question, some are better at navigating it.
I don't think it's "technical minutiae"; I was charged with an offence that I didn't commit. My advocate just took the trouble to read the Act that I was charged under. Given that the court knew I hadn't committed the offence I was charged with, it would certainly have been a miscarriage of justice to go on and convict me anyway, and I could have got it overturned on appeal.
You said you were speeding, right? But somehow the judge can't just say "ah right, looks like it's the wrong traffic statute that's been filed. Here's a fine for whatever it was that you actually did, you can just settle it here or we do a proper trial if you disagree".
I mean of course we don't want people to be convicted of things they didn't do, but how is it ok for someone to get away with something they did do, just because some bureaucrat picked the wrong law?
I don't think judges should be able to go off-piste like that. In this country, charges are laid by the CPS, and adjudicated by courts, and not vice-versa. In the US, I believe (based on TV courtroom dramas!) that judges have more latitude.
In fact my "judge" was a panel of lay magistrates. They must consult the Clerk of the Court (a trained lawyer) if they have any doubt about their decisions.
I like this system; I'm not keen on the idea of a judge being able to change the charges on me at trial. I think the prosecution were given the opportunity to go away and get the charge altered; but they gave up (it was 30 years ago, memory falters).
Look, I deserved to be penalised; I would have simply put my hands up, but I had to go to court to make a mitigation plea, because I risked losing my licence.
My point was just that a really good advocate is head-and-shoulders above the crowd.
> somehow the judge can't just say "ah right, looks like it's the wrong traffic statute that's been filed. Here's a fine for whatever it was that you actually did
We shatter the powers to bring and adjudicate charges. This creates inefficiencies, like this. But it also brings stability. (More practically, the judge may not have all the facts and circumstances relevant for citing the person.)
Due to historical procedural abuses, modern societies insist that due process is as high a bar to prosecution as guilt of the offense for which a defendant is charged. The courts don’t want to be used as a forum for detective work, either. They just want to hear the case as presented, issue a judgment, and move on to the next case.
This is way more common than people realize, and one of the reasons courts accept "no contest" and pleas so often, especially in things like traffic laws.
The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort.
Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.
It's obviously specific to the UK, but lots of the broader points are applicable anywhere (especially in the US, where the provisions whose loss he's writing about are provisions people have simply never had).
Arguably the most painful, cringe-inducing part is this one:
> The restrictions on legal aid are already leading to an increase in the number of people representing themselves in courts and tribunals. This has caused the Bar Council to publish A Guide to Representing Yourself in Court. It opens unpromisingly:
>> The law can be very complicated. This guide explains things as clearly and as briefly as possible, but will only give you an overview of what you need to do if you have a civil law legal problem. This means we have had to miss bits out – bits that are likely to affect what the law would say about your own situation. So please do not rely on any of the examples used in this guide.
And also this very important observation:
> A civil case, let’s say something complex to do with a tenancy agreement, may well take twice as long in court with a self-represented litigant. The savings on lawyers’ already modest legal aid fees hardly count for much when the cost of running a single courtroom at the Old Bailey is estimated at £10,000 a day. [...] The conclusion must be that this legislation has nothing to do with saving money.
Political/funding decisions are part of the mix, but I don't think the daylight between highly funded and underfunded amounts to fundamental difference.
Courts are extremely costly and/or low throughput. The vast majority of legal resolutions happen outside of courts, whether or not they even touch a court along the way.
It just is not designed for efficiency. Court systems are designed to embody legal ideals (and imo myths) of justice, that may be pretty far from common sense ideals.
We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare. This is the nature of the legal system, not a consequence of details like funding.
> We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare.
This is a defeatist attitude, and one that allows bad actors to thrive. Landlord-Tenant law is a particularly relevant example here because most jurisdictions have substantial regulations that put substantial obligations and limitations on landlords -- far more than most other areas of contract law. However, many landlords can ignore these regulations because their tenants don't have access to courts to enforce them.
I would also argue that family law is an area that is a counter-example to your statement. In cases of divorce, especially with children involved, the courts are almost always involved, even when the parties come to an amicable separation agreement. You'll also note that the processes, personnel, and facilities of family court tend to be a lot more economical than a prototypical court of general jurisdiction. They stand as an example that if we want to make access to courts more widely available and economical, we can.
Courts don’t actually need to deal with vary many cases though. I suspect the average person needs to deal with the legal system for anything more complex than a speeding ticket less than once per decade.
And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.”
It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to resolve. The UK has ~700 homicide victims per year and significantly fewer murder trials. Individual trials can be long and expensive without it actually adding up to a significant expense.
So, looking at stats for England and Wales about 80% of homicide incidents result in one or more suspects being charged and a small number of those end up being acquitted (though it often takes some time for people to be charged). I guess that counts as significantly fewer, but wasn’t the impression I got from my initial reading of your post.
80% of incidents, but each incident can have multiple victims. 2020 for example had one unfortunate case of 39 people being found dead in a truck relating to human trafficking.
One of my least favorite trends: offices that give you pages of contract to agree to in order to just have a meeting on premises.
I got one of these in a job interview situation and it really was pages upon pages. I was in the lobby waiting for a job interview, and the person sent to fetch me was visibly pissed off I took the time to at least skim what the heck was in this agreement.
I mean what a messed up context. Obviously I won't get the interview unless I agree, and there's zero chance of negotiating any of these points. Should I just wave past it to placate the interviewers impatience? If I take my time to go through the details will they read me as a potential problem employee that will be legalistic about ordinary matters? If I don't take my time am I signaling that I'm a lax coworker that doesn't apply due diligence? If the interview goes well should I use the same behavior when evaluating the employment agreement? When signing the initial "get past the lobby" contract did I end up agreeing to something that could have implications for me later working at this location?
The whole thing is a kafkaesque farce.
I applaud Stevens for his stunt, even if only ultimately a symbolic protest.
It feels like reform in this area requires a generation of lawyers that become the top judges that are willing to oppose the mentality of most lawyers.
This one time I watched my COO say that he isn't signing the Facebook visitor NDA without getting a lawyer's approval on it first, and if they're not cool with that they can try to reschedule our meeting to happen outside the building. It worked, never signed.
> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff.
I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language.
For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.
On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.
A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts.
I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year.
Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.
I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for.
That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.
House sales are complex enough that most people use common template contracts, simply because it makes the interaction with the required third parties (realtors, notaries, public record offices, lawyers, banks) more efficient by a large enough margin.
Rental however? Almost everyone uses their own crap contracts or some decades old template contract, and usually there is no one involved except the landlord and the renter. And because there is no need for more efficiency, the market can't and won't push for standard contracts.
I love Nova Scotia’s standard rental terms, with generous term for tenants:
> Use these forms to show the terms that must be part of any lease signed in Nova Scotia. The lease a landlord uses may look different, but must contain all the items shown here. If any of the items are not part of the lease a tenant signs, they apply anyway.
Either 2/3 or 3/3 of the apartments I've rented since graduating college have used a similar template to one another, where part of it comes down to checking boxes or filling in a blank space. They each had some variety of addendums, but shared a common core structure.
This was also at apartment complexes that had multiple units, so maybe it's different if you're renting from an individual for a one-off space.
I agree 100%. The "free-for-all contract law" based society in which, to get the most basic goods or services, everyone is forced to sign hundreds of contracts that they didn't have input in writing, can't possibly understand or even read, is completely unattainable.
All basic things of day-to-day life (jobs, rent, utilities, tickets, subscriptions) should be governed by mandated standard contracts (with some flexibility based on a series of optional clauses), so people just have to learn/understand a contract once and take that knowledge for the rest of their life. This way the actual paper contract a person signs should be just a single page, listing the parties, citing the standard contract, and a few bullet points citing the optionals. E.G. "I just rented a house, I signed Standard Rental Contract #3 with a no-pets and no-smoking clauses." - "Good for you, mine is the stricter Standard Rental Contract #2, and they also wanted to add the no-pets clause but I payed extra to remove that."
Anything outside this should only be considered a legal contract if each party involved had their own layer present when the contract was written and when it was signed (layer co-signing it with a legal duty to the client), having full input in writing the actual contract. If a company handles you one of their own contracts and asks you to sign without allowing you to change it, then it should not be valid/legal binding.
Can’t you have auto-renewing clauses on your lease, with only small contractual updates every year on the points that effectively changed ?
That’s what I had on every appartment I rented. As you say it wouldn’t make sense to go through the building’s description every single year when nothing has changed.
Otherwise, an issue with having “standard” clauses, and only the differential in your contract, is your knowledge of the referenced standard at the time of the contract.
Imagine buying a house: I can’t imagine you’d be reviewing the standard house buying contracts every year just to be ready in case you buy one. So I’d assume you’d be reading the whole terms, from the standard + the differential at least once when you buy your first house. But then, if you sell and buy another one 5 years later, won’t you want to recheck the up to date standard terms, on top of the differential you sign for your specific contract ?
At the end of the day, I feel it would only benefit people who spend their lifes in the field and are aware of the standard terms at any given moments. I’d prefer to optimize for the people who are not familiar, and would have a harder time understand the whole of the contract.
In the UK it is to the landlord and their agent's benefit to repeatedly terminate your 12 months (minus 1 day) home lease, and have you sign a new one, with arrangement fees of course.
That's to make sure it is classed as a short term tenancy, less than 12 months, even if you live there for a decade.
Full legal tenancy rights don't kick in unless you have a lease longer than 12 months. As a result, I've never heard of anyone being offered such a lease.
Having an "auto-renewing clause" in an existing tenancy would defeat that benefit to the landlord. You'd better read the terms on the new lease each time, just in case something changed. But you can use your choice of "diff" tool; it's probably the same as the previous time, including typos.
(Commercial (business) leases are the opposite. Commercial landlords often want to offer only long leases (say 5 or more years), because that arrangement gives them strong rights to be paid for the entire term, no matter if the business wants to leave.)
People just don’t care that much about legal documents until it looks like it will matter. People’s choice of individual contract provisions at most wage earning jobs, health care, rentals, or vacations is basically nil - they mostly don’t care to read it and so the writers of the contracts put in egregious terms.
On themortgagereports, setting aside that the other camp from "the absolutists" is the former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is like, one man, who could also probably litigate his way out of any serious trouble, it still gets to the conclusion:
> The important point is that there is much that should be read in home closing materials. Whether you should read every word is arguable.
On professional investors, I wouldn't also hold them as the shinning beacon representing what most of us think or do with money, contracts or responsibilities.
I don't get the feeling that most people don't read, just that it's a deeply painful and frustrating experience that some people bail out from. Like tax reports, or homeworks. I still think most people are way too scare to not take the time to check as much as they can, for them these papers could affect the next 30 years of their life.
Also there's whole sections that can be skimmed pretty fast, but it's different to me than "not reading".
>Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer.
This is a problem with the nuance of law, not lawyers. The thing that finally clicked for me was talking with a lawyer at a electronics meetup. He was talking about some aspect of the law, and I realized that lawyers are just hackers. The system that they try to exploit is the law, rather than a computer.
Your money gets you a better hacker. The system is the same for everyone, but the interface is flexible.
It is frustrating. It's easy to villainize the producers and their lawyers. But on the other hand, it would be nice if consumers weren't so lazy and would instead stand up for themselves and fight back. But then that becomes hard if there isn't sufficient competition and choices in the market. At the end of the day, I think that the occurrence of consumers losing on actual lawsuits (much less even being involved in one) is sufficiently rare that it wouldn't justify the increased cost of goods if the risk were more balanced.
Part of a solution could be to require fine print and it's revisions to be posted online so it's easily accessible and up-to-date.
Once fine-print is published we could have a review sites (similar to fact checking sites) that could extract the essence from the fine print and point out major points, issues, etc.
Another, solution that would dis-incentivize 'kitchen-sink' contracts would be ability to invalidate whole contract if one of the clauses is found invalid.
You are massively over-simplifying the problem. Imagine someone put their contract online somewhere saying, "you must litigate in Miami-Dade County", what happens next? Is that lawful? Is it reasonable? Is it moral? You could easily have multiple legal professionals arguing about whether it is or isn't and at the end of the day, most people decide with their wallet anyway.
The reason we have Courts in many cases is to try and make decisions on grey areas in terms of what has already been decided elsewhere, you can't open-source that because even the judges won't agree.
Single location where people can access fine print and it's revisions (fine print reserving the right to change at any time is such a BS) would make fine print more accessible (you can zoom in, print, etc, and service could monitor for changes and alert you to it.
Argument that one needs a lawyer to understand the contract highlights a problem with contracts. We all could use education and discussion about contract clauses and analyzing contract clauses online would be a perfect forum for that. It would also put pressure on contract writers and companies to make them more reasonable and clear.
Not sure if this works well enough, but tools like https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ could play a valuable role here and cause legalese to simplify along the way too.
> "even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law"
I think by far this is the biggest issue with EULAs and fine print: you really have no idea what anything means because it's all been crafted to cover legal concepts for which you have no prior knowledge.
Yes and: I'm fascinated by 5-4's critiques of law, the legal system (in the USA), law school, courts, and so forth. https://www.fivefourpod.com
IANAL. Emphatically. I just can't wrap my head around it all. I'm an outsider looking in, from a distance. But it seems important, like something I should know. So I've been reading books. Mostly stuff from the library. But I still don't feel any smarter about this stuff.
“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.
> 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.
What's likely to happen is we develop some sort of UCC-esque base contract that normalizes all the fine print boilerplate so that future contracts can just reference it in a manner to the tune of "these terms of service are like literally every other terms of service you agree to but with the following exceptions/specifications".
I thought the same thing but ultimately, many organisations want loads of exceptions to the standards for whatever reason. My wife is a Solicitor and when I proposed this, she laughed. There are already standard legal forms in the UK for many things but it never works out like that.
Even if the general intention is to use standard contracts, each company will have its own concerns: "Our ships are cheaper but a little older, we should reduce the amount of liability accordingly", "We use cheaper off-shore staff so we need to add clauses around languages etc." All of these add up to the mess that we end up with in the Ts and Cs.
The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).
This is a stupid answer. And I don't mean it's ignorant, I mean it's stupid.
The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field."
You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.
Just to respond to this and all the others at once:
The reason my family optimizes for law school as a default is that it's not a specialization, it's a baseline way of thinking about and dealing with any business or life situation you find yourself in. Just as "programming" in the general sense is not a speciality and is something I think everyone should be versed in as a logical form to call upon when needed, their view is that thinking as a lawyer is crucial. Whether you ever practice law or not. This is far different from delving into the specifics of some field of law or, in your example, medicine. It's as general a type of logic as you might get from a degree in philosophy; it just happens to be a lot more useful when you need to get things done in the here and now.
My father's command was: Be whatever you want but do it after you're a lawyer. I didn't do that, but then again, I'm the least successful of my brothers.
All I meant by my original comment was that there's a rationale to it: This is not one aspect of medicine. It's applicable to every endeavor in life. Taking the time to become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the law is roughly the same as learning the CLI for the operating system that your society runs on. Most people are only familiar with the GUI.
And for the person who said no one can afford to go to law school: Many of the best I know went to night school or even studied completely on their own, and passed the bar while they were working other jobs full-time. Just like many of the best coders.
I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of service and avoid terrible outcomes. This is sadly true even when you go to a gastroenterologist.
I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here.
However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers.
You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music.
You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere.
Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another.
So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
I don't think there's anything uncivil about calling something as stupid as "if you don't want to be a victim of the very legal foundation of the country you live in, you must:
a) be smart enough to get into a very competitive professional school (most people don't have a college degree, which is required, and even objectively bad law schools are somewhat hard to get into),
b) be wealthy enough to pay for it (it costs on average $150k plus opportunity costs),
c) be interested enough in it to actually consider it, and
d) be... stupid enough to actually do it (there are too many lawyers, and less than 1/4 of them say their education was worth it)"
stupid.
> The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
And this is exactly why "just go to law school" is a stupid answer in this context.
There's a lot of hostility to unpack in your response, but I'd just say this: It costs nothing to study law, you don't need a college degree to pass the bar, and it's a useful life skill the way understanding code is. If you have the ability to study something that would benefit you and don't choose to, that's a waste of intellect. If you feel the need to deride it as well, that's indicative of having a chip on your shoulder. Ultimately your unfounded class assumptions and indignation at people who try to better themselves by learning as much about the system we live in as possible are a lot of wind and water, and speak more about your insecurities and fear of learning something that seems scary. Make all the appeals to popular emotion you want - they don't change reality. The reality is that people who can read and write legal documents have an ability to execute all of the business strategies that the smartest minds on HN struggle with; for the same reason that those brilliant minds can execute algorithms in binary that the average lawyer can't conceive of. If you could know both languages, why wouldn't you? Your comment is fundamentally no different from one which derides learning math as an elitist activity, when someone else says it's a way of making sense of the natural world. Or who says that learning another language is only for the elite.
"Too extreme" is putting it mildly. Most people couldn't even afford to go to law school. A great many wouldn't have the spare time to study another specialty and a lot might not even be capable of competently understanding the material even if they did go to law school (we all have our strengths and weaknesses after all. For example I'd be a hopeless doctor, chef or teacher). And that's before you've factored in that you also need to keep on top of any new case studies and changes in legislation else risk your knowledge becoming irreverent.
In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).
It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all.
Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively.
Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.
As a total outsider my first instinct was to agree. Then I thought about aspects in my country (Germany) and thought that while not so obvious and blatant we have basically the same problems. And they grow year over year.
Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react?
Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees.
There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like.
Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals.
The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament.
Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time.
Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people".
So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.
It saddens me to see a whole generation grow up losing the DIY ethos that let Americans develop into the strongest, wealthiest middle class of any country in history. It's one thing to demand a better social safety net; it's another entirely to abandon the freedom-to-DIY engine that is the reason immigrants like my family still line up for years to come to America. Those who move to Norway get the benefits but those who come to America have the opportunity for greater rewards. Along with much greater risks. It's frankly insulting to assume they don't know what they're getting into.
And if/when a family like mine puts themselves through law school - this generation wants to slag it as if that represents privilege or assimilation?
My father was responsible for having hundreds of criminal convictions overturned in one single civil rights case before the supreme court of California. His parents didn't even speak English. I guess he shouldn't have put himself through law school taking on debt and selling shoes?
For examples, imposed barriers for law or medical school is a form of barriers of entry. The profit-seeking motive becomes rent-seeking then, because the number of competitors is artificially lower.
What makes you think that these are systemic _problems_? Maybe they _are_ the system? SCNR. I am completely with you. There is a good deal of acquired helplessness involved where small deviations from that "system" are always are conceived as degressions, so the system can not be questioned in general. Wait for the "but capitalism is the best we could come up with so far" arguments to arrive. They are not completely wrong and part of the game...
> The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking
We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt.
In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step.
Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm
I'd counter that if you expect people to handle all your legal issues, your software issues, your financial issues and your medical issues, without a solid understanding of any of those fields, you're also going to spend (and likely waste) a lot of money h and be less effective than if you knew what was going on.
Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
The statistics don’t support your assertion. Most people aren’t lawyers, and the median amount of money a person spends on legal counsel is pretty low.
The question in any given area you outsource to experts isn't how much you spend, but what percentage you waste as a result of lacking domain specific knowledge. For instance, I'm not a good auto mechanic, let alone an expert. But I've read my car's factory service manual end to end, and looked up a lot of what I didn't understand. I don't usually have to ask a mechanic what's wrong, but if a mechanic tells me something I understand what they're talking about and what it should cost, and thus, I might pay $1000 for a job where someone else would pay $3000. Having as much domain specific knowledge as you can is always a good thing. That's the point. Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money. It's about getting what your money is worth without getting scammed.
1. You're improperly discounting opportunity cost, which is making your math incorrect.
2. You might have saved the same amount of money by taking your car to more than one mechanic to get an estimate, without having done all that research.
3. "Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money." On the contrary, that's exactly what it's about, algebraically speaking. Income minus expenses is profit, a/k/a wealth.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't disagree that it's good to know things; I went to university and then law school to get a well-rounded education (I'm an attorney as well as an engineer). But that doesn't mean I spent my time in the most economical way possible. (Law school was very expensive, and I don't even practice law.) If I scrubbed toilets for a living, I'd be way worse off than I am today, even if I knew how to fix my own car.
How do you know the second or third mechanic you take your car to isn't shining you on? My hourly time is $200, when I'm on the clock. Nothing spectacular, but not bad for a drop-out. That doesn't mean I can't do 4 hours of yeoman's labor in my free time to save myself $200 in legal or accounting or insurance or construction contractor or mechanic's fees. Plus I end up educating myself in some field I'm less familiar with. Doesn't that education more than offset the lost opportunity cost, considering it's done in my off-work hours and only at the expense of entertainment?
Congratulations might be the wrong word, but I applaud that you chose to become an attorney and an engineer; that type of combination is the gold standard for my family. I can't believe it's something you'd ever regret.
My argument throughout this thread has been misconstrued. All I'm arguing for is that people should use every available opportunity to educate themselves, and that certain things (to me, logic, computer science, legal, mechanical, biological, historical, and literary - but your preferences may differ) are valuable tools that are worth constantly continuing to educate yourself in.
On refraining from spending money: If you buy things that are worth what you paid for them (as an expendable or an experience), or things that increase in value over time, then spending money is fine. i.e. a fairly agreed-upon trade benefits both parties. The loss of net value comes in with friction in the transaction. Generally, spending money unwisely. If you require an expert go-between for every transaction, those fractions add up to the difference between your income and expenditure. Put more bluntly: The money I save on mechanics because I read the manuals and/or do the work myself is money I save. When I do want to spend money, it's not a problem if I'm getting what I expect from it, because it's an equal trade. The only loss would be if I didn't willingly agree to pay for what I got.
My "hack" around this is, have a friend that's a lawyer.
I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too.
To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them.
I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.
That's the right hack in a lot of cases. Where would we be without friends who know more than we do about these things? But those friends also educate themselves in a lot of fields - and they know what they are or aren't qualified to answer. So if I ask a friend who's a graphics guy about lighting he can help me, but he'll point me to someone better. Or if I ask family members about a specific legal thing, they'll refer me to someone more specialized in a particular form of law. Nothing wrong with that. It's more like: I need to know enough at least to tell whether I'm being bullshitted or not; I trust my friends to know enough to tell me if they can't fully answer my question. But there is nowhere in that chain where knowing more isn't valuable.
Don't forget the medical degree so you can "do your own research", and the mechanic qualifications so you can avoid being scammed when it comes to fixing your car.
At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.
This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.
If that's their response, then you should also expect them to get a computer science degree every time MS Word shows a vague popup and every time their OS hides or changes the way it works, or every time a major software update breaks existing functionality.
I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!
Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.
Dark patterns in software usually involve UI/UX, so knowing to code doesn't really help with those. On the other hand, being able to code an app might be enough to make someone go "why is it like that? I know it doesn't have to be!" in response to a dark pattern.
Unfortunately the Supreme court has become more and more pro-corporations, which means that buying a car or getting a job is a lengthy one-sided legal contract likely waiving your right to trial by an elected judge, trial by jury, choice of forum/law, and arbitration costs that are significantly higher than if you were to go through a regular court. Of course the company has already picked the venue and arbitration company that is most favorable to them.
I'd be curious if there's a way to characterize "the prototypic expected human" as implicitly reflected in SCOTUS decisions and how that changes over time.
For example, this decision implies people are expected to read the volumes of fine print on a ticket before they purchase it.
Seems like if you decontextualized things it might point to absurdities in current law or its interpretation.
I think many decisions are affected by certain kinds of hindsight cognitive biases that distort interpretation of context.
That's a great idea. I would probably take countless hours of poring over legal documents. Maybe NLP tools could help identify relevant sections of text for this purpose.
A 20% of the house voted no on it and several Congress critters said in hearings that arbitration agreements are fine because they “voluntarily entered into”. So a lot of Congress people unabashedly serve corporations.
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 after you make the purchase (such as the type of your plane ticket booked through an online agency). Et alia.
It's absolutely hilarious in the "ha ha isn't the world horrible" sense that anyone in a position of power would base legal decisions on the premise that consumers "voluntarily" enter into such agreements. It is voluntary only in the sense that the alternative is cultural/social deprivation and self-imposed exile from society. Participants in society are expected to be willing to connect to the Internet, board an airplane, etc. As it stands, entering into such an agreement is almost certainly done under duress and coercion. Any argument that consumers should "vote with their dollar" is meaningless, because there are essentially no alternatives.
To argue otherwise is to blatantly disregard the facts, to the point where it can only be done out of malice. Court justices are too intelligent and too well-educated for this to be considered a matter of ignorance.
In my opinion, the fact that the legal stuff tends to be written in fine print is almost irrelevant. People don't ignore it because it's small. If people had a real choice, they would read it anyway. The problem fundamentally is that people do not have any real choice. People don't read such agreements because they feel powerless, not because they are lazy.
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?
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.
> ... is fully and fairly notified about the existence ...
I'm not a lawyer, but recently I did watch the movie Legally Blond (recently for free at YouTube) where the character Elle Woods on her first day of Harvard Law School was sent out of a class for being "unprepared", that is, not having read 41 pages on "jurisdiction" or some such.
Well, Ms. Woods might have responded to the professor that she did nothing wrong and, thus, should not be sent out of class and all that because she was not "fully and fairly notified" of the existence of the assignment.
I thought of that while watching the movie (likely the movie audience was not supposed to think of such things!), but it is nice now to see none other than Justice Stevens make clear the importance of "fully and fairly". Might have been cute in the movie for the character Ms. Woods to raise such an objection that she was not notified!
My guess is that each such page is constructed dynamically, that is, for one specific user from a recommendation engine based on the most recent data YouTube has on that user. When I mentioned elsewhere in this thread "If click around enough at YouTube ...", that was very short for something like a guess that if a YouTube user watches a few movies and that is mostly what they do watch at YouTube, then some YouTube recommendation engine constructs for that user then a page of just movies. But that page and its URL may be valid only for a short time: So, saving the URL for later or giving it to someone else won't be useful.
Can imagine a horror movie: Joe frequently goes to the university library for applied math books but today happens to want a certain book on ancient Greek history. So, as Joe walks down an isle in the history section, the books notice that it is Joe and all change themselves to applied math! Poor Joe can't find his book on ancient Greek history!
YouTube now has maybe several dozens, maybe more, of full movies available to watch for free "with ads". Where they got the movies, I have no idea. If click around enough at YouTube, can get a Web page that lists just movies, all or nearly all for free and the rest "for rent".
In my experience, the operation of downloading a movie, or any video being played in a Web browser, at least with the software tools I have, to a file is touchy, slow, unreliable, etc. but at times works, but I was able to download, from somewhere, Sargent York. Also I was able to buy on DVD the original King Kong.
Both of these two old movies show, at least to my eyes, that the basic craft of drama, story telling, and, really, movie making was plenty advanced by the time of those two movies (the 1930s). For "York" busy movie music composer Max Steiner in places was plenty dramatic.
From such old movies, I have liked the examples of the basic craft of movie making with simpler and easier to understand movies that don't do nearly as much as a lot of more recent movies with special effects.
My guess is that most of what is important in making a movie popular is the basic craft and not the rest, and in my judgment the craft has not improved much since the best work of the 1930s. Maybe this observation is just Film School 101. Yes, current computer based special effects are amazing, but that is only an indirect approach to the main goal of the basic craft, insight into humans. Having at least some understanding of the "basic craft" is somewhat relevant to my Internet startup.
Sure, in school I was a STEM field major and refused to take literature seriously. But at times literature tries to address a serious subject -- humans. Literature does not always do well with that subject, but neither do the STEM fields.
To my eyes, sometimes literature, ..., and movies actually do well in some respects with humans, at times good enough to take seriously in the goal of understanding humans.
Both: Youtube has an official set of movies, possibly a duplicate of Google Play or a different set; and people routinely upload pirate movies, although anything more recent than about 1990 is likely to get a copyright strike.
Justice Stevens is the best. He wrote the sole Dissent on Nordlinger v Hahn (a case where we we had a chance to end the nightmare that is Californias Prop 13) referring to long-time California property owners as "Squires" in the process https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html
Clarence Thomas OTOH wrote the Concurrence and even refused to sign the Opinion because the court didn't go far enough and overturn a previous ruling from Pennsylvania which would have given property owners even more tax cuts. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/19/us/supreme-court-justices...
It's funny, I showed this website to a lawyer and his response was "that's nice, but everyone uses Times New Roman in Word so that's what I have to use. My job is to write and edit, not to make things pretty. I don't see what the point is."
So here I am, a data scientist and software engineer, reading his book purely out of hobby interest, while actual attorneys have no use for it.
I suppose things are different when you are in private practice and presumably work on smaller deals with fewer numbers of people involved in editing the documents.
> Suppose a passenger boards a cruise at a port in the United States. The boat then sails from one destination to another, often among multiple countries, through international waters. This raises two questions: what law applies to the boat and people on it, and where can they bring a legal claim if needed?
> For the boat itself, there is a long and boring answer pertaining to the maritime law of the country where the ship is flagged.
> But for the passengers, the answer is simple: the ticket is a contract, and these provisions are part of the contract terms. The choice of law provision determines which jurisdiction’s laws apply; the choice of forum provision determines where cases can be heard.
I don't see how this can be the answer. Suppose...
(1) My mother (an American national) books a ticket on an international cruise.
(2) A stowaway on the ship (a French national) murders her.
(3) I would like to make some sort of claim against the murderer.
The obvious action open to me under American law is a suit for wrongful death. But my question here is... why would the cruise ship's ticket terms govern the legal situation? My mother was a party to the contract. But the stowaway wasn't. The ticket terms would only appear to be relevant if I want to sue the cruise line. But I want to sue the murderer.
They wouldn’t - the contract is between you and the cruise line only. The ticket contract’s forum/choice of law clause would have zero impact.
However, unless your stowaway murderer has assets that could be used to satisfy a judgment against them, any half decent attorney would also want to sue the cruise line as well for their culpability in allowing a stowaway on board (and the provision would apply).
The murderer is a stowaway and not bound by a contract they never signed. You would sue them under the applicable jurisdiction which, with maritime law, is incredibly complicated. You may not be able to sue the murderer at all depending on where the ship is registered.
The point of the case the article talks about is the enforceability of contracts between two parties with respect to choice of law/forum even when they’re almost contracts of adhesion. If you don’t sign the contract (or the other party doesn’t sign the contract) then it’s not relevant to your situation.
If it was an either-or situation, odds are, you would be better off holding the cruise line responsible for failing to secure the boat and its passengers.
Even if you could sue the murderer, you wouldn't get as much money, and civil suits in the US don't send people to jail.
Being from a family of lawyers, I was always told that fine print on documents you didn't sign or initial essentially has no weight in court. I'm not a lawyer and I've never tested this hypothesis personally, but I tend to disregard it as something that wouldn't hold up if I had a valid claim.
Good to be skeptical of that idea, courts consider many forms of consent contractual as long as they can be accepted as proof of consent. Periodically, a jurisdiction may explicitly specify that a certain form of consent is necessary, presumably to unbog their court system.
Secondly, a lot of fine print benefits you. missed out on crazy compensation during a minor inconvenience just because you skipped locking in provable consent to the contract? oops
I'd love it if you could give examples, preferably more than one. Because most people's view of "fine print" is that it is invariably out to screw you over as hard as possible.
It allows Carnival Cruise Lines to operate cheaply. Cruises depend on cheap labor and low costs. This brings affordable cruise vacations to the masses, as well as employment opportunities in the industry.
There are vacation alternatives, such as land-based resorts. But they tend to be more expensive.
The downside to cheapening every experience for the masses is that you then have to create some kind of extraordinarily untouchable / "aspirational" product for the rich. I thought it was better when flying, taking cruises, or going to Vegas were things accessible to the everyman, but which people had to really earn. As a result, they looked their best, dressed their best, and were on their best behavior. Everyone who simply needed to get somewhere could take a bus or a train. People who wanted a dumpy vacation could drive to Disneyland.
Turning middle-class totems like a once-a-year flight or once-in-ten-years cruise into a situation where 90% of it is sold as herd steerage with markups for barely better "business class" or whatever, had this one perverse effect: It separated the truly rich from the middle class, once and for all. For although the upper-upper-middle class still fly Business or First, the upper class only fly in private jets and no longer interact with the middle or lower class whatsoever. The distance between coach and business became a chasm between a commercial flight and a private jet.
It would be cool to start a middle class airline, or cruise, where everything was just expensive enough to make people act civilized.
>> There are vacation alternatives, such as land-based resorts. But they tend to be more expensive.
Yeah, then again, after watching "White Lotus" I guess we're just completely fucked. No one acts civilized anymore.
I remember reading that in Germany, an EULA is unenforceable unless you have the opportunity to read it before purchasing the product. I imagine this was much more of an issue back in the days when software came on CDs in boxes at stores, and not as downloads.
Do note though that „legal fine print“ is similar to „React-Node.js-Mongodb“ boilerplate.
Meaning that it sometimes makes sense to not have to start off at zero.
Also complaining about long contracts is like saying „I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Depending on the program, this might be a little capricious.
If somebody handed me a program and asked me to prove that there wasn't a virus/security vulnerability hidden somewhere in the source code, yeah I might well say that "I don't like this program because the source code is too long“. Especially if I had to do that for a different program every time I wanted to buy or do pretty much anything at all
Nobody is arguing against reusable, well-tested chunks of legal text!
The argument is that there are too many detailed requirements for typical consumers to reasonably agree to, and moreover they tend to be hidden away where users can't even find them anyway.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think Justice Stevens' objection that the text was too small actually misses the mark. What else are they going to do, have you mail an old-school SASE to an office, or go to some website?
The problem is that consumers don't actually have alternatives to agreeing to terms like this, so the assertion that consumers enter into these agreements "voluntarily" is flawed, because it's not voluntary if there are no alternatives.
If the contract is long but most of it are examples, explanations of terms, and references to where and how things are defined then length would not be a problem.
> Though David Foster Wallace’s famous journalistic argument against cruising had dampened my interest
Uh, did anyone else click this link? If you did, you find find a pdf that is effectively impossible to read on a mobile device. This seems ironic in an article about being able to read the fine print.
Care to explain the relevance aside from this also being about a SCOTUS justice?
Your description is exceeding vague, and I don’t have a ton of time to listen to a NPR story though from the description it seems like it’s just a general discussion about his life.
Off topic question but can anyone explain this baby/toddler talk "did a thing" / "said a thing" meme that is spreading lately? I hear it at work from some of my dev team and just curious if I'm missing some sarcastic/jokey reference every time it's being said.
It's a rhetorical device. Babies wouldn't understand it.
When used in earnest, it tends to sound breathless and dramatic, probably because that's how trashy journalists use it in headlines.
It tends to be used as a kind of statement of passive resignation. It's deliberately the most colorless, blandest, simplest way to possibly express the idea that it expresses. Whereas you might otherwise say "well that's new" or "ugh, I forgot about X", you might say "that's a thing."
It also seems to be somewhat of a recurring meme, I remember reading an article showing how this "a thing" phrase makes the rounds every couple of decades.
I think there are some really ugly phrases out there now ("ask" as a noun instead of "request" or "task" is kind of nauseating).
But lighten up a little bit, some people like to have fun when they speak. Think of it like absurdist humor, rather than baby talk.
I know it's trendy in some circles to claim that adults have become infantilized or whatever, but I don't think that's what's happening here.
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. Someone who is familiar with standards of bridge inspections in most towns hesitates every time they drive over one. A computer security expert keeps their most valuable information under lock and key in a physical safe rather than online.
My conclusion ultimately is – everything is running on goodwill and duct tape, and ignorance is bliss.