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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Also, while a child has little chances dealing with an adult, it's also true that an adult layman has little chances against an adult professional.

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Which is why the very notion of consenting to contracts completely suspect when one side is a larger corporation and the other side is someone with an average IQ and education. You should no more honor their contract than you would a contract between the average child and the average adult.

So what's the solution then? Are corporations are supposed to hire an "average" person to write an employment contract for them, so that the playing field is level? Or is the employee supposed to hire a lawyer to inform them, which is something they can already do? Does the mom-and-pop down the street that hires teenagers with a contract from LegalZoom qualify? At what level of sophistication is this line drawn?

The only real position I see here is something like arethuza discussed [0] where the employer reimburses the employee for legal fees related to reviewing and negotiating the contract. Though questions of "when does this apply" are still unsolved.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11059309

Banning unreasonable clauses is a good step. It's not a complete solution, but those are rarely possible anyway.

Better education would be another good step. WTF Are Contracts 101 should be a required course at every high school, along with WTF Are Credit Cards, WTF is Voting, and How TF Do Taxes Work.

Agreed on all counts, though it's mostly unrelated to Lawtonfogle's exact suggestion that I was replying to. I've held for a long time that every high school needs to have a mandatory personal finance class, which would cover things like budgets, credit, and taxes. I could see a kind of "personal legality" class being useful also.

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