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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>At what point do you expect legally competent adults to pay attention to and take responsibility for what they're doing?

At no point. I don't even consider it a matter of "responsibility". You can only take responsibility when things are clearly laid out. But what about the even more important responsibility to CLEARLY lay things out that should fall into businesses?

What I do expect and find important, and should be legally binding, is that no business should be allowed to hide the actual impact of purchases behind legalese and long-winded "financial product" descriptions, and then put the blame on the customer for not "reading through it".

At the very least, they should be explicitly, and in common, everyday language, give something like: "The average buyer that used this financing option ended up paying X% above the base price".

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"At the very least, they should be explicitly, and in common, everyday language, give something like: "The average buyer that used this financing option ended up paying X% above the base price". " All this does is increase the number of documents.

Seriously. How do you think it got to be so many documents, where half are disclaimers and "plain english" warnings/etc for the consumer.

They usually don't hide the actual impact.

In the three states i've bought houses, there is at least one page in the set that literally says "you are taking out a loan for $x your interest rate is x% after 30 years, you will have paid $x for this loan"

Similar things happen for auto financing. What more do you want?

Also note that no amount of plain english is going to make complicated things both simple to understand and correct in all the details. That's in fact, exactly why they are complicated. Most loan documents are pretty plain english these days, so it's usually not overuse of legalese either.

(plus, what makes it easy for you to understand may not be the same as for others).

One does not get to say it's everyone else's job to make you competent.

If you go and implement PaxOS and screw it up, you are welcome to try to blame Lamport for writing impenetrable papers, but most people are going to blame you for not making yourself competent.

>All this does is increase the number of documents.

Perhaps you didn't get what I said.

That information should be displayed (by law) with prominent letters as big as the base price, under any sign/ad/etc which shows the latter.

Not to be buried in another document.

How can a person making an ad know how long a buyer's loan term will be or what interest rate they will qualify for? How would you know the value of any potential trade ins?

The same way they know the price -- which can also change.

They note the currently (and for the mid-term future) values.

It's 2017, it's not like ads are written in stone and can't be altered when the facts change.

Things like the interest rate you qualify for are unique to the buyer. How can a print ad in the newspaper know the interest rate the buyer will qualify for? How can a print ad in a newspaper know what the purchaser of a car is going to trade in? There's not even a customer yet.

I got what you said. Apparently you missed mine, so let me try again, hopefully a little more clearly :)

You say the point is:

"That information should be displayed (by law) with prominent letters as big as the base price, under any sign/ad/etc which shows the latter."

I'm saying: It already is Along with everything else other people considered to be just as important to make sure everyone knew. :)

IE The thing you want, has already happened. You cannot find it, because not everyone agreed with you about what is the most important, so now you have 50 pages of the base price and the other important thing in big letters.

You defend the leeching practices of financiers by the claim that the law already demands obvious hints in contracts, but consequently pretend that there was no obligation to educate. This is a contradiction.

> but most people are going to blame you for not making yourself competent

Shouldn't it go both ways? Businesses might be confident with your assertion and might rely on it to do business. But blame is the wrong attitude if you go in holding that opinion it's fraud. If you let someone sign a contract although you are sure they didn't read it, that's fraud. Simple as that. Why do I get weird looks when I actually start reading a contract I am about to sign?

"You defend the leeching practices of financiers by the claim that the law already demands obvious hints in contracts, but consequently pretend that there was no obligation to educate. This is a contradiction. "

As i mentioned elsewhere, the vast majority of states very explicitly require education as well!

". If you let someone sign a contract although you are sure they didn't read it, that's fraud.'

Actually, it's not by any definition of fraud. You have not intentionally deceived anyone of anything. It would only be fraud if you intentionally told them the wrong thing, or deliberately tried to get them to not read it, or something more than "knowing this person has not educated themselves". We don't have a lot of thoughtcrimes.

It may be a void contract, but it's definitely not fraud!

" Why do I get weird looks when I actually start reading a contract I am about to sign?"

I don't, so i'm not sure. In fact, in any real estate transaction i've ever been a part of, if i say "hey, do you mind if i take a few minutes to read this page more closely and ask you some questions about it", the answer i get is not "rolled eyes", it's "absolutely, that's what i'm here for"

That was what my car loan paperwork did. It had a table with the negotiated price, the APR, the interest over the term of the loan, and the total price.

I expect this is legally mandated, and the question I have is which states are preferring to let the dealers prey on people?

This looks like people fumbling cryptocoin purchases (or getting them lost for some reason or another) and people answering with "ah you should have known better and done the right way"

But ought personal responsibility matter? People willingly sign this stuff.

Personal responsibility is not a binary.

And in any transaction I put the first blame in the person which had the more information in advance. It's their duty to inform the other, especially if they are the one's receiving the money.

Taleb has written something close to that recently:

I worked once for a classic U.S. investment bank of the prestigious variety, called “white shoe” because the partners were members of hard-to-join golf clubs where they played the game wearing white footwear. As with all such firms, an image of ethics and professionalism was cultivated. But the job of the salespeople (actually, salesmen) on days when they wore black shoes was to “unload” inventory with which traders were “stuffed”, that is, securities they had in plethora in their books and needed to get rid of them to lower their risk. (...) Salesmen hawked how a given security will be perfect for the client’s portfolio, how they were certain it would rise in price and how the client would suffer great regret if he missed “such an opportunity”, that type of discourse. Salespeople were experts in the art of psychological manipulation, making the client trade, often against his own interest, while being happy about it and loving them and their company. One of the top salesman of the firm, a man of huge charisma who came to work in a chauffeured Rolls Royce, was once asked whether customers didn’t get upset when they got the short end of the stick. “A customer is born every day” was his answer.

Which brings us to the notion of asymmetry, the core concept behind skin in the game. The question becomes: to what extent can people in a transaction have an informational differential between them? The ancient Mediterranean and, to some extent the modern world, seems to be converging to Antipater’s position. While we have “buyer beware” (caveat emptor) in the Anglo-Saxon West, the idea is rather new, and never general, often mitigated by lemon laws. So to the question voiced by Cicero of a debate between the two ancient stoics, “If a man knowingly offers for sale wine that is spoiling, ought he to tell his customers?” , the world is getting closer to Diogenes position of transparency, not necessarily via regulations as much as thanks to tort laws, one’s ability to sue for harm in the event the seller deceived him.

> What I do expect and find important, and should be legally binding, is that no business should be allowed to hide the actual impact of purchases behind legalese and long-winded "financial product" descriptions, and then put the blame on the customer for not "reading through it".

And in general, as I pointed out here, such contracts tend to be invalid in court. However, signing a piece of paper in plain english certifying saying "I read it" when one did not ought to mean something.

A legal doctrine where one can not bother reading contracts and yet get them decided in favor of ones imaginary terms doesn't sound like a workable system. The whole point of written contracts is so there's a record of what the terms were and what was agreed upon.

> A legal doctrine where one can not bother reading contracts and yet get them decided in favor of ones imaginary terms doesn't sound like a workable system.

Having to agree to dozens of pages of contract every day just to do seemingly ordinary things like using websites or ordering stuff online doesn't sound like a workable system either.

>However, signing a piece of paper in plain english certifying saying "I read it" when one did not ought to mean something.

If that was the case, EULA also should "mean something".

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