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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

I like to remind people that it's not "you versus AT&T" it's "you versus a quarter million experts in their respective domains."

I would expect any average individual to lose against AT&T in whatever their issue is unless AT&T willingly concedes to them.

Picking on AT&T for no particular reason.

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I once spent nine months in what seemed like a losing battle with AT&T for them to correctly account for two checks I wrote that they credited to my old phone number rather than my new phone number. I had to write a letter to my state's Public Service Commission before I could get the attention of AT&T's executive office and get their collections department off of my back.

This is why corporations need to remain small.

The inefficiencies are what make the system A)navigable, and B) work.

When you have humans trying to run something that no human can fully mentally represent without significant investment in external memory aids, you have a recipe for disaster, because one bad move by a large actor propagates far better than the same move by a smaller actor.

Real life analogy: Your kid trips.<-Less severe YOU TRIP.<-More severe

Hyperbolic analogy: Jack trips Giant trips

Which has worse consequences?

That's an intersting point. Perhaps things would be more level if a conflict between an individual would be settled by selecting one RANDOM employee from that company (not the super ninja expert in the narrow field at hand), and have them battle it out in a lower court / arbitration.

No, just do like you do with children who sign contracts, invalidate any obligations the child has to the adult, but the adult is still bound to any obligations they have, and punish the adult for trying to take advantage of the child.

Ideally, the ability for individuals to sign contracts with corporations should be forbidden. Maybe a single 1 person corporation that doesn't involve a lawyer either direct or as a contractor.

I don't think the world could function without contracts.

I get into a restaurant, I order some food. That's a contract where I get into the obligation of paying, and they get into the obligation of serving the food.

It's much more likely that the justice system needs a complete rework.

You would still have contracts, they would be limited to being between people of similar power, and a lot stronger protections for someone being taken advantage of.

That would work only slightly better than the top level salary cap being the lowest salary - dodged via a nesting doll of layered corporations as contractors or using actual ones. In that case they would have a top level entity with C-levels and elite lawyers which just so happens to own the rights and assume legal responsibility for the lower corporation.

In which case just save everyone the hassle and pass a law requiring proportionality to the degree of defined max lawyers per lawsuit of size defined in some workable metric so it doesn't take decades just to go through every mortgage in a AAA bank with solo lawyers on each side. It would limit the use of lawyer armies but it may lose a constitutional challenge on grounds of right to petition the government for redress.

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