Georgia teacher read the fine print and won $13K (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Georgia teacher read the fine print and won $13K (2019)

cbc.ca

232 pointsColinWright171 comments

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of the visibly nervous PhD student who walks into their thesis oral defense and sets down an expensive bottle of aged single malt whisky. The chair asks, "Before we begin, I am curious why you brought a bottle of whisky to your defense?" The student suddenly relaxes and says, "Oh, um, I'll explain after we finish." The student confidently answers all the committee's questions and the defense goes smoothly. When they conclude, the chair prompts, "Say, what about the whisky?" The student replies, "Oh that. In my dissertation on page four it says I will give the whisky to the first committee member who asks for it."

It reminds me of a story that a PhD student stuck a $10 (the value varies) bill into the copy of their thesis that got filed in the library. Some <large # of> years later, they came back to see that no one had taken it.

This sort of just happened and made news. A professor left clues to money in his syllabus and no one got it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...

And the actual “clue” looked like a borked copy paste in the part of the syllabus telling you about university wide policies that the student would have read elsewhere already.

But sure lazy students don’t read the syllabus

Yeah this was a little viral hit that went down well with boomers, but it was pretty sneaky. Everyone seems to be suggesting that if the kids these days just did what they were supposed to then they could have scored a crisp $50 and had all the avocado toast they ever wanted.

But where exactly was the text and how did the students miss it? These articles say it was "in the syllabus" but don't really go much further. I don't have access to the full syllabus but a snippet showing its immediate surroundings is available:

    ...
    objectives. As a result, skill-based
    courses in music may be exempt
    from Covid-related accomodations
    as a progression in skills must be
    obtained across the semester to be
    successfull in these course. Thus 
    (free to the first who claims; locker
    one hundred forty-seven; 
    combination fifteen, twenty-five,
    thirty-five), students may be 
    ineligible to make up classes and
    coursework beyond the specified 
    number of days as determined by 
    the instructor. Requests will be
    decided on a case-by-case basis with
    specific emphasis on the ability to
    achieve learning outcomes.

    Technology Support: If you have
    problems with your UTC email
    ...

So it was right near the "please contact the tech support department if you need tech support" message. Basically it's in some boilerplate that every course has and nobody reads because they want to actually do their work and don't expect some professor to try to score internet points by pranking them this way. NPR could've done exactly the same thing on that article by adding a clause to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy docs that are linked, but which we all probably ignored and just clicked "Agree and Continue" to view the article.

It's not just that it's embedded in some of the university boilerplate that the students probably have on all their syllabuses, it's that it doesn't read like anything, certainly not a promise of a free $50.

Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.

Also, if I read that, I would assume that figuring out where I needed to go and actually taking time to do that would end up in nothing, so I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't expect to get rich off it, and the chance at (apparently) $50 wouldn't excite me enough for me to waste my time on it.

When i was in college, a chance at say 50$ would totally tempt me to spend a few hours hunting around campus ( Arizona State Uni for me ), i made ~$8 an hour at the time

Sure, it could be a fun thing to do (I'd have done a little treasure hunt for $50, too), but the professor's syllabus doesn't say it's $50 at all. "Free to the first who claims" -- claims what? free what? It isn't even a complete sentence, in the middle of boilerplate that's if anything exceedingly verbose. It doesn't parse like meaningful instructions. That's why I think it's a hokey gotcha, and not an actual sign of "people don't read instructions" (which we all instinctively know anyway??)

Sigh. I never had such luck.

During a first year university computer science course, students were told to line up and sign an agreement for access to department computer labs. Most of the students lined up, grabbed the paperwork when they reached the front of the queue, then promptly signed it. I decided to actually read the paperwork, which earned me the privilege of standing at the side until the task was complete. No sneaky clauses, for the better or the worse, in my humble opinion. I simply had the privilege of standing out.

Not that it really mattered. I walked away learning a different lesson since I already had access to their computer systems. I already asked for permission to access their systems, and was granted permission without doing the paperwork. For the most part, these agreements are intended to handle the typical case, and are meant to inform rather than be a rigid contract. (The irony: I consider trust as sacrosanct, so I often over comply with the rules.)

I've been publicly ridiculed a few times in my life for actually reading something before signing it. Once was a liability waiver for white water rafting. I was yelled at and it was shouted to the group "we got a reader here!!!". Cannot believe how indifferent people are to companies trying to take away their legal rights

Most people neither fundamentally understand (1) what a contract is or (2) what their options are regarding it.

Which is sad, because it's not rocket science.

PS: You should have yelled back "We have an illiterate guide here!" Anyone berating reasonable behavior deserves to be called out as an asshole.

Most people have the (incorrect) understanding that anything and everything in a contract is binding, to the point you could demand their first born child as a deposit for a lease and they'd shrug and say "it's in the contract, so I guess I have to".

Do these contracts actually stand up in court if people sign without reading them and being given due consideration? Can’t find the link but I recall years ago some EULA provisions were found to be unreasonable and void by the courts (US I think).

Yes. There are some rights you can't sign away (e.g. you can't sell yourself into slavery, or use your kidney as collateral), but otherwise yes.

Legally what's important is that you had the opportunity to read the contract before you agreed to it. In HN terms, as an example, you can't legally steal GPL'd code if you don't bother to cat LICENSE.md

Consideration is a hard requirement for a binding contract. Note however that consideration in contract law doesn't mean the same thing as in general usage: in contract law it means "something of value". So a contract promising to give someone a guitar is not enforceable, but a contract promising to sell a guitar for $100 is.

In general the likelihood that the parties have read the contract doesn't have any bearing on the enforceability of it. But most such contracts are also contracts of adhesion (roughly speaking a take-it-or-leave-it offer), and there are special rules for the enforceability of contracts of adhesion. The principle is that they can't be too surprising or too unfair. There's a fair amount of case law about where that line is (which I mostly don't know).

That's when you pull out a blue pen and start striking clauses and making edits, then ask them to initial.

Reciprocate when they want to read the changes you made, if their heads don't explode first.

I will try this the next time I sign something.

they'll say no, and chances are you already prepaid, so they'll take your payment and you'll be stuck somewhere for hours until everyone else is done

Has anyone had a locker at university? As 10000 students attend that university, I doubt the students had any idea where lockers even were.

It depends, at UIC, there were lockers in some of the classroom buildings that were in use. I’d guess that, yes, students would be aware of locker locations.

Many people put answers to assignments and exams in the course material and very few people get it.

Is this a clever way of saying "studying"? :)

I think I remember a story about a professor that said they can stop taking the exam and turn it in if they read a sentence in the exam which was placed like halfway through and only a few people in the class actually did that.

Isn't that kinda the point of these materials in the first place? :)

I’m pretty sure phd dissertation hard copies are never read over in the library anymore. Digital downloads only.

Were they ever read?

An amusing counter example - I was asked to proof a students assignment. I did and the essay seemed weird and I couldn’t work out why, but the content was ok.

Some hours later I realised the work was mine, and had been placed in the library as an example of something (presumably anonymised). Good times.

Well, I do not think I have ever read a dissertation from cover to cover that I checked out from the library, but I did read several substantial sections of quite a few when I was in graduate school. These ones were older and not yet digitized (1960s to 1980s). I had to request them from storage and read them in a reading room. I was just looking for certain kinds of experimental data for my own research and had no reason to read them cover to cover. I agree that people rarely check out hard copies of dissertations anymore but certainly many people do from time to time when needed.

Were these the original hard copies each graduating PhD student must file after they’ve defended? That would involve physically going to some random university to physically check out some random person’s dissertation where the dissertation wasn’t notable enough to be available online. I just can’t see that happening, unless somehow the university you were studying at had the random dissertations that you wanted to read.

If it wasn’t the original hard copy but a copy then I don’t think the $20 bill would be there regardless.

Yes, these were the original hard copies. I was only talking about dissertations filed at the school I went to, so I fortunately did not have to go anywhere. I just had to put in the request and wait a day or two for them to arrive at the reading room from storage.

You are correct that getting dissertations from far off universities is often impossible. Many universities do not loan their dissertations via interlibrary loan, so unless it is online or you are willing to travel to their campus, you can't get access to it. ProQuest is another option, but they do not have everything and it costs money.

I've heard the 20 dollar bill story many times but I have never found anything like that in an original hard-copy dissertation. If I recall correctly, I have found things used as bookmarks, like receipts or scraps of paper, and the cards in the back cover are often stamped at least once a decade. That seems to suggest that other people have read them over the years, just not as often as other materials.

I had heard that some MFA student had written in the library copy of his thesis, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.” Alas, I was part of the two MFA cohorts whose theses were electronically filed which means that it’s unlikely anyone will ever read it even if I did become famous.

We had a PhD student who removed a random different page from his thesis that got sent to each of his committee members.

I went into my thesis with a preprint of a paper exposing a fraud in my thesis chair's lab, literally in my back pocket... As a confidence booster.

When editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley would go to Olsson's, which then had the biggest bookstores in Washington, DC, and leave slips redeemable for $10 or $20 inside copies of the books that "everyone" was taking about and supposedly reading. He never had to pay out.

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions.

They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”

But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”

The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”

About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.

One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way.

Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.

That’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”

I had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian).

Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet.

Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”

Yes! Let us give children the world's worst UX, and then mock them for its inevitable failure!

This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".

I don't know how you could oveethink this that badly.

It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier.

You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.

> It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.

This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish.

It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions.

Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.

An English teacher did this to us. The first big problem is about half of the students knew about the trick because friends in one of her earlier classes told us about it. So half the class got 100% not for reading the instructions but for having friends willing to go against the spirit of the task. The second problem was that it was intentionally formatted to look like the instructions were the paragraph at the top of the page and everything below were tasks. The teacher had a huge grin on her face about the whole thing, apparently happy that she was able to outsmart a group (well, half a group) of children. A classroom relationship between the teacher and students should be built on trust and fairness, both of which she damaged that day.

Same here. Probably 80’s. Kids those days too. I was the fastest reader so the first to prance around.

Isnt there a movie called Exam that does nearly the same thing?

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions.

They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”

But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”

The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”

About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny.

Two different teachers did this at my school (two years in a row). The second year, nobody fell for it. I felt a little bad for that teacher.

I suppose the teacher was glad though.

Yeah, I had that about 3 or 4 times in school. By the third one, people were just flat telling the ones that fell for it not to continue, and why.

Lmao, sounds like it went viral with a certain demographic

Yep, early 6th grade for me.

In my university, in the department where I worked as a post-grad, worked someone who had pulled such a trick in their dissertation. That person was later hired by the university, worked for some years, and was suddenly confronted by a colleague who demanded the bottle. That dissertation actually contained something on the topic of their research, and that page finally found its reader.

(Yes, that guy did produce the bottle as promised, from his words.)

The version I recall was something like a doctoral candidate shows up to their defense, points out that no member of their committee had claimed the free bottle of scotch mentioned in their dissertation (implying no one on the committee had read the diss. closely), and so candidate was allowed to drink the scotch during the defense.

Never assume that a company pushing a contract at you has bothered to read it. Let alone checked any facts.

- Last time I renewed a lease with $Huge_Property_Management_Co, I noticed that our security deposit was being held by a bank which had gone out of business. Several years early. Said bank's address, as listed in the lease, was an office building which $Huge_Property_Management_Co had purchased when the bank folded. Media coverage from that purchase featured a Senior V.P. of $Huge_Property_Management_Co, who was talking up all the great things which they would do with the former bank HQ building. (The leasing agent I was dealing with reacted as if such screw-ups were dull routine.)

- Some years back, we signed up for web hosting with $Major_Hosting_Provider. (~9-digit annual revenue and 4-digit headcount back then.) Part way through their T&C, their lawyer forgot that each bullet point in the list of unforgivable offenses was supposed to begin with "Not...". So their T&C's required their customers to host content advocating violence, and to host content infringing copyrights, and to host child pornography... (I called their bottom-tier Customer Service, and pointed that out. Pause...within seconds I was transferred direct to the head of their Legal Dept.)

Related to your second example, I’ve heard a case of a job contract, pre-singed by the management, requiring the employee to take every effort to harm the company and its interests at its expense.

I’m not sure if it was the same company, but the person with this anecdote also told me about an EULA that was copied verbatim from an unrelated product by a different business, including the name of both.

When I was about to sign my mortgage I noticed that one condition was mostly duplicated word for word in two nearby paragraphs. Looked like a botched copy-paste while rearranging the document.

It wasn't a huge problem because it didn't add any new requirement and second occurence didn't even make sense in context it was in.

But when I brought this to attention of employee that gave me the agreement to sign, even though she read those fragments, she didn't acknowledged that they are duplicates and instead insisted that agreement is flawless because it came from the central

Similarly when we closed on our last house I noticed they messed up the math on the closing paperwork and my final mortgage payment wasn’t updated to current.

I mentioned this multiple times and they got nasty with me and told me I’m wasting my and everyone’s time reading the paperwork and it’s all boilerplate. And it’s never wrong. Especially the math. It’s what they do for a living, yadda yadda.

I just shut up and signed the closing agreement. Escrow closed and they paid me an extra couple thousand.

A few months later they called me…at 7:30 am to ask for the money. I told them they had title insurance and file a claim. Then came the sob stories. I told them my time isn’t free and I’m gonna have to spend some time to pull the paperwork, rerun the math etc.

In the end I gave them half back. Told them I deducted my hourly rate I 1099 others. That if they really wanted it they could take me to small claims. Never heard from them again.

And now I tell every person that mentions buying a house not to use that title company.

I wish you hadn’t given anything back. Let them fry.

Should have started with the small claims argument, if they had not respected their contract.

Genuine opportunities to skewer arrogant fucks are so rare I don’t know why people would bother being so diplomatic, I would have thrown the contract in their face and reminded them repeatedly of what he told them before. He owes them nothing. Let them sob and fight as hard as possible while wasting time and effort to correct their own mistake.

I could have and would be a lie if I said I hadn’t considered it. But realistically it wasn’t my money, incompetence or not. Regardless of the sim it was a mora issue more than monetary.

'insisted that agreement is flawless because it came from the central'

Those drones are the best, it's like dealing with a machine, but more impressive

> drones

Flesh and bones automaton?! Marvelous!

Also use 'Avatar - For The Swarm' as a soundtrack when interacting with them.

Years ago when I was working at a different company, all employees were given an agreement that we were required to sign, regarding (non-)disclosure of confidential information. I carefully read the document, and noticed a section that basically said we were not allowed to disclose any information about our products to anyone outside of the company. It obviously should have specified not to disclose confidential information, but taken literally, we were not allowed to tell customers about our products at all, such as by publishing advertising/marketing materials.

I emailed the president about this, who forwarded my concern to the lawyer who created the agreement. The president then forwarded the lawyer's reply back to me, which more or less said that I was an idiot. Deciding this wasn't a battle worth fighting, I replied "well, since I'm not a lawyer, I'll have to take his word for it that a judge in court would interpret this clause the way he claims it is intended", and signed it.

The agreement also said that the president was supposed to co-sign each signed agreement and return a copy back to the employee, and since I never actually received my co-signed copy, I have to assume it never became binding for me anyway.

The problem with all these “nobody reads this” contests and “proofs” is that communication always and must be both parties’ job. If 1 in 100 doesn’t understand you then it’s probably them, but if it’s 99 in 100 then it’s you who screwed up. They didn’t screw up. Heck, if 10 in 100 don’t understand you, then a professional should be able to do better. Yet here these guys are, fully understanding that they sit at something like 999 in 1,000, and pulling an “it’s not me, it’s everybody else”.

I think it stems from the law validating that view. Courts don’t care if 999 in 1,000 didn’t understand you, they’ll enforce whatever was written. That makes it beneficial to not be understood, because you can basically get courts to enforce terms that you unilaterally dictate. So contracts and laws devolve into a contest of unintelligibility, limited only by ability to prove to a court that you did say the thing: slipping in surprising and unrelated clauses, misleading headings and names, different vocabulary from common English, etc. Contrast that to warning signs and to communication between teammates, which have evolved a totally different communication style, because in those cases it’s actually detrimental to be misunderstood.

This is really not how law works. Courts don't enforce whatever's written (look up "unconscionability" for one thing), and contracts are parsed as an attempt to come to a mutual agreement ("meeting of the minds"). Law has a very specialized vocabulary, and contracts are influenced by a great deal of case law, but it's not a game of tricks.

You’re right mostly. It is about reaching a meeting of the minds. And law isn’t some thing with “loopholes” and “one weird tricks” but contracts generally contain integration clauses that state that the entirety of the agreement is contained inside the language of the signed contract itself. What this means is that as long as the terms are not illegal (such as usurious interest rates or run afoul of consumer protection laws or any number of other things), typically if it’s in the contract, it’s enforced. This manifests itself in situations where someone will cross out clauses that they object to before signing and those clauses don’t have any effect given they’re stricken, or where things are added and then enforced.

This creates a little need for trust among legal peers because this sort of thing can happen if one is not careful, but in a professional environment adding in things randomly is a serious breach of trust.

All the obfuscation I described is present in EULAs, ToSs, and US law, all of which are enforced, when called upon, mostly as written. Maybe there is a higher standard in custom B2B contracts, but that really gets down to the point of it: you start seeing clear communication only when the speaker is motivated to be understood.

And I wouldn’t call it trickery, because that implies intent. I think the forces at play make no distinction between a knowing operator and somebody who just does what’s normal, what’s safe. I think plenty of companies slap an unintelligible ToS on their website not as a trick, not even thinking of it as unintelligible, but just because there’s good evidence that this particular boilerplate protects them in court.

If some random website has a ToS that said by using this service you sign over the deed to your house and add our company to your will, no court would enforce that. Pretty much anything unusual outside of the standard terms is hard to get a court to enforce in a b2c ToS setting.

I wouldn't risk it

A lot of time the vocabulary has equivalents people would regularly understand, what advantage is there in keeping the obtuse language? I understand old laws exist but in such cases new laws could point to the equivalency instead of continuing the undecipherable mess.

> what advantage is there in keeping the obtuse language?

Because if a new legal vocabulary was introduced, I would now have to read contracts in both "old legalese" and "new legalese".

I don't think it really matters how clearly contracts are written or how simple the language is; most people won't read them anyway.

I did this with code once: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/2899/files

Ha nice

I wonder about this from a legal perspective. Everyone knows that no one reads the T&C but companies will argue that they do. But here they're tacitly admitting that they know their customers aren't reading the T&Cs. So where's the meeting of the minds to enforce any of it?

By signing without having read all of the contract, you are voluntarily forfeiting your right and agree to be bound by whatever is in there.

Basically you are signing a blank cheque.

Therefore, to protect consumers, modern legal systems put limits to what T&Cs may contain (everything past the red lines is nonbinding)

interestingly I have seen the UI design choice to prevent you from agreeing to the T&C unless you at least scroll all the way to the bottom of it (not a guarantee you've read it, however). noticed this recently with the official apple app to find nearby airtags on android.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/13/22832731/apple-android-a...

There's also UI trends in the opposite direction, encouraging users not to read a contract at all. After "signing" a location, DocuSign will automatically scroll to the next place requiring a "signature". In order to actually read the contract, you must scroll back to the earlier location.

Or, the inability to mark up a contract while going through it. With a physical contract, changes can be written in and initialed. In DocuSign, any changes require an out-of-band communication, adjustment by the party preparing the contract, and re-issuing. There's no reason that it couldn't be handled in-band, with changes inserted, highlighted, and sent back for the other party to sign. Instead, it only presents the option of signing as-is.

that's just terrible all around. I'm glad that at least some docusign competitors exist. Docusign pricing is also nuts for what you get. It does seem to have become entrenched as the default choice by office admin people who don't know anything else exists.

you know something has gone wrong when a subscription based adobe product has better pricing than docusign.

DocuSign is for contract execution. You shouldn't send a packet unless both parties are willing to execute.

Without the forced scrolling, it would be reasonable to argue that the contract agreed to was the contract displayed on the screen, especially if the signer is a novice computer user.

Broadcom support site does this.

> BY OPENING THE SOFTWARE PACKAGE, CLICKING ON THE "ACCEPT" BUTTON [skip]

> Please scroll through the text to read this agreement.

Also this sometimes were played in the install kits for a various software, both with scrolling and even a humourous "WOW! Did you really read our EULA in 1.59 seconds?!"

We do that because it's good public policy for the counterparty to be able to rely on the signature as evidence of meeting of minds. But if both parties know that it hasn't happened why should it be enforced?

This event seems to prove that people do read the contract: they had planned to run the contest for a year but it was over in less than a day. The insurer might have viewed this as research to do before slipping in something really egregious, but since that hypothesis failed they (or any other firm, really) can use this research to argue that at least one customer per day reads the fine print.

Well I guess it showed that they thought it was read by nobody, but in reality it is just viewed by a fraction of 1% of customers.

(Assuming this is a large enough company to have a few hundred insurance sales each day).

In most sane countries there are strong limits on contracts for ordinary things such as renting, employment or purchases and most creative clauses you would come up with would simply be invalid if ever challenged.

That is very true. I once rented a place that was essentially shared accommodation with an elderly woman. I reviewed rental laws carefully, determined that I was renting a legally separate unit, and maintained good relations with both her and her children. Everything went well during the duration of my stay, but cases like that only work out when the law is properly crafted and nobody views themselves as above the law.

I think the meeting of the minds happens at the point where it reaches what the customer should know. That is, the customer is not only agreeing to the T&C, they're agreeing that they should know what is contained in the T&C (even if they don't really know).

But the point you're trying to make touches on contract ergonomics (is that even a thing?) and why I try to make contracts that are as short and to the point as possible. Maybe some lawyer will tell me I'm making a mistake, but of course it's a mistake not to rack up billable hours ;)

Most people are making an agreement in good faith. Bad actors will exploit a three page contract or a one thousand page contract.

> but of course it's a mistake not to rack up billable hours ;)

Doesn't making a contract shorter rather than longer imply significant rewriting?

“Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

That's true. I wouldn't mind paying a lawyer more to write less. I imagine the question of "why am I paying so much when you did so little" comes up a lot of the contract the lawyer produces isn't long.

The TOS largely don’t matter. They can generally be summed up to “we reserve the right to use your data however you want and ban/delete/modify your account for any reason”

I skim contracts, I’m mostly running a diff in my head as most contracts use copy and pasted clauses so its easy to notice divergences very quickly and only read those parts

But as someone that does this I have one small request: shut the fuck up while I’m reading your contract

I’m not looking for dealbreakers, I’m looking for rights and privileges. I will ignore onerous clauses if I know the state doesn't support that clause or that I’ll challenge it either way, 99% of the time there’s no reason to bring it up or walk away even if I notice an assignment of my soul.

The number of times I've had weird looks for wanting to read what I'm signing... Definitely something that I would recommend to anybody signing anything at all: read it first.

And it this silly little habit has fairly frequently resulted in line item changes, less frequently in major changes and a few time in abandoning a contract. So this is not just a theoretical thing.

Yet I saved my mom and later my landlady by insisting on reading the contract they were about to sign.

In my mom's cause she bought a condo, and cable/phone contract was to bill her for services the previous owner had but she did not have or need.

In the case of my landlady, she thought she had a money back offer on a new furnace if she did not like it. But the fine print showed she would own them for removal of the old furnace and the installation/removal of the new old if she did not like it. I knew something was fishy since they kept trying to get her to sign the paperwork despite the fact they could not come for a couple of days to do the work. Their way would cost her $4000 even if she decided she did not want to kept their furnace, turns out she just needed a new motor that cost her $150.

The faster someone tries to get me to sign something, the slower and more carefully I read it.

Do not ever let someone rush you into signing things involving health, rights, or expensive transactions.

These insurance underwriters seem like fun folks. While reading the fine print of my credit card insurance I noticed my purchases were covered from damages from "aircraft, spacecraft, or other vehicles".

Have you taken time to give a close reading to the ICD-10[0]?

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642489

Probably every single word is there due to a particular legal precedent or carefully calculated risk.

> Probably every single word is there due to a particular legal precedent or carefully calculated risk.

Or, possibly, just a recognized incalculable risk. The frequency of natural impacts is known and not expected to be subject to rapid change; the frequency of impacts by manmade objects doesn't really have a long history of constant conditions or conditions that are not subject to change over the life of the contract.

Also, a man-made item crashing into your house is not really an accident - it's negligence. Someone other than your insurance company should be compensating you (probably the owner of the satellite, potentially the third party who knocked it out of the sky).

> Also, a man-made item crashing into your house is not really an accident - it's negligence. Someone other than your insurance company should be compensating you

It's not uncommon for insurance to cover damages other people are responsible for (and in exchange assume you right to collect from those parties.)

I mean, it's not like there isn't a human liable for theft, and that's a pretty common coverage in both homeowner's and renter’s policies.

Ah right I never thought about that - it's about their ability to recover from a third party.

That's pretty much the only reason for auto insurance. Apart from wildlife enounters, most vehicle accidents have someone at fault.

Well, I guess it depends on your coverage and country, but AFAIK in most countries the legal minimum is 3rd party insurance - which pays for repairs to other vehicles in collisions you caused.

> I mean, it's not like there isn't a human liable for theft, and that's a pretty common coverage in both homeowner's and renter’s policies.

Good point. I guess the logic is that a burglar is unlikely to be doing particularly well for themselves in life, and so may not be able to compensate you for your loss.

My house is insured if a natural object (e.g. meteorite) falls on it, but not artificial objects (this includes satellites).

I wonder how this would play out if an artificial object hit a natural object into the earth and it damaged your house, ie. [0].

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/science/nasa-dart-mission...

Dude, Where's My Landsat?

I remember reading the fine print for the first ever travel insurance I bought. It did not cover thermonuclear explosion.

The AMEX car rental coverage specifically calls out “events based upon war, or acts of war (declared, or undeclared)” as not covered.

Given that these clauses tend to arise from filed claims, I imagine someone attempted to use their car for a car-bombing, and then with a stroke of brilliance later tried to file an insurance claim.

Interestingly, that clause also cancels the theft coverage — so if your car is stolen it’s covered, unless used to engage in an act of war.

when I was younger and I had all the time in the world, I used to enter all these sweepstakes and contests that said you could buy X and then be entered into a prize pool/raffle/etc. the pro tip was to read the fine print, Ctrl+F no purchase necessary, and enter using the "alternative method"

my guess is that there must have been some gambling law requiring that there be a method to enter for free.

never got the top prizes but our mailbox was full of random things that confused my parents.

> my guess is that there must have been some gambling law requiring that there be a method to enter for free.

There is (or at least was) a law like that in Ireland, but not in the UK, leading to promotions with text like No purchase necessary in the Republic of Ireland.

https://www.rpc.co.uk/snapshots/advertising-and-marketing/as...

$10k USD, and if you look at all of the views they received just from HN today it’s about the best use of marketing spend I can think of.

I literally just read the article and I can't tell you the name of the insurance company involved

SquareMouth Travel Insurance: https://www.squaremouth.com/

Skimming through the article what I remember after 3 minutes -

- USD 10k == CAD 13k

- 4,000 Words

- A big old cheque

And that's about it.

Doesn't the fact that someone claimed the prize within 23 hours of the contest just prove that people do actually read their contracts?

It proves that at least one person read that contract. It does not prove that people in general read all, or even most, of their contracts.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of people read effectively nothing in their contract ... otherwise this wouldn't be news.

Depends what kind of contract. I carefully analysed the 300 page document when I bought an apartment but I’m obviously not reading anything when I sign up for some online account.

Especially travel insurance.. the people purchasing that are naturally more careful people otherwise they wouldn't be buying it

I do wonder if they made it too obvious by bolding the text.

Can the time to first event in a poisson distribution tell you the distribution? Im not sure it would be interesting!

Fine print in insurance contracts is probably the only fine print I ever read.

As should everyone. Last summer I learned at least some renters insurance generally doesn’t cover riots. So yes, even though you may not care if your landlord’s building goes up in flames, you should care that your personal property won’t be covered. Just calmly & peacefully (no need to brandish weapons) standing outside your apartment like you’re a homeowner can make a material difference.

That definitely doesn't sound right...

Are you sure you're not referring to some sort of clause excluding a "riot" in the context of war? I've switched renter's insurance providers a lot and never seen something like "civil commotion" not being a covered peril

This was renters insurance pushed by the landlord. Perhaps it’s the barebones the landlord was OK with (e.g. if I burn down the house cooking or create a flood changing the plumbing they get paid out and don’t give a crap about what happens outside of normal tenant-caused disasters).

What? Renter’s insurance should cover your losses, not the landlord’s.

It covers renter's liability too. Whether by accident or negligence, you can be held liable for damages to other people's property.

It pays the landlord if they sue you and win. That's why they require it commonly.

Some landlords even require tenants to cover them with your insurance as additional insured (I think this is stupid). Though it is common for business leases I believe.

> Renter’s insurance should cover your losses, not the landlord’s

Renter’s, like homeowner’s, insurance, usually includes some liability coverage. The landlord is a particularly likely person for a renter to have liabilities to.

That’s fair. I was originally thinking in terms of external events (such as the riot mentioned). But sure, liability for the renter setting the place on fire makes sense.

>Are you sure you're not referring to some sort of clause excluding a "riot" in the context of war?

Searching around it looks like "war" includes "insurrection, rebellion, revolution". Some people seem to think that jan 6th counts as such.

Did Jan 6 affect apartment buildings?

Pretty sure this comment was talking about protests that were coopted into riots around the country. In the political realm people might try and stretch the meaning of revolution, but it's pretty clear that would be covered under "civil commotion" or riots

> Did Jan 6 affect apartment buildings?

Jan 6th specifically? No. jan 6th-like event? Plausibly.

>In the political realm people might try and stretch the meaning of revolution, but it's pretty clear that would be covered under "civil commotion" or riots

Not arguing either way, but what if they succeeded and killed some representatives?

Every one of the first like nine google results says that riot coverage is standard.

Ok, I was using the renters insurance my landlord pushes. Perhaps that’s just a crummy package. Anyways, it pays to read the fine print… And even situations that seem unlikely like a riot or a pandemic, well they actually are worth getting insurance for.

Using insurance your landlord pushes sounds like a bad idea.

I've always avoided those and source my own for this reason. I doubt they have the best coverage for the renter as opposed to best for landlord outcomes. Landlords have enough money and power, this is one thing we can do within that balance to maintain some control.

It's probably more straightforward than that: the landlords just get a bonus for referrals.

Yeah, 23 hours is about what I'd expect for this. Insurance is reasonably important, and 4,000 words is quite short (~8 pages). I've read much longer insurance agreements.

If you really want one of these clauses to go unclaimed, bury it in the middle of a software EULA from a large company, like EA. Ain't nobody reading those.

Employment contracts are worth a digest too:

Compare with college students' failure to notice their professor's hint in a class syllabus: "Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and ..."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/18/us/tennessee-professor-syllab...

Which has received appropriate backlash from real teachers who actually give a damn, myself included. As a teacher, your job is to communicate, not obscure. I suppose it's sort of a cute thing to do, but he was such a smug jerk about it.

Are you saying the syllabus was deliberately obfuscated as part of the game?

How much of your class typically emails you to ask things listed on the syllabus, however clear it is, such as the final exam date?

Very infrequently, because I TALK TO THEM. I communicate with my students regularly. I don't put up b*s* barriers to learning that these nerd know-it-alls mistake for "rigor."

See this is where you have gone wrong - professors are not teachers. At a certain age, it's sink or swim.

This is a joke, right?

There's a related tangent here; Van Halen's "No Brown M&M's backstage!" clause in their venue contract. Here's one link: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232420

Basically, if they found brown M&M's backstage, it meant that the venue organizers did not read their audio / stage setup requirements, and that everything needed to be examined with a fine toothed comb.

Thanks for that, I was going to post it but saw you posted it already.

I was on a science related blog recently and I saw someone misspelled an acronym so I emailed the author. In a huge plot twist the blog author let me know these were in there intentionally, and he'd often send the blog posts to the paper authors he was corresponding with and no one pointed it out yet! In a lot of the posts he's dealing with shady pharma shill scientists who are evading his science based questions so it is a pretty good middle finger to put these booby traps in as a way to guarantee they paid even less attention to it.

I told him about the No Brown M&Ms story and he enjoyed that as well.

> he'd often send the blog posts to the paper authors he was corresponding with and no one pointed it out yet

That's not necessarily because they don't read his blog posts. There's every chance they read them and notice the misspelled acronym, but just assume it's a typo and don't mention it. It comes across as rude and petty to nitpick someone's critical writing by pointing out their typos.

I guess that's why I found it because I'm autistic and I don't agree with that conclusion, especially if someone has a science blog that's citing studies. There's a way to point out typos that's not rude or petty. The fact that people assume that intent or get offended by the intent without asking about my intent is the problem and why it sucks to be autistic a lot of the time.

It's easy to forget that generalizations are just that, and we tend to start taking them literally. "Nobody reads this stuff" is false; somebody reads this stuff. But saying "nobody reads this stuff" with that caveat implied is also true.

It's analogous to attack surface; you have to think of everything, an attacker only needs one vector.

The reason I rarely bother reading the fine print anymore, anywhere, is that way more often than not (and certainly way, way, way more often than containing any sort of prize or easter egg) the fine print is extremely poorly written, full of contradictions and vague statements that are frustrating and exhausting if trying to understand them logically. So it's just not worth the headache.

This place is ~200 feet from right where I’m sitting. They have an interesting take on several things.

For insurance policies I always read the entire policy because I want to know exactly what is covered and what isn't. They are written in fairly easy to understand language, so it's not a huge bother.

Travel insurance policies especially have a ton of exclusions.

I had a biology professor that would put directions on his test, in the directions it would say, write the following word on page 3, bingo.

If you did it he gave like 10% bonus or something on the test. Very few people read the directions.

That seems unethical. Writing or not writing the word 'bingo' in this context has nothing to do with skills or knowledge related to biology, so it should not affect test scores.

The caveats built in to Tesla's almost, soon, about to be, near complete Full Self Driving really ought to have something like this in there so people read the 'find print' that you can't expect FSD to operate on snowy nights on roundabouts, etc., etc., etc.

Strange that they thought people wouldn't read it. I don't read most fine print, but travel insurance is different. The fine print is what you are buying. You need to have a pretty good idea of what's in it, to know if it's of any value at all.

> "This is just a perfect example of why you need to read things. It's not just novels, it's anything that you get as an adult too," she said.

In case you win a secret competition? This is the least likely reason to read it!

I wonder what kind of world we would have if all future unread contracts and website ToS agreements were declared by the government/courts to be null and void.

Best marketing ROI this company has ever achieved

Consider the $10,000 spent as tuition

Somewhat related, this is going viral on twitter today. A woman tried to read the fine print on the vaccine and gets a surprise.

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1474425550055870485

So, as a lawyer, much like the teacher who did something like this:

F** everything about this. This collective idea that it is fair to have a miles long contract that your average person is not likely to read is one of the most harmful ideas that continues to linger.

It's especially pertinent to us in IT; people keep parroting this notion of "well, you used the service and didn't read the fine print and therefore now you are bound to every little thing they say," and its a major contributor to why privacy and social media are so bad right now.

The UK government’s writing guidelines includes this section that describes how legal content should still be straightforward: “Legal content can still be written in plain English. It’s important that users understand content and that we present complicated information simply.”

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

You might not long contracts, but there exist lawyers who do. Contracts will get shorter as soon as there is a consequence for writing contracts of excessive length. I.e., never.

Is there really a point to the long contracts other than billable hours? Upthread, I speculated on that being the reason why "contract ergonomics" is not widespread. A while ago on the Verizon website, I recall seeing a "plain English" annotation of their legalese and thinking why not just have the plain English part without the legalese? And why the hell is it so long?

That's the only purpose I can think of. Including every edge case in a contract just doesn't seem useful... there is going to be a dispute no matter what.

Contracts can get longer if either party is very distrustful of the other. If you expect the contract to be contested it makes sense to lock things down.

An other reason is avoiding precedent and certain judgements from applying to this contract. I think this is quite common with financial documents, to the point where there is a lot of boilerplate that everyone understands without reading (just checking it is actually there).

Sadly, contracts with the public hit both cases. Lots of precedent, and so many people you can expect a few of them to try and misuse the agreement.

I'd say that's generally right, though a slightly more charitable way to think about it is that it partly an arms race as well as a CYA thing -- after all, if you don't rigorously protect your client to the best of your ability you run the risk of getting in trouble yourself; so the things just keep accreting in terms of "what is expected in a contract."

"well, you used the service and didn't read the fine print and therefore now you are bound to every little thing they say"

Well, i did rear terns if tervice once. Bext week i get an email ' our new terms if service'

So whats the point uf they can do whatever they want?

(2019)

Added. Thanks!

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