14 ms·

A Tiny, $25 Million Mistake (2014)

222 points by unmole 8y ago

haser_au 8y ago
Generally, I'd agree. Contracts in big business aren't typically enforced by the letter. You sign a 5-year contract, with +1 year extensions up to 5 years, you aren't going to start enforcing things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Contracts are generally about reducing risk. Reducing the risk that you're going to steal my IP, and reducing your risk that I'm not going to pay you. In saying that, I've seen some be enforced to the letter. So if you're a start-up, take your contracting seriously.
soperj 8y ago
Sometimes I think the long form is over blown, but did I miss half this article or something?
- pietroglyph 8y ago
  I don't think there's anything missing here. I actually really appreciate the brevity. It's a small, informative, and relatively humorous anecdote that knows what it is, no frills included.
  - soperj 8y ago
    I agree, just something I'm not used to seeing on the internet, I felt like it was just getting into it, and then it was over, and I start to wonder how it became an article in the first place...
    - khazhoux 8y ago
      Modern long-form articles online are legally required to cut away in the 3rd paragraph to a story about the protagonist's upbringing, then go back to the main story for 4 paragraphs, then 3 paragraphs about the protagonist's parents (or, grandparents if they're Japanese) before returning to the main story for a paragraph or two, which must end by teasing the headline again. Just when the article gets actually informative, the article must tell you about a competing politician/businessman/musician/whatever, which will surprisingly end with an warm endorsement of our protagonist. The article must then on some choice quote, and leave you somewhat surprised you read it all the way through.
  - sundvor 8y ago
    Agreed, I for one appreciated the writing style that had a very delightful story to tell yet didn't wax on and on.
- smadge 8y ago
  Also note that this is a transcript of a segment on the radio program “All Things Considered.” Typically their stories are in the 3 to 5 minute range, just as this story is. The format probably makes more sense for radio than it does for web.
  - soperj 8y ago
    thank you!
- taspeotis 8y ago
  It’s linked to from here [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes...
MrEldritch 8y ago
This kind of aspect is exactly why I'm fairly wary of smart contracts as a general concept. The problem with "law is code" is that the entire functioning of society depends on law not being code. Think of how broken all software is, everywhere, all the time. Now multiply that by how messy the legal system already is.
- codethief 8y ago
  While I was reading your comment I couldn't help myself thinking that, even though laws are not code, our society does run on code now and algorithms start reflecting the laws we chose and in fact, in some cases, pre-date the laws and in this sense effectively become the law until lawmakers or judges object. So I wonder in how far the question is not whether law is (will become) code or not but whether code will become law. Somewhat relevant: "Code is law" by Lawrence Lessig from 2001. (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html) Side remark: I find it amusing and terrifying at the same time how Lessig distinguished between "the real world" and cyberspace, whereas nowaways these boundaries are a lot more blurry.
numlocked 8y ago
Levine constantly brings this up related to blockchain; people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. We want things that reflect what we bargained for and protects us when things go sideways, but not something that arbitrarily and absolutely enforces technicalities that perhaps weren't in the spirit of the agreement. Turns out it's useful to have wiggle room; it's a feature, not a bug.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  Even without the "binding contract" aspect, the very concept of "put important code in the blockchain (where it can never be patched without the agreement of the entire community)" seems ... spooky. "Unpatchable code" is probably one of the most terrifying two-word phrases in the English language.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    The 9 most terrifying words in the English language: "I work with Blockchain, and this contract is immutable." Turns out everyone likes government when it helps them, and Reagan was just a senile old man making memes.
    - barking 8y ago
      Your second sentence is a non sequitur as well as being ageist and possibly mocking of people with Alzheimer's disease. That's quite a lot for one sentence.
      - paulmd 8y ago
        Please don't shame the differently abled. Alzheimer's disease doesn't really hold you back these days. We've elected presidents with Alzheimer's three times in the last 4 decades. I mean, how much higher can you go than that? What better proof of their competence do you want? They managed to pass through our electoral system, right? How dare you judge their mental abilities? How dare you, sir? Let's see you get elected president, buster. What are you, some kind of doctor? Not that there's any trend as to which party keeps electing the "differently abled" to the highest office in the country, no sir... I mean, my heart and my best intentions say that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. /s After all, we all know that decorum is what's really important, in fact more important than saying what needs to be said. Which is that Republicans keep electing actual dementia patients to be President, and keeping them in office even when that becomes obvious. And, that the US political system is founded on broad assumptions of good faith and isn't built to handle intense partisanship to the extent that a Congress would refuse to deal with an obviously senile president. But hey, it probably worked reasonably well in an era when your average elite lived to be like 50 or something. We're no longer in that era, and it's time to put a maximum age limit on the Presidency as well as a minimum, and start enforcing the 25th.
DreamSpinner 8y ago
It's an interesting item - especially since his latest column https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes... discusses a similar kind of problem that is going through negotiation now.
- tanderson92 8y ago
  Not a coincidence -- he links to the OP's link in yesterday's column when discussing precisely that similar problem. It is likely how the OP found this older article; I know I read it earlier today due to Matt's link.
  - unmole 8y ago
    Yup, that's how I found the link.
- bkohlmann 8y ago
  There's an interesting intersection between "Money Stuff" (Matt Levine's newsletter) readers and HN participants. I often see Matt link to articles that were on the front page of HN the day before and often see front page HN articles that we're in Matt's links from his newsletter that morning. Could be coincidence (interesting articles are interesting articles!) or a more closely linked feedback loop.
an4rchy 8y ago
The Caesar's case that he mentions was an interesting case study, they totally tried to get away with it -- in that case it was the $450 million mistake. In case people are interested: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-05-13/caesars-and-the-450-million-and https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-05-13/caesars-a...
- dannyw 8y ago
  What was the outcome of that case?
  - ChoGGi 8y ago
    I was curious too, seems they filed for chapter 11 and are hoping that debt gets canceled as well? https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/22/news/companies/caesars-bankruptcy-court/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/22/news/companies/caesars-bank...
ternaryoperator 8y ago
In Truman Capote's history of a Kansas massacre, In Cold Blood, he mentions that purely fortuitously the father/husband of the murdered family had taken out a life insurance policy on himself a few days before. The insurance agent had accepted his check, but told him that the policy was not in force until the check cleared. At the time of the family was killed, the check had not yet cleared. The agent called his supervisor as soon as he heard the news about the murders and asked whether the insurer would pay. The supervisor said without hesitation, "Of course we will." This to me is one of the finest examples of living the spirit of the contract, rather than wriggling off responsibilities because you can legally do so. At the same time, I have to wonder how many insurers today would so quickly affirm their intention to pay in such a circumstance.
- patio11 8y ago
  I would expect substantially every adjuster at every life insurance company in the United States to pay a claim for a life insurance policy which a non-specialist might think was bound but which was not factually bound yet given a death for any reason but suicide absent fairly clear indications of insurance fraud. I realize technologists feel like insurance companies are malevolent entities, but they're a) highly regulated financial institutions b) staffed by professionals in risk management with c) significant exposure to negative public attention. Additionally, every insurance regulator has Thou Shalt Not #)%( Around With Paying Out Life Insurance Claims as their #1 rule, principally for historical reasons. Coming to the opposite intuition on this requires one to believe that, for an actuarially insignificant improvement in their loss rates so small as to be undetectable, insurance companies like jousting with regulators and the public while screaming "Catch me if you can, suckers!" (Indeed, when it came to light that some insurance companies were just sitting on unclaimed payments for small-dollar life insurance policies, the regulators had them reopen the books going back sixty years.)
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Interesting, given that health insurance is notorious for the opposite (failing to pay for things that the purchaser might resonably expect to be covered).
codethief 8y ago
> Update: There was a typo in the original post -- the word "word" was misspelled as "world." Thank you to the commenters for bringing it to our attention. How appropriate. :) I'm trying to come up with a phrase where this typo could mean all the difference.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  "From any country found in the wor(l)d scuba equipment may be imported." You can import equipment from Cuba. Not a great example as it needs bad punctuation; and it's the name of the country that's in the word "scuba". Most uses like "imports from anywhere in the Word will be taxed at the rate given in regulations issued by ..." will be nonsensical if taken literally and so wouldn't have any power unless apparent intent was considered.
- mynegation 8y ago
  > I'm trying to come up with a phrase where this typo could mean all the difference. One could say a typo could mean a "world of difference"
mapcars 8y ago
>It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. It's the same in whole life actually, you never know how being bad to someone will turn in the future.
grosjona 8y ago
That's the problem with corporations getting bigger; because executives make huge deals all the time, they forget the true value of money (from the perspective of the majority of the population) and they become inefficient in how they spend it... To the point that they can just round off $25 million.
jwilk 8y ago
Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479
- poizan42 8y ago
  This is also a dark pattern by NPR. It is nice to have a plaintext version available, but 1. The "DECLINE AND VISIT PLAIN TEXT SITE" button does not go to the text version of the article, and you have to actually figure out that the id is part of the url to find the article. 2. The only alternative to all the sharing of personal information is heavily degraded - there might be multimedia that is part of the article that is actually necessary for it. This is probably a violation of GDPR Art. 7. part 4.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    I'd sure love to see the EU try and assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over an American organization publishing news explicitly intended for American audiences...
    - poizan42 8y ago
      Time will tell, but at least NPR takes it serious enough that they added their "opt in" page[1]. [1]: At least from within the EU their page has been redirecting to https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/ https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org... since GDPR came into force.
      - torstenvl 8y ago
        Fair enough, although I suspect someone just figured (basic) compliance was less expensive than litigation. Either way, I bristle at the idea that EU law applies to NPR's main site. That's like saying the U.S. Congress can require things of bbc.co.uk
dspillett 8y ago
Plain text version for people not wanting to agree to the tracking etc: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 (the "decline tracking and go plain-text instead" link goes to the front page not the article requested, which in plain form does not make finding the target article easy as there is no search, list by date, or other such useful mechanism)
tomxor 8y ago
This site is lame... you decline their tracking and they send you to a plain text version of the front page, not the article. Fuck them.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
Why would you sleep under your desk, what is wrong with people
smpetrey 8y ago
> Update: There was a typo in the original post -- the word "word" was misspelled as "world." Thank you to the commenters for bringing it to our attention. Lovely serendipity.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  The word for world is word...
dctoedt 8y ago
Commercial motivations matter — smart parties try to play fair, because they realize they're likely to have to deal with the other side again, and because at some point they're likely to need a break themselves, whether from the other side or from some other party. That's especially true in garden-variety commercial contracts: Suppliers want repeat business, while customers want reliable suppliers who will go the extra mile when necessary, e.g., in a crunch. Neither of those is likely if you get a reputation as uncooperative. The nut graf of the NPR piece is this: "Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. ¶ The only time the words in a contract really matter, Levine says, is when things start to get ugly — like when people start suing each other."
vmarshall23 8y ago
aka the Golden Rule. aka "don't be a dick"
Sharlin 8y ago
> Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. In technical terms, it can be modeled as an iterated prisoner's dilemma [1]. In a regular one-off prisoner's dilemma, it always makes sense for both players to defect, as does in an iterated PD with a set number of rounds, known to both players. That is the only Nash equilibrium. But in an iterated PD where the number of rounds is unknown in advance, more cooperative strategies can be superior. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...
nemo1618 8y ago
>Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. In other words, it's an iterated prisoner's dilemma, not a one-off. Success is determined by your skill at playing the meta-game, the set of all games, moreso than your ability to crush your opponent mercilessly in every individual game. See https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
KSS42 8y ago
There seems to have been a failure in the review process at the client. In the contracts that I have been involved in, there is always a business person/accountant that reviews the contracts for the business terms.
vilhelm_s 8y ago
See also this column, also by Matt Levine, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes..., where someone made a typo which changes the payout of some bonds issued by a company from $640 million to $3.9 billion. Oops.
pmarreck 8y ago
"The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod is a great book that basically makes the case that cooperation is rational as long as there is the promise of more interaction in the future. https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640?sa-no-redirect=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...

222 points by unmole 8y ago

Generally, I'd agree. Contracts in big business aren't typically enforced by the letter. You sign a 5-year contract, with +1 year extensions up to 5 years, you aren't going to start enforcing things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Contracts are generally about reducing risk. Reducing the risk that you're going to steal my IP, and reducing your risk that I'm not going to pay you. In saying that, I've seen some be enforced to the letter. So if you're a start-up, take your contracting seriously.

soperj 8y ago

Sometimes I think the long form is over blown, but did I miss half this article or something?

pietroglyph 8y ago
I don't think there's anything missing here. I actually really appreciate the brevity. It's a small, informative, and relatively humorous anecdote that knows what it is, no frills included.
- soperj 8y ago
  I agree, just something I'm not used to seeing on the internet, I felt like it was just getting into it, and then it was over, and I start to wonder how it became an article in the first place...
  - khazhoux 8y ago
    Modern long-form articles online are legally required to cut away in the 3rd paragraph to a story about the protagonist's upbringing, then go back to the main story for 4 paragraphs, then 3 paragraphs about the protagonist's parents (or, grandparents if they're Japanese) before returning to the main story for a paragraph or two, which must end by teasing the headline again. Just when the article gets actually informative, the article must tell you about a competing politician/businessman/musician/whatever, which will surprisingly end with an warm endorsement of our protagonist. The article must then on some choice quote, and leave you somewhat surprised you read it all the way through.
- sundvor 8y ago
  Agreed, I for one appreciated the writing style that had a very delightful story to tell yet didn't wax on and on.
smadge 8y ago
Also note that this is a transcript of a segment on the radio program “All Things Considered.” Typically their stories are in the 3 to 5 minute range, just as this story is. The format probably makes more sense for radio than it does for web.
- soperj 8y ago
  thank you!
taspeotis 8y ago
It’s linked to from here [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes...

MrEldritch 8y ago

This kind of aspect is exactly why I'm fairly wary of smart contracts as a general concept. The problem with "law is code" is that the entire functioning of society depends on law not being code. Think of how broken all software is, everywhere, all the time. Now multiply that by how messy the legal system already is.

codethief 8y ago
While I was reading your comment I couldn't help myself thinking that, even though laws are not code, our society does run on code now and algorithms start reflecting the laws we chose and in fact, in some cases, pre-date the laws and in this sense effectively become the law until lawmakers or judges object. So I wonder in how far the question is not whether law is (will become) code or not but whether code will become law. Somewhat relevant: "Code is law" by Lawrence Lessig from 2001. (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html) Side remark: I find it amusing and terrifying at the same time how Lessig distinguished between "the real world" and cyberspace, whereas nowaways these boundaries are a lot more blurry.

numlocked 8y ago

Levine constantly brings this up related to blockchain; people (for the most part) don't actually want completely and utterly binding contracts. We want things that reflect what we bargained for and protects us when things go sideways, but not something that arbitrarily and absolutely enforces technicalities that perhaps weren't in the spirit of the agreement. Turns out it's useful to have wiggle room; it's a feature, not a bug.

MrEldritch 8y ago
Even without the "binding contract" aspect, the very concept of "put important code in the blockchain (where it can never be patched without the agreement of the entire community)" seems ... spooky. "Unpatchable code" is probably one of the most terrifying two-word phrases in the English language.
- paulmd 8y ago
  The 9 most terrifying words in the English language: "I work with Blockchain, and this contract is immutable." Turns out everyone likes government when it helps them, and Reagan was just a senile old man making memes.
  - barking 8y ago
    Your second sentence is a non sequitur as well as being ageist and possibly mocking of people with Alzheimer's disease. That's quite a lot for one sentence.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      Please don't shame the differently abled. Alzheimer's disease doesn't really hold you back these days. We've elected presidents with Alzheimer's three times in the last 4 decades. I mean, how much higher can you go than that? What better proof of their competence do you want? They managed to pass through our electoral system, right? How dare you judge their mental abilities? How dare you, sir? Let's see you get elected president, buster. What are you, some kind of doctor? Not that there's any trend as to which party keeps electing the "differently abled" to the highest office in the country, no sir... I mean, my heart and my best intentions say that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. /s After all, we all know that decorum is what's really important, in fact more important than saying what needs to be said. Which is that Republicans keep electing actual dementia patients to be President, and keeping them in office even when that becomes obvious. And, that the US political system is founded on broad assumptions of good faith and isn't built to handle intense partisanship to the extent that a Congress would refuse to deal with an obviously senile president. But hey, it probably worked reasonably well in an era when your average elite lived to be like 50 or something. We're no longer in that era, and it's time to put a maximum age limit on the Presidency as well as a minimum, and start enforcing the 25th.

DreamSpinner 8y ago

It's an interesting item - especially since his latest column https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes... discusses a similar kind of problem that is going through negotiation now.

tanderson92 8y ago
Not a coincidence -- he links to the OP's link in yesterday's column when discussing precisely that similar problem. It is likely how the OP found this older article; I know I read it earlier today due to Matt's link.
- unmole 8y ago
  Yup, that's how I found the link.
bkohlmann 8y ago
There's an interesting intersection between "Money Stuff" (Matt Levine's newsletter) readers and HN participants. I often see Matt link to articles that were on the front page of HN the day before and often see front page HN articles that we're in Matt's links from his newsletter that morning. Could be coincidence (interesting articles are interesting articles!) or a more closely linked feedback loop.

an4rchy 8y ago

The Caesar's case that he mentions was an interesting case study, they totally tried to get away with it -- in that case it was the $450 million mistake. In case people are interested: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-05-13/caesars-and-the-450-million-and https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-05-13/caesars-a...

dannyw 8y ago
What was the outcome of that case?
- ChoGGi 8y ago
  I was curious too, seems they filed for chapter 11 and are hoping that debt gets canceled as well? https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/22/news/companies/caesars-bankruptcy-court/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/22/news/companies/caesars-bank...

ternaryoperator 8y ago

In Truman Capote's history of a Kansas massacre, In Cold Blood, he mentions that purely fortuitously the father/husband of the murdered family had taken out a life insurance policy on himself a few days before. The insurance agent had accepted his check, but told him that the policy was not in force until the check cleared. At the time of the family was killed, the check had not yet cleared. The agent called his supervisor as soon as he heard the news about the murders and asked whether the insurer would pay. The supervisor said without hesitation, "Of course we will." This to me is one of the finest examples of living the spirit of the contract, rather than wriggling off responsibilities because you can legally do so. At the same time, I have to wonder how many insurers today would so quickly affirm their intention to pay in such a circumstance.

patio11 8y ago
I would expect substantially every adjuster at every life insurance company in the United States to pay a claim for a life insurance policy which a non-specialist might think was bound but which was not factually bound yet given a death for any reason but suicide absent fairly clear indications of insurance fraud. I realize technologists feel like insurance companies are malevolent entities, but they're a) highly regulated financial institutions b) staffed by professionals in risk management with c) significant exposure to negative public attention. Additionally, every insurance regulator has Thou Shalt Not #)%( Around With Paying Out Life Insurance Claims as their #1 rule, principally for historical reasons. Coming to the opposite intuition on this requires one to believe that, for an actuarially insignificant improvement in their loss rates so small as to be undetectable, insurance companies like jousting with regulators and the public while screaming "Catch me if you can, suckers!" (Indeed, when it came to light that some insurance companies were just sitting on unclaimed payments for small-dollar life insurance policies, the regulators had them reopen the books going back sixty years.)
- pjc50 8y ago
  Interesting, given that health insurance is notorious for the opposite (failing to pay for things that the purchaser might resonably expect to be covered).

codethief 8y ago

> Update: There was a typo in the original post -- the word "word" was misspelled as "world." Thank you to the commenters for bringing it to our attention. How appropriate. :) I'm trying to come up with a phrase where this typo could mean all the difference.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
"From any country found in the wor(l)d scuba equipment may be imported." You can import equipment from Cuba. Not a great example as it needs bad punctuation; and it's the name of the country that's in the word "scuba". Most uses like "imports from anywhere in the Word will be taxed at the rate given in regulations issued by ..." will be nonsensical if taken literally and so wouldn't have any power unless apparent intent was considered.
mynegation 8y ago
> I'm trying to come up with a phrase where this typo could mean all the difference. One could say a typo could mean a "world of difference"

mapcars 8y ago

>It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. It's the same in whole life actually, you never know how being bad to someone will turn in the future.

grosjona 8y ago

That's the problem with corporations getting bigger; because executives make huge deals all the time, they forget the true value of money (from the perspective of the majority of the population) and they become inefficient in how they spend it... To the point that they can just round off $25 million.

jwilk 8y ago

Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479

poizan42 8y ago
This is also a dark pattern by NPR. It is nice to have a plaintext version available, but 1. The "DECLINE AND VISIT PLAIN TEXT SITE" button does not go to the text version of the article, and you have to actually figure out that the id is part of the url to find the article. 2. The only alternative to all the sharing of personal information is heavily degraded - there might be multimedia that is part of the article that is actually necessary for it. This is probably a violation of GDPR Art. 7. part 4.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  I'd sure love to see the EU try and assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over an American organization publishing news explicitly intended for American audiences...
  - poizan42 8y ago
    Time will tell, but at least NPR takes it serious enough that they added their "opt in" page[1]. [1]: At least from within the EU their page has been redirecting to https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/ https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org... since GDPR came into force.
    - torstenvl 8y ago
      Fair enough, although I suspect someone just figured (basic) compliance was less expensive than litigation. Either way, I bristle at the idea that EU law applies to NPR's main site. That's like saying the U.S. Congress can require things of bbc.co.uk

dspillett 8y ago

Plain text version for people not wanting to agree to the tracking etc: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=348975479 (the "decline tracking and go plain-text instead" link goes to the front page not the article requested, which in plain form does not make finding the target article easy as there is no search, list by date, or other such useful mechanism)

tomxor 8y ago

This site is lame... you decline their tracking and they send you to a plain text version of the front page, not the article. Fuck them.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

Why would you sleep under your desk, what is wrong with people

smpetrey 8y ago

> Update: There was a typo in the original post -- the word "word" was misspelled as "world." Thank you to the commenters for bringing it to our attention. Lovely serendipity.

perl4ever 8y ago
The word for world is word...

dctoedt 8y ago

Commercial motivations matter — smart parties try to play fair, because they realize they're likely to have to deal with the other side again, and because at some point they're likely to need a break themselves, whether from the other side or from some other party. That's especially true in garden-variety commercial contracts: Suppliers want repeat business, while customers want reliable suppliers who will go the extra mile when necessary, e.g., in a crunch. Neither of those is likely if you get a reputation as uncooperative. The nut graf of the NPR piece is this: "Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. ¶ The only time the words in a contract really matter, Levine says, is when things start to get ugly — like when people start suing each other."

vmarshall23 8y ago

aka the Golden Rule. aka "don't be a dick"

Sharlin 8y ago

> Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. In technical terms, it can be modeled as an iterated prisoner's dilemma [1]. In a regular one-off prisoner's dilemma, it always makes sense for both players to defect, as does in an iterated PD with a set number of rounds, known to both players. That is the only Nash equilibrium. But in an iterated PD where the number of rounds is unknown in advance, more cooperative strategies can be superior. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_iterated_prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_itera...

nemo1618 8y ago

>Business may be a game, Levine realized, but it's not a one-time game. It's more like an infinite game. It's a game in which people have to live with each other, work with each other again, and perhaps, write another big contract. In other words, it's an iterated prisoner's dilemma, not a one-off. Success is determined by your skill at playing the meta-game, the set of all games, moreso than your ability to crush your opponent mercilessly in every individual game. See https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/

KSS42 8y ago

There seems to have been a failure in the review process at the client. In the contracts that I have been involved in, there is always a business person/accountant that reviews the contracts for the business terms.

vilhelm_s 8y ago

See also this column, also by Matt Levine, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes-the-documents-are-wrong https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/sometimes..., where someone made a typo which changes the payout of some bonds issued by a company from $640 million to $3.9 billion. Oops.

pmarreck 8y ago

"The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod is a great book that basically makes the case that cooperation is rational as long as there is the promise of more interaction in the future. https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465005640?sa-no-redirect=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...