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Georgia teacher read the fine print and won $13K (2019)
- maltalex 5y ago(2019)
- dang 5y agoAdded. Thanks!
- enterexit 5y agoFine print in insurance contracts is probably the only fine print I ever read.
- jdavis703 5y agoAs 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.
- albedoa 5y agoEvery one of the first like nine google results says that riot coverage is standard.
- jdavis703 5y agoOk, 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.
- ipaddr 5y agoUsing insurance your landlord pushes sounds like a bad idea.
- netizen-936824 5y agoI'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.
- jessaustin 5y agoIt's probably more straightforward than that: the landlords just get a bonus for referrals.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 5y agoThat 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
- jdavis703 5y agoThis 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).
- dpark 5y agoWhat? Renter’s insurance should cover your losses, not the landlord’s.
- cmurf 5y agoIt covers renter's liability too. Whether by accident or negligence, you can be held liable for damages to other people's property.
- simplestats 5y agoIt 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.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> 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.
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- Groxx 5y agoYeah, 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.
- quickthrower2 5y agoEmployment contracts are worth a digest too:
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rtourn 5y agoThese 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".
- RyJones 5y agoHave you taken time to give a close reading to the ICD-10[0]? 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29642489
- chrisseaton 5y agoProbably every single word is there due to a particular legal precedent or carefully calculated risk.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> 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.
- d1sxeyes 5y agoAlso, 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).
- dragonwriter 5y ago> 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.
- alex_young 5y ago$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.
- petesergeant 5y agoI literally just read the article and I can't tell you the name of the insurance company involved
- treis 5y agoI 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?
- Gigachad 5y agoThe 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”
- axiosgunnar 5y agoBy 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)
- walrus01 5y agointerestingly 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-app-airtag-search-tracker-detect-find-my https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/13/22832731/apple-android-a...
- MereInterest 5y agoThere'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.
- vmception 5y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 5y agoThe 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.
- ecpottinger 5y agoYet 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.
- shostack 5y agoThe 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.
- jshprentz 5y agoCompare 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-syllabus-money-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/18/us/tennessee-professor-syllab...
- jrm4 5y agoWhich 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.
- stefan_ 5y agoSee this is where you have gone wrong - professors are not teachers. At a certain age, it's sink or swim.
- jrm4 5y agoThis is a joke, right?
- simplestats 5y agoAre 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?
- jrm4 5y agoVery 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."
- jrm4 5y agoSo, 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- divbzero 5y agoThe 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-uk https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
- jessaustin 5y agoYou 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.
- dqv 5y agoIs 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.
- rocqua 5y ago
- mwcremer 5y agoReminds 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."
- michaelcampbell 5y agoIt 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.
- owlninja 5y agoThis 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-professor-hid-a-cash-p https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...
- smallpipe 5y agoAnd 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
- smcl 5y agoYeah 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.
- albertshin 5y agowhen 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.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago> 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/asa-new-cap-guidance-on-prize-draws-including-the-northern-irish-anomaly/ https://www.rpc.co.uk/snapshots/advertising-and-marketing/as...
- kentonv 5y agoI did this with code once: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/2899/files https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/pull/2899/files
- unbanned 5y agoHa nice
- 63 5y agoDoesn't the fact that someone claimed the prize within 23 hours of the contest just prove that people do actually read their contracts?
- ColinWright 5y agoIt 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.
- Gigachad 5y agoDepends 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.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoEspecially travel insurance.. the people purchasing that are naturally more careful people otherwise they wouldn't be buying it
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI do wonder if they made it too obvious by bolding the text.
- quickthrower2 5y agoCan the time to first event in a poisson distribution tell you the distribution? Im not sure it would be interesting!
- astura 5y agoFor 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.
- betwixthewires 5y agoIt'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.
- tedmcory77 5y agoThis place is ~200 feet from right where I’m sitting. They have an interesting take on several things.
- bell-cot 5y agoNever 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.)
- ben_w 5y agoRelated 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.
- scotty79 5y agoWhen 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
- twhb 5y agoThe 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.
- cipheredStones 5y agoThis 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.
- catillac 5y agoYou’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.
- spoonjim 5y agoBest marketing ROI this company has ever achieved
- wglb 5y agoConsider the $10,000 spent as tuition
- altgeek 5y agoThere'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 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.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y agoThanks 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.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago> 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.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y agoI 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.
- 97s 5y agoI 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.
- Thiez 5y agoThat 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.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoSomewhat 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 https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1474425550055870485
- pabs3 5y agoI 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.
- 4oh9do 5y agoThe 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.
- stevage 5y agoStrange 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.
- robertlagrant 5y ago> "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!
- powerbroker 5y agoThe 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.