Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

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> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff.

I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language.

For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.

On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.

Respectfully; No.

A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts.

I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year.

Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.

I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for.

That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.

House sales are complex enough that most people use common template contracts, simply because it makes the interaction with the required third parties (realtors, notaries, public record offices, lawyers, banks) more efficient by a large enough margin.

Rental however? Almost everyone uses their own crap contracts or some decades old template contract, and usually there is no one involved except the landlord and the renter. And because there is no need for more efficiency, the market can't and won't push for standard contracts.

I love Nova Scotia’s standard rental terms, with generous term for tenants:

> Use these forms to show the terms that must be part of any lease signed in Nova Scotia. The lease a landlord uses may look different, but must contain all the items shown here. If any of the items are not part of the lease a tenant signs, they apply anyway.

Either 2/3 or 3/3 of the apartments I've rented since graduating college have used a similar template to one another, where part of it comes down to checking boxes or filling in a blank space. They each had some variety of addendums, but shared a common core structure.

This was also at apartment complexes that had multiple units, so maybe it's different if you're renting from an individual for a one-off space.

Can’t you have auto-renewing clauses on your lease, with only small contractual updates every year on the points that effectively changed ?

That’s what I had on every appartment I rented. As you say it wouldn’t make sense to go through the building’s description every single year when nothing has changed.

Otherwise, an issue with having “standard” clauses, and only the differential in your contract, is your knowledge of the referenced standard at the time of the contract.

Imagine buying a house: I can’t imagine you’d be reviewing the standard house buying contracts every year just to be ready in case you buy one. So I’d assume you’d be reading the whole terms, from the standard + the differential at least once when you buy your first house. But then, if you sell and buy another one 5 years later, won’t you want to recheck the up to date standard terms, on top of the differential you sign for your specific contract ?

At the end of the day, I feel it would only benefit people who spend their lifes in the field and are aware of the standard terms at any given moments. I’d prefer to optimize for the people who are not familiar, and would have a harder time understand the whole of the contract.

In the UK it is to the landlord and their agent's benefit to repeatedly terminate your 12 months (minus 1 day) home lease, and have you sign a new one, with arrangement fees of course.

That's to make sure it is classed as a short term tenancy, less than 12 months, even if you live there for a decade.

Full legal tenancy rights don't kick in unless you have a lease longer than 12 months. As a result, I've never heard of anyone being offered such a lease.

Having an "auto-renewing clause" in an existing tenancy would defeat that benefit to the landlord. You'd better read the terms on the new lease each time, just in case something changed. But you can use your choice of "diff" tool; it's probably the same as the previous time, including typos.

(Commercial (business) leases are the opposite. Commercial landlords often want to offer only long leases (say 5 or more years), because that arrangement gives them strong rights to be paid for the entire term, no matter if the business wants to leave.)

I agree 100%. The "free-for-all contract law" based society in which, to get the most basic goods or services, everyone is forced to sign hundreds of contracts that they didn't have input in writing, can't possibly understand or even read, is completely unattainable.

All basic things of day-to-day life (jobs, rent, utilities, tickets, subscriptions) should be governed by mandated standard contracts (with some flexibility based on a series of optional clauses), so people just have to learn/understand a contract once and take that knowledge for the rest of their life. This way the actual paper contract a person signs should be just a single page, listing the parties, citing the standard contract, and a few bullet points citing the optionals. E.G. "I just rented a house, I signed Standard Rental Contract #3 with a no-pets and no-smoking clauses." - "Good for you, mine is the stricter Standard Rental Contract #2, and they also wanted to add the no-pets clause but I payed extra to remove that."

Anything outside this should only be considered a legal contract if each party involved had their own layer present when the contract was written and when it was signed (layer co-signing it with a legal duty to the client), having full input in writing the actual contract. If a company handles you one of their own contracts and asks you to sign without allowing you to change it, then it should not be valid/legal binding.

Re: the house, no, most people don’t sit and read it: https://themortgagereports.com/39671/home-closing-what-you-n... .

Even professional investors with millions of dollars of investments don’t appear to read or negotiate the documents until it looks like it might matter: https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/03/odd-lots-pod...

People just don’t care that much about legal documents until it looks like it will matter. People’s choice of individual contract provisions at most wage earning jobs, health care, rentals, or vacations is basically nil - they mostly don’t care to read it and so the writers of the contracts put in egregious terms.

Your links had me thinking for a while.

On themortgagereports, setting aside that the other camp from "the absolutists" is the former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is like, one man, who could also probably litigate his way out of any serious trouble, it still gets to the conclusion:

> The important point is that there is much that should be read in home closing materials. Whether you should read every word is arguable.

On professional investors, I wouldn't also hold them as the shinning beacon representing what most of us think or do with money, contracts or responsibilities.

I don't get the feeling that most people don't read, just that it's a deeply painful and frustrating experience that some people bail out from. Like tax reports, or homeworks. I still think most people are way too scare to not take the time to check as much as they can, for them these papers could affect the next 30 years of their life.

Also there's whole sections that can be skimmed pretty fast, but it's different to me than "not reading".

“ Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.”

In the US it typically is.

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