“By mistake”? This was absolutely criminal. And since this is a very small town (<1000), knowing the kind of people who live in small towns, I could very well believe this is a case of “fuck everybody else”
Then don’t use the services. I wouldn’t sign a contract without reading it. “Your honour, I had no time to read the contract, therefore it’s void” seems a bad excuse.
Or society can just treat shitty ToS clauses as invalid because the good of the individual is far more important than being fair to powerful ultra corporations.
Ok it is obvious that there are one of three possible ways you handle terms of service:
1. You do not read any terms of service, like most people, and thus when you end up getting screwed over by a service you will accept that because you should have read the TOS, or perhaps you think the likelihood of you being screwed is minimal so you are willing to take the risk.
2. You read all TOS, do not accept those you disagree with, accept others you agree with.
3. You mix reading and not reading TOS dependent on how central you think they should be to your life, those that are not central you do not read because obviously those that are not central you can afford to have removed at the will of the corporations that own them.
But of course, you stated quite clearly that you wouldn't sign a contract without reading it, this must mean that you are doing number 2. You read every TOS you sign and some of them you refuse. That's great!
It's great because the parent poster you replied to made suppositions about how much time a person who did that would have to put aside to doing it, those were just suppositions though, you possess the cold hard facts and can tell us and them exactly how close their guestimates were, as well as answering the extremely important question as to how you manage your time to have enough of it to read and sign all those TOS, and in the cases where you have decided that a TOS did not fulfill your needs how you have handled it - how do you find services to replace them - have you ever been in a situation where you had to refuse a TOS even though your job may have depended on the usage of the service - how did you handle that?
Sure are a lot of things to find out about here, and finally someone who can help us out.
on edit: from reading further down the thread it seems when you said "I wouldn’t sign a contract without reading it." you actually meant that you would, but you would not complain when the company that you did not read the contract of screwed you over. Well that's sad. So I mean there is absolutely nothing a company could do to you that was not illegal that you would come complain about? Really?
So you are ok with a system that is created to legally bind you to something you don't know and can be used against you later unless you take tremendous efforts to not be?
In that case, ok.
Most people are not, and it's reasonable.
In fact, it's terrible that we have to rely on lawyers because the law is so complicated you can't know or understand it all, just to live you regular life.
But TOS are even worst. Because they are asymmetrical. You don't get some right and some duty. Only duty for you, and rights for the other party, which is already economically and socially in a position of strength compared to you.
And no, it's not acceptable to tell people to accept that or live in a cave.
I don't have a google account attached to my android phone. This makes my life more difficult in all sort of ways, because society assumes more and more than I do.
So I'm just being punished because I don't want to give my life to a big corporation.
I understand people think it's BS. You should not have to do that.
You already have that right. At least in my country, by law.
The TOS is a layer on top of that right that corporations abuse to make that right conditional to their own laws.
EDIT: Arf, just looked at your comment history and now I understand I'm loosing my touch. One person answered:
"Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it's not what this site is for."
Sometimes it's not about how long does it take to read it, but even how it is interpreted by one of the parties, or if it includes clauses that are unreasonable.
For example, contracts signed by seniors who didn't have the knowledge or mental faculties to understand what they were signing, may be voided.
If you don’t have the legal expertise or the time to read a contract you hire a lawyer to have him see if the contract is reasonable, or you don’t sign it.
I see the analogy but there’s a pretty big difference between hiding your face and hiding your device’s IP address. The former is a social norm going back tens of thousands of years, the latter is an arbitrary and artificial artefact of man made technology in the last 30.
A better analogy is sending mail with either proxy return addresses or none at all. Both are socially acceptable in most circumstances.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account because it's not what this site is for.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
At the same time, industrialization has created the very concept of leisure time. Vacation, travel, two days off per week, much less a 40 hour work week — these would have only been fantasies before industrialization.
Maternal death during childbirth, child mortality, and plagues dominated peoples' lives and offered no escape other than dumb luck before the rise of technology. Superstition provided the only hope of escaping the grim reaper who was omnipresent — could strike at any time and without warning.
Mass starvation was commonplace throughout history, but is now quite rare — due to high tech farming and distribution of foodstuffs.
All of those fears have faded enormously since the rise of modernity and public health advanced tech. COVID-19 would have been FAR worse (especially to the elderly and unhealthy) than it was but for the advancements of modern tech, especially the MRNA vaccines which, through the rapid advancements of tech, were created at an ASTONISHING rate. And it was only through the presence of tech that we've all been able to continue sharing our lives with friends and family during this, the first truly GLOBAL pandemic in history.
No, I'm thankful for the rise of technology EVERY DAY, and it gives we a lot of hope to continue improving everyday life in years to come.. It's the failures of humankind individually to advance emotionally and rationally that I fear. Humans still have a lot of growing up to do before we start responding to the vicissitudes of life like responsible adults still. In far too many ways, we still behave like children convinced the best response to difficulty is to behave badly and tear our hair in despair.
Fact is, living now, with all the plenty that tech has given us, should offer more hope for a better future than ever before. Yes, tech is disruptive, as it always has been. But tech has made the world a far better place in the past 300 years, and I for one expect that to continue, once the public gets some perspective on what life was BEFORE industrialization gave us hope for a better future.
Life expectancy != quality of life. In the modern world many more people are alienated and kept alive when nature would release them. Many people are spiritually alienated. The newest version iPhone does not give meaning to your life. Neither does buying a bunch of crap you don't need every week off of Amazon.
What does it mean to be spiritually alienated? I think also you are projecting a large part of your own unhappiness onto the world by suggesting that people are buying the newest iPhone to give meaning to their life.
I'm not going to claim life expectancy is equivalent to quality of life (although I do think it correlates). But I was just responding to the comment which claimed life expectancy had only increased in advanced countries.
I got a good laugh at how many people replied sincerely to this comment, not knowing it’s literally the opening paragraph of the Unabomber’s Manifesto.
Subsistence farming in the year A.D. 22 is just as unfulfilling as repetitive factory work in 2022.
What makes unfulfilling work meaningful is it going to yourself. When you work and your earnings are not going to a feudal lord or bank, it's worth it.
Modern finance engineering is ruining everything, and tech is beneath it.
I think the industrial revolution was great. What puts us under pressure today is the economic arms race it accelerated. Religious work ethics also played a role here, but a minor one.
Just read about how a software glitch lead to conviction of people for alleged theft in the UK. This is a severe example of people being overwhelmed with technology they don't understand and I don't mean the clerks.
I'll play Devil's Advocate: "advanced" nations went through the same suffering and exploitation on their way to being advanced as newly-industrialized nations are going through now. Much of the modern discontent with society and technology is simply due to greater awareness and better education, rather than actual change in the nature of society or how technology is used.
I don't necessarily disagree that Big Tech is driving dystopian changes in the nature of governance, but I don't think a rose-tinted view of the past is very helpful. Spying, disinformation, and corruption in the controllers of communication technologies has been a thing since the telegraph, if not earlier.
That sounds like an unhappy delusion. Life was not magically better before the industrial revolution, unless you were the king. The problems we have now are mostly related to a greatly increased number of people, so unless you want to be Thanos, we'll just have to learn to deal with it. And if we fail, reversion to the mean will do it for us.
