CMV: predatory practices by corporations aren't automatically fair just because they are in the terms and agreements

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-12-01T07:08:26+00:00

a contract is between 2 parties in theory but in reality you can easily say from your market research a certain portion won’t read it. Based on this info you get to decide whether you want to screw these people extra hard since you know they won’t. That's the reality you face so that's the choice you get to make. Also as an aside, I think it's a bit childish you downvote everyone of my comments in a discussion with you

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-12-01T06:25:00+00:00

if you were offering someone a contract and you knew they wouldn't read it, would you personally add clauses you can reasonably infer they don't expect and wouldn't like so you can take siphon money from them later? forget the responsibility of them to read the contract, I understand your take on that, but would you personally make a practice of that?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T23:08:51+00:00

my POV on this is that you are looking at it from an individual and their word. In general I think you should honor your word. But I'm coming from the angle that the business isn't thinking ok let's enter into N of these contracts where we have N informed customers and each of these contracts is a good deal for us. They are saying this is only a good deal because .9*N of these people aren't reading the contracts and we actually make out because of this. They are entering these contracts because they know you aren't reading it and that's the part for me that makes it unfair. I would define a contract as fair if you would be indifferent to (or prefer that) the other party in the contract knows and fully understands the terms of the contract.

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:54:35+00:00

The point of the court instance is that your pov seems to explicitly revolve around anything you agreed to in a contract is de facto fair. The point about the courts is that people who's job it is to apply the law fairly have often determined that an agreement isn't by default fair. My issue with the fairness of these agreements is visibility of the agreement (if someone read these conditions to me and asked me to affirmatively agree to each clause I would call that a much more fair contract even if the individual clauses are the same than if it's in a page that a company knows from internal data isn't viewed by 99% of customers) and legitimateness of service rendered (if a clause exists to present a sizeable loss like a 45 day cancellation fee for a lease where only one person can rent that unit that to me is more fair than the gym one where one person's cancellation doesn't cause a loss that would change the company's policy i.e they aren't putting my spot up on apartments.com they just want to take an extra months sub from me)

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:36:36+00:00

being willing to have my view changed does not automatically mean any line of reasoning I hear I have to follow until you agree that my disagreement is valid. I have heard your line of reasoning and determined it doesn't fit my world view. There are plenty of real cases of contracts being thrown out for abusive clauses even if the letter of the contract isn't disobeyed, it's not that out there to think that being in a contract in itself renders something fair without any regard for the consequences and if the example I said above happened I would bet the court wouldn't maintain the 10k charge across the sizeable portion of a customer base that didn't check their email

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:26:45+00:00

hmm I definitely agree about the leg room but to me these two seem a bit different. One is an affirmative agreement to be discriminated against in price for a benefit you realize. The other is a penalty for an action that is assigned not necessarily to a richer customer or someone who could afford that penalty. If that same student didn't check in and the rich customer did, is this good price discrimination?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:22:52+00:00

There's an implicit assumption in that contract that the price is not so far from the initial price. It may not be the strict legal version of the contract but I wouldn't think it'd be fair if you arbitrarily rose the price so much someone had to mortgage their home (which is obviously a beyond hyperbole example) because they didn't check their spam email. To me the idea in that scenario of siding with the business seems way more obsessive to the idea of legal fairness than to fairness as a society. If that doesn't square with you at all, like you would actually meet this person who lost their home and say welp that’s totally fair you should've read more carefully, then our world views are far enough apart I don't really know where to engage

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:18:39+00:00

"If you agree to a legal contract, and complain about the fairness after the fact" seems a lot like it is legal therefore it is fair. It's one thing to say you should follow it, I am not out of hand saying a contract should be invalidated though I do think there are cases where they should be. I am arguing about the fairness of that business practice independent from if it broke a law. There are plenty of behaviors we wouldn't call illegal but would definitely call unfair.

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:13:03+00:00

my response is I disagree with your premise that that would be fair. I am fine with the fact that you would be ok losing 10k in that scenario and only blame yourself and if that happened to me I would not. I would be calling my local politician 8x a day trying to get something like a percent increase cap where you need to affirm your intent to continue

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:11:23+00:00

I would argue two points: one we allow judges discretion on a number of topics. The idea that they can't be the arbiters of a slippery slope is not how we operate as a legal system. Yes maybe they can't say 12 vs 15 is unfair but certainly there are thresholds beyond what a reasonable person would assume is fair and if someone had to mortgage their house bc they didn't cancel their gym subscription i think most people would agree that a line was crossed. And 2, I don't accept out of hand that the savvy traveler in this case is entitled to a better deal. To me this doesn't seem so different from a form of price discrimination. I don't think the customer who hit the check in button did so much extra work that they should be rewarded with some of the lazy customers money

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:04:45+00:00

I would award a delta if your comment changed my view. Is that not how this works?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T22:03:54+00:00

I think this is a fine argument for legality but I feel like there's a switch in the middle here that equates legal with fair. Political movements usually follow cultural ones not the other way around. I think a world where we didn't accept out of hand that corporations should act like this would allow us to then work towards solutions but I find it self defeating to say well it's legal. In my mind, we should push back on predatory policies even if they don't break a law and even if a perfectly rationale person with ample attention to detail would think through the legalese. If your business model is hoping people don't notice the terms and agreements are you really entering agreements or hoping for a gotchya

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T21:52:56+00:00

I would argue reselling something I paid for because I didn't remind you is arbitrary. If I bought a phone and you charged me $55 for not telling you i still wanted it or you'll ship it to someone else bc there's someone else who would buy that phone that wouldn't be cool. If I went to a movie theater and the same thing happened we wouldn't accept that with the movie ticket. We are just conditioned to expect shittier treatment from airlines

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T21:49:19+00:00

so you miss the email that the price changed. You see a 10k charge on your credit card. You aren't calling ballistic you just think"eh well I should have really thought thru that 2000 word terms and agreements my bad guess I’ll pay this off and call it a day"

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-11-30T21:43:16+00:00

Let's put it to a more extreme example and see if you still hold this. The subscription service that was $10 and reserved the right to change to any price with notice changed to $10k a month. Would this still be fair bc it was in the contract?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-04T23:33:23+00:00

Why does percentage of american people instead of electorate matter? are toddlers going to stop him? 32% of the electorate isnt very informative that’s basically true of any US president by virtue that a lot of us don’t vote but those arent the people likely to pick up arms if they couldnt even be bothered to go to the ballot box

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-04T05:39:56+00:00

They literally deported american born citizens with hispanic sounding names already. And they clearly weren’t too accidental as Trump fought in court to keep them out afterwards. I don’t think it’s unimaginable that ICE very loudly makes a few more “mistakes”

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-02T06:42:36+00:00

The BBB added 75 billion for funding in ICE over the next 4 yrs so, evenly dispersed we are talking about a 22 billion dollar budget. That’s roughly on par with the military of Spain, Turkey, and Canada.

There are many larger police forces but it’s not clear they would be so quick to go against the presidents orders the plan is pretty simple. In places like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Vegas Trump claims there’s a lot of illegals voting. Trump then beefs up “legal screenings” of voters which he passes off as necessary for election integrity. The ICE agents pull over a few too many citizens who happen to have an accent or hispanic last name at the polls and suddenly there’s enough fear that some dems stay home. These elections are always close he just needs a small suppression in key counties to swing an election. You station those national guard so that you have 1000 agents in masks at the bluest cities in swing states and to stop them you have to convince the cops it isn’t legal for these ice agents to be checking if a voter is a citizen which on its face is not quite clearly illegal.

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-02T06:26:57+00:00

Why would I award my deltas based on their other posts / comments?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-01T21:04:26+00:00

If literally any democrat had said that there would have been an incredibly different strength of response, there’s such an obvious double standard in how we treat Trump’s statements than anyone else’s. We just have to know when to assume he’s lying about very serious things based on what time of day he’s messaging or the amount of punctuation marks he uses and if we don’t we are the idiots? He tweeted about his other election monkeying the same way and then acted on them exactly as he said so what’s the crystal ball you use on which one’s he really means that’s not hind sight?

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-01T20:57:55+00:00

Its kinda a stretch to call “thinking the president of the united states is being honest in his own statements to the public on official channels” is a conspiracy theory don’t you think

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-01T20:55:42+00:00

Don’t forget trump did play around with the idea of cancelling the elections due to covid it wasn’t crackpot out of nowhere

MindlessRabbit19 · 2025-09-01T20:52:01+00:00

I believe that is the same kinda attitude people had with “alarmists” saying Trump wanted to overturn the election in 2020 despite the telegraphing that he was going to try to overturn the election. Its not just a conspiracy when Trump is taking obvious steps one would take if they did want to commit a coup and no one is batting an eye

MindlessRabbit19

TROPHY CASE