I'm shocked they don't just scale the picture down to do side by side style commercials at the same time regardless of what was occurring during play. They do this in auto racing events. There's no need to wait for specific times and can keep with their regularly spacing of breaks.
Forced arbitration is creating a parallel legal system where certain companies are excluded from the consequences of their own actions. One might even say they’re becoming a protected class even.
I have been on both sides of arbitration, winning and losing. It’s much better. Basically legislation done right (for civil matters).
The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)
Arbitration can be more efficient, but both parties should have an option to choose it, a direct settlement or public court. The average consumer is denied the choice by using these everyday services that have non-negotiable contracts.
Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.
Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.
They are very profitable when they win, what is the win rate of class action cases. Also what is the win rate of chosen class action cases versus all potential class action cases.
The 'tipping point' for class actions is usually the class certification, not a final judgement by the court. Class actions are absurdly expensive for defendants, largely due to the scope of discovery, and they also cause problems for public companies (for reporting and other reasons), so public companies almost always settle them after the class is certified. On the other side, these settlements often don't offer much benefit to the class, because the plaintiff counsel take a massive fee off the top, pay off the lead plaintiff, and don't have much incentive to do anything for the remainder of the class.
Eh, class action lawsuits are more about altering the large companies behavior in bulk because the individual harm to any plaintiff is rather small and nearly impossible to justify the expense and complexity of the suit. The plaintiff themselves would not profit off of it.
You're describing the 'private attorney general' theory/idea, which I'd believe if class-action lawyers were taking less remunerative cases that offered more public benefit.
This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
Throwing out our whole legal system because sometimes the lawyers make the most money is reductionist at best.
I believe what he's referring to is the cost of the legal system. Lawyers cost money, and if the other party has a lot more money, they can play all kinds of tactics to keep the case going (filing pointless motions, drowning your lawyer with huge amounts of documents, etc).
With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.
There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).
> All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.
A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).
And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.
Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.
> This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
That's weird. Two things can be true at once: arbitrary is better than the American legal system, and the American legal system is better than what 80% of the global population live under.
> All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, [...]
It is! You explicitly have to opt in, that's why Uber needs have it in their ToS that you accept. They can't just force it on you, when you have no contractual relationship with them.
You seem to be missing that arbitrators have a financial incentive to side with the company, which pays them? Explained in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787720
I wonder how often this is the case. The one time I read the fine print when signing up for a service, it said that I had the right to disagree with the choice of arbiter, and get some national organization to pick a different arbiter independently.
I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.
But, many of the members of that organization make their money from various forced arbitration deals, so that doesn't necessarily move the needle back towards the consumer.
This isn't specifically business vs consumer. The problem is ruling against the guy who brings you more business isn't good for getting more business. And you have a related problem with big fish vs big fish (for example, arbitration of union contracts) where you have to appease both sides--go something like 50/50 regardless of merits.
Very clear case, arbitration is fine. Fuzzy case, I would much prefer something that doesn't tip the scales in advance.
Note that the same bias problem exists with home inspectors. Realtors won't like inspectors that find things that kill deals. That one can be solved by hiring your own inspector with no input from the realtor.
I always thought arbitration was forcing weaker parties out of the fairer legal system. Now I wonder if that's a planted idea by the legal industry? It made sense to me that arbitration was paid for by the company, and there would be incentives for the judge to side with their long term meal ticket. But perhaps all that is wrong? I really wish you could elaborate on why it is better, I'm very interested in challenging my assumptions here.
Your reasoning makes sense, and I was concerned in a similar way when I filed my arbitration case (for about $8k) against the manufacturer of my leased car. The so called “Lemon law” in California suggests the arbitration as the first step. Surprisingly enough, I won the case, and it only took me about an hour of collecting documents and filling in the forms, and 45 minutes of the phone call.
Even though the car manufacturer does indeed pay for the arbitration, I never felt the arbiter was biased, and the judgement was completely in my favor.
> Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
Letting entities that hold the vast majority of the leverage and financial/legal/political power in a contract opt out of the legal system and pick an alternative with a financial incentive to side with them is perhaps "fair" to you, but a lot of people would disagree on the "enough" part.
Huh? You can only hold leverage in a contract, if the other guys agree to enter into the contract.
If the contract party A proposes gives too much advantage to party A for party B's liking, party B can make up their mind before they enter the contract.
Btw, if Uber is so powerful as you say, why do they bother with the tinkering around the margin and only force arbitration? Surely the bigger deal would be to jack up prices to thousand dollar per ride?
Disney+ case showed us that companies are using arbitration to erode basic rights, even in unrelated matters.
It’s one thing to say the legal system is expensive and slow, let’s resolve our issues by a third party, and another thing to where there’s no further action you can take and the arbitration authority is being paid by the company.
Its simply becoming a parallel legal system for a different class.
How's that being forced? (Though I would assume that in most jurisdictions you actually have to book a car and ride in it, to be bound by the more wide-ranging clauses in the ToS.)
That attitude is exactly how we got into the current situation where every company only offers unreasonably one-sided contracts so no you can't actually get a better contract by not accepting the shitty one. As a society we don't have to tolerate that and can set different rules for large corporations dealing with individuals.
> That attitude is exactly how we got into the current situation where every company only offers unreasonably one-sided contracts so no you can't actually get a better contract by not accepting the shitty one.
Sounds like a great opportunity to start a new company that offers slightly less bad contracts and take all their customers.
Companies like arbitration because unlike in a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff cannot compel discovery. Paying for an arbitrator is cheaper than going through discovery, especially if the discovery unearths facts materially damaging to the business.
Prove it. Where are the transcripts of all arbitration proceedings so we can see that arbitration is fair?
See, that's why court proceedings are public, so that the public can verify that courts are fair. It's also why judges are appointed by democratically elected politicians. Who appointed your arbitrator?
And of course the court system is bad and unfair in a bunch of ways. But it's starting from a much better place than secret, forced arbitration.
In general, most issues are being redirected to forced arbitration and not enough people can or effort to sue these companies, so in actual effect, they’re immune one might say.
Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
Let’s reverse the situation, they were able to add ads to sport events, so they can definitely remove ads and show the main event cameras if they wanted to. But they’re picking up showing ads indirectly through some other service.
I noted that the streaming service, like Paramount+, would be able to overlay their own ads over the broadcasted commercials, but they won't have control over the cameras. That's on the broadcast station, they're the ones controlling the remote production.
Paramount+ can only rebroadcast what my local CBS affiliate is broadcasting.
I think only Netflix and Prime have deals to actually produce sports broadcasts.
> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.
What's happening in that time is just random bullshit. They'll run bits on the jumbotron, hold raffles, go play games with people in the stands, etc. All sponsored by "<SO AND SO>, the official <THING> of your <LOCAL SPORTS TEAM>". Or, in other words, ads.
You could show the players and coaches on the sidelines, but that's also rather boring. It'll be a couple of guys shooting the shit on a bench, or a couple of guys hunched over a table, or some guys warming up.
The best thing they can do is like information from other games maybe.
Honestly, I was going by my most recent experience, which was F1 in Singapore last year. (I’ve been in Singapore at the time, but haven’t managed to get to a good spot, so I was watching it online a couple blocks away.) That thing had ads every minute, but the race obviously doesn’t stop during the breaks.
> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.
Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.
Do you blame them for trying to protect and control things? It might be a little extreme, but we also need to remember that rich folks used to uncover mummies in their parties for fun.
Whilst voice clearances have been the norm since aviation really took flight, no pun intended, there's much more subtle but crucially important aspects about why this has remained: situational awareness by broadcast.
The critically important aspect: approach clearances and weather reports for a specific aircraft are still useful and relevant to all nearby aircraft. Narrow-casting them to specific aircraft reduces situational awareness for all other nearby aircraft. The system is also tolerant of noise: digital communications can be lost entirely with some degradation in signal, analog voice communications can still be interpreted with a fair bit of noise present (see video below).
The subtle aspect: multi-tasking by using more than one human sense - looking and hearing. People dealing with risky or dangerous situations absolutely should not be sucked into a screen for more than a minute or two to get critical information. This includes to more than one pilot where tasks are being managed and delegated. Most (if not all) controlled or 'aviator-coordinated' (CTAF) airports have a specific radio frequency to tune into to get weather information from an automated weather-to-voice system (e.g. https://youtu.be/HHbrlUPP-4k?t=339).
Digital voice communications often completely degrade for several seconds with a few lost packets, combined with the brevity of aeronautical phrasing can mean critical information is missed. All of these 'old' systems add up to the cumulative safety (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model) and doctrine built by the aviation industry over many, many decades though sadly because a lot of them were written in the blood of others who perished.
Well, as far as I remember, the Link 16 was invented around the 1970s where aircraft could share real-time data in a combat zone.
The weather information can easily be transmitted every minute and it can be nicely visualized in the cockpit instead of being crammed into cryptic abbreviations and ancient codes.
Similarly, we are aware of the precise aircraft location and it's intended course, I'm talking about commercial airlines here, so we already know where they're going and what the approach path will be etc.
I find it hard to accept that we're collecting terabytes of telemetry from engines and all the other equipment on the aircraft, but we expect to communicate the weather and traffic information in verbal ways.
There are so many good ways we can solve the underlying requirements, but I think it's all stuck on the cost of implementation and who's going to be making money from it.
Aircraft can already receive traffic and weather information over ADS-B. Larger or more modern aircraft even have onboard collision avoidance systems that supersede ATC when necessary and also carry weather radars themselves.
Additionally, there are human factors to consider. One commonly read-out piece of data is the local altimeter setting which ensures that all aircraft under the control of the same facility have a common reference - you generally don't set your altimeter to the area you're in, but rather to the setting of where you're going. Airplanes already automatically receive that data, but selecting the exact setting requires manual intervention for precisely this reason.
Add in the need to allow older airplanes to keep flying, the need to be robust to signal jamming, and the inherent safety issues with packing an airplane full of gas and hundreds of people, and it quickly becomes clear that full automation is inadvisable.
Maybe because literally the entire world is currently using that system, and sending machine-readable clearances to just some airplanes means that the non-equipped planes are denied situational awareness?
Yeah, I listen/watch some flight radar youtube and it’s insane how many issues arise from the language barrier, which could be solved by just communicating via a text channel
CPDLC exists and is used. It has its limitations though - it doesn’t provide as much flexibility for pilot replies, pilots don’t always have a free hand to text with (especially in turbulence), and is generally slower and more clumsy than voice so is only suitable for routine, non-time-sensitive messages.
That sounds like a system that was bound to fail, because it was kept limited to a certain range of capabilities.
One can easily imagine a system that broadcasts the weather and clearance, and even aircraft location data close to real-time, and provide great situational awareness to everyone involved.
I don't think it's acceptable to put tens of thousands of people within a crowded airspace and not do everything in our power to keep things organized and secure.
> That sounds like a system that was bound to fail, because it was kept limited to a certain range of capabilities.
You're always going to be limited to a limited range of capabilities. You can't run a full web browser in every cockpit - you need a standardized interface that works across different vendors, across borders, and over a low-bandwidth radio link.
And I don't think anybody considers CPDLC a failure. The goal was never to 100% replace voice communication.
> One can easily imagine a system that broadcasts the weather
That exists, it's called FIS-B. Everyone uses it.
> and clearance
Clearance isn't something that can just be broadcast. You need to have a conversation with the pilot to make sure the clearance is acceptable to them. The pilot needs the ability to reject the clearance and request amendments.
> even aircraft location data close to real-time, and provide great situational awareness to everyone involved.
The human auditory input channel is the modality already in use by pilots for other parts of this task - for example, copilots will verbally provide confirmation that the plane is capable of landing (flaps, gear). Aircraft safety engineering has done a lot of investigation into how humans process information and make decisions and they have found that putting two mandatory pieces of information for landing (is the ground ready for me, am I ready for the ground) in two separate modalities will inevitably mean that during high intensity moments such as landing a plane, only one modality is checked. You would absolutely get planes landing without clearance, or with clearance but without their gear down.
The military has switched their aircraft over to datalink for C2, but asking every civil aircraft to upgrade to the systems required is economically and legally infeasible.
Nearly hands-free for pilots operating controls (not all pilots have a copilot), simple and reliable technology available to planes and airports of all sizes, high amount of message flexibility, faster than typing or some other form of electronic message selection.
Why do quarterbacks yell out code words to call plays? After all, it’s loud stadium and it’s only a couple structs worth of data!
There is no need for pilots or anyone to type anything.
Weather data can be published every minute and shown live as a full map over the screen, not as random abbreviations of wind and cloud coverage.
And we already know where each aircraft is, and where they took off, and where they're headed. So practically speaking the radio talk can be limited to only the important communication and emergencies, while increasing the situational awareness by at least ten fold.
> Weather data can be published every minute and shown live as a full map over the screen
This already exists via FIS-B.
> not as random abbreviations of wind and cloud coverage
The abbreviations (METARs) are a feature, not a bug. There are numerical legal minimums for weather that determine whether a landing is legal or not. A graphical map doesn't tell you this. The METARs are condensed because they're easy for professional pilots to skim.
(Back in the days of teletypes they also saved bandwidth, but that's just a historical note at this point.)
Regardless, pilots already have access to both textual and graphical weather products in the cockpit.
> And we already know where each aircraft is, and where they took off, and where they're headed. So practically speaking the radio talk can be limited to only the important communication and emergencies, while increasing the situational awareness by at least ten fold.
As a pilot myself, I think you're vastly misunderstanding the nature of ATC communication. 90% of communication on the radio are time-sensitve, important things - mostly heading and altitude changes to avoid other traffic.
Weather and clearances (when not relayed by ACARS, FIS-B, or CPDLC) are routinely handled on dedicated frequencies and aren't really causing meaningful frequency congestion.
Edit: Spelling. “right” to “sick”.
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