I love little cases/stories like this. I think many of us have some things that we will doggedly pursue, which in the greater scheme of things may be small... but it becomes a matter of principal mixed with amusement.
In London our transport network is managed by TFL. Their website lets you search for routes, and in the route options you can go for the fastest route, or choose this option: "Routes with the least changes". Every year on the same date, I would contact them and ask them to change that to "Routes with the fewest changes" and they would respond with something to the effect of "thanks for the feedback, passed it on, go away now".
I think I did this for over 10 years until one day it did get changed on their site. They did accompany it with a greater set of changes, that made the results more convoluted with pointless waypoints that clutter the results, but that's a new matter to pursue.
My story is not nearly as cool, but one day I could not visit my bank's website via "<bank-name>.tld" and I thought something was broken. After a few days I called and they said that it works fine for them and there was no recent problem and they told me to just type "www.<bank-name>.tld" into my browser, which.. worked. The person on the other end of the phone call clearly thought I did not know how to use a computer (arguably I actually don't, because I did not try out prepending "www." myself). I explained to them that it worked without "www." in the past and this likely was a mistake and they should inform someone, if possible. For a while I called them every couple of months and after about 2 years I finally got someone on the phone that did not think I am being an idiot and calling for something silly and a few days later it was fixed :)
I bitched and whined about Google Flight service being useless for searching for long business class flights with a change in them, because it would assume you were fine with the shorter leg being in economy -- even if the shorter leg ended up being 7 hours long. I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK)
> I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK)
How long did his LinkedIn say he was still at Google afterwards? I have to imagine that sometimes being reasonable in the face of infallible bureaucracy would either drive you crazy enough to leave or drive your coworkers crazy enough to get someone to make you leave.
Agree that Google Flights isn't perfect, though I do find it better than any other flight search engine. Especially the 'explore' option is so good for finding very cheap flights across Europe.
If you're really old-school, you know that it makes sense to require the "www" prefix. Why should the machine pointed to by the bare domain be the web server, instead of for instance the FTP server or the Gopher server? It's not necessarily the same machine which provides all these protocols, and putting the web server there is privileging one protocol over another.
Of course, that ship has long sailed; everyone uses HTTP now, even for things where it doesn't make sense, and one should at least have a tiny web server pointed to by the bare domain which redirects to the correct "www"-prefixed address. The fate of bare domains was sealed when browsers started prefixing "www." and suffixing ".com" whenever one typed a bare word in the address bar.
Actually, what makes sense is to put the most important server people may access from your systems at the shortest possible host name. If you're mainly doing FTP file hosting, it makes sense for your FTP server to be domain.net, while your less used web server can live at www.domain.net. Bonus, if you can, run your FTP and your HTTP servers on the same physical system, and allow the L4 port to determine which to talk to.
Of course, it's even better if you can use an L4 load balancer, put that on the root domain, and tell it what internal machines to access based on port.
I always wanted user agents and DNS to do a little bit more coordination here. The user agent should ask the DNS server "how do I get to http for example.com", and then DNS should reply with an IP address and a port number (so if you can't bind 443, you don't have to). Additionally, these records should have extra information, perhaps related to location (so that the entire world has a consistent view of A records associated with the host, but can still find the CDN edge node closest to them), and health checking (so if you have 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 as options, and 1.2.3.6 is being rebooted, the browser could test them all and use the one that is supposedly working). Oh, and maybe we could go totally crazy and add some information about authentication, so the user agent could get a token from its identity provider of choice and send that with the initial request (if the user's preferences allow it), and save engineers from ever having to implement sign up / sign in / account recovery / etc.
As it stands now, we have conventions for port numbers, and load balancers / VIPs for mapping the address in the DNS response to an actual computer running the desired services. We could kill a lot of complexity by letting user agents do the work of the load balancer here.
(The port number is a personal pet peeve of mine. I want to run HTTP/3 for my website, but my cloud provider's load balancer can't represent a configuration where port 443/TCP and port 443/UDP are both managed by the same load balancer. Interestingly, browsers are configured to do HTTP/3 with an Alt-Svc on an HTTP/2 or HTTP/1.1 response, which includes the port number. Chrome refuses to use anything other than port 443, while Firefox is happy with something like 30443. As a result, I have to reconfigure my network, or my cloud provider has to fix their bugs... and there is just no need. The browser could do this for me for free!)
I don't think this is a good idea at all. Most importantly, you can't rely on the client for doing load balancing! Load balancing is about making sure that one user can't affect the service quality for other users. Exposing all backend servers directly to users and asking them to choose which to use is a recipe for denial of service attacks and floods. Not to mention that LBs can help with auto-scaling based on health checks, but you can't rely on client health checks for that, and DNS would be entirely out of the loop.
DNS as used most commonly by far on the internet is a non-authenticated non-encrypted protocol. Everyone with access to the network can see what DNS requests you are making, so putting even more information in them is not great.
Further, DNS is already a single point of failure, but it at least has the advantage of relatively long cache times - so clients who already resolved the IP they need can keep working. Relying on the DNS Server instead of a separate LB seems like it would greatly increase the risk that you'd constantly be updating DNS records (for example, when your service auto-scales, you have to add/remove DNS records now) meaning you'd want very very short caches etc.
Finally, fixed port numbers are a critical part of having a low attack footprint. Even if you convinced browsers to talk to your service on port 30443 automatically, you'd soon discover that many corporate customers can't reach your service, because their network/firewall blocks outbound traffic to unknown ports. Having dynamic port numbers for protocols would be an anti-feature in most cases.
DNS is already doing the most that it should do. Bloating it with even more responsibility should be avoided, not encouraged.
That means that TLS-protected SIP is on port 5060 on sip.example.com. In theory you can do this for http/https as well, but in practice, unfortunately, browsers don't do SRV lookups.
It's worse than that. It seems to be a Kubernetes defect around merge keys; using the port number and not the protocol + port number. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/39188 But it is possible to create Kubernetes services that work correctly serving UDP and TCP on the same port; look at any old kube-dns/coredns service, for example. Indeed, I can easily create such a service for my HTTP proxy (sending TCP 443, TCP 80, and UDP 443 to my L7 proxy), but the cloud provider's software explicitly rejects it because it can't possibly work. (Meanwhile, going into their UI and modifying their object behind the k8s reconciler's back works fine, but not well enough that I trust it to announce HTTP/3 support.) I think they got spooked by a bug, but didn't realize it's a corner case and not something that happens 100% of the time. I hope it will be fixed, because I'm pretty sure they added UDP support to load balancers specifically for HTTP/3.
Not at all. It makes sense to allow it, but never makes sense to require it.
"Why should the machine pointed to by the bare domain be the web server, instead of for instance the FTP server or the Gopher server?"
We use ports to distinguish protocols. A more salient question is: Why should there only be one web server in a domain?
In fact, it used to be common to have dozens of web servers on differently named hosts in a domain, all of which might be running several internet servers like http, ftp, etc. If you're actually old-school you'll remember knowing the names of individual machines at a site and visiting urls like http://foo.building.company.com
There are some technical reasons why you might not want your web server's A record in the @ for a zone, but they mostly no longer apply.
Nowadays they do that, but in the past (think of the old Netscape and MSIE days) they used to just prefix "www." and suffix ".com"; there was no "default search engine" back then.
> If you're opening a connection to TCP/80 it's a safe assumption that you want the web server.
Yes, and if you're opening a connection to TCP/21, it's a safe assumption that you want the FTP server. But what if these two are different machines, possibly even in separate and distant networks?
To put it simply, in that old-school thinking, the bare domain should have only SOA and NS (these two being required for the domain to work), MX and SRV (these two being protocol-specific), things like TXT for SPF, and the DNSSEC stuff, but not A or AAAA or CNAME (and AFAIK using CNAME in a bare domain can cause problems, since it's not supposed to be used together with anything else, and a bare domain always has at least SOA and NS).
This is inaccurate. There's never been a reason to not assign an A record to @.
The historic structure of DNS is that names were given to systems within a domain. So you might have pikachu.company.com, squirtle.company.com, etc. It wouldn't make sense to just assign an address to the domain itself because we simply didn't have the technology to drive sophisticated consolidated sites on one system. You might need to get some files off one host, and some off another. We didn't have load balancers, and we often didn't have drive space to hold everything in one place.
MX doesn't have this problem of scale, as MX specifies multiple systems per SMTP spec.
Sometimes people would create www.pikachu.company.com, and sometimes they wouldn't. The www prefix was sometimes a handy default, but certainly wasn't ubiquitous.
The real change here is the rise of single endpoints for a domain. This began by assigning "www" as place to look for web content for the entire domain and almost in unison people began to also add A records to the domain itself. After all, why wouldn't we?
CNAME is different, of course, because CNAME aliases all record types - not just A records.
you wanna know a secret? well when indian income tax department announced a new web portal, they made a big deal out of it but guess what, they still haven't gotten the memo how incompetent they are and that they know it and don't care.
case in point, www.incometax.gov.in works but incometax.gov.in does not.
haven't you learned in domain setup tutorials to set your A records straight? i guess they didn't and its been like 1.5/2 years and its still a problem. go figure
Because they were either designed in 90s or are being approved by people who are stuck in 90s. Like you still can’t use back/forward buttons, paste text on many indian gov websites
at least on the banking side, i do suppose that is a good thing.
looking at all the scammer payback videos, most of the scammers take your remote tool, make you open the banking website and then they edit the source, reload and here is your money.
Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element which actually makes these scams very very difficult on indian netbanking customers....
that makes me wonder,why don't american banks have reload security for one? like if you reload a page it should log you out?
> Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element [...]
I don't see how these four things are related. Banks in the Netherlands require 2FA (i.e. smartphone or dedicated 2FA device) for every transaction, but this does not prohibit you from pasting an account number or reloading the page.
In particular, I don't see how opening the developer tools and reloading the page are related. If you reload a page, changes you made using the developer tools are lost.
> like if you reload a page it should log you out?
why would you do that? reloading is a normal process, what if you are on a bad connection and sometimes files don't load? you hit reload and now everything works...
FWIW I don't understand why forwarding the bare domain to the www subdomain would increase traffic so much so that they'd need to provision extra servers...
... but hey, I'm not working for NASA, so I can't say.
There's no reason to use fewest instead of least here (or fewer instead of less more generally)
A few people have decided to start a strange grammatical crusade on the usage of less and fewer, despite the fact that for all recorded history with the usage of these words up and including modern day, less is used for both countable and uncountable nouns. Some people have a preference for using fewer instead but that doesn't make the usage of less incorrect
I’d argue there could be a reason to use ‘least’ over ‘fewer’: they may be intending to emphasize the lesser impact of some changes over others, and not simply be referring to the number of changes that were made. It is possible to have a larger number of changes to a route and still end up with a lower impact to riders than another route than technically has fewer changes.
Completely agree on the language crusade, we have these fads and memes all the time where some people decide there’s only one way and try to forcefully correct others without understanding the history of these words. I have even been guilty of doing this on occasion in the past but have learned over time that language policing is almost never correct. It is not wrong to say “myriad of”. The word “literally” has been used for figurative emphasis for hundreds of years by some of our greatest writers. Responding to a ‘how are you?’ with “I’m good” or “I’m doing good” rather than “well” is not incorrect and does not communicate that you’re an angel. People, all of us I think, are just prone to getting notions about what’s right and wanting to demonstrate our found knowledge, but it’s easy to not be aware of alternatives.
I’m a descriptivist as much as the next guy, but fewer to me sounds better with countables. Like I still use things like “less cars” to sound casual but it does sound wrong to my ear.
As a descriptivist[1] I’m sure you understand that languages evolve. Just as the learn/teach distinction was made up by grammarians, so was the least/fewest one. Likewise it stuck. Most attempts at linguistic innovation fail. This one didn’t.
From the point of view of a foreigner who attempts to speak correct English, this is a beautiful nightmare. Even the natives cannot agree among themselves.
Neverthefewer (/s), I try to use fewer when the items are obviously countable. But less seems to have a natural advantage of having one syllable only; people usually try to express their point as quickly as possible, and -1 syllable is better.
Last time I was in a supermarket (Tesco near blackpool) I saw a sign for "5 items or fewer". I don't remember seeing an "or less" sign for a long time.
Do you have any information on the learn/teach distinction you mention? I couldn't find anything by googling - although those are very common words. Those two words seem very distinct in my mind, so it would be interesting to learn that it didn't used to be the case.
In some languages, "learn" and "teach" are the same word.
For example in Czech, the former is in reflexive form, to "teach oneself".
učit se (learn) and učit (teach)
And in other languages, the meaning of "teach" can be expressed using the word for "learn", by adding the learner as indirect/transitive object:
to learn someone how to play the piano
But I don't know what the parent comment meant by this:
> the learn/teach distinction was made up by grammarians
That distinction exists in some languages, and not in others. Perhaps they mean that this difference didn't used to exist in English, but in later years grammarians popularized it..?
Looking up the etymology of "learn", I found the answer.
> Transitive use (He learned me (how) to read), now considered vulgar (except in reflexive expressions, I learn English), was acceptable from c. 1200 until early 19c.
This is a disgusting perspective. The same people who champion descriptivism conveniently tend also to champion prescriptivism selectively, such as with the transexual madness over pronouns. No, I'm a prescriptivist, and I feel so strongly about it that I'd kill. Languages have rules, damn it, and damn those who disagree with this.
Tell me, do either of us see people championing this for other languages? I don't. I think, if a white man learned Chinese and butchered it, and a Chinese man corrected him, that would be fine. Why is it different for English?
Without prescriptivism, we'll see "Me love you long time" be considered to be as acceptable as "I will love you for a long time" and the very thought sickens me.
> They did accompany it with a greater set of changes
Doesn’t your wording here clarify why using ‘fewer’ might actually be incorrect from their point of view? You’re referring to changes that are qualitatively larger, just like TFL may have been trying to communicate changes that are qualitatively smaller, routes with less noticeable changes to a smaller number of riders, or even a smaller number of rider-trips, without having to include an explanatory paragraph. The number of changes might be irrelevant to most people, and it’s a good thing if TFL is trying to tell you whether statistically you should expect to notice changes based on your usage, and not whether the potentially somewhat meaningless total number of changes is lower.
‘Least’ is a word that allows subjective interpretation, while ‘fewer’ is not. Saying ‘fewer changes’ implies something more specific than saying ‘least changes’, and in making it more specific it may literally communicate the wrong thing.
Fewest is the correct word. There is no subjectivity about it.
They could have said (albeit hideously): "The routes with the least change". In this case, change is an uncountable noun.
But they didn't. They said "The routes with the least changeS", which uses the plural of the countable noun "change". So quantifier "fewest" is correct. The quantifier "least" is not.
You’re right. If you read the crappy first reply I deleted, please accept my apologies.
That said, there are still two separate reasons why “least” might be acceptable, the first reason that I used above is weaker, while the second reason is stronger IMO.
1- not all changes are equivalent. The main factor most people care about, I assume, is total trip time. It’s definitely possible to have two routes to a destination where one route has more transfers but the shortest trip time. In that specific case, “least changes” can mean something different than “fewest changes”. I’m stretching a little, and I have no idea if any pair of TFL routes does this, but purely from a language perspective, it might not be as black and white as you say.
2- Use of “least” to compare countable quantities has existed for a long time. Yes there’s a rule of thumb for fewest vs least, but this is by no means absolute.
“This rule is simple enough and looks easy enough to follow, but it's not accurate for all usage. The fact is that less is also sometimes used to refer to number among things that are counted.
“Origins of The Fewer vs Less Rule
“This isn't an example of how modern English is going to the dogs. Less has been used this way for well over a thousand years—nearly as long as there's been a written English language. But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of personal preference. Somewhere along the way—it's not clear how—his preference was generalized and elevated to an absolute, inviolable rule.”
> You’re referring to changes that are qualitatively larger,
No, a change in this context (TFL messaging on result) very explicitly means getting off the train and onto another one, possibly at a different station. The GPs use of "changes" later just refers to changes in the UI.
> The number of changes might be irrelevant to most people
The number of changes is a key bit of information to everyone as it's vital to how you actually get to your destination.
Ah thank you, I misinterpreted. I assumed it was talking about changes to the routes themselves over time. I don’t know why, but train-to-train transfers makes more sense. Okay, in that case, I agree fewer is the better word. ;)
There could still be reasons to use ‘least’ subjectively - for example the locations, time of day, traffic, and wait time between transfers may matter.
I see "least charges" as a correct way to say "the smallest sum of charges". "Fewest charges" would mean to me "being charged as few times as possible". In London subway it's normally two times.
So, "least charges", but "fewest transfers" or "fewest stops".
I don’t think great minds engage in such small battles.
It's a matter of time to not fight over some negligible matter of principle. time is limited for us all and is way too valuable to be wasted for such petty pursuits.
> Equally surprising was that Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer, chose to continue fighting the case.
If you think it's crazy for this lone lawyer to have gone through this crusade, keep in mind that Indian Railways fought in a 100 hearings for ~25 cents, and their lawyers don't work for free. How bonkers is that?
I think real justice would include an absolutely enormous fine to the company for tying up 20 years of court resources over a case they were clearly wrong about.
The plaintiff may not have incurred any legal costs, but the railway certainly cost the court a lot of money over the years.
I know nothing about the Indian legal system other than it draws a lot from the British one, but generally in cases like this the seemingly obtuse behavior is to prevent a precedential decision that others might refer to.
If they are suddenly on hook for refunds in a way they weren't before, there's a loss of potential future revenue and the additional cost of refund issuance bureaucracy. In a country the size of india even a 0.1% overcharge rate could add up to significant money. I can see why they would want to limit customers to disputing prices at the time of ticket issue.
It's not hard to find examples of private companies litigating over matters that seem superficially petty.
Not that bonkers really. I think the manager or responsible party is legally required to exhaust all options before refunding. It’s not about the money but about covering his bases.
Reminds of the time I had an argument over the phone with a guy from a UPI app (PhonePe). There was a hack going around on dormant accounts. I had one account with them which was (maybe?) used only a few times.
I called customer care and asked if they could delete my account. They said, and I quote, "due to RBI regulations, we can't". Naturally, I asked "which regulation document? do you have a number?". The other person did not have an answer and escalated my call. They said they would get back to me and in the meantime, I read all the regulations there were. The regulations clearly stated that issuers shall give an option to close the account at any time. There was no such option in the app.
I pressed again to close the account to prevent misuse and/or fraud. The person on the other end of the call asked me (beratingly) to logout and delete the app. Because it was the same as deleting the account. I argued that it is not the same thing. To which his tone was more or less like, [my words, this is how it sounded] "you blithering idiot, you blasphemous imbecile, do you know how miniscule you are in the grand scheme of things. I am God here and you should bow down to my superiority and accept my solution"
Simply filing a complaint with the office of the ombudsman[0] would have sufficed. My friend made a complaint regarding misbehavior by a banking official and the branch manager called in a few days grovelling apologies.
This case is extra special, as anyone who has ever dealt with any Indian bureaucracy can attest to. I went to my university for some paperwork (years after I had gotten my degree) - I was treated like a leper and openly asked for a bribe.
This man is a hero! As he says, it is not about the money
My granddad had to fight a case for more than 30 years because the tenant wouldn't leave. 30 fucking years just to get back a house which he bought. The only mistake he made was buying the house with the tenants still inside. They even went onto to take the deal outside the court where we would pay 1/4 of the house price to make them leave the house.
Indian legal battles stretch for so long that many times people die without hearing a judgement for the case but my granddad was lucky enough to get the house back a few years before he died.
> The only mistake he made was buying the house with the tenants still inside.
I'm not sure how strong tenant protection is in India, but here in the Netherlands, it's well-understood that purchasing a property is not a valid reason to evict its tenants. Rental properties are sold and purchased with the understanding that they are investments, and that the property owners will not be able to live there (unless the tenants voluntarily leave).
Yes people do that, you need to have a bit of local political connections and make donations every now and then for festive events/blood donation camps etc for them to even consider sending goons on your behalf. Even though we used to joke around about hiring thugs to evict them we are pretty law abiding citizens who want no trouble. But it was sad to see grandad go to the court every other weekend when I used to come to his house for summer break.
You can pay clerks to move your file around but the judiciary is so overloaded and understaffed that unless yours is a high priority or high profile case, it will just need to wait its turn. Which can be months in between hearings.
Does it really benefit anyone? Massive organisations like the Indian railways don't blink at a fine of $160 and they certainly aren't going to change anything. Presumably most people don't get over-charged so there isn't necessarily anything they can improve anyway.
I don’t know what the particulars of this case were, but a lot of similar cases led to companies being forced to adopt more consumer-friendly policies.
Like this story of a man who fought for a similar amount which ended up forcing the railways to refund hundreds of thousands to thousands of people:
Another case I remember off the top of my head was vendors charging beyond MRP for beverages in airports. Someone fought that in court over years and as a result, every vendor is now forced to sell bottled beverages at MRP now.
If there is any chance that this very public news has caused even an iota of embarrassment to the publicity-sensitive government and maybe a review of similar useless cases underway, it is well worth it.
Measuring everything is terms of money is wrong and extremely bad attitude. Rules and laws exist for a reason. You can’t put a price on upholding the law
So you'd be fine paying say 99% of your income to hire someone to follow you around and cite you for speeding or jaywalking or any other infraction you commit?
Obviously this is hyperbole, but every society places a price on upholding the law, and a hundred hearings over a quarter is a huge waste of that budget. The only benefit anyone gets is a small smug feeling that for once things went right.
I am not sure this argument is made in good faith. Governments and government bureaucracy have enormous power over an ordinary citizen - part of the reason why there is rampant corruption in India (in the govt sector) is because people don't fight back. For example, paying the bribe is way cheaper and faster than fighting back, in terms of energy/time/money. Same way, we let all kinds of nasty behavior from government slide because we are in a hurry (totally understandable).
The only benefit anyone gets is a small smug feeling that for once things went right.
I can't understand why you are upset at this man for keeping up the case for so long and not at Indian Railways for the same? All Indian railways had to do was say sorry and refund 20 bucks. The fact that they kept fighting him for a measly 20 rupees for over two decades tells you everything you need to know about what they think of the ordinary citizen. This attitude is not unique to Indian railways or to India, btw.
>I can't understand why you are upset at this man for keeping up the case for so long and not at Indian Railways for the same?
None of my criticism has been directed solely at the man, but at all three parties that let this happen. The Railways should have accepted their mistake at the time, the courts should have immediately thrown out or ruled on a case over a quarter, and the man should have accepted that sometimes small mistakes happen.
You seem to hold this as some hero fighting the good fight over corruption, and I don't see that position at all. Yes corruption is an issue, in India and elsewhere. This waste of time had nothing to do with it.
Of course you can, it happens all the time. I suggest you temper your idealism in the cold water of pragmatic awareness. A simple example of cost-capping is the idea of barratry, where a person can be deemed a vexatious litigant - legalspeak for a troll who harasses others with frivolous lawsuits that are substantively deficient but require expensive procedural work to dismiss.
What's notable here (and often true in stories like this) is that the litigant is a lawyer. They have the skill to manage the case and it is only costing them personal time, which might pay for itself in terms of professional or commercial reputation in addition to emotional satisfaction.
This is not a story about tenacity or an overloaded court system. It's a story about deliberate bad governance to keep corruption money flowing in an impoverished country.
The political leadership could easily find solutions to stop such abuses of the public legal system, and direct resources to high priority cases with large public impact. By deliberately allowing such cases to bog down the justice system and waste limited public resources, they ensure rule of law cannot operate effectively. It's a typical story.
Ever since we tossed out Divine Right, our overlords have had to resort to increasingly-inscrutable systems to do the needful, and inscrutable systems are effectively the same as "no system" in this regard.
I tire of hearing excuses like "our judges can't adjudicate simple matters in fewer than three generations [because they are busy and have A Hard Job]", or "we can't have healthcare because the sous chef du jour did not include it on the menu, and we must respect the venerable and time-honored tradition of the sous chef du jour in designing the menu"
Just once, I'd rather hear them say "Obama of Nantucket relayed a vision in which 12 great dragons appeared, all pissed about the price of oil, the upcoming NATO summit, the Franklin County Republican primaries, and the wearing of pocket squares with striped suits. On healthcare, saith the Orange Dragon: put an onion in your sock and go to MedExpress if you get sick, and you'll probably be fine."
Even if nothing substantive changed, at least the comments sections and over-the-shoulder graphics on the news would be cooler, anyway.
>> The case highlights India’s overloaded court system, where around 40m cases are clogging up the system. Legal cases have been known to take 10-15 years to reach a conclusion.
Most interesting tidbit for me. Is this really true?
Yes, sadly this is true and one of the biggest bottlenecks in India. There are many ways (bribing and legal) to delay a case. I have known cases to last 20-30 years because more time will benefit one of the parties. For example if a rich person sues a poor person, lets say for an inherited property, the rich person benefits from making the case go longer. They dont even have to have a valid case, just after enough delays, the poor person is going to move on. Replace 'poor' above with any disadvantaged group.
Edit: The rich/powerful people give a return of their "winnings" to the judges/court-employees. This is one of the main reasons for delays on cases that can be easily closed.
I don't know about India, but it really is the case in less-developed countries. The sluggishness of the legal system is a catalyst to corruption - so anyone can do anything, and suing is useless because the case won't even be heard until years later.
The only way anyone is gonna get sued is because of such "stubborn" individuals that keep on going. But alas, a few individuals can't fix the whole system.
Yes. Part of the reason is that lower courts have a very lenient attitude towards no-shows that encourages continual postponement of cases. Any random excuse like "my lawyer has a stomach ache" will delay the hearing to the next date. It's then not a surprise that many folks use this to delay out of malice.
He shared a story with me of a particular lawyer that ends up being paid millions of dollars per hour, because he's able to leverage his connections to help corporate clients jump to the front of the line.
Yes it is true, and this is just one small example which managed to get some news . Cases drag for years and years , there are hearings etc.
Unless something gets in the news or fast tracked , legal battles seems never ending in most of the cases.
I am not sure about the 40m cases. But the 10-15 years is true. The civil cases in the country can drag on for a generation or more. I have personally witnessed one such case where the plaintiff has died of old age.
A lot of countries are like this, the main reason justice is swift in the US is the out-of-court settlement scheme where 95%-99% of the cases don’t reach trial.
Telecom companies cannot take small subscribers to court in India. You don't pay your bills, they can send legal notices, but not much beyond that. We have ~1B+ subscribers. Even if a small percentage goes into dispute, our judicial system will completely collapse.
Periodically stories emerge about cases in Indian courts that have been pending for centuries. [0]. Such cases, not only in India, have also been the fodder for literature, including Charles Dicken's "Bleak House" set against the backdrop of the interminable fictional probate case "Jarndyce v Jarndyce" which is implied to have lasted for generations.
When Rakuten finally shuttered the forums I think the thread was about 13 years old; it was about a minor estate (mid 7 figures??) from someone who died inestate being divided up among an extended family, complicated by a random multi-year pause in the proceedings while no lawyers did anything to advance the case, and by the periodic appearance of purported long-lost relatives.
A law professor who consulted around the world on transactional banking law with litigants and even courts recounted a sardonic bit of legal advice from India: Always pick a lawyer with a son. (Because the case will outlive the first lawyer, and better that it's passed on to someone with familiarity.)
I'm currently over 2 months and 4 emails into a battle to get a tiny amount of compensation for a train delay in the UK. Similar situation, it's not about the money, it's the principle.
Me and my friends often debate as most of the cases follow certain pattern, it should be easier to categories the majority of the cases and if not fully but partially automate the process.
Most of the paper work(judiciary / non judiciary) involves similar template , SSH/SSA , agreements etc. It need not be this complex. Most of the manual work involved in the process should be automated
Idk about India, but in other common law countries, courts often don’t even award basic costs to self-represented applicants, as a matter of policy. I never really understood the rationale.
It's worth noting that in the Indian judicial system a large number of judges are related to previous judges. There is a system where the previous judges appoint subsequent ones, which results in widespread nepotism.
The length of the battle comes from an overcrowded judicial system which has many reasons like this to be overcrowded via constraint of supply.
Supply constraint mechanisms are a way for labour to extract value from society. It happens with the AMA here and the judiciary there.
"Equally surprising was that Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer, chose to continue fighting the case."
There needs to be some sort of common sense oversight in the Raliways (and most probably in other Indian government organizations also).
Also I wonder on what grounds the Railways was fighting on? The prices of the tickets are well known and widely published, and even though they do change over time, a lawyer like Chaturvedi would have kept all documentation.
Love this story. The sheer level of stubbornness by some companies and and then the energy they spend fighting back, when they are clearly in the wrong, is mind-blowing. I’ve had my own battles, and it’s this kind of story that reminds me sometimes the energy is worth it.
i am a legal practitioner operating in these courts and let me be the party pooper, cases like these are the reason why the judiciary is fucked shit.
courts in india have like 100 year backlog or something crazy amount. reason? i get the whole "principle" thing but get in line.
because of "principled people" like this man, inmates incarcerated for 10+ years without a trial are being delayed because once admitted, each case has to be completed to the full and these shall i say "worthless petty cases" are one of the causes of delay.
want to know how much delay? apparently the case, over 22 years had over 100 hearing. that means, the 100 times the court was in session, some other case got pushed back, just a tiny bit but over 100 times, that counts to a lot.
now, i am not saying people should not fight for "principle" but when you are being pompous assholes for fighting over pennies while innocent men and women are being subjected to horrendous conditions in indian jails or thousands of victims of sexual crimes or other more serious issue, these principled people are causing the delay.
why dont you do arbitration whereby you go outside the traditional court system and fight your battles however long you like. why are they holding up courts?
It is not this man's fault your country has a 100 year backlog on court cases, it is your country's fault. Take responsibility for your country's failure in managing its judicial system efficiently rather than trying to scapegoat a man who was ripped off by your country's railway system.
Hear you! This sort of unprincipled pragmatism, that overlooks any long term benefit over short term inconvenience is pretty much how things are done in India.
how is the court at fault here? i just said if the case is admitted, it has to run its course. why did the other side not budge in the first place? why did it take them 22 years and a court to tell them they were wrong? didn't they know that?
they did and they still didn't care. that is the problem, not the courts per se.
Hacker News is really going to the dogs. This comment shouldn't be downvoted. It's a dissenting viewpoint that comes from a vastly more informed place than the top comment which is a petty-minded justice boner about 'principle'.
legal incompetence, bureaucracy, case load of judges, yada yada.
the judge looks at his calender, thinks "hmm, how about 3 months from now".
on that date, either of the lawyers says "judge, i need more time for an affidavit, why dont you give me 4 more months"...... on and on..
oh, btw, the next time the court does hear your case, its a different judge so you have to explain it once again and then the judge goes "next hearing date 4 months"....
These problems seem to be fixable either by judges themselves or by lawmakers who presumably have the power to pass laws that speed up the legal system.
Lawyer: "judge, i need more time for an affidavit, why dont you give me 4 more months"
In London our transport network is managed by TFL. Their website lets you search for routes, and in the route options you can go for the fastest route, or choose this option: "Routes with the least changes". Every year on the same date, I would contact them and ask them to change that to "Routes with the fewest changes" and they would respond with something to the effect of "thanks for the feedback, passed it on, go away now".
I think I did this for over 10 years until one day it did get changed on their site. They did accompany it with a greater set of changes, that made the results more convoluted with pointless waypoints that clutter the results, but that's a new matter to pursue.