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I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

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Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#331

Post by boris-ning-usds »

lvl102 wrote: post #103

That’s why you buy through a bank. Edit: I am wrong. You can only buy it two ways which is ridiculous in my view. More to the point of the website that belongs in a museum, why can’t they update this consumer facing portal? What happened to all the people from “digitization” govt organizations? Such as 18F and usds. Oh. You mean all they do is replace the front end? Got it.

We absolutely can update this consumer facing portal, and I believe there is a Treasury team actively working to modernize this portal.

Personally, I didn't even know of this portal's existence until I signed up for an account and and went through the same process the author went through. I noted the same security theater and passed it over to my USDS team to see if there's anything we can do.

At first glance, simply replacing the front end is a solution, but there are bigger problems here that the author did not try. If one tries to change your bank account number, having typed in it wrong, they'll have to mail in a physical form to have it changed. As the author noted, going over $10k per year will also trigger unintended consequences that can span 8-10 weeks before the money is returned.

There are problems here that goes beyond just replacing the "front end".

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#332

Post by scarface74 »

heartbreak wrote: post #312
scarface74 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone talks about “people working for a FAANG”, realistically no one is referring to Amazon warehouse workers neither are people talking about Uber drivers. Mostly they are talking about software engineers and adjacent roles. Thats not meant to throw shade on warehouse workers as “lesser”. My dad is retired factory worker.

It’s not just warehouse workers and drivers. Accounting, marketing, legal, HR, etc. all exist.

Yes, and at least at Amazon, they all pay much more than the $130K that it takes to be in the 90th percentile income level in the US if you are at least a mid level (L5) employee.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#334

Post by pc86 »

Jenk wrote: post #76
xkbarkar wrote: post #69

I thought this was funny. Weird comments in the thread about how he/she should have known better. Author is not making a complaint to demand internet outrage. There is no inflammatory justice warrior content here. Sheesh! Author admits they screwed up, decided to share the screwup, and who hasnt been trough that exact dunder blunder? Fun short read 8/10.

There is a strange human phenomenon, particularly visible online. Some folk see a title like that and it triggers a "How can I blame the author?" urge within before they even open the link.

Because blaming the author means it's their fault, because they're stupid/didn't pay attention/whatever. The alternative is that they just made a mistake that anyone could make, which means the keyboard warriors would need to reconcile the fact that they might have made this mistake. And since we're all Very Smart People, we wouldn't make such a silly mistake. So clearly the author much be a bumbling idiot. It's the only possible explanation.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#335

Post by nullc »

SpaceL10n wrote: post #28
roenxi wrote: post #22

> They're zero-risk bonds... To qualify this, there is zero risk that the technical letter of the agreement won't be honoured. Lending money to the US government is very high risk right now. Simple person metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII, and the trend-line says they are losing. If you lend the US government enough money to buy a sandwich there is a real risk that at…

The I-bond guarantees a return rate at inflation or higher. You're saying you expect negative inflation this year?

The i-bond with a fixed rate of 0% is guaranteed to return less than inflation: Even if you buy their inflation metric as faithful: The 'gains' are taxed. The tax is at income rates, not even LTCG rates.

Moreover, what they're attempting to match isn't inflation, it's a specific government inflation metric which contains many corrections which make it obviously not match inflation for the purpose of preserving purchasing power.

For example, when inflation goes up the metric assumes that purchasing will shift from high value goods (like steak) to lower value goods (like rice), which causes the metric to read lower. This is no good if your goal is preserving purchasing power: you put in enough to buy steak and the inflation metric is okay with what comes out being only enough to buy a meal of rice (not technically, since steak and rice aren't the only goods but you get my point).

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#336

Post by exikyut »

loeg wrote: post #266
bmitc wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are some fields like that? I have never understood why. It happens a lot when entering in bank account numbers. I am almost always copying and pasting the bank account number directly from my bank's website, but yet, these fields require me to type it in, increasing the possibility of a mistake.

Faux security measure. You could blame the PMs or the customers. Why browsers enable it, I'm not sure.

Most likely because the amount of furor and kerfuffle that would be created when "the security system broke" would basically be equal quantities of facepalm and hustle that would phase between canceling each other out and producing undirected chaos.

Like, this brand of "security" is being persisted with, in 2022, when virtually nothing else uses this sort of approach, and the writing's been on the wall for so long you almost can't see the wall for the writing anymore. And yet.

At the end of the day from an actual-security standpoint there's a lot to be said for generally rooting this kind of thing out and doing away with it, but given the direct association to vaults and banks and government (and probably military) systems and whatnot it's one situation where the blowback might genuinely cause enough bad press to require a summary firing or two as a token of reassurance to the type of old-world mindset in charge of this sort of thing. Maybe.

*shrug* that's a worst-case-scenario imagining what might happen, at least. I honestly have no idea. I just get strong "swim away!!" vibes from it, heh

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#337

Post by redisman »

bhaney wrote: post #289

> if you buy before May this year, you get a guaranteed ~8.5% return Of course I'd learn about this on May 1st

I bought on Friday and they marked me for Monday so I missed it too. BUT I don’t think inflation is going down this year so whatever. China is in lockdown, Russian energy imports are curtailed, Ukrainian grain supply is down 20% at least. If it’s a supply side issue things are only getting worse

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#338

Post by redisman »

jldugger wrote: post #161
erwincoumans wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the undetermined inflation rate for November 2022 has to go down to less than 7.12% (annualized) for that (the April case) to be a real "golden" opportunity? How likely is that?

More like the interest rate 30y from now has to be higher than 7.12 annualized, since thats the one period that will be different, everything else is just the same but lagged

You don’t have to hold them for 30 years. I’m holding my down payment on them for example until a better option comes along (which probably won’t)

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#339

Post by jrimbault »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #305
jrimbault wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there's a keylogger installed, why would the same keylogger not take regular screenshots ?

there are indeed keyloggers that do this, but it wasn't common in the early 2000s when most of these on-screen keyboard setups were implemented.

My intuition tells me that nowadays, if you can embed an arbitrary program "keylogger" onto a computer, it should also log most user events, not just "keyboard events", including screenshots of areas around mouse clicks, maybe a small OCR module etc.

Of course, a physical keylogger is a different beast, but really, if you got physical access enough to install an actual piece of hardware...

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#340

Post by exikyut »

jandrese wrote: post #212
tashbarg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in the described scenario, the password never shows up in the keyloggers log. Works as intended.

Keyloggers track mouse clicks just as well as keystrokes. They had the password the entire time since the site doesn't randomize the keyboard layout.

Another comment was mentioning malware that uses screenshot-on-click :<
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