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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

#411

Post by kube-system »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #358
coffeeblack wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn’t the authors fault at all. It’s 2022, not 1998. I would expect a banking/payment UI to be very clear and foolproof.

Hah, if you've ever used the TreasuryDirect site it's a disaster from the Windows XP days. Reminds me of those old Flash and Silverlight apps. The keyboard in the article is a virtual keyboard you click to type your password in for "security" reasons (yet there's no 2FA app supported).

It made sense at one point in the past when everyone was worried about keyloggers and nobody was thinking about credential stuffing. Information security has come a long way in the past 20 years.

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

#412

Post by folmar »

yesenadam wrote: post #191
ntkachov wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ridiculously annoying. I have to edit the HTML every single time to remove "readonly" on that field and paste in my randomly generated password.

> I have to edit the HTML every single time to remove "readonly" on that field Couldn't you do that with a bookmarklet, so it would just take one click?

Given websites with CSP bookmarklets generally are a dead thing now as they are usually blocked by the policies.

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

#413

Post by avgcorrection »

danuker wrote: post #402
avgcorrection wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government Can Do Nothing Right has been the propaganda line of the right-wing of the American business community since the end of WWII. A lot of the business community resented the social democratic reforms of that time (those ’50s white picket fence times) and so they sought to first argue that government was useless, and then later prove it through their government-sucks politicians.

Compare OP's story to, say, creating a Facebook account. Why is the government's solution so much crappier? Why can a private company streamline a web experience much better?

In my neck of the woods (not the US) people do most government things like file their taxes through websites. And it’s for the most part a good experience.

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

#414

Post by kube-system »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #343
vasco wrote: post #32

The venn diagram of internet users that read about super specific financial products, decide to buy them, while not even understanding the need to keep an emergency fund such that a move like this leaves them with under $200 in their account seems to be growing. It seems to be a weird mix of wall street cosplay and financial ineptitude.

I have a colleague who just can't justify to themselves having an emergency fund while they still have debt to pay... yet buy a brand new 40k car and think about replacing it after 2 years even though they have nothing against it. I feel like a lot of people just can't stand having money standing there doing nothing as an insurance policy when they could be making money or buying something with it.

> people just can't stand having money standing there doing nothing as an insurance policy

And then, they pay more on their actual insurance policies to have low deductibles because they can’t afford a larger deductible because they don’t save anything.

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

#416

Post by 542458 »

galangalalgol wrote: post #378
PawBer wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no wonder that people vote for less government influence in the US. They just never had a good experience with it so they want to get rid of it as a band-aid solution.

Are large organizations in other countries more human friendly? That sounds delightful. My impression from friends in the EU is that it is similar there, at least for housing and healthcare regulations.

Some “nice” bits of government I’ve hit recently in Canada:

When my kid was born I was given a convenient form to fill out that registered my child’s birth, applied for a SIN, applied for the relevant tax breaks, and registered me to be contacted about options for saving for my child’s education.

My city has a nice little online portal where I can see my tax and utility bills, register city maintenance issues, apply for local city programs, etc. It’s pretty decent.

Oh, and the CRA’s NETFILE system is pretty neat. In addition to the expected submitting of taxes online, banks, employers, etc can send documents to netfile which my tax software can automatically retrieve and ingest.

Not saying that any of the above are perfect, but government can (and does sometimes) produce decent systems. Of course, there are always bad parts - I’ve recently had friend and family deal with immigration and death systems that badly need a redesign.

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

#417

Post by woojoo666 »

smachiz wrote: post #281
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting there appears to be a race condition at play. The third transaction was marked as canceled because the second has not finished processing and so is still counting against the total. There is no guarantee the govt system will check that again once 2 completes (in fact, I'd be shocked if it did). And by the time both 2 and 3 process, the window to buy looks like it will be closed per the author's post…

There is no race condition. The order won’t actually matter here - but even if it did, the “right” thing will happen either way depending on which interpretation of the email you have. The third transaction got the same response as the second. Which would actually imply that the common reading of that email (he’s getting $25 back from the second deposit is correct, and he’s going to get the entire $9,975 back from th…

I'm not so sure that the author currently has 10k in bonds. The pseudo-code for the purchasing backend might just look like

    totalReceived = totalReceived + transactionAmount
    if (totalReceived > 10000) {
        sendEmail()
        wait10weeks()
        refund(transactionAmount)
        totalReceived = totalReceived - transactionAmount
    } else {
        buybonds(transactionAmount)
    }
In which case, the author would have 20k locked up in the government and only $25 invested.

A horrible way to write a system of course but if the system takes 10 weeks to process a refund then it doesn't sound like the system is that great to begin with

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

#418

Post by 3252624626 »

_tom_ wrote: post #390
3252624626 wrote: post #386

> Recently I learned that the US government offers a little gift called I-bonds, and that this is the month to buy them. Basically an ordinary HNer saw that article posted here about I-bonds, and like a typical HNer, probably thinks they're a lot smarter than they actually are, so they went and tried to buy a financial product they didn't fully understand, made a mess of it, and now blames the UI.

If you are familiar, could you post a short explanation? I'm also curious as to why buying in may is too late. Edit: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds... Doesn't explain why may is too late.

This is the article the OP read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006354
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