I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

Post by skeptikal » Mon, May 02, 2022, 12:55 AM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #290

cesarb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Canada is in America too Even Brazil is in America. This is why I dislike using the term "American" when referring to US citizens, it's hopelessly ambiguous: are you talking about the country or the continent?

Among native English speakers, “American” almost always means someone from the United States. That’s partly because, unlike every other country, the US doesn’t have a convenient adjective for its residents. However, after a few years in Central America I’ve broken myself of this usage. Spanish has an adjective for US people (aside from gringo, etc.) that I can use in Spanish, and when speaking English I find some oth…

Post by skeptikal » Mon, May 02, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

throwmeariver1 wrote: post #67

skeptikal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP wrote (admittedly wordy), “metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII,” Meaning that the GDP trends as if we’re in a WW3 situation and loosing, not that we are. I.E the GDP/debt metric appears to be as bad as if we were loosing a war when in fact we’re not even fighting one. Ironically I disagree with both points. Yes the economy is bad, yes it will get worse but: - I don't…

Weaker fundamentals? Do you really think the relationships with third world countries are more strained than were during active colonization? Russia and China did a lot of work with their infrastructure programs but I am still not sure they have the upper hand.

Post by prepend » Mon, May 02, 2022, 2:07 AM UTC

danuker wrote: post #395

prepend wrote: post #364

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Of course the only place you can get 8% return on savings is at treasury and he already maxed that out. He’s lucky to get 1% return on a high yield savings so he lost 1/12 = .08%/month so if it takes two months for a refund he lost $16.66 in interest from where he has it parked. My bank’s high yield interest only returns .05% so if I had acted stupidly and made the same mistake I would have missed out on 83 cents for…

> He’s lucky to get 1% return on a high yield savings To match inflation, all one has to do is to buy nonperishable components of the CPI: fuel, real estate (through a REIT), food, commodities, and so on. If banking can't keep up with that, it speaks volumes about the competence of the financial system.

Post by la6472 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #409

la6472 wrote: post #405

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Any website worth anything would have done a real time check on the users balance and only allow the leftover amount to be used to buy the bonds I.e if I already have $2K worth of bonds then I should be allowed only another $8K worth of bonds. How difficult is it to build this simple business logic into the user experience? Not a lot specially with the resources at their disposal. But unfortunately I can guarantee th…

> check on the users balance and only allow the leftover amount to be used to buy the bonds I.e if I already have $2K worth of bonds then I should be allowed only another $8K worth of bonds. Your pseudocode already failed the unit tests. The limit is 10k per year, and you can hold I bonds for 30 years. Someone can have 300k of I bonds in their account balance. (Not that it would be hard to do it correctly.)

Post by mint2 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 3:04 AM UTC

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?