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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

#451

Post by brewdad »

Someone1234 wrote: post #222
codedokode wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why keyloggers also log the title of an active window.

So the malware is running in the user's context, and has the browser's window handle and instead of using that to hook the child input elements directly, they're going to store an unintelligible stream of keystrokes then use the window handle to bundle that with the window's title? Is that a reasonable way to implement malware? Will it result in high quality data for resale? One of those "Things programmers believe a…

Even if a naive keylogger is only capturing keystrokes and sending that file somewhere. It's a simple script to search for email addresses and then assume the next 8-64 characters are the password. How many of us type in a web address, then go type something else. Then return to the web site and type the user name, go back to work on an email, then come back and type the password?

I would guess approximately no one does this as standard behavior.

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

#452

Post by brewdad »

jaimehrubiks wrote: post #308

I've been in the US for 4 years and it seems like the government is just like a computer that you cannot talk to or get issues fixed somehow. It's like, if something goes wrong you're fucked. If USPS loses your documents or even your car's title, or your immigration approval notice, you're fucked, you might need to wait 2 months, or 6, or 8, and nobody cares, nobody will help you. There's no one that can help you. At…

Ok, but if USPS loses your important document, what do you expect them to do about it? They have no idea where it is and, unless someone paid for special tracking, no way to locate it aside from dumb luck.

Whatever agency was sending you your important document has to be the one to re-issue it and resend it. USPS has no role until it comes time to deliver it again.

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

#453

Post by butlerm »

otterley wrote: post #236
butlerm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1933 Congress unilaterally devalued the dollar by nearly seventy percent, rewrote the gold clauses in private contracts, largely forbid the private possession of gold, and managed to get away with it. The Supreme Court conveniently decided to ignore the Constitution on that occasion.

Why do you believe this was unconstitutional?

If a state did it, it would be a straightforward violation of the Contracts Clause. With regard to Treasury bonds and gold certificates it was the government rewriting its own contracts. It was a violation of the contract on every Federal Reserve Note and bank deposit as well. Redemption in gold had been suspended before, but the value had not been, and in the late nineteenth century the government started redeeming gold certificates again at full face value after an interruption during and after the Civil War.

So if you start out by issuing an executive order requiring everyone to turn in their gold in exchange for certificates denominated in dollars and then a few months later you decide that those certificates and all other deposits are worth 70% less in gold then they were before it amounts to a systematic taking that looks like the worst violation of the Takings Clause ever. i.e. "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" (from the Fifth Amendment).

In theory states could do something similar under the taxing power, but Congress doesn't have the power under the Constitution to enact property taxes in any way that is practical. We have the 16th Amendment so they could do that in a practical way on incomes.

Congress just decided to jointly repossess 70% of the financial wealth of the country, and ignore every solemn representation they or anyone else had ever made to the contrary. It that is not unconstitutional it should be.

There were alternatives, they could for example have recapitalized the Federal Reserve system, with a debt for equity swap at the cost of wiping out the original shareholders, of course. The banks held title to a worthless enterprise and Congress sanctioned a massive levy of their depositors to keep them afloat.

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

#454

Post by butlerm »

notch656a wrote: post #344
butlerm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are government agents out there that do that sort of thing as a matter of course, they should be prosecuted without mercy and imprisoned for decades as the criminals they are, if not lined up and shot at dawn.

They have done much worse than this at this port of entry (Nogales) along with their friends at Carondelet Health Network (Nogales/Tucson). Refer to federal case 4:16-cv-00334-CKJ filed in US District Court of Arizona: ------------------ '31. Even though prior searches resulted in no evidence of internal drug smuggling, the CBP Agents and Dr. Martinez continued the intrusion on ***’s body without her knowing, willful…

I don't know what to say except that the death penalty is too light a sentence for government agents guilty of offenses like that.

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

#455

Post by conradludgate »

Posts and threads like this make me so happy to be using the payment stack that is in the UK. We have the Faster Payments scheme which now allows moving £1million pretty much instantly (no card fees).

And now we have open banking which makes creating bank transfers like this trivial for the end user [disclaimer, I work for a leading open banking API company in the UK] and the right API can be just as easy as stripe to use

I guess it's in part helped that we were stuck with only a few old major banks until the last decade when the technology was ready for the new challenger banks to actually offer new interesting ideas. I think the US is stuck with thousands of smallish banks that somehow need to send cash between themselves.

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

#456

Post by [deleted] »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #301
cortesoft wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens whenever something bad happens to someone else, be it a car accident or a major illness or being the victim of a crime. People want to think it wouldn’t happen to them, so they go through all the reasons they would have been able to avoid the situation so that they don’t have to fear it happening to them. People really don’t want to admit to themselves that there are a lot of things outside our control t…

That's mostly because people in good circumstances are usually reluctant to attribute much of it to luck. It's so much more fun to pretend that everything good that's happened to you, you earned and deserved, rather than a lot of it just being random noise that compounded in the fortunate direction.

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by emteycz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #301
cortesoft wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens whenever something bad happens to someone else, be it a car accident or a major illness or being the victim of a crime. People want to think it wouldn’t happen to them, so they go through all the reasons they would have been able to avoid the situation so that they don’t have to fear it happening to them. People really don’t want to admit to themselves that there are a lot of things outside our control t…

That's mostly because people in good circumstances are usually reluctant to attribute much of it to luck. It's so much more fun to pretend that everything good that's happened to you, you earned and deserved, rather than a lot of it just being random noise that compounded in the fortunate direction.

That's mostly because luck is only one very small component. The years and years of hard work are much more important. Yeah you need to be "lucky" to find a good opportunity - but everyone is lucky in that way, but most people do nothing about their opportunities.

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

#458

Post by lostlogin »

This reminds me of a time I played with entering data into a terrible system.

A GE MRI scanner had options in the software that could be on, or off. Rather than a check box you typed ‘1’ or ‘0’. This is relatively recently.

I tried for a while to find a field that would accept other values, and eventually found one. When the sequences ran it crashed the scanner and the patient had to be rebooked as the reboot takes a long time.

I don’t test on patients anymore.

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

#459

Post by fxtentacle »

notch656a wrote: post #5
fxtentacle wrote: post #4

Great story :) I'm guessing it will have a happy ending because there's a thinking human on the other side. This is government, not a private megacorp.

I honestly can't tell if this is satire.

No, my experience with government offices has actually been mostly positive so far. Not US, but Germany, though.

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

#460

Post by zerocrates »

conradludgate wrote: post #455

Posts and threads like this make me so happy to be using the payment stack that is in the UK. We have the Faster Payments scheme which now allows moving £1million pretty much instantly (no card fees). And now we have open banking which makes creating bank transfers like this trivial for the end user [disclaimer, I work for a leading open banking API company in the UK] and the right API can be just as easy as stripe t…

There's an ACH involved here which isn't unrelated to the slow speed, but the main issue here is just that you can only buy this particular savings bond directly from the government using this one website.
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