461–470 of 512 posts
I stopped reading when I got to "They're zero-risk bonds..."
US treasury bonds are generally considered "zero-risk" in finance, it's a pretty common notion.
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…
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.
The UK gov has its fair share of problems but gov.uk is great at explaining all their stupid rules.
South European governments are incredibly bad from my experience and from what my friends tell me, Germany, France and the Netherlands are fairly bad as well (in different ways). Maybe nordic countries fare better.
Russia used to be a bureaucracy nightmare but got much better in the last few years.
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.
A Venn diagram is just a graphical representation of sets. You're thinking of an intersection (of sets).
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…
"A refund of the excess purchase will be made" Sounds like he will have made his intended 10k investment, there's no indication the system doesn't work as intended (even though it could work a lot better, obviously - the app could check for the investment limit right away, and an 8-week window for refunds, in a system that offers 2-month investments, is borderline scammy).
At least that's what I view as the logically "correct" way to interpret the sentence. Whether it's what the software does or not is anyone's guess.
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.
I am not sure how much clearer "Your deposit exceeded the limit. The excess funds will be returned" could be.
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?
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…
This has been my experience with basically any large company in the country.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see the logic. Is there no way to purchase these bonds besides this website?
The only other way is via your annual tax return.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not luck being born without birth defects, being healthy, and still being alive to this day?