501–510 of 512 posts
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Just edit it to 'value="mypassword"' directly.
It will enrage you to find out that some sites actually track the value, and if more than one character changes per keystroke, it'll reset the value. It's rare, but I have seen it.
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Inflation/monetary policy risk. Liquidity risk. Market risk. Geopolitical risk. To name a few.
Those are risks of the currency and risks of your personal finances, not risks of the bond not being paid back.
You might get your money back. But that money might be worth shit due to inflation. It might be impossible to sell the bond due to a shortage of liquidity, etc, etc.
It's naive and basically wrong to characterise a bond as zero risk just because there is an (almost) zero percent chance you won't get your money back on maturity. This is merely _one_ risk.
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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.
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…
I did something analogous ?/similar-ish recently. I tried to pay my parents' credit card balance (let's say it was $1000). I went through the process and received an automated email saying, "Thank you for paying $1000 on the credit card." Got a call from my father a few hours later telling me he spent another $300 and could I please pay the extra $300...? So, I signed in again and paid another $300. Only thing is, un…
They will almost certainly refund the $40 if you call and ask nicely. I have a couple times called (various credit card companies) and said, "Look, I've been a cardholder for years, I pay off my full balance every month, I just forgot this time. Can you please refund the $70 interest fee and the $25 late payment fee"?
If I ever feel an urge to try out test cases on banking apps, hopefully I'll think of this story and stop.
Do the same thing one does with software: setup a dev environment Either create an LLC or a child. Both can have a tax identifier. Not sure which is cheaper in the long run but the child is definitely more fun.
Source: I have both a child and an I bond
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One of my coworkers told me a long time ago, it's better to increase your withholding allowances. That way the government is giving you an interest free loan.
There's a limit to how much you can do that and not owe a penalty.
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But why immediately do it again?!
Especially when there is two weeks left in the month... Like, maybe wait the same time it took your last transfer to show up just to be sure... Maybe some people just have more money than sense...
> They're zero-risk bonds with an interest rate that always matches or exceeds inflation The caveat is that you must agree with how your govt. calculates inflation. Also, your personal expenses might not be well represented by official inflation. Finally, like any bond, if you sell them before they mature you might get smaller (or higher) returns. Not saying this is a bad investment though, I just rarely see those ri…
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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 hard to define just how much luck would matter in any given situation, but if you consider every aspect of our lives as part of luck, which I think is what people mean when they debate luck vs hard work, then I think it's a lot higher than 5% actually. That is, things like place/time of birth, parents, family, socioeconomic status at birth, schools, friends, teachers, health, timing of things, chance encounters - these things are all mostly outside of your control.
Someone on hacker news might be thinking how they worked hard for years to learn software engineering, spent time networking, practiced interview questions, applied to several places, performed well in the interviews, and landed a lucrative job. And that's all part of hard work and it's often a necessary part of success. It doesn't feel like you lucked into anything. But the lucky part was mostly all the stuff I mentioned before - things that happened at birth, or things that happened because of others' actions. If you're born an affluent white American, for example, your luck meter is highly filled from the start. Then maybe at some point you had a teacher that helped you in a meaningful way, or you met a friend that influenced your decision making. And let's not forget there are people who are just as qualified, who study hard, practice, do all the same things, and they don't get the job. Maybe because the interviewer had a hangover, or maybe it was just someone else got in before them and wowed the interview team and made up their mind before seeing them. That's luck.
I believe this is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en
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"By yearend 1960, pension plans covered 23 million persons, about one-half of all private sector workers." "By yearend 1977, total employer contributions to defined benefit pension plans had risen [...] covering nearly 35 million active employees." [More than half.] https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1991/12/art3full.pdf https://www.thebalance.com/the-history-of-the-pension-plan-2... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USPRIV Ad…
I like that you inject "[More than half]" when referring to the nearly 35 million workers in 1977. Except there were over 90 million workers by then [1]. The FRED series you picked is not all employed people. > And we saw how great these investment plans worked out for the poor folks that had planned to retire around 2008. Ah, cherry picking, the best of all logical fallacies. It's already known that those pensions d…
I don't appreciate your tone here. Everything I posted was the result of a quick web search. It just so happened that the FRED data I found corroborated the numbers in the study I found. Maybe you missed it, but both the study and FRED data are specifically about private sector workers.
Here is some more data (not hidden behind a paywall like your study):
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
It looks like at the end of 1977 there was 85M people employed (total) in the US. Which is certainly not "moving above the 90-million mark" as your page suggests. So maybe your data is cherry picked? Is your data even US data? The page you provided doesn't say.
> It's already known that those pensions didn't turn out too well either
You didn't back this up with anything. Private pensions are protected by ERISA that was passed in 1974. It requires employers to have separate assets to cover their pensions and created the PBGC which insures them. The only pensions that I've seen go belly up are state (Kentucky) pensions where the state governments (not beholden to ERISA) raided the pension funds for other things.
> Why not own some productive assets?
If by "productive assets" you mean real estate, the price to play is way too high. And on a moral note, allowing family homes to be commoditizated into investment vehicles for the rich is part of the problem. If, instead, "productive assets" is just your fancy way of saying stocks and their derivatives then yeah; I'm invested in the market. I'm not happy about it, but there isn't another choice.
> And now the bias shows.
Yes I'm biased. Fuck Wall Street. It has nothing to do with "investing in companies". It's all about wealth extraction (from companies and now from dumb money). It produces nothing of value.