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I thought this was funny. Weird comments in the thread about how he/she should have known better. Author is not making a complaint to demand internet outra
by xkbarkar 4y ago
I thought this was funny.
Weird comments in the thread about how he/she should have known better.
Author is not making a complaint to demand internet outrage. There is no inflammatory justice warrior content here. Sheesh!
Author admits they screwed up, decided to share the screwup, and who hasnt been trough that exact dunder blunder?
Fun short read 8/10.
- Jenk 4y agoThere 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.
- ianai 4y agoThat’s definitely a thing too often. The “middlebrow rejection” or something like that. But in this case the OP got a message saying they had exceeded the limit and would get a refund. Then they repeated the transaction at the limit for a total of 20k. From reading comments here it sounds like the author both misinterpreted things and also compulsively over deposited to test the governments software. Testing government systems as an outsider is a really bad idea.
- cmeacham98 4y agoMaybe I was primed by the author because I was reading their article, but I understood it the same way they did - the entire $10k was rejected because it put them over the limit. I probably would have tried the same $9975 transaction they did.
- ianai 4y agoDidn’t they see at that point they were already down 10k? That’s what I thought they meant, from reading it.
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
- sacrosancty 4y agoMaybe I still don't understand but why didn't he get any I-bonds for either the $10k or the $9975 if they're only refunding the excess? What are you supposed to do if you over-pay? Wait for your refund before buying again?
- scarface74 4y agoAccording to their system yes. It’s a bad case of eventual consistency.
- Jenk 4y agoI like to think of it as an extension of Cunningham's Law[0] > Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." That is "post anything online and someone will point out you are doing it wrong" [0]: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
- ssnistfajen 4y ago[flagged]
- cortesoft 4y agoThis 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 that can happen to us.
- tectonic 4y agoI think this is exactly right.
- enumjorge 4y ago> People want to think it wouldn’t happen to them I’ve often wondered why some people can be so harsh towards those who’ve had something unfortunate happen to them. This makes a lot of sense.
- MikeDelta 4y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoThat'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.
- bckr 4y agoWhen taken together, your observation and GP's form a phenomenon called the "fundamental attribution error": https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution-error https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...
- deleted 4y ago
- pc86 4y agoBecause blaming the author means it's their fault, because they're stupid/didn't pay attention/whatever. The alternative is that they just made a mistake that anyone could make, which means the keyboard warriors would need to reconcile the fact that they might have made this mistake. And since we're all Very Smart People, we wouldn't make such a silly mistake. So clearly the author much be a bumbling idiot. It's the only possible explanation.
- laurent123456 4y agoAnother strange human phenomenon is that comments that criticise other comments are guaranteed to be on top in HN. It's boring, not even about the article, and barely accurate (only very few comments actually criticise the article's author), yet that's the first thing you read here.
- dcposch 4y agoSpeaking of blaming the author. This post is a fantastic example of the poverty trap. We design laws that, on paper, help the poor; and then we blame them for not taking advantage. When in reality, they are poorly implemented, poorly advertised, and confusing. With a $10k cap, this program is clearly intended to help people with low assets. How many people with a net worth under, say, $20k in the US? Tens of millions! How many of those would've really loved the extra $850 to offset this year's record inflation? Basically all of them! How many of them found this obscure website with awful UX and received the money? Approximately none!
- belltaco 4y agoI only clicked on the article because the title said "all my money". I thought there was some glitch where the entire bank account got emptied. But it's just the author putting in the numbers that got withdrawn, and the author having 20K as all his money(if true, not confirmed in the article) is a coincidence. Clickbait title for sure if nothing else.
- JadeNB 4y ago> the author having 20K as all his money(if true, not confirmed in the article) The author explicitly indicates that it is all of their savings: > I sat there with my $173.12 of remaining savings and $25 in I-bonds, feeling like I had accomplished something truly remarkable.
- prepend 4y agoIt’s not a big deal, it’s just the author did a bonehead move and it writing it up because it’s funny. I think it’s appropriate to say they made a stupid mistake and move on. The author is likely a little frustrated so I can forgive their shade throwing at treasury.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
- tomatowurst 4y agoFelt like a wallstreetbets post. Inflation is only at "8%" (still remember back in 2021 calling this a conspiracy), so 8 / 12 = ~0.7% = 700 USD loss / month on 10k deposit.
- nelsondev 4y ago70
- prepend 4y agoOf 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 the two months. So he’s lucky it’s not a very expensive mistake.
- danuker 4y ago> 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.
- jen729w 4y agoBest thing my content blocker (1Blocker) does is remove comments. It does it so well I’ve basically forgotten that they exist. :-) Agreed, fun little article.
- onionisafruit 4y agoYet here you are replying to a comment.
- coffeeblack 4y agoThis 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.
- FireBeyond 4y agoI am not sure how much clearer "Your deposit exceeded the limit. The excess funds will be returned" could be.
- mindslight 4y agoYou have not quoted the email correctly. The email says "excess purchase". As someone who has experience with savings bonds and Treasury Direct, I still have no clue how to interpret that phrase. Savings bonds are discrete things with discrete values, even though TD has worked to smooth over that quality with arbitrary purchase amounts and partial redemptions. "Excess purchase" may very well mean a refund of the entire singular $9,975 bond that was purchased. The way to find out is to call TD or search around web forums, but it's understandable that OP reacted to one possible implication of the message rather than taking a few hours to find out what it means.
- zerocrates 4y agoThey are probably getting a full refund of both the $10,000 and the $9,975 purchases. Eventually. It's possible they'll get $25 and $9,975 back and end up with $10,000 in bonds total, though I'd doubt it. The website not stopping or warning you is one thing, though I think the real change needed here is on the backend: when executing the order it should check your limit before trying to transfer the money. The way they're doing it is probably safer for them in terms of races or whatever, and who knows what ancient Treasury system it's probably interfacing with, but still.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coffeeblack 4y agoYou should never get to that point. Why would they take the money when they know that it is an invalid transaction?
- throwoutway 4y agoI agree. The ending paragraph was truly funny writing with subtle self-deprecation that I appreciate. I laughed out loud for the first time this weekend
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- la6472 4y agoAny 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 that the bureaucratic mechanisms , the digital divide that exists in the govt departments will ensure that there is no quick fix for this. And on top of that some of us may think of this as a feature :D and don’t realize what is wrong with this picture.
- kube-system 4y ago> 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.)
- la6472 4y agoTouché :p