Author admits they screwed up, decided to share the screwup, and who hasnt been trough that exact dunder blunder?
Fun short read 8/10.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
It’s 2022, not 1998.
I would expect a banking/payment UI to be very clear and foolproof.
Agreed, fun little 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.
I don't think this is generally worth it as a security measure, but the goal is not to protect against automation. Instead, custom on-screen keyboards are attempts to thwart keyloggers.
Commercial malware doesn't work this way. The term "keylogger" is a misnomer.
"Keylogging" without context provides an unintelligible stream of garbage that might have well be from a random number generator. Most malware that I've seen either directly target the browser or the operating system, but in both cases they're looking for an unencrypted HTTPS stream, that they can re-package, upload, and store. With the goal to sell batches of credentials for specific websites.
Many people have this unusual belief that a user's stream of keys would look like e.g. www.example.com(13)username(9)password(13). But that isn't how users typically interact with their browsers, MOST websites are accessed via a search engine or favorites/bookmarks, and users often won't use the keystrokes to navigate between input elements.
Again, CONTEXT is everything with "keylogging," since most of the value is generated from WHERE not just WHAT. "Targeted credential theft" is a better way to describe it since they're stealing structured HTTP form data, not raw keyboard input (and even if they were steaming keycode inputs, they'd likely still be using the browser's context to do so).
So, in my opinion, most malware wouldn't even be aware or need specific support to bypass this virtual keyboard "security" because by the very nature of them they aren't operating at this layer anyway.
I don't know about commercial malware, but at least in the 90s (which is when these kinds of on-screen keyboards started to appear), it was not unusual to find on a computer "infected" with malware a text file containing every key that was pressed since the malware was installed.
Yes, nowadays malware tends to be much smarter: also capturing an image of the area around the mouse pointer on every click (which is the reason some on-screen keyboards blank the keys when you click), only logging when the window has an specific title (which is the reason some online banking sites add lots of random spaces and punctuation to the window title), or even using lower-level code to hook into the browser and directly capture the form contents on submission (which is the reason several online banking sites require you to use invasive "anti-malware" plugins which attempt to prevent these kinds of hooks).
And yes, there is malware that collects unencrypted traffic, but that is _appreciably_ more complex to design and implement than simple keylogging. There's also malware which pulls credentials directly out of the web browser memory, although improved protections on cross-process memory access are making this much harder to do on real operating systems. Both of these are better methods, but they are harder and operating systems are intentionally implementing measure to defeat them. For mostly historic reasons straightforward keylogging remains easy and reliable on modern computers.
But it doesn't really refute the kind of snapshot-in-time voodoo that government websites tend to build out and then never change because if doing so were to cause a problem, then someone could get blamed. I've never seen such a UI contraption in the "private" sector of banking. Not that they don't have their own obtuse slow moving corporate bullshit like snake oil "2FA" with varying requirements, it's just less bad.
FWIW related to this topic does anyone know the details of how the IRS website just decides to spit out "Permission Denied" when trying to obtain an EIN? I think it's an Akamai? message, probably due to some user surveillance garbage, but haven't investigated further. Even coming from my own naive residential IP with surveillance-friendly Chromium I still got it. I figured I'd wait a few days and try again, but same thing. It worked fine from a vanilla iPhone on the cell connection, but unfortunately I ended up doing that too late and missed the window to lock in April's rate.
Couldn't you do that with a bookmarklet, so it would just take one click?
1. They don’t have network access by default. It’s not a simple confirmation screen to enable network access. You have to go into settings
2. Apps can explicitly disallow third party keyboards for password entry.
3. Keyboards run out of process from the app.
And yes, iOS has extensibility support for third party password managers.
When I saw the email informing the author of the over-purchase, I knew there was no way out. Purchasing the difference, as the author did, would only cause more trouble. The questions now are how much will be refunded, whether any purchases will go through, and whether there will be a fine or legal action. Refer to the rule above for my guesses.
I think many people do not appreciate how devastating this is to public trust.
It looks to me like he was going to get the extra $25 returned to him and have 10k in bonds. It's definitely vague though.
(1) Purchase #1 for $25 successful --> reduce remaining limit from $10000 to $9975.
(2) Purchase #2 for $10000 rejected and refund pending --> DO NOT reduce limit since you know the purchase didn't go through.
(3) Purchase #3 for $9975 within limit --> allow purchase, reduce limit to exactly $0.
Instead, at step 2, the software seems to handle the purchase by unconditionally taking $10000 off the limit at purchase time and putting $10000 back later when the refund is processed. (And consequently, at step 3, it failed the purchase.)
There isn't an obvious reason to do it this way, so it's surprising. It seems like if you can reduce the limit, you can check if you've exceeded it and just fail the purchase and never modify the limit (at purchase or refund time).
> "A refund of the excess purchase..."
So they'd be refunded the excess, i.e. $25.
Putting another $9,975 through just feels like being "too smart".
Is there no way to purchase these bonds besides this website?
It seems to be a weird mix of wall street cosplay and financial ineptitude.
The problem is, giving financial advice en-masse is very expensive and risky for a company. You need to ask a lot of questions about the users situation (assets, debt, income, dependants, etc) to make an informed decision. If you give bad financial advice, your putting yourself at big legal risk. The language has to be very specific (aka hard to understand for normal humans). And often the advice comes out as rather un-opinionated and general, which for most people means it's hard to actually action and put in place. All in all, it's a big investment, big cost, stresses out your legal team - which means less companies choose to do it, which in turn make it less accessible.
The alternative camp is very clearly just choosing to give 0 advice. Just giving access to investment products, with a full hands off 'make your own choices man' approach. Think robinhood. This is where people make mistakes.
The weird thing is while legitimate companies are afraid of giving advice, anyone with a social media presence can get online and talk whatever smack they want, with very little worry of blowback. One of the biggest mistakes I see is somebody from one country (say AU) watching a youtuber talking about another country (say US) like it's a universal truth. Different financial systems have their own metas depending on government retirement schemes, importance of credit scores, mortgage systems etc. Most useful and practical advice is country specific.
Legislation has just fully failed to protect consumers from bad advice, by making the barrier to entry so high for legitimate companies looking to inform at scale that it's not financially viable - compared to just doing the hands off 'not our problem man' approach. They've also done nothing to stop people taking advice from randoms online (not that they really could). Unfortunately visiting a personalised financial advisor in the same way you'd visit a doctor, is just expensive and not an option for most.
I agree with this. It seems that I have to make all the choices myself to shield the company from any responsibility so why should I pay some fee for the advice? No wonders that people get advice from random videos on YouTube or any equivalent source.
Due to the increasing financialization of the economy, more and more people feel like they need to become wannabe speculators to protect their situations.
Thanks, Wall Street and Harvard Business School for fucking us all.
And fuck the Uniparty for squashing any real option to them.
Those times never existed for the vast majority of people. Minorities, single women, most men...... None of them had this rose colored past.
Statistically, more people now have more income in the US than ever before. Each income level is higher, some more than others (and this is a static snapshot, most people move around income quintiles throughout a career), options for goods are higher, items are safer (cars especially), and on and on.
The "life used to be so easy to make a good pay and have a great life" views are not backed by the evidence.
> Gone are the times when having a good job, paying a reasonable mortgage for a reasonably paid house, saving a reasonable amount for retirement, while keeping a reasonable amount for emergencies (rare, before lay-offs become the knee jerk reaction of MBAs fatten their bonuses).
Is there a word or half the sentence missing there? I cannot follow your meaning.
I feel like a lot of people just can't stand having money standing there doing nothing as an insurance policy when they could be making money or buying something with it.
Depending on the interest rates, and assuming they can keep the line of credit if they lose their job, this might make sense since it's a choice between reducing debt now vs potentially increasing debt later.
The second part is just silly, but it's probably the attitude they got them in debt in the first place.
And then, they pay more on their actual insurance policies to have low deductibles because they can’t afford a larger deductible because they don’t save anything.
Also the blog clearly indicates they were going to poke the fate bear, poked said bear, and then went surprised pikachu.
Is anybody else just sick to death of the term "emergency fund"? If you go to /r/personalfinance, every other comment is reminding people to stock up their emergency fund. Towelie says, "Don't forget to bring a towel!"
I'll tell you about my real "emergency fund": In an actual, living emergency, every single dollar I have, in every account, even my IRA, and all my credit lines combined, are my emergency fund. That's the nature of an emergency. If I empty out some specially earmarked emergency fund, I don't tell the doctor to quit taking the bullets out of my spleen because I'm tapped. "Sorry, can't touch my HYSA!" (HYSAs are another butt bug of /r/pf)
What people mean by "emergency fund" obviously is their "don't stupidly overdraft your checking account fund", but they never spell that out.
At least that's how I feel here.
People keep voting for less government (meaning workers) but not less government (meaning scope of responsibility), so the remaining workers must handle larger workloads. That's never worked out well in any industry, and it's bizarre people think it would work any better in government.
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.
Otherwise you're effectively left as your own lawyer, having to know tricks of how to communicate/escalate and doing online research to find out. In general if you can get a government agency on the phone they can be quite helpful (their customer service hasn't been optimized away like private companies), but you still need to know what to ask for and how to work with their bureaucratic minds.
For example, for something like a car's title, you could probably apply for a duplicate title from the DMV and get another one sent. But for immigration problems I've got no idea.
For the title, I've known a person that had the issue. It was the duplicate that was lost again, not sure why they couldn't request another one, not sure if a lawyer would have helped. But the result was a wait time of 6 months (instead of the supposed 3-5 weeks)
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.
The only difference is there are less opportunities for the bourgeois who are willing and able to pay to be on the other side of the velvet ropes
I suspect that's not what's going to happen though. OP will get a refund of $25 + $9,975.
This is a perfect HN post because it combines terrible technology and “let’s see how it breaks.” Thanks OP, a delightful Sunday read.
Well played, sir. Well played.
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, unbeknownst to me, the $300 payment canceled the $1000 payment -- because they both were scheduled for the same day.
I only found out when I signed in a few weeks later and saw a $40 interest charge for not paying the full balance on the credit card.
<grumble>...
Definitely my fault for not paying closer attention, but still annoying.
But lots of ways to "fix" bad software.
Also, the refunds for Cetes when you go over the limit take a few days, not 8 to 10 weeks.
Also, the US tax system is partially the result of lobbying by parties such as TurboTax [1].
I'm glad I live in NZ, another smaller country with great online systems for government interactions.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...
But with your last $10k? That's just stupid (or fiction)
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
Strip a few zeroes from there and I guess it's worth the funny anecdote, but these are serious amounts of money that the author just sent into the black hole of bureaucracy for shits and giggles.
I think if regular people used these transactions more we’d have more errors. But then I suppose the UX would get improved because we’d have millions of transactions instead of thousands.
As it is now people spend a lot of time and so bad UX can still be successful. I probably spent 20 minutes on the treasurydirect site and their purchase/transfer page as opposed to seconds on my consumer-designed bank page.
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.
also, the 8-week window is indicative that this will be reviewed by a human being, who would hopefully understand the intention behind depositing 25 and then 10000 (the intention behind depositing another 10k might be a bit less clear lol).
"I purposefully tried to make a transaction that breaks the rules, it didn't end well."
E.g. I buy shares and mistype the ticker or buy extra. It processes but then I notice my mistake and I can either fix it by selling, or decide ir doesn't matter and keep the shares. What doesn't make any sense is the broker keeping the money for two months and not giving me any share.
I don't think this is a defense against bots. Virtual keyboards were created primarily as a defense against keyloggers, IMHO.
TLDR: this is indeed BS security theatre along the same lines of blocking password managers.
I feel like the agencies should just let Visa or Mastercard handle billing and collection.
I went through the process 3 times and got an error each time. Eventually I gave up and decided I'd have to buy books in person the old-fashioned way. I'm pretty sure I got at least 2 sets of books delivered to me.
I had to arrange for a return, and customer service wasn't happy about it. These days, it's pretty obvious that an error on a web page doesn't conclusively mean a purchase didn't go through, but back then I don't think either they or I clearly understood that.
But good lord is that TreasuryDirect site the worst site on the Internet. Every single time - and I mean every single time - I instinctively click the back button to go back to a prior screen only to be presented with an error message and thrown out of my session, requiring another visit to the god-awful virtual keyboard and navigation through menu after menu of curiously similar, poorly-worded options. They can do better.
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 risks discussed!
This is an easy caveat to make as there are many other parts depending on how the US government calculates inflation.
And there aren’t alternate inflation calculations out there, and certainly no consumer financial instruments pegged to them.
For all its flaws, it’s the best we have. I think it’s not discussed because it’s such a sunk risk that it’s not really anything that would change someone’s mind.
Surely this is to prevent keyloggers, no slowing down bots. With that said it is questionable if it is worth it. People would probably pick less secure password as a result.
It tried ordering new ink based on supply levels and apparently became upset with the supply chain delays so it kept trying to order as the ink remained low. (Of course, I didn’t recognize this for a while…)
Silly me, I had assumed someone would code a simple ‘check-if’ flag in the ‘order ink’ algorithm…
I know that US banking system is something else but this is preposterous.
If the first case delivering the smaller amount and refunding the overpayment would be what the customer would want. In the second case delivering nothing and refunding the entire payment would be what the customer would want.
I could see purchases of financial instruments fall into either group. It would depend on what alternate investments are available to the person. Say I've got $10k to invest and my first choice in investment #1. I try to purchase $10k of #1 and it turns out there is a limit of $5k. My second choice is investment #2 which has no limits.
In that case I'd want $5k in #1 and the other $5k in #2 and so the behavior I'd want from the seller of #1 when I try to buy $10k is to sell me $5k and refund my $5k overpayment.
But suppose #2 has a minimum investment of $6k, and I have no good #3. In this case what I might want is all $10k in #2. When my attempt to purchase $10k of #1 fails I'd want them to sell me nothing and refund all $10k so I can buy #2.
I don't know anything about money/finance. Can someone ELI5 to me if I can still get the free money from this, this year?
The US Government offers a special savings program called iBonds (not an apple product). Technically they’re referred to as Series I bonds.
These bonds are special. Each citizen can only purchase $10,000 per year. The thing that makes them special is that they have really favorable interest rates that are made up of two components. There’s a fixed component largely controlled by the Fed. Currently this is essential 0% though rates are rising. The second component is tied to inflation. Right now, that component is ~8% for the most recent issuance (there are two issuances per year of these bonds where they recalculate the interest rate). This rate may change if inflation goes up or down.
The bond is special because that 8% is really high compared to other risk free instruments. For example, compare that 8% to what you’re earning on your savings account. Hence why many people have taken interest in iBonds recently.
You can only purchase these instruments directly from the treasury department. Google Treasury Direct. Also there are rules about how long you have to hold them and how much interest you give up if you need to withdraw your money early. Those rules are outlined on Treasury Direct.
You can still purchase I-Bonds, with the understanding that the May rate will be adjusted again in 6 months (it could go down if inflation goes down) and you won't be able to pull your funds for a minimum of one year.
It's a great option for inflation protection if you can let that money sit for awhile. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
This guy has less than 20 grand to his name and he's investing in I-Bonds? That's the real tragedy.
Another time, I was using a public restroom and it contained a very large red button with a very large sign that read "ATTENTION DO NOT PUSH RED BUTTON UNLESS IT IS AN EMERGENCY"[1]. I did not push the button and my curiosity about remains unsatisfied.
Point is, just because the Federal government ordains that the limit on series I bonds is $10K purchased electronically plus $5K purchased with tax refund per tax ID[2] per calendar year, you shouldn't expect the web site itself to enforce this limit. There's all sorts of ways you can accidentally or intentionally exceed limits, sometimes systems will catch them, but sometimes not.
In prior years, you could even apparently get away with exceeding the limit with no more than a stern warning not to do it again[3].
I'm fairly confident OP misinterpreted the emails they got from Treasury Direct, and that the Treasury will refund the excess amount of the purchase, not full transaction amount. At this point, they own $10K in Series I bonds and will receive a refund for the excess $10K. I'm curious if they'll get the refund as a single transaction for $10K, or as two transactions of $25 and $9975.
[1]: https://imgur.com/jAKRPQt
[2]: You can use "Entity Accounts" to purchase additional bonds. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/help/tdhelp/help_ug_292...
[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/na13f/exce...
Obviously still better than regular bonds in this regard.
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.
With a fixed rate of 0% at the moment, the ibond is an "investment" which is guaranteed to lose real value because the 'gains' from the ibond are taxed so if the fixed rate is zero it will lose real value. It will also lose value due to systematic understatement of inflation e.g. due to the substitution correction-- but even if you believe that its inflation metric is fair the taxation makes it lose value.
Now-- if your investment plans direct you to hold something cash-like which ibonds withdraw delays are still good enough to satisfy, then okay sure, it does pay more than cash. But that's the right comparison. Ibonds are not, for example, a good alternative to buying a market index with a historical return of 10% after inflation.
I never want to see what their backend database looks like -- probably ROT0ing the passwords.
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.
I don’t think this is correct. They’re going to re-calculate the interest rate 6 months from May and it could be less than ~8.5%. So you’re really just guaranteed ~4.25% for half the year.
If you buy in May, you lock in the May rate for 6 months and then an unknown rate after that.
But anyway it staying inflation-linked is presumably what people buying it want? The more often it updates the better, could go up too.
There are blogs that explain it in detail.
Probably best to buy them in a fund due to their complexities. Vanguard and Fidelity both have funds for them.
* Passwords require a mix of upper/lower and special characters, however when entering your password on the ALL UPPERCASE VIRTUAL KEYBOARD, you're informed that they're not case-sensitive.
* Any use of the back button gets you to an error page, from which there is no way to get back to your account. You're now logged out.
It's as if whoever built the site never even tested it.
That's too little to be true money storage. It's not enough to buy any new car.
> ... deposited to your TreasuryDirect account by the IRS as a result of an IRS tax refund ...
The how-to:
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/articles/res_i...
Anyone know when this became possible? I've been buying I-bonds for years and it's news to me. Paper bonds have been a hassle, all-online is a huge improvement.
what is the benefit of buying ibonds on April 30, 2022 at 7.12% gain versus buying on May 1, 2022 at 9.6% gain?
The bond rates are set per 6 month window - but you get it relative to the purchase date. So if you buy before the last possible day before the rate change date you would get 7.12% (annualized) for 6 months then 9.6% (annualized) for 6 months. If you buy after the rate change, you would get 9.6% (annualized) followed by some yet to be determined yield for 6 months.
It confused me for awhile until I figured out that different people with different investment dates will have different instantaneous interest rates as a function of their date of investment.
So buying now lets you take advantage of the similarly nice previously set rate, for 6 mos, then another guaranteed (and known) nice rate for another 6 mos.
If that was so it would make perfect sense that the third transaction to purchase $9975 would fail because you already purchased your limit in the second transaction. In that case user would expect 2 refunds 25 and 9975 NOT 10,000 and 9975.
Basically an ordinary HNer saw that article posted here about I-bonds, and like a typical HNer, probably thinks they're a lot smarter than they actually are, so they went and tried to buy a financial product they didn't fully understand, made a mess of it, and now blames the UI.
Edit: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
Doesn't explain why may is too late.
Shoddy software like this undermines general trust in the government.
Of course I'd learn about this on May 1st
Can anybody elaborate on this? If I buy on Monday what’s the rate?
Hard to put that on anyone but the purchasers.
The Treasury is supposed to be a huge backbone of the world's economy and it doesn't look good imo to have software designed this badly for it.
Does not sound like an accident, but a clickbait instead.
These bonds only match inflation as defined by the government via CPI. But there is a strong argument that real world inflation is significantly higher than CPI.
If the US government defaults on debt, then I bonds will be the least of our concerns. So this is sort of an “all eggs in a single basket” type situation as USG pays a zero risk premium.
"They're zero-risk bonds..."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.
Edit: I am wrong. You can only buy it two ways which is ridiculous in my view.
More to the point of the website that belongs in a museum, why can’t they update this consumer facing portal? What happened to all the people from “digitization” govt organizations? Such as 18F and usds. Oh. You mean all they do is replace the front end? Got it.
Personally, I didn't even know of this portal's existence until I signed up for an account and and went through the same process the author went through. I noted the same security theater and passed it over to my USDS team to see if there's anything we can do.
At first glance, simply replacing the front end is a solution, but there are bigger problems here that the author did not try. If one tries to change your bank account number, having typed in it wrong, they'll have to mail in a physical form to have it changed. As the author noted, going over $10k per year will also trigger unintended consequences that can span 8-10 weeks before the money is returned.
There are problems here that goes beyond just replacing the "front end".
But separately, it is a miracle that the author didn't hit the physical identity verification path [2] when signing up for the TreasuryDirect account.
[1] https://treasurydirect.gov/timeline.htm?src=td&med=banner&lo...
[2] https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/46840/treasury-dir...
You’ll be happy to know this site is in fact being redesigned per an article I read recently
:(
Regarding virtual keyboard, of course it would be better to use physical keys, but for reasons I don't understand they don't have a wide adoption that they deserve.
It’s unlikely that the author reads hacker news, and even if they do, they have said anything in this thread for you to respond to.
When you deal with an entity that has the monopoly on legitimate violence, your bargaining power is - unsurprisingly - borderline nonexistent.
The US isn’t quite yet there where they won’t let you go to court, so you could still try that
To qualify this, there is zero risk that the technical letter of the agreement won't be honoured.
Lending money to the US government is very high risk right now. Simple person metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII, and the trend-line says they are losing. If you lend the US government enough money to buy a sandwich there is a real risk that at the end of the agreement they'll return an amount of money that won't get you a sandwich.
It doesn't matter that they say "inflation protected" on the tin. Exactly what happens there is uncertain, it is quite likely that there will be games played with inflation figures. Or a simple haircut of how much money they owe ("we did owe you $100, now we owe you $75. Law says so.").
De facto its happened at least once before when Nixon closed the gold window overnight.