GOP student loan plan would automatically deduct monthly payments from paychecks - Polidicks

I spent a couple of years in a well-paying, but mentally and physically awful job paying about 15% of my income to student loans, afraid that if I took a lesser-paying job I wouldn't be able to pay my bills (not just student loans, but they were a big part). It was made very clear to me that if I didn't meet payments, I'd be held in default, and then in addition to ruining my credit the federal government would garnish 15% of my wages anyways. If you gave me the option to cap my mandatory loan repayment to 10% of whatever I was making, I'd have jumped at it. When I saw this proposal it sounded like a positive change, more in line with how student debt repayment works in other countries, but everyone in this thread seems universally negative, so I'm wondering if my experience was atypical. I'd rather somebody puts in the effort to actually reform the predatory student loan system, but on the face of it this doesn't seem like a bad idea. What am I missing?

We shouldn't be putting time, money, and resources into propping up a fundamentally broken system so it can last a little bit longer.

Maybe over the road trucks will be auto, but I highly doubt my stuff will be.the places I have to go, the tight spots, and unloading cargo? I'd love to see a truck try.

Should I tell him or should someone else

are social insurance contributions deducted from your wage slavery are taxes slavery Like, I'd rather have a student allowance and free tuition, but if you're going to force people to take out student loans, this is probably the best way to do it. The administrative load shifts from the person that's taken out the student loan to the employer It's the same with health insurance premiums. It's much simpler and less of a headache, especially for poor people, if health insurance premiums are deducted from your wage automatically (or through taxes) instead of having to worry about a dozen different bills Again, I'd rather also not force people to take on debt to pay for their studies, but if there's a system in place where you have to, this is actually quite a nice proposal.

This is digging deeper into the problem. Students in America are not allowed to restructure or declare bankruptcy on their student loans. Many students, knowing they will never be able to repay their loans or get a job which pays well enough to afford those loans, choose to be delinquent on the loans and accept that their credit will be shit forever. This prevents students from doing that and instead will just force them into even worse poverty

fair enough it's just that the idea of shifting administrative loads and reducing the amount of bills one might receive is a good one imo, I was viewing it more from that angle

"Everyone should learn a trade" is just the opposite side of the "everyone should go to college" coin. Jobs, training and skills aren't one size fits all; every pathway should be open and affordable to people regardless of their background. Additionally, education shouldn't require that people think purely about their income when they're because there's value in learning and growing as a person.

Are they actively trying to get everyone to hate them/kill them(hopefully) at this point? Is greed really that strong of a motivator for screwing everyone and everything else over?

Hi I do what I love which is automating things here's a video of an automated thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wngL0BnF_4

Hi yes I deliver groceries to convenience stores in 48', pup, and box trucks. Please show me a video of any of those types of trucks driving into small, unmarked parking lots, unloading the cargo into the store. Not to mention moving around a city with shit lines, or no clear way to get somewhere that requires creative thinking.

I mean, if the demand to automate that process was there, it probably wouldn't take much.

Even if your current job doesn't get replaced have fun with lower wages because of a massive surplus of people who did lose their jobs competing for yours.

It's being worked on. A big problem up until now is the 250mm/s speed limitation set upon robots if they don't have some kind of safety barrier between it and persons. What robot companies have done is build these things called Cobots which are incredibly easy to program and are specifically designed to stop if they hit something. I hate KUKA with a burning passion but as far as I'm aware they're the first big robotics company to come out with what your asking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9-j3CaDM_U while its not shown stacking shelves if you attach a shopping cart to it, put a motor in the cart, give it machine vision and program it with the stores layout you could toss whatever in the cart and have it stack automatically. We're almost there, the problem is cobots are very new, expensive and have teething problems.

I'd like to see one unload a Lowe's truck. Those things were the text-book definition of "cluster-fuck".

Cognex software is a gift from god that we are unworthy of and could totally allow a bot through edge detection and camera to robot offsets to sort through a mess.

"Machines can't currently do my job" does not mean "machines can never do my job". Twenty years ago, the thought of any automation of driving was insane. Ten years ago, the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge, a program to spur development of autonomous vehicles, ended with a winner averaging only 14mph over a 60 mile simulated urban course. Today, there have multiple programs testing autonomous cars in real cities - shit road markings and all. The biggest obstacles right now to full-scale deployment are the cost of LIDAR and figuring out how liability would work, not the actual automation. As for the unloading... there's humans at your destinations, right? Forget robots for a moment - "unload a truck" is a trivial task for humans, and convenience store workers cost a lot less than truck drivers. Maybe right now the task falls to you simply because you're there, but what's to stop an autonomous truck from parking itself and calling one of the shop workers to come unload it? Robots will come for their jobs too, eventually, but shifting the harder-to-automate parts of your job to unskilled workers still ends up with you out of a job.

My point is that no sorting algorithm, no matter how advanced, would allow man or machine to unload that truck without many, many objects taking a tumble. It's like they load these things by tilting the trailer so the front is facing downward and then they pour the merchandise in, close the door, then re-orient the trailer for hook-up, they're that bad.

Okay, you've got me there. But, here's another counterpoint: companies simply aren't going to pay for it. My company, and a lot of other distribution companies, buy the absolute cheapest new semis they can get their hands on, and do the least amount of repairs and maintenance to keep them road-worthy. A LOT of companies are that way. A cheap truck, and a cheap driver, is a lot better investment than a truck that can and probably will cost 500k-1m, plus all the updates to the infrastructure needed to do that.

Not every company will be that cheap - and the ones that aren't will have a big advantage in the long run. Trucks cost money to operate. According to some Googling, average salary for a CDL driver is $70K/yr - using the normal rule of thumb, that means a company is paying about $140K/yr per driver. Let's go ahead and round that to $100K/yr cost-to-company (~$50K/yr driver income), since you specified "cheap drivers". And, unless you're hiring multiple drivers per truck, you're not using those vehicles 24/7. I know truck drivers work way longer hours than is reasonable (or safe), but no matter how many amphetamines they take, they still have to sleep sometime. So now, as a spitball number, we've got a lower operating cost of about $200K per year - plus you only have to buy half as many trucks, since you can run them nonstop (but I'll ignore this because your maintenance/fuel operating costs will also roughly double). Using your own estimated price range of $500-1000K, even if a human-driven truck was free to buy (ie. you already owned it), autonomy would pay for itself in thirty months to five years. What's the average lifespan of a semi? Google tells me 5-6 years is normal (high-end companies selling them off after ~3 years to keep maintenance costs down), so even under every worst possible assumption - cheap drivers, the most expensive truck compared to one that's free - it still comes out even in the end. Turn those numbers to mean-case instead of worst-case, you get it paid back in 2-3 years, or half the lifespan of the vehicle. I'm sure someone with more experience in the industry than my two minutes on google could give more precise numbers and better calculations (in particular, what are annual maintenance and fuel costs?). But it's good enough for spitball "is autonomy even close to viable?" math, and the answer it gives is a pretty solid YES. We are definitely at least in the same order of magnitude already, and the cost of autonomy is only going to drop. Seriously, there's a small gold rush of companies trying to make cheaper LIDAR units, one of them is going to crack it soon.

You've got really good points and your numbers aren't too far off. But I still have to stick to my guns here, there will always be a driver of some sort, just like with airplanes. Some planes CAN take off, land, and fly by themselves, but the pilots still do the hard stuff by hand to make sure it's safe, and there's some things the planes can do themselves. So I believe we will see automated trucks, with a driver backup. My trucks already have radar lane assist, automated emergency brakes, and can tell if the driver is sleepy.

An aircraft is a complex vehicle where if something goes wrong, an expert is needed onboard to resolve the crisis. Either it lands successfully, or the failure mode is typically the complete destruction of the aircraft. A truck that encounters a failure isn't jeopardizing the lives of hundreds of people, and can pull over on the side of the road and call home for help. The 'pilot' for autonomous vehicles will be a single guy in a chaser car who catches up with a stopped truck and either fixes it or drives it manually to its destination, then a repair depot. And there'll be one of him for dozens, maybe hundreds of trucks. Oh, and they're already working on autonomous cargo aircraft. I don't mean to beat you while you're down here, but the writing is on the wall for a lot of industries in the US that currently rely on human involvement but don't require highly skilled (in the academic sense) labor.

I love the smell of instrumental rationality in the morning.

Those little companies will vanish overnight by the over efficiency of giant companies.

Wait, you expect people to work for a living?

yeah i think i would happily wager that the transport industry (as it currently exists), will stop existing before people born in the last two years come of age to be employed by it

I will continue to be on record to say that Automation, in its current incarnation, is a really dumb idea.

Can I get the lotto numbers for the next Powerball too please? Claiming that automation in the future will be a dumb idea is a painfully regressive mindset. Of course it will improve, expand, and become more viable. Of course employers are going to use it where ever they can fit it. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but it will almost certainly happen in your lifetime, unless you're 70+ years old. Tesla Semis, public transport vehicles, aviation, trains, McDonald's, cashiers at Wal-mart. The writing is on the wall.

It will be a legitimately dumb idea because its not being done to make our lives better. Bar none. Its being designed by rich pricks who rather just not deal with us at all. In addition; they're going to only enable us to consume even more fucking products which is exactly what's killing the fucking planet. A lot of people focus on the power that these automated factories and etc will take; and never the raw material and obfuscation/abstraction that these automated system maintain to keep us from seeing the damage we do from our rampant consumption of high end goods.

The problem is that nothing is being done about all the low skill jobs that no longer exist for those who cannot either change careers or not have enough money to retrain into something else. There will be a growing number of people put out of decently paying work and forced into garbage jobs or no jobs. I also do not consider service based jobs as a good job unless you are the one running the operation, due to shit pay.