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Let Them Eat Teslas
theodp writes "If you're a bright kid who wants to prepare for the 21st century workforce (PDF) by studying engineering at Purdue, the government will help your parents pay the $100,000 or so tuition tab with a 7.9% interest loan (plus 4% fees) that's likely to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and paid back with after-tax money. If, on the other hand, you want to buy a tricked-out $100,000 Model S, Tesla has teamed up with the government, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank on what it calls a 'Revolutionary New Finance Product' that enables those who play the game right to avoid paying sales tax, get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!), and also receive a 2.95% bankruptcy-dischargeable loan for the balance, the payments for which could be tax-deductible. Yep, 'Revolutionary' may be about right!"
They can always repo your car.
This is why Education should be funded where the risk is borne by the one making the loan. The repayment terms should be based on a percent of the students income for a fixed number of years.
These guys are trying to do it.
https://www.upstart.com/
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I don't really have a problem with this. Everyone knows that a car, even considering that they quickly depreciate, is much more valuable to the average person than most college degrees.
:|
I defy you to prove me wrong.
Sell Tesla.
Use funds for college.
Our government is being managed for the benefit of corporate elites. It's the simplest and most reasonable explanation for what looks like total idiocy from the outside.
While it would be easy to say Government just prefers the sheeple broke and stupid... These really aren't the same. Cars can be repo'ed.. Your education can't be repo'ed.. Further from a Govt perspective the return in tax income from your education is risky.. You might never finish school. Might end up working in India and not paying taxes.. You might never repay those loans if given the choice because you won't lose anything.. The car might seem like a loss, but you will definitely pay taxes on stuff for the car like tires, registration and property taxes etc the employees who built the car will pay income tax etc. Plus there is the political side of green jobs.....
Nissan took 1.4 billion from the feds for the Leaf and produced laughable results. Tesla took a third of that and produces the Motor Trend car of the year, and is set to pay off the loan early. I don't blame the DOE for wanting to help them out some more. Note: from a student with a non-dischargeable 7.9% loan.
Apparently you have never financed a vehicle. The bank holds the actual title, you only get a certificate of registration. You cannot sell the car without the title, and the bank will not release it without the loan being paid off.
So if you tried to sell the car, the bank would take the money and you'd end up with nothing.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Maybe if you had taken some of those "fluff and filler" classes that maybe you could form cogent sentences?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
From the outside?
Our entire economy and society is being managed for the benefit of corporate elites. It's the simplest and most reasonable explanation for what looks like total idiocy from the outside.
FTFY
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I am biased as I already have a Purdue degree, earned 12 years ago. It was far cheaper back then - tuition and fees were less than $7500 per year. Add in the cost of housing and food and I was all in for around $50000. My first job after college paid more than that per year.
Now, 12 years later, I have three quarters of a million dollars in the bank and a six-figure job. I can write a check for a Tesla sedan without flinching. And as the years pass, I will continue to increase my financial standing.
On the other hand, if I were to buy a Tesla sedan and use it for 12 years I would have an obsolete car with a severely diminished battery. Now, don't think that I dislike Tesla. I have high hopes for them. I made a lot of money buying long-term call options several years ago - in fact it was when the Model S was announced and everyone thought they would be out of business in a year. I put my own money on the line, in the face of overwhelming negative opinion.
I think that electric cars will prove to have far lower operating costs than IC cars - and the benefit gets larger the longer you own and the more miles you drive. But let's be perfectly honest. A degree helps you make money. A car costs you money.
... even more stupid people going to college to get degrees in things they have no talent for. I see them all the time, developers with 'degrees' who can only code if you put a spec in front of them, they are incapable of creative thought and have no real-world experience to pull from.
.. I'm not saying that some truly great people have not come out of college and done great things. I know some people far smarter than me that have degrees and will always make more than me. And no matter how much college I had, I would never have been them. They had the talent already.
.. go to college.
I went for a job interview last week, and the hiring VP said their biggest problem is finding developers who know how to program instead of just knowing how to code. Programmers who actually understand things like operations and systems. Programmers who are capable of seeing the big picture and coding at the systems level instead of at the method level.
These days that type of programmer is hard to find, because the days of becoming a computer programmer by starting as an operator or trainee are over. No one will hire anyone without a degree now. And no developer with a degree is willing to start as an operator, they all want $100k/year to pay off their debts. And of course, no one will hire a programmer with a degree as an operator because they are overqualified.
Yet some of the brightest programmers I know don't have degrees. They started at the bottom and worked up. They attended classes here and there, either at school or online, to learn what they needed to learn. They bought books and learned new tech.
But back when I started, companies were willing to hire someone simply because they were smart, creative, and had a great curiosity about how things work. People with good work ethics that worked smarter, not necessarily harder, than their peers.
And we do none of it now because we have been lied to that programming requires a degree. Bullshit. Programming is one of the easiest things in the world to do. I've seen 10 year old kids write code without ever having been to a class. Simply because their brain works a certain way. I've seen programmers learn new styles of programming over a weekend simply be reading a book. Their biggest stumbling block wasn't not going to college, they understood how to do things. But they didn't know the fancy words for everything. They just programmed and got the job done without worrying about technical mumbo-jumbo that really doesn't mean jack squat. Like how 'initialization' was change to 'instantiation'.
If all we want is code monkeys who need a complete spec before writing anything, go ahead. Keep sending them to school. Continue to let the government subsidize people who really have no business writing code because their brain just doesn't have the spatial aptitude that is required for programming. Because they thought it was just a great way to make a buck. Continuing only hiring people based on a piece of paper that only says they know how to pass tests.
Now
It wasn't college that made them successful, it was themselves. College was just a tool they chose to use because it served a purpose. They already had the ability, college was a different way of getting the information.
Starting at the bottom is not a bad way to learn. Sure, it sucks at first. But in 3 or 4 years, you get 3 or 4 years of experience and little or no college debt. Many companies will help with tuition. Granted, it cuts out a lot of companies that will only hire if you have a degree. And it can take a lot of time to find someplace that will do it. But someone that has been writing code at home or part-time for friends and family, and knows how to write a resume, should be able to find something if they truly have talent and interview well. If you don't interview well
But really, do you want to work for a company that is so procedure oriented that they won't look beyond the resume to what a pe
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I just bought a Tesla. I paid sales tax (a lot). I got a 1.9% loan from BofA that wasn't subsidized by anybody. My accountant would laugh if I suggested that this would be deductible. The federal grant is $7500, there may be a little more from Illinois. From what I understand, what is "revolutionary" is Tesla and Elon Musk personally guaranteeing the resale value of the Tesla as part of their new financing plan. The taxpayer isn't on the hook for that - Elon Musk is. Frankly, if I wasn't planning on keeping the car for 8 years with it's "everything but tires" warranty option, I'd jump on this new deal if I could. As for the subsidy, I suppose that's a matter of opinion. Any reasonable person has to agree that we cannot burn gasoline in our cars forever. But there is a chicken and egg problem. A completely free market will likely fail to protect the environment for our children. Alternative fuel cars are prohibitively expensive and always will be without the economy of scale. The government's role is to to serve the long term public good and the tax break's intent is to resolve the chicken/egg problem.
Greed is the root of all evil.
No, you won't. That's the Big Lie: if you put up with being shat upon for now, you get to do the shitting one day. You won't. It's just a lie to keep you sitting there in a shower of shit rather than fight those who shit on others. It's that simple.
Besides, if by some miracle you actually became an elite yourself, is getting to shit on others really such a desirable goal? How about you grow up, or at leat try to get past your anal stage?
And that's another lie.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I also have quite favorable loan terms on my house - better than my girlfriend has on her student loans. I'm not going to go pound on my credit union's door and demand social justice. The problem is with the education loans, not the home or car loans. Demonizing Tesla or the auto industry for striving to provide a means of buying their products is asinine and childish.
Education finance has some serious issues that need to be addressed. We aren't going to solve them by crying about auto loans. This entire discussion is flamebait - just fishing for angry rants.
+1 Disagree
I'm not arguing that education loans should have lower interest rates - just pointing out that the submitter (and maybe the article, but who RTFAs anyway) is specifically picking on Tesla when his beef is with education. Hell, I could walk down to the Subaru dealership and get at worst a 2.9% rate loan with no money down. In any case, I don't think you and I really have differing opinions on the interest rates for school loans and car loans because you are spot on about the investment risk and options in the event of default.
However, I stand by my main point that this summary is written just to rile up the masses.
Nobody here is demonizing Tesla. We are demonizing the government. It is not Tesla's responsibility to make sure tax dollars are spent wisely.
The only federal government involvement here is a $7500 tax credit. This is the same type of credit that's been around for hybrid vehicles for years. You may not agree with them - I don't - but enough people have decided they're worthwhile, so they stick around. Sales tax exemption and state tax credits are the state's issues, write your (much more local) state legislator about those. I know I'd pay full sales tax. TFS is making it sound like everybody's going to run out and get a check from Uncle Sam for $15k and dodge sales tax just for buying a Tesla, but that's a stretch at best and - depending on the tax credit situations in Washington and New Jersey - a outright lie at worst.
Anyhow, I think it's important to talk about the costs of education. People talk about education loans these days as if they're mandatory - ignoring options like scholarships, grants, less expensive school choices, or part time work during college. But this Tesla thing is just an attention grab.
+1 Disagree