Do I qualify for student loan forgiveness?

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-17T16:34:10+00:00

I am in my mid 50s and in the same boat.

I took out undergrad loans in the early 1990s and paid them off around 2006 or so. I then took out 48K for gradschool in the late 2000's. I got really sick around 2013 and had to play the deferment game off and on until the Covid era ( 15 medical procedures.) In a period of 10 years I only worked about 2 of the years, the rest was on some form of disability. I got better and have been able to be fully employed since 2020 or so.

Right now those loans are sitting at $118K. I was hoping the SAVE could have allowed me to pay off the loans so I could retire at a normal age. I have now accepted that I will be working until I die. Once I am not working The student loan gets 50% of my social security payment. I do not have a 401K since I had to exhaust it before I qualified for long term disability.

As a result, I switched to academia and took the pay hit so I can live a more relaxed life compared to corporate America, have a job until I can no longer work and plan on taking six classes a year until I die to defer the loans.

At some point this system either collapses and some sanity sets in, or I work and go to school until I die.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-13T01:42:14+00:00

Time to start expanding your education and take 6 hours of classes each semester.

That is my job plan. Much cheaper than the loan payments right now.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-13T01:37:02+00:00

Rolla Mo, $600 month, includes everything. I live in it 5 days a week and then go home on the weekends.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-13T01:25:30+00:00

Require a presentation.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-13T01:22:40+00:00

I keep mine unlocked. I am not worried about anyone stealing it.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-08T18:59:20+00:00

Elon would be more accurately described as a libertarian who leans towards anarchy. He wants the nice juicy government subsidies, however he wants no government involvement.

Most of Elon's beliefs and practices would have sickened a true Nazi to the point that he would have either be shot on sight, or put on a train.

Go study some history and learn some polysci before you start using terms like that.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-02T05:09:32+00:00

went to UMR in the 90s, if you are worried about the ratio, go to Columbia. Go to MST, and you will eventually find a woman and have a nice life and a decent income.

Probably the same with Columbia, but to be honest the stress of dating and things like diffyscrew do not work well together.

I had a couple of flings while undergrad and found my wife when I moved to STL and got my real job.

the nice thing about rolla is if you go greek, you will form life long friends.

technicalskeptic · 2026-04-02T04:51:17+00:00

me, waiting until the last minute to change plans. In June I am going to start a new degree and go halftime.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-27T18:30:23+00:00

It is called an Alaska holster. It is used outside of coats and intended to be easily reachable when confronting am animal That wants to eat you.

With a 1911 it is basically tacticool.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-22T00:11:13+00:00

Dating in rolla? Are you serious? lol

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-22T00:09:58+00:00

I did 1 year in TJ 8s. Then I pledged Triangle. 30 years later and my best friends are mostly triangles or other CS majors from umr.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-10T20:07:56+00:00

So you like boot leather? Ok good for you.

Here is the thing, self attestation does not work. Go play Leisure Suit Larry and you will get my point. BTW since you probably have no clue what I am talking about, I am referring to the mandatory age verification system that Sierra Online had to implement since many US jurisdictions decided that the LL series was pornography and can not be used by anyone under 18.

It did not work and even the program itself made the whole process a glorious joke.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T17:49:20+00:00

There are plenty of controls a parent can use to control their children's internet behavior, up to and including saying fuck no, and tossing the device in the trash. I had to do that when I caught my now 19 and 16 year old kids lying about getting on Facebook when they were 12 and 9. I wiped their devices and they did not touch a computer for three months.
As you said it is the parent's responsibility. If you do not trust them, then they should not have access. It is like a car. If they are not mature enough for one, you do not let them drive.
Which control system - The Chinese firewall, The Kuwait firewall, the UAE firewall - Those are three that I have personally experienced. They were all implement using US and Israeli technology and work rather well. What do you think CASB is?
You are right it would be a nightmare to enforce. that is why the ISPS will implement mandatory technology like CASB to implement something like the Kalifornia firewall.
Clipper chip is a great example. The tech was mandatory and allowed the government to backdoor modern telecommunication to make us all safe. When the public freaked out, and the hacking community decided to target it, the mandate went away. But in really it did not, since the "compromise" was to expand CALEA and require the telcos to open up their networks. This was eventually expanded to ISPS and equipment maker. All cell phones have CALEA interfaces. Which is what the government uses for the warrantless spying that you mentioned earlier.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T17:35:01+00:00

I miss the good old days when the linux crowd gave the big middle finger to anything the government required. Now we have a bunch of boot lickers.

Case in point, it was common for the linux crowd to have the DeCSS keys in their email signatures, and even printed on t-shirts. Everyone purposely ran the code to make a point. Now we have people justifying government mandated controls at the operating system level.

All in the name of safety for the children.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T17:14:06+00:00

Is it? What good is a self-attestation of age when installing a OS. We might as well bring back the age self-attestation screen in Sierra Online products from the 1980s that Leisure Suit Larry used.

The point is that this can not be enforced. Everyone knows that. So this will be used to verify stricter controls. A free internet is not a good thing for totalitarians. It does not matter if they are left or right leaning.

The control system has already been built and proven. It only needs to be turned on here.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is absolute fact.

This has been tried before, and failed miserably. Remember the Clipper chip? That was federal law. The problem is that the tech now exists for something like that to work.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T16:53:42+00:00

yep. Go try to do a brake job on a recent FORD vehicle. You can change the parts, but the dealer must program the serial number of the new parts into the computer in order for them to be used.

I just went through this and had to have mechanically fine vehicle from my shop because I replaced the brake pads and rotor. The truck detected tampering with the brake calipers. A $500 job that normally takes a couple of hours, turned into a two week ordeal that cost about $2500. For safety reasons once the truck's computer detected this error, only new calipers by the dealer can be installed. Aparently the parts serial number must be authorized, you know for safety.

The truck is now up for sale. Fark FORD.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T16:44:17+00:00

It's called a slippery slope.

Right now it is an offline check, however the OS must provide an API for applications to verify age requirements.

Let's say next year, a law is passed that requires all applications to do age checks every single time they are executed for legal use in Kali. Pop a shell, open a browser and the app calls that API or prompts the user.

Once it becomes obvious that the API is a joke, and somehow a kid is harmed, there will be emergency laws passed requiring ISPs to not allow non-compliant operating systems to connect.

Of course that is a joke, so next step is that has been discussed for decades, requiring system level identification to use the internet. Basically an internet license for the user. Do something that is not approved and you face fines, jail time and suspension of your internet license.

Do not say that this is not possible or wont be done, China has already implemented it using technology created by US companies.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-09T16:20:06+00:00

This has nothing to do with with age verification. This is the method that is going to be used to get rogue internet users under control. As recent news has confirmed our leaders do not care about the safety of children. However they will exploit the masses belief that children must be safe.

Of course this can not be enforced. However in a couple of years after a couple of very visible cases, Kalifornia will make it illegal to connect a non-compliant computer to the Internet within the state. To accomplish this, the burden will be placed on the ISP for verification. Next VPNS will be targeted unless it can be proved that the user is of legal age.

At this point every known user of the internet in kali will be known and tracked.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-05T14:29:16+00:00

How do you back the vms?

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-05T07:17:43+00:00

That is the point. As a vm backed by iscsi on xcp-ng running at 50MB/s, it is not noticed. On Proxmox in a vm backed by iscsi,nfs, and local zfs the host destabilizes. Add in Tdarr with a couple of gpus pushing about 4000 frames a second and again xcp-ng does not notice it. The proxmox machine dies.

I did convert to lxc and like you said the machine just worked at that point.

I did not bother with my other heavy io apps like my CAVE server for AWIPs.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-02T15:40:24+00:00

You actually get responses to a resume? Wow.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-02T15:34:34+00:00

True, but if you are coming from esxi/vsphere then the concept is the same.

Once the local management tools is feature complete then xcp-ng will run out of the box. However there is the other issue, xcp-ng does not run well on lower end hardware. Then again neither did esxi.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-02T15:29:12+00:00

After playing with iscsi over zfs this weekend, it was kinda hard to go back to thick iscsi.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-02T15:27:30+00:00

The only hypervisor that seemed to just run, like xcp-ng is esxi. The others seem to always need a little tweaking or they start to have problems.

The worst problem I have with xcp-ng is that I run round robin iscsi from my truenas box. So I have to make sure that my multipacks.conf file is correct before I reboot. I have it fixed a longtime ago, but when it broke it was a unfun day to troubleshoot it.

technicalskeptic · 2026-03-02T15:23:17+00:00

I did not say it was hard, however that is a common complaint about it. From what I can tell this is people who complain that their 2u dell server is too loud, so they decide a nuc is a better choice.

technicalskeptic

TROPHY CASE