Hey, so. I know a lot of us here in the U.S. are struggling under our student loan debt. I just wanted to make sure everyone knows about the Borrower’s Defense to Repayment program. It is an official government program to have your loans forgiven if your college engaged in fraud. This has been a big part of cases like the ITT Tech and DeVry cases, among others.
A LOT is happening with this program now, and everything I’m finding is urging people to apply ASAP. (I applied back at the end of 2020.)
You can even apply if you’ve already paid off your loans, and then if your case gets approved you might be eligible to get that money back depending how long ago you made your payments.
Examples of fraud in this situation include:
My school did not fulfill its promise that I would find future employment.
My school misrepresented its job placement rates.
My school misrepresented the demand for graduates in my field.
My school misrepresented its partnerships with employers.
My school misrepresented my eligibility for a certification or a licensure in my field of study.
My school exaggerated the earnings of prior graduates or my likely earnings after graduation.
My school misrepresented that it was accredited when it was not.
My school misrepresented that my program had the accreditation
necessary to qualify graduates for licensure or certification when it
did not.
My school failed to tell me that my programs did not have the
accreditation necessary to qualify graduates for certification or
licensure.
Also, while the claim is pending (which could be years, unless things really do start to move) your loans will remain in forbearance even after/if the C*VID pause ends.
You will have to gather evidence to support your claim, but not much given the limit is 5mb (which is, yes, annoyingly small and 100% too small, but you CAN add more. You just have to mail it in. Because our government is oh so functional like that). Depending on what sort of fraud you’re alleging, evidence can include things like old marketing materials, old screenshots of the college website using web archive viewers, email exchanges between you and people at the college, etc.. Search the name of your college along with “Borrower Defense to Repayment” and see if anyone else has built an archive of evidence for everyone to pull from. There’s a few good ones out there for the bigger colleges at least, and everyone really is trying to help everyone else.
I’m not going to include a link so that it doesn’t get buried by tumblr, but a quick search for “Borrower’s Defense to Repayment” will get you to the right spot.
Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]
For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.
Beautiful.
Now I’m crying thanks
and a new cat was hired right?
yep! her name is Nitama (essentially ”second tama” or “tama II”) and she served under Tama as an apprentice before being appointed her deputy
she works very hard
Everytime this crosses my dash, I reblog. It is the law.
Law
I’m crying at 11pm over train cats
Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016). There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.
^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama
Yontama.
a legacy
okay but actually what happened to santama (or sun-tama-tama, which is her name because it’s a pun on santama) was that she was basically sent to train for the position in okayama and they liked her so much they refused to send her back
“Sun-tama-tama” (a pun off of “Santama”, lit. “third Tama”) was a calico cat sent for training in Okayama. Sun-tama-tama was considered as a candidate for Tama’s successor, but the Okayama Public Relations representative who had been caring for Sun-tama-tama refused to give the cat up writing, “I will not let go of this child, she will stay in Okayama.” [25]
As of September 2018, Sun-tama-tama is working as the stationmaster in Naka-ku, Okayama and appears occasionally on Tama’s Twitter account.
Every time I see this post there’s new info and it gets better
You are only allowed to scroll pass this after you pay tribute to the great Tama Station masters.
The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.
Nitama presenting her yearly offerings to Tama
Daimyōjin on the anniversary of Tama’s Death, June 23 (The offerings are presented by the company president, as Nitama is a cat and thus can’t hold the offerings herself) (Not pictured, but also present, Yontama)
you cannot pass without reblogging guys. i’m sorry, i don’t make the rules.
You can’t not reblog a goddess. It’s just what’s so. :)
So, fun fact- the manga Noragami has an arc where the main character, Yato (a minor kami/God that is down on his luck but trying to make it big time) goes to a council/conference for all the Gods in Japan.
And they are announcing the winner of the “up and coming god” award, and of course, Yato thinks it’s him.
This might surprise you, but I do volunteer at a local daycare. It’s part of my work-release program, negotiated by my shark of a lawyer, Max. Turns out that all the other criminals had been accused of some kind of crime that directly disqualified them from working with children, but “doing burnouts for seven straight minutes in front of the police station until the tires exploded” is not one of those. So I help out the kids, and part of that help is repairing toys.
As any parent knows, children are hard on toys. There’s a couple reasons for this. One, toys are built to be cheap, because children are hard on toys. Two, a child’s interest in a toy doesn’t last very long until they’ve outgrown it. Three, kids fucking misuse the damn things all the time. Just last week I saw a pair of little boys pushing a toy truck down the sidewalk while making a “vroom, vroom” sound that clearly had too many revolutions-per-minute to be a lazy-cammed, big-bore Chevy V8. What, did they swap that shit with a Busso?
Anyway, one morning, the daycare supervisor presented me with a broken front-end-loader. A wheel had broken off it, and was nowhere to be seen. This one, unlike others, was licensed. Someone at the toy company decided the best way to add verisimilitude to the tiny plastic construction equipment was to call up Caterpillar and give them some money in order to use their logo. Just to be an asshole about it, I decided to also call up Caterpillar and ask if I could get a service tech to come out and fix it.
Here’s the thing about Caterpillar: if you tell them that you have a service contract, and then kind of mumble a bunch of numbers into the phone when asked about it, they send someone out to fix it. The next morning, a full-ton Ram showed up, towing a flatbed trailer. On that flatbed trailer? One single two-inch plastic tire, ratchet strapped down for safety. That technician did a pretty good job, although he got a little shirty with me when I pointed out that he didn’t bother to use a torque wrench on the little fake lugnuts.
C’mon, man, there are kids watching. You gotta set a good example.
Have you seen Its A Sin or Queer as Folk or My Beautiful Launderette?
Maybe you have seen some of the many viral independent news pieces by the British Channel 4 News team?
Channel 4 is a publicly owned public service broadcaster, but it is not publicly funded.
It funds itself, and it keeps its head above water.
It is also fiercely independent and pretty much the last major media bastion for really holding to the government to account.
The UK government announced this week that they want to privatise Channel 4.
When they held a public consultation on this, 90% of respondants said this was a bad idea.
Those who have informed opinions are pretty much universally against this, and see it as a political move to silence an organisation that consistent represents marginalised communities, stands for diversity, invests in foreign correspondants and holds the government to account by asking awkward questions.
I don’t imagine this will gain much traction outside of the UK and this isn’t the spectacularly detailed post I would like to make with all the links and sources but it is happening and it is bad and we need to spread the word.
Wow, what a spectacularly bad idea. Just what I’d expect from the Creature of No. 10.
What do you recommend for sled dogs when it comes to dog toys? I never know what is safe for them or what would be fun for them in their dog yard! I know plastic is a no go but that's about it!
I can’t answer for all sled dogs because I just have experience with my own, but to be honest my dogs do not have toys out and about without supervision. I like leather toys, scraps of hide, rubber toys like kongs, canvas toys and hard bones. My dogs like stuffed animals but they don’t last and it seems almost no company makes dog items without squeakers these days.
IKEA plushes. Not -intended- as dog toys, but consider:
no buttons, because choking hazard for little kids
no squeakers, because infanticide hazard from parents sick of the squeaking.
I don’t know whether the stuffing is cotton, poly, or combo, but I do know we go through their rats like I’m the pied piper.
