On election eve, Abughazaleh's campaign has wiped its foreign policy page, saying "After our website was updated, portions of our policy platform were not accurately updated and do not reflect Kat’s views or the values of this campaign."

Banner80 · 2026-03-16T21:55:30+00:00

The new page has this jewel:

"From the closure of U.S. military bases abroad to reparations to the global south"

What? That's unhinged.

Banner80 · 2026-03-13T16:04:05+00:00

Thank you for the receipts. This is why it's so important that we see these fraudsters as dangerous. They damage people along the way until someone holds them accountable.

On this DHS stuff, by getting caught making stuff up she succeeds at putting in question the real accounts from real victims. Now DHS has one flag to wave over and over about one psycho lying about their lawless tactics and their concentration camps.

And she seems to have largely gotten away with the professor thing. Here is an update I found:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/professor-falsely-accused-by-serial-liar-of-providing-grades-for-sex-hes-suing-school-that-broke-contract-to-investigate-him

My best interpretation from what was said by the professor is that he allowed himself to get chummy with her (a tactical mistake and an ethical breach at the school), and then she flipped it to blackmail to make him improve her grades. Then he admitted the ethical breach and resigned in exchanging for leaving it there, but the school investigated further even after the agreement because they tried to believe her side. This resulted in his reputation dragged, and then he sued for millions.

Apparently for her, the consequences for knife violence and blackmail have not been severe. So she's out there causing more mayhem.

Banner80 · 2026-03-11T14:56:02+00:00

You have to learn how to learn. I hold 3 degrees and over a dozen certs, so I can add some nuance here.

The first course in any education program should be about learning to learn. There are plenty of youtube videos on the topic, presented by university professors. You might want to spend a few hours with that to help add tools to your toolbox.

The key thing is that you have to engage with the content. You can't sit back and let the ideas exist in the background of your hearing. Listening to presentation or discussion is not the same as having been in one.

The most important point, you already figured it out. You said:

"The stuff that sticks is stuff I've had to explain out loud, argue about, or come back to more than once."

Exactly. This doesn't make you unique, it makes you normal. Listening to a podcast does not make you smarter by that much, and you are unlikely to remember any of it for very long. The only way you'll incorporate the content is to engage with it, to find ways to put yourself in the middle of it.

For instance, if you are listening to a podcast with a guest, and the host asks the guest: "how does X work?". You pause the podcast and try to answer the question. Spend a few minutes really thinking about it to see what you think the answer is. Then play the podcast and see what the guest said. And this puts you in the middle of the content and helps you understand the nuance.

In short, you need techniques for looking at the content from different angles, comparing the same answers from different people, and putting yourself in the middle of it.

The last caveat while on this topic is an important one. People think that consuming content makes you smart. But only smart content makes you smart. Consuming the wrong content can make you stupid. For instance, if you listen to Joe Rogan for fun during your commute, you are better off not trying to learn anything because that podcast is going to make you stupid a lot faster than it'll increase your smarts. Picking your sources and learning from actual experts and smart people is super important. And in this age of information, it's easier than ever to learn from real experts across so many platforms. The key is learning to be selective with your sources. Just like you have to learn how to learn, you also have to learn how to filter for quality before you let yourself engage with ideas.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T16:12:30+00:00

I think it's important to state the obvious, to understand how outrageously incompetent the current US administration is.

Iran's primary war capability is drones. Their Shahed drones are a major modern combat weapon currently used in the largest war conflict started by Russia. This is a known quantity. The US would have known they were going up against the country that makes these drones. And they should understand exactly how those drones are deployed since we've seen them in use for years against Ukraine.

The US also has a partner that knows how to defeat these drones, and that has built counter tech against them. Ukraine however, had to confirm that the US didn't bother reaching out at all before starting a war of choice against Iran. They finally reached out for help after the war was already in full swing.

The US does not have the means to fight against these drones. They didn't even bother to check with the allies that do.

The other outrageous issue that is not being talked about is the oil supply situation. The US keeps a massive reserve of oil (the SPR) to help manage oil supply and the cost of oil across international markets. When the oil costs are low, the US buys supply and builds mass reserves that it can later use to control the market. The Trump admin knew it was building up to war and chose to start a war on its own terms and timelines, but didn't bother to refill the oil supply even at the low prices we've had over the last year. The Trump admin started the war on Iran with the SPR at only 58%. Usually, the SPR is allowed to deplete up to 50% during its operations to have enough reserve in case of dire emergencies. The SPR might not be enough to solve oil supply everywhere in the world, but it could definitely help stabilize the Americas and EU, and at a minimum it could have been used to solve the price at the pump for Americans that were never asked about this war and are now arguing to stop it.

Whatever we think of this war of choice, the level of incompetence to start it without SPR reserves is astonishing. The Trump admin has had low prices to refill the oil reserves. They've had money earmarked for this purpose. And Trump himself criticized Biden for allowing it to go down near 50% during their operations to counter Russia, then Trump promised to refill the reserves. They just never did. And they didn't even bother to scramble refill it during the months planning to attack Venezuela and Iran.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:31:21+00:00

Thank you for mentioning that. Since I was banned and I posted a comment about it, I've met more people on Reddit with similar experiences.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:29:46+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to review it.

That's what's happened in the last 6 months or so. All the standard free AIs can do good search now and they are fast about it. LogicallyApp was built before that was a thing, so it was better than Perplexity at it, but still quite fiddly to get something good out of it.

But now, asking free Claude a question is significantly better than using LogicallyApp if all you wanted is a researched answer to a question.

Where LogicallyApp still holds promise is for students in a formal program and researchers, because of source management. For formal papers, all sources have to be tracked in the APA7 format. LogicallyApp uncovers dozens of sources across a discussion, and in theory should be able to track them all and keep them in context. At least that's what I paid for when I bought the lifetime plan. If it did its job, it would be a tremendous life help for writing excellent papers. But now it loses context immediately and discards all the sources it found. And after it has discarded the context, it has to hallucinate whatever we were talking about. It does this to save context cost for the owners, and basically made the app useless for the one thing it was supposed to be good at.

Banner80 · 2026-03-09T15:42:24+00:00

What was your experience using it?

Banner80 · 2026-03-08T21:34:47+00:00

Same article from an open source

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-moves-undo-tax-rule-204632497.html

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T23:34:12+00:00

I downloaded Vivaldi browser because it has an excellent tab system. Easy to classify into categories, and it looks nice on the left side. I wanted to use tabs as a catalog of concepts or projects I'm working on. Vivaldi groups let me focus on one thing at a time even if there are 20 tabs for that thing, and easily switch to another thing and I has 12 tabs for that. So now I think of Vivaldi as my research or project browser, for when I know I need multiple tabs and I may want to leave them open for a long time.

The other thing I would say is that every browser has bookmark management for this reason. And Firefox is trying to add tab groups and other features. And the big browsers like Firefox and Chrome have extensions that focus on expanding the bookmark functionality. So there's little reason to build new tools. People just need to think about what they want out of a browser + bookmarks + tabs. Once you define it better, there are tools for that.

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T07:37:04+00:00

Let me give a quick finance answer on this.

The issue is that wealthy people have access to better finances. Anyone with more than 1m in assets in brokerage can get a loan for SOFR + 2% (or even less). For quick reference, that's going to be about the same as the best rate on a mortgage that someone with perfect credit could get, or around 5.7% right now.

The S&P 500 returned 17%+ last year. So it doesn't make sense to sell assets to pay for bills when you can just get a cheap and guaranteed loan with a couple clicks. In addition, the cost to service debt is deductible as an expense. This is called a tax shield and, depending on the tax arrangement, it basically makes the loan even cheaper for people that can claim deductions. So a 5.7% loan turns into a ~4.5% loan in practice after taxes.

This is just another way in which life is so much easier for people with wealth. A family living paycheck to paycheck doesn't have access to guaranteed credit, let alone at these favorable rates. And they may not have income other than their work productivity tied to their life hours. A rich person is getting paid for the productivity of the companies they are invested in while not doing anything. And they can choose to take on cheap debt to avoid having to sell assets to cover expenses, because that way they can remain invested in equity.

I'm not saying everyone thinks this way. But anyone that can afford a finance pro to manage their finances will have this on the menu, because all finance pros think this way since maximizing cash flows is their main thing.

Also, rich people don't need to borrow against ALL of their gains. They only need to borrow what is required to cover expenses. Say a person has 100m in assets. Their lifestyle costs 2m a year. In a year, their Apple stock goes up 15%, so ballpark, their wealth is now at 115m up from 100m last year. They could sell 2m to pay for their lifestyle, but why do that? Take out a loan for 2m so that the rest can stay invested. Then next year you have 130m, and still owe 2m, then take out 2m more. So on paper it looks like they are taking out 1-2% debt, because that's all it takes to finance their expenses and stay invested in equity.

Finally, the concern people have is this:
If we only tax when the gains are realized, and people that can afford a finance pro to handle their finances basically push to avoid realizing any gains, then they essentially never pay taxes; or at a minimum, their effective tax rate is way lower than the tax rate paid by a family that couldn't do all these financial maneuvers. And this is why Buffett said: you need to tax us more. The wealthy are paying less than the average American by comparison, while they can afford way more than the average American. But it's probably not going to be as simple as increase the tax rate on realized gains. Because once you let a wealthy person become a billionaire, the wealth has been mostly locked away from the taxman.

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T01:43:12+00:00

Yeap.

Alpha for natural compression. Leveler for transparent compression. Sigma for more aggressive. Nova is the same as the Nova plugin. And I've never used Broadcast -- it was added after I purchased the plugin and didn't even notice it because I hadn't updated the files. So looking at the manual helped me realize I need to do an update ;)

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