“Time is not fungible. The time you spend reading this column cannot be ‘reclaimed’. It is gone and it won’t be back. Which is why the ‘talking filibuster’ proposal for the United States Senate is such an awful idea. I wrote the first paragraph fully aware of the jests it will bring forth — thank you for underscoring my point by posting a comment along the lines of ‘That’s five minutes I will never get back!’ You are correct. You won’t get it back. Hold that thought. It applies to the United States Senate too. Another debate has come around about the rules of the United States Senate. The debate is welcome provided it occurs in columns and in studios and doesn’t take up ‘floor time’ in the Senate.” (02/17/26)
“Hello, I’m from the government, and I’d like to see what it’s going to take to get you and your community into one of our lovely new immigrant detention facilities! That’s right, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is on a $38 billion spending spree, scooping up warehouses across the country and revamping them into state-of-the-art-ish storage centers for people we have been working tirelessly to dehumanize. … our goal is to increase the federal immigration detention capacity by more than 90,000 beds, and we’re excited to start doing that as soon as you welcome one of our cruelty-forward human-being warehouses into your backyard. That’s where we’ve run into an unexpected bit of trouble.” (02/17/26)
“Sutton draws from decades of AI history to argue that researchers have learned a ‘bitter’ truth. Researchers repeatedly assume that computers will make the next advance in intelligence by relying on specialized human expertise. Recent history shows that methods that scale with computation outperform those reliant on human expertise. For example, in computer chess, brute-force search on specialized hardware triumphed over knowledge-based approaches. Sutton warns that researchers resist learning this lesson because building in knowledge feels satisfying, but true breakthroughs come from computation’s relentless scaling. … The Bitter Lesson is less about any single algorithm than about intellectual humility: progress in AI has come from accepting that general-purpose learning, persistently scaled, outperforms our best attempts to hard-code intelligence.” (02/17/26)
“Debates over free expression often center on government power and the First Amendment. But in fandom communities and other niche online subcultures, the boundaries of speech are shaped by moderators, platform policies, and evolving group norms. Within these intensely participatory spaces, decisions about what is acceptable can determine which voices are amplified and which are pushed aside. In these environments, cultural gatekeeping and platform rules often define who gets heard.” (02/17/26)
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“Guys, when Herschel Walker ran for the Senate in Georgia, I told everybody the Democrats would attack Walker for holding a gun to his wife’s head. Republicans yelled back that Walker had been open about his mental health, his ex-wife had forgiven him, etc. Walker lost women, including a sizable portion of Republican women, and lost the Senate to Warnock. Good luck to the Texas Republicans running a serial adulterer whose own staff reported him to the FBI and the man who bought Jeffrey Epstein’s desert sex dungeon. Bravo, Texas Republicans. Bravo.” (02/17/26)
“Washington sent warships this month to deploy ‘gunboat diplomacy’ while the island nation continues its freefall of violence and corruption.” (02/17/26)
“While inflation ranges may offer technical advantages, they risk blurring accountability and weakening confidence in the Federal Reserve when clarity is most needed.” (02/17/26)
“In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs. Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing.” (02/17/26)
