Aaron Huertas
aaronhuertas.bsky.social
Aaron Huertas
@aaronhuertas.bsky.social
Carpenter and woodworker. Democracy and unions liker. Building and fixing things: capehenlopencarpentry.com. Writing and editing: aaronhuertas.com.
Me starring in Quantum Leap: You’re *sure* Ziggy doesn’t want me to help unionize all the workers in this town?
I love how DS9 just has "form a union" episode
February 12, 2026 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
really interesting to me how many professional political commentators have basically retconned the draconian immigration enforcement policies of Obama and Biden out of existence and have completely swallowed the right wing narrative of immigration enforcement
Not going to read them all because jesus fucking christ but this is nasty work from Friedersdorf
February 12, 2026 at 4:29 PM
And yet it moves
February 12, 2026 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
February 11, 2026 at 10:13 PM
See my instinct would be to get my mouth as close to the mic as possible and whisper “Hosh Jawley”
Hawley ended up getting so aggressive toward Ellison, including calling for his arrest, that even Rand Paul asked him to tone it down
February 12, 2026 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
New poll: In 2024, low-engagement voters went for Trump over Harris by 11 percentage points. But now they disapprove of the way he's handling the presidency by 13. They have moved 25 points against Trump — 2x as large as the shift for high-knowledge voters www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-lost...
Trump has lost the voters who weren’t paying attention in 2024
The least-engaged Americans have swung 25 points against him since 2024 — about twice the shift among everyone else. Trump has flattened the engagement gap.
www.gelliottmorris.com
February 12, 2026 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
February 11, 2026 at 5:38 PM
Certainly don’t think OP is phishing, but which high school you went to was a common backup security question for a while and famous alumni are public info.
Who's the most famous alum of your high school?

I'll go first: David Draiman of Disturbed
guys i just found out i went to the same high school as howard lutnick. please respect my privacy at this time.
February 12, 2026 at 1:10 PM
Every worker deserves a union. Cool to see a big national union like CWA support sex worker organizing.
February 12, 2026 at 11:44 AM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
This is incredible. Like the previous few years, near all of the electricity capacity added to the grid was clean energy. The Inflation Reduction Act helped this - it made solar & wind cheaper but it also for the first time had a standalone incentive for grid storage. Look at the growth in storage!
Final EIA-860 is out, and 2025 really did it: 54 GW of new U.S. electric capacity, 96% clean. Solar again carries the offense, and we built more storage in 2025 than the cumulative total through 2023. More and more and more additions... but also record low retirements.
February 12, 2026 at 4:38 AM
True Median Voter Theory
February 12, 2026 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
February 10, 2026 at 3:27 AM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
Some personal news
February 12, 2026 at 1:10 AM
Not making someone listen to right wing podcasts for monitoring purposes is peak ethical use of AI
This is an interesting piece about how NYT is using AI in its newsroom. (tl;dr: they generate transcripts of the podcasts they're tracking, those transcripts gets summarized, those summaries get delivered in a report to journalists)
When actress Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad became a culture war flashpoint last summer, Times journalists noticed, in part through the reports, that right-wing podcast figures were shaping the backlash. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/how-...
February 12, 2026 at 1:35 AM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
Incredible.
February 11, 2026 at 4:42 PM
Worth some followup reporting to see if they’re under political pressure including from clients.
Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years thehill.com/homenews/med...
February 11, 2026 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
Metascience FTW
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
February 11, 2026 at 6:40 PM
Toddler started eating ravioli but when he asks for it only says the last two syllables. Hard not to repeat that one back to him.
February 11, 2026 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
if you played sonic the hedgehog and put down the controller, sonic would look at you and tap his foot impatiently. this was proof that sega genesis cartridges had souls. the decision was made to make the storage cases a lot larger than the cartridges so they would have room to move around in there
February 11, 2026 at 3:58 PM
I have squatted
the reps
that were for
much later
in the
lifting program
after
more cycles
Forgive me
they were DOMS-inducing
so sore
and hurty
February 11, 2026 at 6:51 PM
Even assuming massive improvements, this is predicated on LLM outputs becoming socially acceptable replacements for human decision-making and / or hidden away from end users.

And at this level of disruption it’s the same kind of socialism vs. barbarism ratchet we’ve had since the post-war era.
I'm not even saying that's the most *likely* possibility, but it's just very clear that the likelihood of that outcome as increased and even if there's, like, a 1 in 10 change that "AI replaces most to all white collar jobs in 10 years" that's an *enormous* risk to the social order!
February 11, 2026 at 5:54 PM
Roberts and Hobbes got at this with their reactionary centrism podcast, but a sterling example of a media outlet reenforcing right wing stereotypes about Democrats while decrying Democrats’ inability to fend off right wing stereotypes.
I am starting to hate the Bulwark people as much as Republicans which makes sense considering they are Republicans
February 11, 2026 at 4:31 PM
We need something like Funders for Funding Reform because they sure as hell don't listen to operatives
Democratic donors have spent a year frozen, largely out of justified anger at the consultant class, the spammy texts, and lack of leadership from some elected leaders.

That anger, however, is also hurting outside groups doing critical work — and that could hurt us in November.

THREAD 🧵
February 11, 2026 at 4:03 PM
I would simply send a bunch of stand up comedians to heckle the president.
NEW: Jeffries clamping down on SOTU disruptions

Said at whips meeting this AM to either sit in "silent defiance" or boycott altogether, sources told @axios.com

Senior House Dem tells me the current plan for resisters is to go to an "alternative viewing site" www.axios.com/2026/02/11/t...
House Democrats try to shut down disruptions at Trump's State of the Union
Jeffries told his members to either show "silent defiance" or boycott the speech.
www.axios.com
February 11, 2026 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Aaron Huertas
Notice how the popular media narrative has moved on, while people on the ground in Minneapolis are still struggling and crying out that things are as bad as ever. This is how fascist regimes operate — overreach, recalibration, normalization. Get louder, not quieter.
February 11, 2026 at 3:54 AM