Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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What is there to say other than in a country which is basically stitched together through economic opportunity that if the ruling party fucks the economy blatantly and incontestably (and pointlessly, hard to see Iran as anything other than that) then they’re going to get rekt?
I’m sure the democrats will do the same in turn, and shovel another trillion dollars to boomers and various other welfare queens. On and on the wheel will turn.
The economy is not rekt. Stocks at all time highs. Oil prices especially after accounting for fuel efficient are like 40% of 2 decades ago.
Some legit K-shaped issues but no one has proposed a good way to solve that issue.
Bernie Sanders of 2016 would seem like a great candidate for today.
But still the economy can not get much better than it is right now. The biggest issue is unemployed males which are booming mostly thru leaving the labor market.
Average US gasoline price in October 2006 was $2.32/gallon, or about $3.87 in today's money. Accounting for fuel economy is harder to do, but I would caution that while economy has improved as far as specific cars are concerned, the market has shifted toward less economical vehicles. In 2006, passenger cars accounted for 11 of the top 20 best-selling vehicles in the US. In 2026, they accounted for 4, and that's giving the Tesla Model Y credit for having infinite fuel economy despite being an SUV. The modal American appears to have replaced a sedan that gets 25 mpg with an SUV that gets 25 mpg. But this is all pointless because nobody is comparing gas prices now with what they were 20 years ago. Fuel economy was about the same one year ago as it is now, and gas was significantly cheaper. Hell, if you look at the 2024 election, it was over a dollar a gallon cheaper. People notice when it costs an extra $20 to fill the tank, and it's not exactly an occasional purchase.
I just filled up yesterday at about $4.2. Yeah, it's a little higher. Not enough to scream "the economy is ruined!". Yeah, we have wars in two major oil-producing nations, it's going to affect the price of oil. But the economy is not ruined at all, and there are many more factors than the price of oil.
What makes people think the economy is ruined is the barrage of news that sound like this: [Xbox] Project Helix reportedly launching in late 2028, projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800. Or also on the gaming front the quite novel phenomenon of seeing the cost of a console increase dramatically over this generation rather than drop. These are things that young people care about, and there's a GTA game dropping now which puts extra attention on this. You can bet anyone who casually looks at this would get the impression there's something extremely wrong with the economy. While this is more RAM unavailability than tarrifs, RAM unavailability as an issue is owned in the public's eye by the tech industry's AI obsession, and by virtue of Trump's embrace of their AI obsession, by the Republicans. So that's the "games" part of "bread & games", the "bread" isn't doing that much better either, Trump couldn't single-handedly fix elevated prices, which I wouldn't really blame him for, but considering how he pinned high egg and other food prices on Biden he can't really complain the same's done to him.
If your problems is a newest ever fresh from the presses gaming toy costs too much, I don't think we have any issues with the economy. We have the issues with people's perspective. I mean you hear people talking in terms like they're on the verge of starvation, and then it turns out the problem is a newest shiniest toy is a little bit too expensive? Maybe diamond tiaras and Hermès handbags are too pricey too now? How can a simple working man get by in such an economy???
It's not just that though. Housing is notoriously expensive, at least in the places that people want to live in. Many younger millenials have given up on ever getting a house short of inheriting one. Cars... The average new car transaction recently hit above 50000$. If you account for typical dealership bullshit "destination fees", add taxes and such, you'll find there's only limited options that won't cost you over 30000$. Beef prices are still much higher than in recent memory. So it's gaming toys... and food, and houses, and transportation...
I'm mentioning RAM-related game console prices because the problem here is recent enough and "owned by Trump" enough that one can pin that one on him, being that enthusiastic about datacenter buildup, but the other problems are still there and from the public's perspective not only did Trump not solve them like he implied a president could, but he got distracted by other stuff (like endorsing AI development and the Iran war) that added some on top.
TVs are still cheap I guess, but they spy on you though.
We all know why (or at least one of the reasons why). People are selfish and short-sighted. They want housing built, in theory, but not where the good housing is, because that'd ruin the value of the good housing. There's no real solution for it that does not involve somebody left unhappy. And usually already having an expensive house correlates well with being able to leverage your desires into policy outcomes. So guess who is going to be left unhappy.
There are plenty of housing that is affordable if you don't want to live within 15 minutes walk of 200 restaurants and 50 shoe stores. One just needs to see what their priorities are. Again, there's no solution that would make desirable places inexpensive - it's a contradiction in terms, until somebody invents infinite space and infinitely scalable housing, people with more money will always outbid people with less money for desirable living spaces.
Also, the millennials (not only them of course) have been voting for various state-allocated goodies for decades. Redistribution have been growing rampantly. We're financing and subsidizing megatons of stuff we didn't before. Where all this is coming out? From the pockets of the people, ultimately. Via taxation, via inflation, via costs increases, via wages stagnation, via standards of living reduction.
Blaming Trump for data center buildup is the weirdest complaint of the season, to be honest. Trump didn't invent the AI boom, he just didn't destroy US chances of being the leading nation for the next 50 years by suppressing it. Europe is pretty much non-contender in this, but China very much is. China already leveraged perfectly the reluctance of the West to have physical industry - now if you want to manufacture anything, you have to go to China. Trump tried to change the trend, but that has costs - so everybody is whining "why Trump is making everything so expensive?!" You want it so that if you want to have any AI-related development happen, you'd also have to to go to China? And have China - read CCP - own all the best data centers and all the data in them? That, plainly speaking, is hooting insane. Trump didn't do that - for which I can't even really praise him, as not being hooting insane is not something we usually praise a person for. We are in the middle of a technological change, yes, it will have some pains, and it has nothing to do with Trump. Trump could make it worse, but he did not.
Well, this is something you can indeed blame Trump - and any politician - for. There are limits of what a politician - even the President - can do, and they are not as wide as they like to imagine. But you can't really run on the platform of "You know, really I can't do a lot, shit just happens and I'll try not to ruin good shit happening and maybe make bad shit happening slightly less bad, but that's all you can really expect of me in the best of cases". That would be a honest and a realistic platform, and nobody ever could win any election with it. No, actually, I am lying, this guy did: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16223571/man-wins-council-election-qualified-money-politics.html - but not a Presidential election.
Don't connect them to the internet. It's your choice.
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