Mark Minevich

People spoke, and the numbers were not close.
Voters faced 41 local ballot measures on data centers across 10 states and sided against the industry in every single one except a small town in North Dakota. In most cases the margin cleared 70%. Roughly three-quarters of voters told NBC they oppose a data center in their own community. More than half said AI and data centers were a major factor in how they voted.
Gallup and Pew have been saying this for months. The public expects AI to do more harm than good, and they just made it expensive and slow to build the infrastructure behind it.
Prepare for the AI slowdown , at least for now.
In my new Fortune column I lay out what actually comes next:
• The regulation wave headed for frontier models and AI agents once the new Congress sits in January
• The social contract companies will have to accept (pay your own grid upgrades, publish water and power use, flex load, share revenue)
• Why a more distributed map of smaller regional centers may win
• Why the U.S. still leads and why I’m still betting on American resilience
The industry spent two years telling people AI was an existential risk. People believed them. Now the bill is due.

Full piece: fortune.com/2026/11/09/mid…

Fully agree. We must do something about our health care

I came to this country in 1980s with nothing. America gave me everything. I owe it the truth before we vote next week
We cannot go on like this.

Washington says the economy is great. GDP up. Unemployment 4.2 percent. Markets at records. Congratulations to the spreadsheet of numbers. Whoopie!

Now walk into any grocery store, any gas station, any pharmacy in this country and tell me who is celebrating.
Gas is up 34 percent in a year. Inflation is back to 3.7 percent. The average worker now pays $7,471 out of pocket for family health coverage, up 9 percent. A college bill crossed $100,000 a year. Employers have announced 573,195 layoffs through September, and the single most common reason they give is AI. Tech alone has cut 165,925 jobs, up 54 percent. Kids coming out of school into AI-exposed fields are 19 percent less likely to find a job than their peers.
That is the economy. The rest is a PR exercise.

The numbers go up and your life gets harder. A soft landing for capital. A hard landing for everyone who works for a living.
And here is the part that should make every one of you furious.
We are sitting on the most powerful technology humanity has ever built. The United States leads the world in it. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into data centers right now. And what are we doing with it? Writing ad copy. Cutting headcount. Padding margins. Telling 24 year olds there is no entry-level job for them anymore.
Meanwhile the grid is fragile. The water systems leak billions of gallons. The bridges are rotting. The cost of a diagnosis keeps climbing. A war in the Middle East sent energy prices through the roof and we had no shock absorber.
Every one of those is a problem AI can attack today. Model the grid so a supply shock does not become a gas spike. Find the leaks. Predict the drought. Cut the cost of care at the source. Compress a decade of clean energy research into three years. Inspect the infrastructure before it fails instead of after.
We have the models. We have the compute. We have the capital. We have the talent. We lack the decision.
Nobody in power is making it. The administration hands out contracts and calls it strategy. Congress holds hearings and calls it oversight. Big Tech consolidates and calls it innovation. Both parties are running a midterm campaign instead of a country. Trust in government is near the lowest Gallup has ever measured and honestly, it is earned.
So let me ask the question that will decide next Tuesday.

Did your life get better over the last two years?
No. It got more complicated. More expensive. More uncertain. The paycheck shrank in real terms. The job hunt got longer. The premium went up again. The kid's future got narrower. And every politician on your screen is telling you to be grateful for the GDP print.
Voters are not stupid. They do not vote on GDP. They vote on whether the month got easier or harder. For most Americans it got harder and they know exactly who was in the room when it happened.

Expect that at the ballot box next week.
I am not asking for socialism. I am not asking for a free pass for monopolies. I am asking for adults. Energy resilience treated as national security. Healthcare costs capped where they start, not shifted onto workers. An AI transition that trains people faster than it replaces them. Public infrastructure that gets the same AI money private data centers get. Antitrust that finishes a case.

None of that fits in a 30 second ad. All of it decides whether the next decade feels like growth or just feels expensive.
This country gave me a shot. It is failing to give the next generation the same one and it is failing on purpose, through neglect dressed up as prosperity.

Fix it or get out of the way.

What a guest list. What a night. What a different world.

April 2005. NYC’s legendary 21 Club. A dinner I co-hosted with Frank-Jürgen Richter.

Shashi Tharoor, Jagdish Bhagwati, Michael Nobel and many more.

21 years later, what memories!

America’s housing market is splitting in two.

Home values falling year over year:

📉 Austin, TX: −3.2%
📉 Cape Coral, FL: −2.9%
📉 Las Vegas, NV: −2.8%
📉 Denver, CO: −1.9%
📉 Phoenix, AZ: −1.2%

Meanwhile, statewide values keep rising:

📈 New York: +5.6%
📈 Connecticut: +5.0%
📈 New Jersey: +4.0%

Two very different housing markets.