It may feel that way but I do not believe it is indicative of the situation of the masses. Often who we surround ourselves with alters our perception of reality. I do think the US has work to do to restore more faith in people that success is achievable for everyone.
Unfortunately that is the sad reality of the state of fiscal literacy in the country. We have work to do to prepare people for their own futures. Pensions were nice but this transition to private plans has been rough, with far too many believing their Social Security Income alone will be enough to sustain them in their golden years.
I'd be curious if the folks that are advocating for people to provide support to their adults kids also expect those adult kids to keep their parents living with them when elderly. I know assisted living facilities charge exorbitant amounts of money, to the point it's often advised to setup a trust, so the parent's assets are no longer viewed as their assets. These facilities apparently charge based on assets, where if you have none then suddenly the monthly cost to live there equates only to the value of your Social Security Income payments.
So if said kids are relying on their parents for support... how are their kids going to rely on them? The idea behind generational wealth is that there is something left to pass down. If you have nothing to pass down, because both you and your parents spent it all, then you're fully on your own to support yourself. Somewhere along the line the bill always comes due.
They have built something like 34 schools, public transit, all kind of projects. It's all in political approach as to how tax windfalls get spent. Here they plan to credit homestead tax bills, eventually down to $0.
What gets me though is that hyperscale data centers are nothing new, they've been around for the better part of two decades. What appears to have changed is the arrival of TikTok "reporters" and cryptomining operations being taken for AI data centers.
Here they have mandated that data centers pay any cost associated with servicing them, as well as signing a contract and having a bond, should they go insolvent. As well, excess tax revenue from them is going to be used to credit homestead tax bills.
The intent is to not make companies shoulder the cost of other organizations scraping their content. When it is regular users browsing the cost incurred is trivial. When bots are scraping the entirety of a site, repeatedly, it adds up quickly.
I think DDoS attacks are really what propelled them to the heights it has. The attacks seem to get bigger and bigger by the year. You need a really big pipe to filter them out on before passing on traffic to servers with a much smaller pipe.
You missed a fun part of that story! The person who programmed it was a kid in the district at the time. They continued to hire him to come back and maintain it any time they had issues, which apparently was fairly rare.
Cinnamon is cool and all but I prefer KDE Plasma. It seems to eliminate all the pain points Linux desktop environments typically have and everything just works. Pair it with Debian and you got a solid system.