Is America a well oiled machine or is it a series of mouse traps and no one really understands why it's still around?
Is America a well oiled machine or is it a series of mouse traps and no one really understands why it's still around?
I think the only reason the US continues to exist in its current state is due to the global power of the US currency. It is the dominant currency for international exchange, which gives the US government extraordinary influence in international affairs AND gives corporations and wealthy people a reason to be based in the US. There are historical similarities with other countries having a dominant currency such as the British Pound or Dutch Guilder during those countries periods of imperial dominance. The empire is likely to persist as long as the currency remains dominant no matter how badly it is mismanaged.
One thing you need to understand is that the US is a Federal system.
Take education. Every state has its own standards, and each individual county has its own Board of Education. Two towns in the same state can have vast differences in curriculum and standards. Same with police forces. One jurisdiction might have all college graduates and another might accept GEDs.
America is still around because a continent does not go down easily.
The society and the country called Us and a which you are probably talking about, they are very busy at the moment with de-inventing themselves.
It's a series of highly efficient machines, each optimized to the point of fragility. Think of the supply chain disruptions during Covid. The cost of shipping is so cheap that it can make sense to ship even simple products back and forth across the ocean several times as they move up the value chain. But if one of those links breaks, the whole house of cards collapses. In generations past, commerce needed huge buffers in the supply chains, and the chains themselves were kept simple. In the days of wooden sailing ships, ships arriving late or not all were common. Before computerized inventory tracking and just in time manufacturing, storing large quantities of intermediary parts was also required. These buffers in the systems represented economic inefficiency, but they also produced resiliency.
America is a series of highly efficient industrial juggernauts built on feet of clay. Any good you buy at the grocery store or big box retailer is going to have a huge logistics supply chain behind it. And that chain will be, in economic terms, highly efficient. It will also be very fragile.
this is an incredibly accurate and well written depiction.
Thank you!
It is held together by duct-tape.
Bubble gum.
Duct tape actually holds things together well; the US is going to collapse any minute now.
Well oiled… with the blood of the working class and the poor
It's a well oiled machine for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
It's a machine that used to be well oiled but management's been deferring maintenance for decades, the oil's gross, it's leaking everywhere and overheating, it's barely hanging on, and the manufacturer's long been out of business.
But the people writing the instruction manuals every year are convinced they are the only ones able to understand the original manufacturer’s intent. Thus all the constant changes they are making to the instructions are perfectly valid and everyone should follow those. Also bear traps.
It is a series of smaller machines of various qualities with many of the machines getting randomly replaced at times.
People have a general idea how a lot of it works, but it isn't perfect.
I'm not American, but surely this is some form of false dichotomy when you restrict answers to such inflammatory options?
The prison industrial complex is a well oiled mouse trap making machine.
The only machine here is the one that turns grade school kids into fertilizer. Ohh say can you seeeee....
mmmm whatchu sayyyyyyy
I only meant well.
It's a well oiled machine that turns the greed of some people into the misery for other people
The greed of a relatively small number of people and misery for an almost unimaginably large number of others.
Objectively tiny, as well as relatively small
In one word, "dysfunctional".
Edit: yes, I made a mistake and corrected it after I read SpaceNoodle's remark.
Too bad that's not a word
Edit: it was misspelled before, y'all
It's totally a word, too many people suffer from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Electile+Dysfunction
Now it is
Feel free to crosspost to !AskUSA@discuss.online
America is a rather young country compared to others. The others have gone through these issues already.
...or disppeared. Lots and lots have disappeared.
The US has been around for less than 250 years. That's less than four times as long as the Soviet union, which didn't even last a lifetime.
And America's issues are uniquely American. It has similarities to feudalism in France, but it is not at all the same.
It's not, though. America is young as a nation, but as a country with a set political system it's one of, if not the oldest in the world.
It's well oiled for the people running it.
It's (barely?) good enough for the people who are units in the calculation.