Is America a well oiled machine or is it a series of mouse traps and no one really understands why it's still around?

Both. Most people depend on literally thousands of interactions per day to survive: to eat, to have medicine,to travel, etc

These interactions depend on countless people around the world to do things no person fully understands.

This applies to most nations.

And it means most people are caught up in a small fragment of a system so mind boggling complex that will exploit them without anyone fully comprehending the why and how.

Can’t escape things one can’t understand

America is a whole collection of third world countries that work together. A lot of the states would be barely functional, if they were on their own, but they’re not, they have all their family to look out for them, so it’s fine.

The federal government, for its part, is probably many times over the most powerful entity that has ever existed on the planet. It is so massive and so complex that it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around, and almost completely invisible until you interact with one of the tentacles. And, bizarrely, huge parts of it are simply devoted to people working to try to make things better and work on some particular problem for no other reason than that it needs to be done. The very top is pretty corrupt, and the military isn’t always a great thing, but almost all of the rest of the substance is the real deal.

It’s a damn shame, because Trump is about to do his best to wreck the entire thing, because he hates people trying to make the world a better place all day.

Bro I don't know how to break this to you but all human made systems (companies, govt, etc.) are essentially just spaghetti and marshmallow towers with varying degrees of structural stability. They're entirely made of people who know their specific role and only their role.

There are no monolithic, perfect, "well oiled machine" human systems. Not the CCP, not the EU, not Apple, nor Amazon. They're all composed of the same idiots trying their best (I'm in this picture and so are you).

So to answer your question, it's a series of mousetraps, just like everything else. 😁

We've got some good answers in this thread, which is good to see. This question is really leading though, and not really meant to start a conversation so much as fire people up. I'm going to leave it up, but this isn't really the sort of conversation we're going for here.

I’ve heard someone here on visa call if a giant casino.

Why do people answer bait questions like this at all

America was always an experiment in democracy. We'll see how it goes.

All societies run by strong centralized governments are attempts to create well oiled machines, yet the impossibility of such a task invariably leads to periodic break downs resulting in destructive conflicts.

Sure is.

There's a machine in desperate need of maintenance under there still somewhere, becoming increasingly unstable for neglect and having been hooked up to an increasingly complex rube goldberg apparatus which takes a meandering convoluted path from the labor of poor workers to the pockets of rich owners.

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

Population Control matters. The more people WORKING, the more successful the country is from the ground up. If everyone in the US collectively stopped working, the country would fall in about a week.

Every society has always been a series of individual interactions and experiences. I don't understand what this question is asking

Building went on fire across the street. Its brick and concrete so they needed to do the roof and windows and then redo the interior. Its been almost 3 years and they finally finished the roof and are starting on the windows. This is in a suburb bordering a major city. Well withing the metropolitan area. The building is only 3 stories so not a crazy highrise or such.