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.
Plus people have just kinda been putting mouse traps in the machine here and there.
And taking out important parts of the machine and replacing them with mousetraps.
Don’t forget the duct tape.
Or the WD-40, can’t forget that.
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’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!
I’m not American, but surely this is some form of false dichotomy when you restrict answers to such inflammatory options?
It’s not worded where it’s either one or the other, they’re asking “is it this, or this?” Anyone can say “it’s neither, here’s why”.
At this point it’s mostly mousetraps, though.
They are well oiled though…
It’s a well oiled machine for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
Well oiled… with the blood of the working class and the poor
The prison industrial complex is a well oiled mouse trap making machine.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Bubble gum.
Duct tape actually holds things together well; the US is going to collapse any minute now.
Stop living in the past. We’ve got flex seal now.
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
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.
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.
Are you expecting multiple continents to just disappear or something?
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
Now it is
It’s totally a word, too many people suffer from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Electile+Dysfunction
It was misspelled before.
deleted by creator
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.
And that’s a problem. Other countries modernize and improve their political systems. The US clings to archaic institutions like the electoral college.
I’d say it’s a testament to the stability of the US political system, which is related to but not the same thing as their political establishment’s resistance to change. When I said “a set political system”, I meant more as opposed to France’s two kingdoms and five republics, the Ottoman Empire’s transition to modern Turkey or the Russian empire becoming the USSR. I don’t think not going through that kind of transformation can be called stagnation, though the US definitely suffers from that too.
France invented constitutionalism and you were the first to adapt it after them. That’s important political history, but don’t overestimate yourselves.
England has been the same kingdom since the early 10th century.
England has been the same kingdom since the early 10th century.
It hasn’t, though. The modern UK is a union of England, Scotland and Ireland and was created by the Act of Union in 1800, and if you don’t count that then you go back to the Treaty of Union in 1707. That’s definitely older than the US so good point there, but either way modern Britain is hardly the same political entity as Norman England.
England is England. They have laws going back until before any of that. There’s continuity all the way. Joining a union does not mean your country stops existing.
It does in the sense that it stops being a country and becomes a part of a country. There’s no country called England today.
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom.
According to Wikipedia, anyway. I’m not sure what you think England is.
That is… Fair enough. I guess I don’t understand the UK political system. Anyway that pushes us back to the mid-17th century when they tried their hand at being a Republic for a while.
Since the mid 17th century, really. And does not currently exist as an independent nation. Which is exactly the point, they were making.
The US is certainly not the oldest institution in the world. And as a people, as a culture, yes, the US is rather young. But the US is relatively mature as far as continuous national governments go, and the oldest surviving democracy.
Part of a political system is that it changes, but the House of Lords for example has roots back to the 11th century. Sure, things change through the centuries, but it’s wrong to say they are not the same. The US has gained states and amended the constitution as well.
