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.

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.

I’m not American, but surely this is some form of false dichotomy when you restrict answers to such inflammatory options?

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.

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The only machine here is the one that turns grade school kids into fertilizer. Ohh say can you seeeee…

It’s a well oiled machine that turns the greed of some people into the misery for other people

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.

In one word, “dysfunctional”.

Edit: yes, I made a mistake and corrected it after I read SpaceNoodle’s remark.

Are you expecting multiple continents to just disappear or something?

Both.