The US government, hollowed out, has all but collapsed. The east coast states down to Georgia have mostly held together and still recognize the authority of Washington DC. California, Oregon, and Washington have formed an independent coalition on the west coast. Texas' influence captures the whole coast of the Gulf of Mexico, now called the Gulf of Texas by several hundred million people. The Great Lakes states have merged with Canada. And the Great Plains in the middle of the continent are overrun by feral hogs, and war.
if you've ever used the London Underground you might have noticed that it often gets uncomfortably hot. the reason for this is actually that its builders dug too greedily & too deep and as a result the trains are very close to the fires of hell. hope that helps.
What do you think happens first: the last human dies, or the last machine gives out?
Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):
He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.
He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox
He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths
He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace
He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process
He never figured out how to live without enslaving people
He never had a child
He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system
He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion
He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region
wheres seasons greasons
There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz. 2016 edition.