We're in collapse, of course. It's just that the economy and the country are so large that it's taking time. Kind of like how a large building takes more time to fall down than a kid's building made of blocks.
Web pages often take minutes, sometimes several minutes, to load. Not obscure ones, I'm talking about major ones like Google, Ebay, etc.
I'm hearing on Reddit that they've made the California driver's written test a lot harder. There's a ton of nicky-picky things you have to know about how much alcohol in one's bloodstream is bad (you have to memorize a chart for a lot of different body weights) and lots of legal stuff about what punishments for this and that. Since I might have to re-take the written test to get my "Real ID" so I can fly, this is a worry. I'm a pretty good test-taker so I'll probably just memorize the booklet and probably pass the test, but I've been considering just getting a state ID once I'm back in Hawaii anyway so I may just go that route.
And, today I've found that it's getting a lot harder to search for things on Google that aren't in my immediate area. I guess if you're planning to move, tough luck. You'll find out about the banks etc. when you get there. If you can get there. (One thing that has me spooked is the banks in Hawaii are all different than the ones here. I'm trying to find out if there are any credit unions that have branches here and there, and not having much luck.)
I take for granted as we get into the "doom times" people will move less not more, as they'll be less able to move. This was noted after the 2008 crash. For all the people moving their wife and kids back to their parents' places and striking out on their own to look for work, and all the people moving back in with parents themselves, people were moving far less overall.
I'm just hoping that in a year and a half or so, Hawaiian vacations are still a thing at least for some, and the facade of normalcy will still be held up sufficiently that a reason for travel like an innocent vacation or going to visit an ailing relative, or some normal-times excuse will be enough.
Plus, you know, the has-become-normal background buzz of terror ....
"First, it’s not economically feasible for anyone of a child rearing age to actually have a family, so our birthrate is plummeting. This means the available labor pool will be shrinking dramatically in the next few decades and by the law of supply and demand means that labor pool will have exponentially greater bargaining power. This is unacceptable for a system built around perpetual growth.
Second, and this is more important. The fascists on the right are actively trying to make it unpalatable for anyone left of Mussolini to live in Republican held States. They want anyone who disagrees with them driven into the blue states. Their goal is to establish control over 34 American states. Once they have that, they can legally trigger a constitutional convention and dissolve the Federal Government with carte blanche to rewrite the constitution however they see fit. This makes the will of the citizens of the blue states irrelevant. With their enemies already consolidated into centralized locations, it will also be much easier for them to facilitate a purge." -- u/Stentata on Reddit.
This sort of thing makes me want to not only get my ass back to Hawaii ASAP, at least putting me furthest from the bulk of the empire, but to consider taking a week's vacation somewhere even further away that's not part of the empire, so that I'm watching on TV from far, far away when the next coup attempt happens.
Kind of like how I woke up one fine morning in Hiroshima and got the newspaper from its little holder in front of my hotel room door and right on the front page was the destroyed Murrah building in Oklahoma City. My room mate was sure it was "Arabs" and I said, pretty much, "No, Arabs have got taste. They'd bomb someplace important in New York or something. This is domestic".
That bombing wasn't enough to set off a civil war but it was certainly a funny feeling, being on the other side of the wide Pacific and seeing, on the front page of my hosts' newspaper, the first signs of my country destroying itself.
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