Sometimes I think our country would be better understood as 50-something separate countries, kind of like the EU, except without the general goal the EU has of increasing amounts of cooperation and convergence. Since in America, everything that’s different from one place to another is generally different because somebody very influential wants it to be. As programmers I feel like all this inconsistency drives us crazy because it seems pointless, but as a citizen, I can see how it would be a tremendous waste of effort to try to force national standardization merely for standardization’s sake when we have so many real problems that need to be addressed.

Virginia is another edge case here, where cities aren't part of counties and are directly under the state. If you look at a map, you'll see holes in a bunch of counties where the cities are, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_counties_...

All of these are tiny exceptions compared to the vast number of counties within US States. However, reality is made of exceptions! All things considered, it is interesting and important to have local exceptions in a nation IMHO.

> Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments

This breaks my brain.

And even where everything seems the same on paper, different states can handle things wildly differently.

Some the counties run almost everything except where a large city is, some the county does almost nothing, and everything is tied to whatever the biggest town is.

I'm always a little bit angry that New York calls Townships Towns.