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“Beneath heaven is hell, and beneath hell is Furnace.”

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The Holy Empire of The furnace is a very large, safe nation, remarkable for its compulsory military service, irreverence towards religion, and punitive income tax rates. The hard-nosed, cynical population of 147 million furnaceans are kept under strict control by the oppressive government, which measures its success by the nation's GDP and refers to individual citizens as "human resources."

The enormous, moralistic government juggles the competing demands of Defense, Law & Order, and Welfare. The average income tax rate is 63.8%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The sizeable but inefficient furnacean economy, worth 6.25 trillion caps a year, is quite specialized and mostly made up of the Trout Farming industry, with significant contributions from Retail, Uranium Mining, and Soda Sales. State-owned companies are reasonably common. Average income is 42,546 caps, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 2.5 times as much as the poorest.

Viewers get headaches from trying to read the screen full of small print warnings that precede most TV shows, earthquake sirens are a leading cause of hearing loss, the populace has developed a mortal fear of the woods, and teenagers performing appendectomies on their friends has become a popular schoolyard prank. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a very well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. The furnace's national animal is the anglerfish.

The furnace is ranked 130,934^th in the world and 1,898^th in The East Pacific for Most Extreme, scoring 20.65 on the Paul-Nader Subjective Decentrality Index.