The City on a hill of San Marlindo is a gargantuan, cultured nation, ruled by Her Excellency Comrade President with an iron fist, and notable for its rum-swilling pirates, zero percent divorce rate, and state-planned economy. The hard-nosed, cynical, humorless, devout population of 18.397 billion San Marlindans are ruled by a mostly-benevolent dictator, who grants the populace the freedom to live their own lives but watches carefully for anyone to slip up.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent, corrupt government stops and the rest of society begins, but it juggles the competing demands of Environment, Industry, and Defense. The average income tax rate is 95.4%.

The frighteningly efficient San Marlindan economy, worth a remarkable 3,035 trillion San Marlindo Lire a year, is driven almost entirely by government activity, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is an enormous, deeply entrenched, extremely specialized black market in Information Technology. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is an impressive 165,002 San Marlindo Lire, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 2.7 times as much as the poorest.

Space shuttles are lying silent on the runway till the Space Agency can work out how to fit a creche and a meditation room into their next spacecraft, the nation's exceedingly polite children have often been referred to as "robots" by international media, the government regularly publishes lengthy reports on its own excessive recordkeeping, and dinosaur breeders have a yabba-dabba-doo gay old time in San Marlindo. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. San Marlindo's national animal is the Gray Reticulan, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its national religion is a major religion.

San Marlindo is ranked 275,179^th in the world and 3^rd in desert for Highest Disposable Incomes, with 7,590.13 Standard Monetary Units.