The Free Land of Gloon Ald is a huge, environmentally stunning nation, remarkable for its unlimited-speed roads, daily referendums, and stringent health and safety legislation. The compassionate, democratic population of 321 million Gloon Aldians are free to do what they want with their own bodies, and vote for whomever they like in elections; if they go into business, however, they are regulated to within an inch of their lives.

The large, liberal, socially-minded government juggles the competing demands of Welfare, Education, and Healthcare. The average income tax rate is 53.6%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The Gloon Aldian economy, worth 16.5 trillion francs a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is a slick, highly efficient, quite specialized black market in Tourism, Pizza Delivery, Information Technology, and Book Publishing. 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 51,441 francs, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Vats of anabolic steroids are being dumped into the ocean to make Gloon Aldian mussels the biggest in Conch Kingdom, an increasing percentage of the population's youth have homosexual parents, country folk are sent to obligatory boarding schools to learn how to be civilized, and citizens are allowed to rise or fall based on their own merits. Crime is well under control. Gloon Ald's national animal is the bison, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

Gloon Ald is ranked 100,975^th in the world and 213^th in Conch Kingdom for Most Scientifically Advanced, scoring 85 on the Kurzweil Singularity Index.