Prior to Alexander, simple city-state like entities were dominant and the norm. No one had to bear the tax of some professional army or deal with the federations of disparate polities. Shit gets real bad, everyone goanna die this winter from starvation, worst case is city vs city raids. Lots to try to trade across cities where many skilled trades and goods are unique but quality varied. Getting raided? NP, retreat to the walls with your belongings and defend with your neighbors. You know nearly everyone on the walls beside you. Wives and daughters worry, but the idle times and company are more jubilant than not. The differential in forces is negligible. Defending is a massive advantage. There are very few creative innovators around that are focused on attacking. Raiding is about poor management, resource scarcity, and minor thievery. Where the former are larger parties and latter are smaller.

Along comes The Great Asshole, and here come the pro bro brutes. They are the first regional sized force. The whole group of them are totally desensitized to morality. This is not some parity or simple innovation of technology. This is - it does not matter that a coalition of cities are banded for defense. No one has ever seen a force so large and so murderous. These are the military engineers.

Brutishness is so very limited in real value. It only matters in one on one engagements with limited constraints. Humans are not predators of strength, but of endurance.

The real strength to fear are the engineers. The creative innovators are scary as fuck. When a group of them are focused on the innovations of murder orgies, common folks are a thrashing harvest.

After The Great Asshole, you no longer have some negligible tax to help pay for the walls. Now you pay a much larger sum. The city is dotted with these new professional murder chaps that work for this raider fuckwit asshat that killed Gerry, the guy at the forum market everyone liked. You know, the one with the two gorgeous daughters everyone loved. You would not believe the terrible things the guy in the tower did to them. The whole city heard it, every night for weeks.

Now here you are on a wall next to a bunch of guys you do not know. They seem halfway alright most of the time, but you just know they are not leaving until all your reserves for the winter are gone. Half of your neighbors are dead or left the countryside. Your shack of a home, it is the third time you had to toss something together. The old raiders are looking for food and goods, but these new sadistic fucks burn your shit down for kicks and giggles. Now, uncle dude is not just enslaved in yondertown. He is literally abducted by aliens. People just disappear and no one knows what happened. The party is over, decency is dead, tyranny of the foreigner reigns supreme, hailing from a place you never knew existed. You never imagined humans could be so vile, so cruel, so terrifying. You never felt so violated, so traumatized, so helpless, so lonely. That was the real change.

The population reached a size and wealth that made a test of true human nature possible. Alex was simply at the right time and place to manage an engineering core of mass murder orgies profession that was at the transition point of local to regional wealth management. It was a giant regression and depression of progress that ground everywhere Alex touched to a crawl by the force of attenuation; the way things recovered were a shell of what could have been achieved without attenuation and the same resources and effort gone into amplification. That is always the case, as proven by tit for tat plus ten percent forgiveness solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem within Statistics. One of the most persistent primitive stupidities present across time and human culture thus far is the failure to understand how attenuation cannot amplify. Shame does not produce positive change. Alex was the great monster. A serial killer in parallel port operation. •»ÀĪÙ¬§¬¶¬×

First of all, cops are data collectors in this dimension. Nothing about right or wrong matters with them. They are not judges. You need to be very aware of this, and when they can kill you. You must know when to do exactly as they say, and exactly when to tell them no. In every other circumstance stfu and say absolutely nothing. When a cop is copping, you are a lump of solder. Talking is heat. Once stuck to copper, there is no going back. The rest is only up to the judge and jury. You will need to spend around $100k in any case in court. If you do not have this money to burn, you are fucked. The blindness of justice in the now, is the blindsiding of those that do not understand how court is a major burier of caste. TV shows project the diluted nonsense about philosophical morality, but it is not really like that at all. There is not someone that will fight for you for free. The pedantic language is inaccessible to most, and the convoluted rules are a nonsensical patchwork of hacks and stupid mistakes that are a minefield to navigate. Part of the mistake is to think those mines are ignorance or unintentional. Most are not passive but active with corrupt interests holding the trigger for each one. They lie, watching your every move, hoping to pull the trigger and kill for kicks and giggles. The USA has a tenth of the laws on the books as a country like Germany. That is extremely intentional. The ambiguity is the minefield.

Inherited wealth caner cannot lead, cannot innovate, and hates any who can as the biggest threat to their existence and hegemony. The cancer doubles back, talks about fuckwit nonsense like morality of the populous to hide their own ineptitude from self. Their era feels stagnant, like some final state of progress because of their lack of leadership. Is the age of scientific discovery complete? Is biology a fully understood engineering corpus broken into code one programs with complete understanding?

The reason crime shows exist is manipulative in nature. These are owned by the bunker island cuck cancer. Nothing they offer you is legitimate or benevolent, especially any influence of emotions and perspective philosophy.

Nothing about your attitude or state is relevant to the cops. Any information they are able to collect and spin is fair game. It benefits them when they sell a story. They are in the business of selling stories. They are not supposed to do so. They are supposed to be indifferent and collect all the possible data. That is not reality. Humans are lazy and time is artificially pressured for results. The path of least resistance is always taken. They cover their own ass at the edge of the minefield, but they laugh and cackle in the entourage at the edge of the minefield too.

In reality, court is a meaningless formality and financial warfare by proxy. You must be willing and able to spend more than the enemy, and to doing so result in your own advantage. This is the only function it plays. The way it works is simple. Each expert witness will cost you between $5k-$20k. These are all academic mercenaries. Most are unable to practice in their field for likely criminality gone unpunished. They are experts in what to say in their respective legal domain and hold the credentials in tack to go unchallenged. Right and wrong are totally irrelevant. These argue anything you would like for their fee and will do so in a way that holds considerable sway, especially if unanswered, and herein lies the swindle. For every legal expert the enemy conjures, you must respond in kind or you will lose. It does not matter what a judge or jury thinks. No one will sit on your case and front the $100k. You must pay the attorney for weeks of real work before each stage of the case goes before a judge. Some may float these funds for you, if the work load is small. The problem is that how the case unfolds is unknown. They are at risk of all that unpaid work, which will likely be under valued by all in the end. They have likely been burned by this many times before. So they are not going to fight a dozen mercenaries for you by themselves. If you are unable to equip your forces and march them into battle lord, perhaps it be better to sell self to thy enemy, lest one ends up in a federated homeless camp halfway unhouse. The for profit prison slave market beckons you to believe there is philosophical justice. Ignorance is grooming of slaves. Their pay is extortion from your family.

Extortion and privateering are the only reliable means for those of the nepotism of inherited wealth cancer to maintain their hierarchical standing. They have no vision of the future to sell in their actions beyond lies and words. They are cowards of conservatism.

Police are the dogs of the regime; judges are the many guards outside the royal court. Their primary job is to stop you from getting behind them and into the royal ranks. There is no idealist shortcut to paying the tolls and bribes required to penetrate their ranks.

One of the biggest barriers is insurance. They get a bulk discount on experts in large numbers. They are some of the most powerful lords of the realm. You will not field a larger army of more criminal and experienced mercenary raiders. Besting one of them is a heist of considerable undertaking. All of us are taxed to the cause of these lords by royal decree for a reason.

What is shown on TV is simply a curtain on a stage in front of a prison camp. How you react is irrelevant. Saying exactly what is required, complying exactly when required, and saying absolutely nothing else is all that matters. The idea that your emotional state is relevant to the dogs is preposterous. That your emotional state is feed for them to tear and gnaw as some kind of right is propagandistic misinformation.

Voting here is mostly bots that follow a similar path. I have lived this court experience to know it. •»ÀĪÙ¬«

$160pp to fairytale.

Older stuff used basic green sand castings. These molds tend to align rather poorly. The outer mold is just compacted oil sand. If the part cannot be cast with green sand using a cope and drag, they used inner cores that are made of chemically hardened sand. All of this is manually aligned and has poor tolerances. One of the causes of poor tolerances is the tendency for the mold and core to shift. The molten metal is a liquid and the sand parts float on this liquid, like a whole lot of floatiness.

Newer techniques use better chemically hardened core like materials, and instead of using green sand with a cope and drag, the entire mold is made of hardened sand that locks with multiple pieces like a puzzle that cannot come apart. This technological shift is the main reason why cars went from lasting 60k to 120k miles to 250k to 500k miles.

Also investment casting is now used on many smaller parts. Basically a wax version of the part is made. This is coated in several layers of a ceramic slurry. Then it is fired in a kiln, burning out the wax and leaving a ceramic negative of the part. The form is placed in sand and then cast. The ceramic is far far more accurate, but is a labor intensive and more involved process.

From my experience in auto body work, owning my own shop, the way cars look is primary down to metal forming machinery and the quality of steel. The thinness of the metal sheet and its strength dictate much, but it is also a compromise in how easily the panel can be assembled on a line. Limits in logistics complexity management are also a critical factor. One of the biggest shifts here in the last twenty years is the use of adhesives and robotics. Adhesives have replaced fasteners and welding in many places on modern vehicles. It is one of the reasons they are so resilient in crashes. This is nothing like the adhesives you find in the US consumer market. These are on the level of fucking dangerous if you stick your fingers together or get them on a hand. They are not taking a thin layer of skin off or letting go like anything you are likely to have used before. These are only available in industry or at an auto paint jobber. The ability to form complex bends and metal drawing operations without cracking the steel sheet are key. Like as a body guy, I am looking at how the panel was initially formed, and then the exact series of forces that went into crumpling and damaging it. My job was to create as close to the same amount of force as possible but in order, and in reverse. Over time, the complexity of forces used to initially form every panel has increased. So when I look at cars, I see this progression of industrial technology and materials.

In other words, six fender washers and three frame bolts cannot compete with fifteen glued panels and complex geometry under the thin surface you see outside. It also makes new cars unrepairable in most circumstances. They are, but not in a traditional sense that passes classical insurance standards. It requires… creativity… like an, artist. (Do not look behind the curtains.)

The actual argument for old cars is ownership.