IIRC, rubber "bullets" are somewhere around 30mm, which isn't that far off from the size of the rounds grenade launchers commonly use - I think those are usually 30-40mm. I saw somebody recently say that they're the size of 8 or even 4-gauge shotgun slugs, and an 8-gauge is 25% larger than a 12-gauge.
They're also not rubber like people think of when they hear the name. They're a metal slug wrapped in a layer of rubber or foam.
I don't know about them, they may have personal experience, but there was definitely a period in the 90s and 2000s when doctors were prescribing Ritalin as freely as opioids and it was advertised by some as a treatment for hyperactive kids. Kids won't sit still in class? Just pop a pill and watch them become model students!
Absolute numbers absolutely do matter, because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate and handle the logistics involved the more people you have and the larger the area that you are coordinating across.
An estimated 2 million showed up in the city of Boston alone on Saturday, and these protests were coordinated across thousands of miles by ordinary people using social media and cellphones, not some sophisticated form of logistics network or something. Europeans don't understand the sheer scale of the US. Americans are standing up for immigrants at home and thousands of miles away being kidnapped. There were protests in small towns all across the country where they've never had more than a deputy sheriff drive through. It's closer to setting up simultaneous protests in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and the Hague than it is to setting up a protest in one city in a country that you can drive across in a single day. These protests made the top 5 of the largest protests in US history.
Europeans also don't truly understand the conditions of the US. The government has spent every day since the death of MLK making these kinds of protests as difficult to pull off as possible. People are desperate but not so desperate that they have nothing left to lose, making them more desperate to hold onto what they do have. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without access to medical care that won't put them in massive debt or bankrupt them, or any other form of support network that Europeans take for granted. We're dependent on our employers for all of those things. We aren't even guaranteed the 2 weeks of vacation time that is considered the norm here. The average lifespan for an American has fallen for several years in a row now and is equal to the average lifespan of the worst county in the UK. An ambulance ride with no medical care expenses added on can cost you $600 after insurance. The average American has $300 or less in their bank account. Wealth disparity in the US today is higher than it was in France at the time of the French Revolution. We're a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt. A coat of shiny paint over a society and culture built to keep the masses in check.
You might as well criticize the Arab Spring protests for not drawing big enough crowds.
More people showed up for TACO's birthday bash on Saturday than at the Hague. By your logic, that means the Dutch care less about the genocide in Palestine than Americans care about celebrating Trump's birthday, and Americans basically don't care about that at all based on the numbers.
So what principles do the Dutch have again?
Edit: Important addendum I just saw in another post:
Should've gone for the thermite, then at least we could call him a "hot" boomer.
They've been saying this in some form or another practically since the Industrial Revolution itself. For many of these backbreaking jobs, immigrant laborers are cheaper and more effective than automating them. UPS and FedEx use barcodes and scanners on each package to (try to) ensure that they all get to the right address, but it's still people shoveling them into and out of the vans.
Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn't being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.
Also the first step in realizing that suburbs will strangle your city and its economy due to the low density (and therefore lower tax revenue), high traffic demands, and high service costs compared to more dense parts of the city.
I thought Flavor-Aid was the cheap alternative they used because they couldn't afford Kool-Aid.
Hell, even biker gangs got in on this and would show up at veteran's funerals to shield them from the WBC.
To add to this, the game industry has had year after year of record-breaking layoffs worse than the 2008 Recession for about 5 years in a row now. They over-hired during the Pandemic, expecting things to not drop off afterward, but this is way beyond that. The big companies are devouring each other and destroying studios they bought for large sums of money only a couple of years later, bleeding talent and creativity out of the workforce along the way as there are too many people laid off and too few jobs. Most of them will never work in the industry again.
I saw somebody say that older rounds were designed to be used that way while newer rounds are meant to be aimed at center mass (both from at least a certain distance away to let the energy dissipate before it hits somebody/something), but cops have both kinds in their arsenal and fire them both directly at people from point-blank range - breaking all the rules for their use.