EldritchFeminity

I used to work with a guy who had a Tachoma that he loved and he only used it for offroading. He kept a pair of spare axles in the bed to swap out on the trail if he snapped one.

I think he means that the engine, transmission, and frame are the same, not necessarily the body.

Also, I don't think you two really disagree with each other, as his first comment was:

The big one is a work truck and should not be driven as a commuter. It really shouldn't be allowed on roads where cargo trucks aren't allowed.

The horrible sightlines of modern pickups is a different issue, and I was actually going to post that same chart in this thread because I was thinking of it too. I will add that the pickup is about the same size as the tank, though, and has a worse view.

The average American has less than $300 in their bank account. There is no county in the US where somebody making the median salary can afford the average cost of a house for that county.

Vacationing in Europe and going on wine tours would sound like a once-in-a-lifetime trip for the majority of Americans.

The average lifespan in the US has fallen 3 years in a row and is the same as the part of the UK with the worst average lifespan. With the destruction of the CDC and the removal of food safety inspections they keep attempting, I don't think many of us will have to worry about it.

Besides, Berretas are cheap.

His speech patterns and dialogue match up surprisingly well with Jim Jones of the famous Jonestown Massacre. Once somebody like that has a following, it doesn't matter how crazy he gets, the diehard believers will literally die hard for the guy.

The first campaign drew the cult together from a cult that was already there (a groomed voter base who will vote Republican no matter who) and the first term bonded them together against an enemy (everybody with common sense) while the Republican party and the entire media insulated them from how bad he is. There were some people who saw what he did and turned away - he got less votes this time around than he did last time, and that's even with the questions of election interference that keep cropping up - but that just means that the people left are the crazies who would defend him even if he personally started shooting up schools.

American politics is so screwed up that most people have little clue of what exactly happens in this country. A coworker of mine just the other day was effectively saying that daddy Trump had to hurt us because big-meanie Biden ruined the government deficit.

I believe it's a hormone thing because otherwise nobody would have a second kid. Apparently the hormones kick in and make you forget the pain while also giving you a big hit of dopamine so that you connect having a kid to being happy.

I didn't even know that Ritalin was a stimulant. It makes sense as an ADHD med that it would be, but I just knew how easily kids were buying it at school (even middle school, not just high school) because it seemed like practically anyone could get a prescription for it.

Every one of your complaints stem from Americans not marching in the past.

This is largely my point, but the more accurate description is that Americans were convinced that those things are bad and should be protested against rather than protested for.

You can't come in here and disparage more than 3 million people (now corrected in the final tally to 13 million people) in an organized protest across a country the size of Europe with that background of stomping down people's ability to protest because a country the size of a single one of our states organized 150,000 people to protest in one city in a country without all those barriers. It would be like me coming in here and saying that the UK doesn't care about the genocide because they had 0 people protesting in London during this protest, or complaining that Russians and the Chinese aren't protesting hard enough.

Historically, most major protest movements in the US since WW2 have come from college students, as they have the financial security to spend the time and energy of being activists while also being the youngest group usually to be politically active, but this is yet another area where the US has cracked down on protesting. Since the Vietnam War protests, the cost of college has risen something like 1,000x (not percent - one thousand times the cost) as a direct retaliation to the protests. Colleges across the US have been protesting the genocide in Palestine since it began and have seen massive police crackdowns including arrests, students being kicked out of college, police stealing or destroying students' property, and students in custody being denied access to life-saving medication.

The last time major change resulted from social upheaval in the US was when MLK was murdered and billions of dollars was burned to the ground in riots that shut down entire cities for a week, and the government has spent the 50+ years since convincing the population how that change was the result of very peaceful and polite protests that didn't inconvenience anyone. The Million Man March was a threat and a display of force that left white people all over the country shaking in fear in their suburbs, and today people think it was a jolly jaunt through the city like a Pride parade.

Let's make a comparison: the city of Boston, Massachusetts had an estimated 2 million protesters on Saturday. Massachusetts is just about half the size of the Netherlands, with a population of about 6.5 million people (compared to the roughly 18 million who live in the Netherlands). That's a protest roughly 1/3rd the size of the entire population of the state. Obviously, people were coming from all over the place (other states included, Boston is one of the major cities in the region), but that doesn't count all the protests that happened in small towns across the state and region as well. We know for a fact that these protests were larger than just about any other time in US history.

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.

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.