Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It’s not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.

Oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments. Environments that when left undisturbed would be tropical rainforest. Decoupling palm oil from deforestation is therefore very hard. Certified sustainable palmoil is simply from farmland that the farmers have proved not to have been deforested recently but that same land still has the potential to return to tropical rainforest after restoration.

Regarding America specifically probably only Hawaii could support it. But land there is scarce and is used for much higher value crops like fruit crops. Harvesting palm oil is also quite labor intensive since the fruit bunches are harvested manually. It therefore does not make economic sense to grow it in countries with high wages.

Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.

Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.

As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.

Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.

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They are by any metric very dense. According to population by area they are right between India and the Philippines, both highly dense countries. Another way would be by hectares of arable land per capita which would roughly indicate how large a population their agriculture could support. According to this they rank 137th and rank below countries like Japan and Norway, both known for being severely deficient in farmland. Only reason Israel gets by with their surprisingly high food self sufficiency is their use of highly advanced agricultural technology and intensive use of irrigation from both the Jordan river and desalination plants. However they are still unable to produce all the food they need and need imports.

The fact is that Israel is very small, especially for their population size. Occupying more land in Palestine and the Golan heights have therefore made strategic sense. And with the high fertility rate constantly increasing their population the land deficiency will only increase without occupying more territory. Look at Israel on satellite you quickly see how villages, towns and cities occupy a huge percentage of their land and this urban development is encroaching on their already limited farmland.

Wait I thought about it for a couple more minutes and there are humongous amounts of biological fruits that are not culinary fruits. Wheat, rice, sunflower seeds, almonds, basically any grain or seed. Well nevertheless I like the concept of fruit vegetable. But I do admit my point just became weakened.

While there is a clear biological definition of fruit there is no biological definition of vegetable. So why can’t something be a fruit and a vegetable at the same time. Why can’t a tomato be a fruit vegetable?

Using “fruit vegetable” would solve all issues because I can’t think of any culinary fruits that are not also biological fruit. So no word is needed for the opposite situation. The whole confusion stems from the idea that something must either be fruit or vegetable. End the binary state of fruits and vegetables!

I live in a place where there’s 5 months of winter with real snow. I work in agriculture and the short growing season is a huge limiter on what can be produced here and with what yield. Most people here wouldn’t mind it being a bit warmer. Say having 3 months of winter instead of the usual 5. And in my industry at this specific region the farmers are actually looking forward to climate change and have already started benefiting from it. New crops are already entering that were not possible before. And farmers can now start harvesting grains in August while only 10-20 years ago september was the norm. All science-based projections predict yield increases for all crops here.

From a purely selfish perspective I should celebrate climate change. Farming here will just get better and if farming elsewhere gets worse the price for produce produced here will also increase. But while it’s good for my career and maybe even my own enjoyment of the weather I would never say I look forward to it. The huge amount of future misery in the world that is and will be caused by climate change is not worth any improvement in this absolutely tiny piece of the planet I’m on. Still I take comfort in knowing I’ll be alright. As long as the affected regions of the world don’t invade mine…

It’s true that this is very bad news for the moneyed class. But it can simultaneously also be bad news for normal people. A higher ratio of pensioners to tax payers will raise taxes for everyone which is a bad thing, to everyone. This is true for any economic system I can imagine. Even in an economic system without money having a high ratio of pensioners means a larger portion of working people have to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly which means less medical workers, less farmers, less social workers helping the non-pensioners etc, meaning worse living standards for the population.

Even in your preferred dream society and economic system (which I don’t know about) I can’t see an aging population being a good thing. If you have a suggestion for how it could be a good thing please enlighten me. And before you say we can just tax the rich to pay for pensions. You could also tax the rich to pay for better healthcare, which would be preferably for us non-pensioners would it not?

Iranians can sometimes be surprisingly pale while isrealis can sometimes be surprisingly dark, there are of course the mizrahi jews but the beta isreal population are straight up black. I don’t think it’s as much a race thing as it is a western aligned vs non-western aligned thing. Other western aligned countries like Taiwan also get overwhelmingly positive media coverage despite not being white. The fact that Iranians are Muslims also contribute a lot to their bad media image. Lots of isrealis could fit in with Iranians without any problem looks wise but absolutely not culture wise.

Palm trees are monocots and are therefore related to grasses, however they are not grasses themselves. Monocots are a really broad group though. Kinda like saying a certain animal is a mammal. Important distinction but still very broad.

Trees are not a taxonomic group. It’s rather a description of characteristics the most important of which is having a woody trunk. For example there are tree legumes and non-tree legumes. A species of tree can therefore be more closely related to a non-tree than to other trees. However it’s totally true bamboo is not a tree. A grass could in theory however hit all the characteristics that are required to be tree and would then be considered as such, however no such grass happens to exist.

Bamboo is kind of a tree in this case which is an area I know more about and I think many of these factors would apply to bamboo as well. First forests used to actually be more rare than today before humans came along. Europe and North America was covered by endless plains which were grazed by huge numbers of ruminant animals. Any tree that would try to grow would get grazed before it could grow so tall that the animals couldn’t eat it anymore. That’s why grass thrives in such an environment, it’s practically made to get grazed. Once cut it quickly grows back again. Once ancient humans came along and hunted most of the grazing animals extinct forest suddenly started spreading like crazy until almost the entirety of Europe was forested (which was then to a large extent deforested again after agriculture was invented). Grass simply can’t compete against trees for sunlight. Therefore I would expect less or none bamboo in areas with a huge grazing wild life populations. And I don’t mean animals that would eat the leaves, but the ones that would eat the new seedling.

Another thing that limits trees is moisture. In general the drier the climate the less beneficial it is to be a tree. That’s because deep roots are of no benefit in dry climates (but they are of huge benefit in humid climates during drought). Grass which generally have very shallow roots suck up all the rain before it can penetrate deep into the soil while deep tree roots never get any significant amount of water. Trees handle drought well but constant dryness is very detrimental for them. Dry areas also tend to have wild fires which also hamper trees. It’s simply better to be a grass (if moderately dry) or a cactus like plant if it’s extremely dry.

Another factor is soil conditions. Now I don’t know what soil bamboo prefers but I doubt it’s all soil. Soil can have huge impacts on things like pH and water availability. For example in far Northern Europe where I live you can tell that you are standing on sandy soil if all around you are spruces and pines. If you however see lots of leaf trees you are probably on a silt and clay soil. This is because conifers handle both dry and sour soil better than the local leaf trees which leads to more conifers on sand. Bamboo is probably also limited to a certain soil condition.

I hope that can at least help you develop more theories on why bamboo is not everywhere. Something important to remember is that just because a plant can grow well in a certain location doesn’t mean it will be found there. That’s because plants are always in fierce competition. I bet bamboo if intentionally planted and cared for could thrive in lots more places than its found naturally, but it just happens to not be the best plant in that location, meaning it’s outcompeted over long time scales.

Fertility rate is calculated by dividing every age group in the country into groups and multiplying them by how many children that age group are currently having to estimate how many children a woman is going to have during their lifetime. So if today’s women have on average 1 kid in their 20s and 1 kid in their 30s, and none after, that will give a fertility rate of 2.0, no matter how many women are actually in their 20s or 30s. So there being a lot of old people does not change the results. Fertility rate is dependent on how many children women have during their reproductive years. Birth rate however is affected by their being a lot of old people because birth rate numbers are just the number of children born per year per a 1000 people. So the birth rate of Japan would look comparably much worse than the fertility rate. Fertility rate is therefore considered to be a fairer metric.

Latin American countries have recently had a collapse in birth rate, even since that chart from 2017 was made. Colombia has dropped to 1,2 in 2023. Fertility rates are collapsing almost everywhere and I think it’s because of how globalisation is spreading anti natalist culture around the globe. It’s so drastic and so consistent in nearly every developed country.

As someone who lives in a country where giving birth is free that sounds absolutely insane to me. Are these birth costs in the US at least covered by common medical insurance or is it always that bad? It’s a miracle that the US birth rate is one of the highest in the western world when the conditions are like this…

Spending money on families hasn’t been shown to help in any way whatsoever in increasing the birth rate. You have countries with close to free day care and generous monthly child subsidies with the same or even much lower fertility rate as countries that give just about nothing at all. I still support these kinds of policies just for the sake of helping families and their kids, but doing it for the only purpose of helping the fertility rate is futile. Honestly I don’t think the government can do much at all to help the fertility rate. It’s a cultural issue first and foremost. And the government can’t (and I think shouldn’t!) do much to change the culture of our society. You see people living in poverty with 9 kids just because they belong to a certain religious or ethnic group who values children above all else. That’s the main issue. How important is children to the culture? Is it prestigious to be a dad or a mom? Is personal success measured in how you’ve built your family or is success measured in how much money you make?

For anyone who hasn’t heard it there is a banger song about him: https://youtu.be/PaZXPx1kdtg

That’s correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.

Alfalfa is drought tolerant compared to other forage legumes like clover. This means that during drought the alfalfa will fare better and also yield better than clover or a grass like Timothy or blue grass. However as you can see pasture is also on that list you linked. Fodder crops are harvested for their entire biomass above ground and the amount of biomass is very large. It’s a very productive crop and makes a lot of fodder and this fodder is mostly water. Therefore it takes a lot of water to grow. The water required is not extreme in any way however and where I live alfalfa is a rainfed crop that only very rarely has any water deficiency symptoms. The extreme amounts of water applied to alfalfa in the south east of the USA is only because of the desert climate there. Growing beans, corn or potatoes there also requires insane amounts of water. If potatoes were chiefly grown in the desert southeast you bet you would see news articles going around about how terrible potatoes are. In the end it’s only a matter of matching the right crop to the right climate. Even the most water hungry crop on earth will not require irrigation in the most rainy place on earth.