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

Alfalfa is a great crop. It has deep roots which store carbon in the soil, it is drought tolerant, it’s high yielding and it’s nitrogen fixating meaning it improves the soil quality and does not require nitrogen fertilizer which normally is a huge carbon footprint. Overall fantastic crop if you need fodder for ruminant animals. The big problem is farming it on an absurd scale in the middle of the damn desert. Alfalfa does not require irrigation in regions with ample rainfall.

A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.

Even if one claims that there are white passing people there today only because of foreign conquests, then it’s important to remember those were also going on before Jesus was born. Most notably Jesus was born in the Palestine province of the Roman Empire. There is even a myth that his dad was a Roman soldier (there is no real evidence of this however). Before the Romans the Greeks ruled isreal after Alexander the greats conquest. So the flow of “white genes” to isreal did not start only after Jesus was born. So I don’t think it’s a good argument to say everyone was uniformly brown there back then but are all mixed today. That’s not true. You could argue however the procentage of white passing people have gone up since then.

The United States government does officially consider Middle Eastern people to be white for census purposes. However this does not mean that is what everyone else considers to be white. Benjamin Franklin famously considered only English and northern German people to be white, even excluding Scandinavians from white status. In the end it’s totally arbitrary where you draw the line. What is totally clear is that Jesus was not blond and blue eyed. Those traits were incredibly rare in the middle east both then and today. There is a chance however that Jesus was white passing as many people from the levant are today and probably were back then as well.

Here is a picture of modern day Samaritans who are a sister group to the Jews. They never left their homeland of northern isreal and are therefore probably close to the genetic makeup of ancient Jews.

Here is a picture of a modern day Lebanese classroom.

So it may be that Jesus looked like an Italian, could also be that he was one of the less white passing ones. But in the end does it really matter? The message of Jesus is the same no matter the case.

Largest problem with manure, including human manure in this case, is the algal blooms that result from the phosphorous and nitrogen getting into water. That can cause eutrophication that can cause the collapse of entire ecosystems. But of course with proper sewage treatment this risk is minimized. You peeing in the lake while swimming is more akin to the bush by the lakeside dropping leaves. However when it’s an entire town’s untreated sewage then it’s a whole other issue and the results can be catastrophic.

But yes 1 tonne of pure tensides is much worse than 1 ton of poop. However poop tends to come in humongous quantities which is where the real problem lies.

When it comes to toxicity to water life you have to think of the dose. If a rose bush sheds a few petals and it falls to a lake will anything bad happen to the life in the lake? No absolutely not. That happens naturally. The petals will quickly decompose and become nutrients that will feed the ecosystem in the lake. However if someone would drop a dozen truckloads of petals in the lake then that would be way too much organic matter for the ecosystem in the lake to handle. But some shower gel is never gonna come close to that. It’s more gonna be on the magnitude of the bush shedding some petals naturally in the lake. Same with the essential oil. Concentrated essential oil can be quite toxic to both human and other life. But in dilution it’s something else completely. A natural rose bush will evaporate tonnes of essential oil straight into the air during its whole life time and nothing takes damage from it. That’s why you can smell a rose plant when standing next to it. Dilution is sometimes actually the solution. A single drop of essential oil into the sewer drain once a day would not cause any negative effect at all when it’s diluted with tonnes of shower, toilet, sink and even industrial waste water. Diluted it won’t damage any life, especially since essential oils are biodegradable.

Also think what else gets down into the sewer. In most places your toilet and your shower are connected to the same system. The poop you put in your toilet is multiple magnitudes worse than anything you could use while showering. If your waste water treatment plant can’t even treat the poo then you have bigger problems then anything you could put into your shower gel. If it’s good enough to treat poo however then it’s good enough to treat whatever’s in your shower gel.

In this specific case isreal asked residents of Gaza city, a subpart of the Gaza strip to move to a more southern position in the Gaza strip. Like asking people to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn because they are going to blow up Manhattan. People are capable of moving within the Gaza strip. That doesn’t mean there will be housing for them however.