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2 yr. ago

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I don't have data to quote here but considering heart problems were rare back in the day when butter, lard and tallow was used in generous amounts in combination with obesity being rare and daily labor was common, I would assume it would be mostly fine. Heart problems in non-overweight people are rare even today, especially at younger ages.

    There are also 2 new high quality studies out there showing milk fats being significantly safer for heart health compared to other saturated animal fats. I can link that study for you on request. However you wouldn't need to use butter for your potatoes necessarily. You can oven bake potatoes in rapeseed oil or olive oil just fine and get the same calories in, if you happen to be afraid of milk fat that is. Finding a milk alternative would be harder however since the seed and nut oils out there are generally much less nutrient dense than whole milk. The exception would be soy milk but then you have to be careful not to get a version full of sugar.

  • When trying to gain weight (or simply not go minus as in your case) the method will be the opposite of what is needed to lose weight. I have helped someone with this in the past and what I saw as his greatest trouble was that he would get too full to eat more very quickly. I asked about his diet and it was just full of foods which are very filling without actually containing many calories. Lots of fruits and vegetables with almost no carb and no fat.

    So really what you need are easily digestible and not too filling calorie rich ingredients. Think lots of grains and fat. Buttered potatoes instead of air fried potatoes. Carrots instead of lettuce. White pasta over whole grain pasta. Cream or mayo based sauce instead of a stock/water based sauce etc. However still try to eat healthy. If going for bread take the white bread without added sugar for example. And still include vegetables but don't make them over ⅓ of your plate. I have read many success stories with adding heavy amounts of dairy to the diet which makes sense since milk is there to grow a calf as fast as possible. Drinking a package of milk a day is almost a miracle cure to being underweight if you can stomach it. In fact the medical food packs they give to malnourished children are dairy based. Consider it if your diet allows it.

    However what specific meals which are convenient to bring I don't have many ideas. But I hope this mode of thinking will help at least a bit. It has to be a big portion that you can actually stomach. Think about which foods you seem to be able to eat a huge amount of and then narrow those down to the most calorie rich. They also have to not clog your stomach for the whole rest of the day so being easy to digest is also key.

  • Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world

    Was your own birth a good thing for you and would you have chosen to be born today?

  • 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.