You’re referring to Syncretism, and it’s extremely common in the Western world. 25% of American Christians report believing in reincarnation.

As someone with some profound ADHD that has affected my career, I have to say, I would be fucking amazing in the Star Trek universe. For someone with an interest-based focus ability, a society where the standard of social merit is, “do cool shit you’re passionate about,” would be Heaven. I can do things. I can do amazing things. When I’m passionate about something, I can move mountains. But stick me in a cubicle and ask me to do the same grind day in, day out? I really struggle. Some people say they would just disappear forever into the Holodeck. But for me, the coolest thing about the Star Trek universe is that regular people can simply do whatever they’re most passionate about, without concern for monetary profit.

This or Star Trek are the only serious answers.

Well we do have to find a way to work together. The Democrats vs Republicans conflict is an example of specialization vs generalization strategies.

Back in the mid 20th century and earlier, both parties catered to white straight married Christians. That group represented maybe 80% of the electorate, so both parties took the needs and desires of that demographic as a given. Before the Civil Rights era, most black people didn’t have the vote, and straight white married Christian was the standard cultural model. If you weren’t married, you probably aspired to be so. If you weren’t straight, you were a social pariah at best and a felonious sex offender at worst. Being gay was literally a mental illness. Racial groups beyond black and white were similarly marginalized, as were faiths other than Christianity. This demographic was numerous enough and powerful enough that no politician could win office while offending their sensibilities.

Then society slowly changed, diversified, and opened up. More universal suffrage was achieved; more people started living alone. More people left Christianity, the LGBT rights movement happened, and racial and religious minorities proliferated through cultural shifts and immigration.

The parties responded to this with competing strategies. Republicans just kept doubling down on straight white married Christians. Anyone who either isn’t all of these, or at least aspires to be these, fundamentally isn’t welcome in the Republican party. This means everyone else has to become Democrat by default if they want any hope of having their voices heard by those in power.

It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s what we got. The country is much more diverse than in the past, but not so diverse that hyper specializing in the single largest unified demographic group is an nonviable strategy. It’s even more so when Republicans are willing to stretch the definition of “white” to include some Hispanic and Asian people.

Until this is no longer a viable strategy, Democrats are just going to have to remain a big tent coalition party. And this makes for some awkward allies. Conservative black Christians have to find a way to work with radical queer anarchists. And vice versa. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s what our first-past-the-post electoral system and national demographics require. Sometimes you just have to play the hand you’re dealt.

You know, I haven’t lived a perfect life. But unless things go in a real wild direction, at least I can say I’m extremely unlikely to ever do something so bad I get sentenced to death in absentia…

The difference is that most Americans are literally biologically evolved to consume animal products. (Lactose tolerance.)

If you polled most Democratic voters, just how many would endorse higher beef prices? Except for a handful of vegans and very left environmentalist folks, very few would say yes.

Does meat contribute to climate change? Yes. But it’s a rounding error compared to the burning of fossil fuels for heat, transportation, and electricity. Raising the price of meat is the absolute lowest priority when it comes to fighting climate change. There are far more effective ways to spend finite political capital than going after people’s dinner plates. Democrats don’t even support jacking up gas taxes for environmental reasons. The approach has always been to subsidize green energy rather than tax fossil energy. The carrot rather than the stick.

Farmers are generally very wealthy people. That is the inevitable result of a century of farm consolidations. Most farmers are not true farmers in the traditional sense. They operate large “family farms” that are just family-owned businesses in the same was Johnson and Johnson is a family business. The large number of migrant workers and farm hands they hire do the real work. But the actual guy who owns the land, whose family has had the land for five generations? That is literally just landed gentry.

I’m a binary trans woman myself. I just wanted the full standard package.

But there are varieties, mainly spearheaded by the nonbinary community. There’s zero depth vaginoplasty, where they make a labia but no vaginal canal. (Easier maintenance, ideal for lesbians with no interest in penetration.) For asexual folks or those with no interest in sex, there’s nullification surgery, aka the “Ken doll” method. And for the most exotic, the term you’re looking for is “Salmacian.”

Here’s a subreddit. Obviously NSFW:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/salmacian

I went for the pretty standard fem package. But there are folks doing some pretty wild things out there now.

We use the barter economy here. You have to personally go to Jaybone’s house and perform mutual aid sexual favors for them.

It should be legal to set fire to unoccupied cars parked in a bike lane.

A fish cannot experience water.

I got the last laugh. I was cut as a newborn, but I still didn’t end up with the parts my parents wanted. They took a little snip. I went for the full origami of gender reassignment surgery. 🤣

That’s what’s so insulting about American healthcare. If you’re going to charge such criminally high prices, at least don’t cheap out on the small stuff. Don’t stock your bathrooms with ghostly thin sandpaper toilet paper. Have decently thick barrier paper. We’re talking pennies here.

Who cares what a sex pest thinks?

That article is unfortunately devoid of the information we need.

I however managed to find the Nature article that it appears to be based on.

https://annas-archive.pk/scidb/10.1038/nature02417/

Trees do face limits on their height due to the limits of the lengths capillary forces can draw water up through their cells. However, the figure quoted is from a regression analysis of living trees. It’s not a prediction of how tall trees could evolve if certain environmental stresses were removed. It’s a prediction of the maximum height achievable by California Redwoods.

From the paper:

At reserves further north and closer to the coast, stronger storms may explain the lower heights (,100 m), yet similar relationships of water potential and d13 C to height 27 as we observed in the tallest redwoods. At the drier inland margin of redwood’s natural distribution in northern California, maximum tree height is lower (,80 m), yet treetop values of minimum water potential (21.9 MPa) and maximum d13 C (222‰) are similar to those at 110 m in the tallest redwoods. Thus a similar physiological ceiling may be reached at different physical heights depending on water availability, with storm damage reducing realized heights at sites that are otherwise optimal

So note that even though the trees on the coast have moisture conditions, they still reach lower heights than those further inland.

The key thing to keep in mind is that the current maximum height achievable by living tree species is not the maximum height of trees allowable by physics. For example, instead of relying only on osmotic pressure, trees might evolve a staged-lift system, where they have upper reservoirs that feed one into the next. This is how tall skyscrapers handle their plumbing systems. A hundred story building will have water tanks at different levels rather than just one big tank on the roof. This prevents the need to have pipes at the base of the skyscraper capable of surviving 100 stories worth of water pressure.

There’s no need for trees on our planet to evolve such mechanisms. The limits for wind kick in at similar heights to the limits of the water transport mechanisms trees have evolved. But other mechanisms would have different limits. There just isn’t any evolutionary pressure to develop them.

Although, the paper does make being a tree scientist sound like an amazing job.

We accessed tree crowns by shooting arrows trailing filament over branches with a powerful bow. Rope was then hauled over the branches and climbed via mechanical ascenders. Access to the treetop was achieved by arborist-style techniques. Heights were measured by lowering weighted fibreglass measuring tapes from the treetop to average ground level.

Wind dominates the morphological structure of trees. Weight is not the limit to tree height. Trees could grow many times their current maximum height on a planet with no wind. You could hang iron weights on most trees much greater than the weight of the tree. As long as the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the tree would stand.

Wind, the movement of something as light as air, is able to dominate the form land plants have evolved into.

Now realize that water has a thousand times the density of air.

There’s a reason all it takes to cause a local explosion of diversity in sea life is to dump something solid like a subway car into the sea. Water has so much momentum behind it that life struggles just to remain firmly fixed in one place while subject to waves and current.

EDIT: Also one other major structural factor: soil! Dry well compacted soils are stronger than moist loose soils. The sea bed is an ever-churning bed of loose water logged mud and sand. So not only are ocean plants subject to much greater lateral loads due to the 1000x density of water over air, but those ocean plants also must cling to the worst foundation imaginable.

If your vehicle is so large it makes you a danger to those around you, it is no longer simply a matter of personal taste.

I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero till the end of the night