I have a friend whose parents came to the US from Holland, and I believe he's 6'6" (201cm). He said it was really strange when he went to Holland to visit family because he's so used to being a head taller than everyone else - looking out over a crowd - but in Holland there were tons of people as tall as he.
Very interesting that the article says the current Dutch generation is shorter than their parents.
"Regression to the mean", it was studied a century, or so, ago. It's not about stress directly but the average/ natural/ non-stressful height is the most probable outcome indeed.
This was Francis Galton, a British polymath of the 19th and early 20th century, who observed that certain characteristics of parents -such as height- are not passed on completely to their children. If parents' heights lie at the tails of the distribution in both directions, the heights of their children tend to lie closer to the mean of the distribution. Simply speaking, tall parents have kids shorter then they are, and short parents have kids taller than they are.
Galton invented what we today now as linear regression.
The article says that the Dutch children are now shorter than their parents. I was wondering whether this is simply a manifestation of the regression toward the mean, first discovered by Galton (and published in 1886)?
Evolution (natural selection) doesn't work that way though. That would only work if either people started only having kids with shorter people, or those stresses you're taking about caused people to die before having kids, which I didn't think is happening.
"they were not supportive of asylum seekers’ freedom of movement and would prefer them to live in a designated place (respondents were 8.3% more likely to choose the latter option ... "
But who do they think does this designating, and according to what criteria, is the result really anywhere near optimal for anybody?
Doesn't it make more sense for people to have the option to move, in their own time, to where they can find housing, jobs, languages they know etc., than be stuck in ghettos where they happened to gather due to various short-term factors ?
Doesn't it make more sense for people to have the option to move ....
Certainly. The most important outcome of this study imho is that there is a significant gap between the public/political debate and the peoples' sentiment.
It is a tourist hotspot by Swedish standards. Visby is a picturesque old-fashioned town where quite a few people go for a few weeks, and additionally, hosts events including an annual festival of political debate and, a week or two later, a medieval reenactment festival.
If anyone is allowed to bully the Swedes, it's us Finns, and we do it in a hockey-ring.
We don't have any submarines in Finland though and our navy isn't the strongest, but we'll do our best to help you Brother Sweden. Which has usually been good enough in regards to Russia.
with the inflation pace and the rising rates, if there was EVER a time when btc should run up wildy this would be the time. instead it has fizzled out and it is not making an end run. VERONICA TOLAN ON FACEBOOK, can help with a successful trade
That draft decree by the Russian defence ministry, which has since been removed, proposed that Russia wanted to revise its borders with Finland and Kaliningrad (based on a resolution adopted by the Soviet Union’s council of ministers in [1985]) and expand its territorial waters.
They just removed the floating bouy border w/ Estonia
Yeah, that guy is greatly misrepresenting what happened inside the governments. Germany and others didn't hold back because they didn't believe what was happening or something, they had a different stance on how weapon deliveries would affect Europe's ability to defend itself and how this could drag Europe into the hot side of the conflict. We're they too cautious and slow at times? Absolutely. But that's not because they were "westsplaining", but because they had different approaches to this mess. This only becomes "westsplaining" and "belittling" of other nations if you dismiss any approach besides "deliver all the weapons immediately" as a mistake and weapon deliveries as the only solution. Which is almost never true in any issue of this magnitude.
And this "different stance" is exactly what the dude has been talking about. Poland was sending tanks almost immediately. They literally disappeared from polish warehouses, were seen on trains and fought in Ukraine. Other countries' tanks were sent what, a year later? If not even more. There wasn't a nuke flying for that, there probably was a tantrum and "stern warnings" and that's it.
The issue is simple. All these countries were under soviet rule until very recently. Every eastern country remembers how life was then. There are jokes about polish exports under soviet rule, that Russia exports empty train cars and Poland exports everything else in them to Russia. The country was robbed for decades. People were killed. That's why "the eastern flank" doesn't want Ukraine to fail - because they know what happens when it does, and who is next.
Because it is the only and obvious solution to any country that knew how it was? Like, it was so bad, nobody is even thinking about "oh maybe joining Russia would be coooool"?
Not sending weapons to Ukraine is appeasement and nothing else. If you are alright with appeasement, I would like you to stop your claims on Sudetenland, the free city of Gdansk and probably the Benelux region and the entirety of France.
Then we should probably arm Hamas lest we are guilty of appeasement of Israel. Or wait, now westsplaining away genocide is okay?
Maybe this is a strawman and you are on the correct side of history in the middle east, then I apologize, but too often I see this outrageous hypocrisy in German discourse.
What's your proposed solution to the conflict then? If it's not weapons for Palestine, why not?
I admit this is far-fetched. But I really don't, like 0%, understand how you can propose arming Ukraine as a means towards a lasting peace. Maybe you'd like to explain or maybe you don't.
And maybe you have a similar proposal for conflicts that involve the US as the baddies, because calling for the US to police themselves surely can't be your solution.
A two state solution where Palestine exists alongside Israel as independent countries. There is no need to fuel the conflict further, just reign in Israel instead of appeasing them.
I'm for a two state solution where Ukraine exists alongside Russia as independent countries. There is no need to fuel the conflict further, just reign in Russia instead of appeasing them.
I'd still like to know why your preferred solution is to apply pressure on the aggressor in one case and to arm the victim in another.
I mean, yeah, no shit, if Russia goes home and gets out of every occupied territory and returns them to Ukraine, then the war is over and I am 100% for that. If you think the Palestinians are "the aggressors" then you don't know the history of Palestine at all.
when countries that are culturally closest to russia, that understand their decision making the best unanimously say a thing, it’s probably good to listen rather than saying “oh but” and doing the opposite
the “oh but” is somewhat of a dismissal of their lived experiences. they probably know best here - they probably know better than the west here, because this is more about closer to their culture than the wests
Broadly speaking, Central and Western European countries have largely dismissed Eastern European concerns and wariness towards Russia for literal decades. All the “leading European countries” were pushing for increased engagement with Russia despite their territorial adventurism in Georgia. Hell, increased trade with Russia was practically Merkel’s signature policy (which, it has to be said, has aged like milk).
Eastern Europe has been encouraging caution and skepticism towards Russia’s geopolitical motivations basically since they joined NATO. The rest of the alliance ignored those warnings, and it’s demonstrably biting us in the ass now. Yes, there are many factors at play, but this is absolutely one of the factors, and it’s a big one.
It maybe that I read the whole thing wrong, because I'd agree if we are talking about the lead up to the 2022 conflict since 2014, but I got the impression that the person talked about the reaction to the attack specifically.
Eastern Europe was a lot more proactive in getting equipment to Ukraine while it was reported that Western European countries needed some initial push by the USA.
There has been this slow dawning in Western Europe that they may need to take a more active role in their collective self defense instead of relying on American guarantees only. Eastern European countries have seemed far more proactive in dealing with the Ukrainian invasion while it looks like, outside of France and the UK, countries are having to remember what it takes to run a military.
The fact that these countries all had stocks of the exact equipment Ukraine was already using. The EU setup a "buy back" of equipment. Where these countries could donate their equipment to Ukraine and they where reimbursed from an EU fund. This made sure Ukraine could use their existing supply lines and support systems to keep the gear running.
I find the economic decoupling of great powers very troubling for the future stability of the world. To avoid a world war, and to actually have a chance to address climate change and other world-scale problems, we need more economic interdependence, not more "sovereignty".
If we only had a market lead in solar power in Germany. Oh we HAD that! we also just happened to have conservative politicians who decided to sell that technology to China.
If only we had corporate structures in Germany building wind turbines that were competitive. Oh we HAD that...
You mean free trade policies might result in foreign companies coming in and outcompeting local ones here instead of just allowing our companies to go into, take over, and outcompete their ones? How could this happen? Who could have possibly predicted this turn of events? How could anyone else’s companies come in and do unto us exactly what we’ve been doing to them for the last half century?
Why, next your going to tell me that in a free market a company with lower labor costs that is willing to slash profit margins might actually gain market share over a collection of companies that collectively decided not to compete with each other on margins./s
theconversation.com
Aktiv