@SaraHigdon@TheJoeySwoll Okay, fair enough and good comms. Are those both options you get exclusively online or is there a brick and mortar store one could get them from?
@SaraHigdon@TheJoeySwoll Those new Sketchers are surprisingly solid. I've personally worn them doing anything from incline treadmill to fixed leg press, and they feel absolutely solid.
Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.
The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.
After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.
Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.
The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.
Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.
@tuuu28283 I think it is in their nature to be curious and mess with stuff, I don't think they intend to damage anything. They are doing exactly what their natural instincts are telling them to do :)
You have every right to know what your government is doing, and they have no right to know what you are doing.
That is why they are called public servants and we are called private citizens.
Instead, the relationship has been inverted. The state hides behind secrecy, classified files, and redactions while demanding total visibility into your finances, communications, movement, and behavior.
A society where the rulers live in privacy while the population lives under surveillance is the very definition of tyranny.
@learning_yohei If you are into drinking at all, Seattle would be a great place to visit. There are soooo many bars and breweries there, not to mention the Space Needle and Pike Place Market. Seattle used to be much better a decade or so ago, but there is still much fun to be had here!
@axel__tv Those who intrinsically value emotion tend to hit the blue button, while those who put more weight into objective truth go for the red button. There is no logical reason to push the blue button, and on top of that hitting red assures survival.