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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

These numbers seem based on global distributions rather than local ones. After all, six feet is just average height in the Netherlands.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-h...

Maybe that's what the rule tells you. Ladies love the north Europeans.

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It's all relative.

You're gonna need to be even bigger in the netherlands, both in height and salary to impress a dutch woman if you're dutch already.

In south east asia you may get away with less height and money.

Not in salary though, given that the salaries in TFA are local to the US, and West European salaries are lower, as a rule (East European salaries, of course, even lower).

What an American makes in absolute terms is irrelevant unless you're planning to move to the US.

And if you're planning to move to the US, then its still irrelevant, because what matters is how much you make in US compared to the cost of living of the US.

Nobody would trade making 40k net in Italy for making 80k net in US, you're actually poorer (and not just financially).

All measures are relative. Absolute wages have stopped being impressive as the world got richer in the last decades and standards of living improved.

It's not completely irrelevant, especially if you're planning to move back eventually.

If you're a decent software engineer, living in North Elbonia, making $20,000 / year, that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $100,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

Or you could move to the Silicon Valley and make $400,000 / year and that's just enough to cover mortgage on a $2,000,000 house and live. In 30 years you've got a house and that's it.

But when you sell your house, move back to North Elbonia, and buy a house there, you've got $1,900,000 banked. I'd take that deal.

OTOH many women may prefer as partner the European man who doesn't work crazy overtime every night, takes 4 weeks of holidays every year with her, uses his months of legally mandated parental leave when they have a baby...

The 6/6/6 dimensions seem to capture very little about what's actually important for the success of a long-term relationship. I guess that's fine, it's presumably a game for 20-year-olds.

long term success of a relationship =/= mating, breeding, or getting a sugar daddy to cover your lifestyle

Maybe we can get the USA to get the metric system for all those men who are 1.83 meters and below. Or do people internationally say that you need to be 1,8 meters to be dateable?

They do, usually 1,8m+ for men and 1,7m+ for girls

I'd never call someone from the Netherlands north European, it's western Europe

I'd group the Dutch with the Scandinavians as the "other Germanic branches", possibly also including the UK. As a taxonomy it makes far more sense to me. Western Europe is too broad. You have the French and the Portugese and the Spanish which are all quite different.

It's North when contrasted with the South, like the Mediterranean countries, and West when contrasted with the East, like the old Easter Bloc.

And South when contrasted with the "real" North?

Northern Europe is a region and while there can be various definitions the most common ones do not include Benelux countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Europe

Southern Europeans, Italians, Spanish, Greeks also call Germany Northern Europe. It's anything where the weather is generally not as hot (well, this is changing) people are more reserved, more work-focused, or individual, less prominent communal eating, big families etc. It's a real thing that I often hear from Southern Europeans. You could also relate it to Catholic / Protestant split perhaps.

It depends. Quite often, Germanic countries are grouped with Northern Europe because many of them are located around the North Sea, Latin countries with Western Europe, Slavic countries with Eastern Europe, and Balkan countries with Southern Europe.

Average height for boys that were 19 years old in 2019, not for the entire population.

Then again, based on local income statistics. Don't know locality of the third one. It's the good old, lies, damned lies and statistics (and meant as humor thus not really an issue).

Men are pretty tall in Montenegro too.

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