jonc211

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins

Just because it sounds cool.

It’s not necessarily how far things are, it’s that you need a car to get to places in a sensible way.

I’m a fellow Brit, but have stayed in suburban US enough to have experienced how different it is. You might have a supermarket a couple of miles away, but if you want to attempt to walk there, you’ll often be going well out of your way trying to find safe crossing points or even roads with paved sidewalks.

Train stations are mostly used for cargo in most US cities. If you don’t have a car, you’re pretty much screwed.

Some cities are different. NYC being the obvious one. You can get about there by public transport pretty easily in most places there. San Francisco is another city that is more doable without a car, but more difficult than NYC.

I stayed near Orlando not too long ago and there it’s just endless surburban housing with shops and malls dotted about mostly along the sides of main roads. You definitely need a car there.

An annual degradation of 1.8% over 20 years gives more than 69% capacity the end of the period, so it’s better than what you posted.

Each year, you have 0.982 of the previous year’s capacity (1 - 0.018), so the capacity at the end of the 20 years is 0.982 ^ 20.

I mean, why does anything have value?

In the strict financial sense, something is only worth what somone else is willing to pay for it. That's the whole premise of financial trading. Getting a bit beyond ELI5 now, but most exchanges use something called a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to let the participants in the market see who wants to buy and sell what and for how much, and also to match those buyers and sellers. This is a good intro: https://optiver.com/explainers/orders-and-the-order-book/

In terms of shares in companies, then they do have some fundamental value according to the market. If you buy a share in the company, you get a share of the profits (paid as dividends), which gives those shares some value. Obviously, there's a lot of speculation too as people are involved, so emotions and wild predictions can come into play!

Financial instruments that get traded aren't limited to shares in companies though. There are all kind of other financial instruments that get traded every day, some are pretty basic like buying and selling different currencies. Others involve all kinds of crazy financial engineering , like the sort that caused the crash in 2008!

Most have some fundamental value based on their attributes, so it's a little different to the likes of an NFT. The big issues come if the values that the market has agreed upon don't match reality, which is what happened in 2008.

If you strip things back, the most fundamental point of a market is to bring buyers and sellers together and to enable price discovery.

The price of a financial instrument you see on a stock exchange or similar is simply the last traded price between a buyer and a seller. If you want to buy or sell something, then the price you get depends on who wants to sell/buy on the other side and what price they have put an order in for.

The more trades going on in the market, the more likely it is that you will be able to buy at a price close to what you see as the last price in the market.

If you only allow trading every hour, then you lose some of that price discovery.

Additionally, as already mentioned, trades would likely still happen, but away from the designated marketplace. If I want to sell something, then I may just ask who else has the thing I want to sell and try to negotiate a price directly with them.

That way, fewer trades happen in the marketplace and more trades happen in private away from there.

That sort of limited trading does happen for some very niche products that don’t have a lot of potential buyers and sellers. For common financial instruments, have a lot of participants wanting to trade, having a centralised marketplace helps avoid the issues that would come otherwise.

Now, you can argue that in practice it doesn’t work as well as the theory, and I would agree there. If you are a HFT, then you can make money by getting in milli or microseconds ahead of others.

For a lot of market participants, that doesn’t really matter though. The big banks typically don’t do that sort of trading. They are buying and selling on behalf of their clients, both individuals and companies that want access to the market. The bank makes their money by charging a margin to their client (similar to how it works for pretty much any retailer), and the fact that the HFTs are making all these trades helps them with price discovery and liquidity (ensuring there is someone to buy what they want to sell, or sell what they want to buy)

First Contact main theme > all

So I deleted the story before I posted it, and began to realize that even though I'm 40, and should be past all this, it still hurts, and I'm a deeply broken person.

The thing about trauma (and it likely is trauma) is that it often just doesn’t go away on its own and you need to do work on it. So, why should you be over it?

Should is a loaded word as it pretty much always comes from what you learned as a child. You should do that. You should be like this.

That “should” probably comes from your father when he told you how you should be as a child.

It sounds like you aren’t over it now, but that’s ok. It’s ok not to be over stuff that happened in childhood. But the important thing to understand is that you can get over it with work. Being aware of that is the first step on that road.

I won’t be holding my breath on anything meaningful changing with drug policy though

Specifically, this is Eixample

The roads in the old city are much more chaotic.

I still remember the code for Braeburn Apples, over 25 years after I worked in a supermarket.

For some reason, their code of 6969 sticks in my mind.

Sure, there’s a lot of plug sockets there, but I don’t see a single plug in that image

And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham's personal relationships took priority over everything else.

This is the part that I’ve never got on well with in Discovery.

In TNG, it’s not a show about Picard, or Riker, or any of the other individuals. It’s a show about the crew. I’ve even seen it said that the actual star of the show is the ship.

Whereas, with Disco, it’s a show about Michael Burnham and everyone else has a bit part. That always felt weird for a Star Trek show. I want to see how the crew works together to solve problems and overcome things with everyone on an equal footing regardless of their rank in the show.

And I think that’s why there was such a warm reception to season 3 of Picard. It brought the crew back together. Picard alone isn’t satisfying enough. What we wanted was him as part of the crew.