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)

Although filling an entire trunk full of peanut butter, let’s say 500kg worth (assume a 450 litre trunk and density of 1.1 kg/l according to Google), then adding all that weight over the rear axle would affect the handling and balance of the car, potentially making it dangerous and therefore illegal to drive.

So, it’s not actually that clear cut that it wouldn’t be illegal!

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.

That guy with the mullet looks sharp

It bothers me that the height chart suggests there are 10 inches in a foot

The third dude was Kumar from the Harold & Kumar movies too

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.

Maybe let’s just say that you and I have different senses of humour and leave it at that.

For me, the humour comes from the fact that I pretended not to understand the image and point out that there are no plugs in the image. It’s a bit of wordplay that relies on the fact that people sometimes call plug sockets plugs.

I’m from the UK.

It was a joke. Don’t take things so seriously

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

That one’s actually really easy to prove numerically.

Not going to type out a full proof here, but here’s an example.

Let’s look at a two digit number for simplicity. You can write any two digit number as 10*a+b, where a and b are the first and second digits respectively.

E.g. 72 is 10 * 7 + 2. And 10 is just 9+1, so in this case it becomes 72=(9 * 7)+7+2

We know 9 * 7 is divisible by 3 as it’s just 3 * 3 * 7. Then if the number we add on (7 and 2) also sum to a multiple of 3, then we know the entire number is a multiple of 3.

You can then extend that to larger numbers as 100 is 99+1 and 99 is divisible by 3, and so on.