Yes I don't think we know how common this sort of thing is because we are discouraged from when we are little from talking about "women's problems". Miscarriages are another one. So much more common than people realise. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. I will try to be more aware that women have these issues for other reasons than childbirth (so much for intelligent design).

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It's complicated because Bloomberg, Reuters and the Financial Times are usually top-level economic data companies that many banks themselves will source data from, but these media companies will in-turn source their data from the banks. Other sources include the central banks, brokers, IMF, statistics companies, investment mangagement firms, investors, companies that deal in large amounts of FX, etc... basically anyone who is considered by the media company to be affecting FX rates.

The top three that I listed above certainly have similar levels of access to financial data for live FX rates, but technically media companies will compete to provide the best FX rates possible so obviously there will be differences between companies.

No one person sets the price. It emerges through the actions of many buyers and sellers. Let’s suppose I run a bank and have extra yen and want to buy dollars. I offer to pay 139 yen per dollar. Other people and banks are less desperate to get rid of their yen: one offers 138, one offers 137 yen per dollar. Other folks are looking to sell dollars: they want 141, 140, and 139 yen.

I can do a deal with that last guy. I buy up his dollars, and now the low offer is 140. If I want more I’ll have to pay 140 for them. The new price is 140.

Now you come along with tons of dollars to sell. You sell me all I want at 139 yen. If you want to sell more, you’ll have to sell to the next guy who’s offering 138. The new price is 138.

At every moment, the price is set by the most generous offer that nobody is yet willing to meet.

It's a term that many would say is intentionally general.

Some use it as shorthand for "LGBT+" without being as cumbersome as an actonym.

Others use it to label themselves because they're unsure of where they fit but they know (or are at least pretty sure) they're not cisgender and/or not heterosexual.

Still others use it as s descriptor for either themselves or other people on the LGBT+ spectrum who don't fit neatly into the common categories.

Important addendum: it's not common nowadays, but "queer" was and is used in some circles as a slur. There's been an active effort to reclaim it, and it might feel a bit old-timey to hear it used with malice, but there's a reasonable minority of LGBT+ people who aren't a fan of being called "queer". There's nothing wrong with using it or with not liking it either, it's just something to keep in mind.

The people who advocate for queerness haven't come to a consensus yet because it's a nebulous term that doesn't really mean anything. The simplest explanation is queer = anything that isn't heteronormative.

There’s no central place where currencies are traded.

Instead, large banks advertise an interbank rate that they will trade at - they do that by sending information to all the other banks through a wide range of e-trading platforms - including Bloomberg and platforms run by other banks like State Street, Deutsche etc.

There is a huge volume of transactions happening every minute - so prices tend to harmonise very quickly. Banks set their prices based on their internal supply and demand. If a bank is offering a good price, other banks will deal with them until they have exhausted that bank’s offer. If a bank offers a bad price, no-one will trade with them until they raise their offer.

Information services like Bloomberg, MorningStar and many other capture that information and make it publicly available - normally on a slight delay to the general public.

Many governments also require banks to report to them on fx rates in parallel to the above.

Could you elaborate who is the "etc" beyond banks and brokers?

Do all these organizations have a similar degree of access to data regarding international trade done between two currencies?

Techncially there isn't a single source and formula. Every company that publishes FX data (Bloomberg, Financial Times etc...) collects data from hundreds of sources such as banks, brokers etc... to come to a conclusion which is usually around the same ballpark due to similar methodology (especially considering that an FX rate can go into many digits after the decimal point). And generally everyone in the market will sell for around the same rate, with any "exceptions" being accounted for and excluded by the methodology. If someone were to sell/buy a large amount of a currency at a rate that deviates from the general FX rate, then it is likely that that currency trade would change the FX rate for the entire market.

The central banks also publish their own FX rates, but whether they themselves consider the rates to be "authoritive" differs from country to country.

Another authoritive source may be interbank exchange rates that are established by banks when they want to trade with each other - it is this rate that Google publishes and usually everyday retail FX rates are more expensive.

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This sub isn't for questions with narrow answers, see rule 2 for an explanation. For an answer to your question, just check wiktionary.

I agree with you perhaps ~80%

Since I enjoy provoking people to think I will make some remarks about what you said to see how you react to them.

> However, you need to be really careful analysing that sort of thing,

/r/ExplainLikeImFive is for those who want a simplified analysis, is it not?

What is the context for this conversation?

> because culture and societal norms play a massive role in moulding behaviour, and completely drown out the biological differences.

What place on planet earth are you describing?

The biological differences that I listed are: “hassle with peeing, monthly mensuration, risk of pregnancy, actual pregnancy, giving birth, breast feeding, menopause”, also “physically smaller and weaker sex”, and “living longer”

Surely these biological differences exist in Portugal do they not? Did you really mean to say that ‘culture and societal norms … completely drown out the biological differences’? You strike as a smart person. Surely you are exaggerating or meant something else by your words. People often believe to be true what they prefer to be true. Perhaps what you wrote is what you prefer to be true (even if it is not true)? That I can understand. I would also prefer what you wrote to be true.

> By way of example, you get a lot of US-based people arguing that men are just better at STEM topics than women, but my university (in Portugal) didn’t really match that at all. Overall there were more males than females, but the difference wasn’t anywhere near as big as in the US.

“By way of example, most will argue that women are just better at wearing skirts than men, but opinion in my Irish town (where kilts are popular) doesn’t really match that at all.”

The academic preference examples you shared depend on subjective judgement much like what clothes you pick and how others judge you for it. What I am trying to show with my imperfect example above is that what culture is and what people argue is somewhat arbitrary and varies from place to place. I prefer objective examples and will share two objective examples below for you to think about.

First a fact about men vs women: the difference on average is tiny. Most men and women are close to average and there isn’t much difference between them and you can find plenty of examples with one or the other being better at X or taller, thinner, smaller... That said the tiny difference in the averages however makes a huge difference in the tails of the distribution. Shift a normal distribution by a tiny amount and compare the area under the curve above a high threshold before and after your shift. Ever try that? What happens? You see this difference in the tails in many places.

Objective Example #1: On average the best men are objectively far better then the best women at most (but not all) physical activities such as sports. Would you apply your “culture and societal norms play a massive role in moulding behaviour, and completely drown out the biological differences” explanation to physical sports? What do you predict would happen if gender specific competitions were merged? Do you think gender specific competition is due to left over sexism? Likely not.

Objective Example #2: The other place I see large men vs women gap is in the videos of people doing dumb stuff. You can see such videos all over the internet and /r/whatcouldgowrong collects them. They show the riskiest of the risky, most dangerous of the dangerous. the dumbest of the dumb. Men dominate in these video clips. Here too do you think ‘culture and societal norms … completely drown out the biological differences’? Are men doing dangerous, risky, dumb stuff around the world due to culture? Do you think their mothers teach them that culture? Do you think their wives and sisters promote that culture? Where does that culture come from? What does that tell you about men?

What is your “really careful analysis” of these two examples?

EDIT: Spelling.

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That is the explanation I have heard.

When a cell dies, it usually releases its genetic material into the environment. Wild organisms are constantly running across DNA/RNA from dead cells. Some organisms have found that picking up random DNA can be beneficial as it can lead to obtaining genes that will give the organism a special advantage. Imagine this happening millions and millions of times over a period a day. It's not hard to see how some stands of DNA/RNA that make it into cells cause adverse effects and eventually develop into more complex items

It comes down to tactics.

One simple one was to have the archers at the back of your ranks. When the enemy was at a distance, the archers could fire volleys in a high arc over the heads of your soldiers to rain down on the enemy soldiers. Then, when the armies got close enough for hand-to-hand combat the archers would be taking pot shots here and there.

Another one was to put your archers on high ground like a hilltop or castle tower. That way they could fire over the heads of your soldiers and into enemy ranks even at closer ranges.

Archers were also considered "efficient" in terms of speed, for a little while. In Europe, from the 14th to 16th century, crossbows became the ranged weapon of choice in some armies, because soldiers could fire a crossbow more accurately with less training. However, that particular "efficiency" of the crossbow came at the expense of speed and quantity. In the time it took a crossbowman to fire a shot, reload, aim and fire a second shot, a bowman could fire 4 or 5 shots. And, provided you had a good supply of the right kind of wood, you could build a lot of bows for cheaper than crossbows. Meaning, you would have more men firing more arrows.

And yes, it was typical for an army to have hundreds or even thousands of arrows made in advance, with each archer typically carrying about 2 dozen at a time. And at the end of a battle they could retrieve shot arrows from the battlefield.

I'm an amateur historian and archer. You're right, 200 was not all that common. 100-150 was typical.

Detailed, but insightful.. Thanks a lot

They didn't question whether they exist, they asked why.

There are almost certainly differences in behaviour like what you’re describing that are just down to biological differences. However, you need to be really careful analysing that sort of thing, because culture and societal norms play a massive role in moulding behaviour, and completely drown out the biological differences.

By way of example, you get a lot of US-based people arguing that men are just better at STEM topics than women, but my university (in Portugal) didn’t really match that at all. Overall there were more males than females, but the difference wasn’t anywhere near as big as in the US.

Then you could really see the cultural effects and biases at the department level — maths and physics departments were pretty balanced between genders (both in terms of students and lecturers), electrotechnical engineering and mechanical engineering were almost completely male-dominated, while chemistry and chemical engineering were female-dominated. Biomedical engineering and architecture were female-heavy, but to a much smaller extent.

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Viruses are DNA or RNA in a capsid (protein) shell

They are not considered "alive" because they do not do anything that a living thing requires. No organs (organelles in microbes), do not carry out any metabolic processes (no eating, growing, use energy, etc), and the biggest thing in microbiology class they do not reproduce without needing a host.

The reason the non reproducing thing is the biggest point is because a lot of other microbes are kind of similar to viruses in the sense of: very little to no organelles (usually have ribosomes), little to no metabolic processes at points in its life cycles. But all microbes can reproduce without a host (such as through binary fission). Viruses need a cell to act as its baby factory, hijack it's organelles (ribosomes usually) to make copies of its DNA or RNA

Side notes: ribosomes are organelles (organs) that take rna (instructions) and make protein (building block of life) (making protein is called protein synthesis, this is called the central dogma of biology). Viruses can use these to make new viruses (since they can't make protein themselves).

A lot of simple bacteria have only dna and ribosomes (so little to almost no organelles)

Binary fission is what you typically think of when cells split to make 2 new cells

DNA is double helix, RNA is a single strand, they get their different names based on their sugar base on the strands. Ribonucleic acid (ribose sugar) deoxyribonucleic acid (derived from ribose but lacks a oxygen (hydroxyl) in it). DNA is basically the "master instructions" to make a cell/living thing, RNA is a more compressed version of it (basically a smaller copy).

Try filling your mouth with water and then trying to push it out through a straw. Now try cutting 4/5 of the straw off, and repeat the experiment with the much shorter straw. Barely any pressure is needed for the short straw while you'll find it requires a bit more pressure with the longer straw. In a sense, males need to push a bit more to overcome the pressure, while females may end up with the same results from just allowing their muscles to relax.

For the non-ELI5 answer: Female urethra is generally a fifth of the length of the male urethra. In addition, the rhabdosphincter (external sphincter muscle for urethra) is significantly thinner in females. Because of the above stated, females would require less pressure to void the bladder.

Here is a relatively new (within the past 5 years) study talking about the differences between male and female lower urinary tract biology and physiology.

As well as the Wikipedia pages for both the male and female versions of the external sphincter muscles.