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Rare cosmic events can feel like being smiled down upon from up above. However, on the morning of April 25, an actual smiley face will appear in the skykind of. Venus, Saturn, and the moon will align in a pattern called a triple conjunction. Given the moon will be in its crescent form, the lineup will resemble a smiley face, but only for a short time on Friday morning. “Venus is higher above the eastern horizon with Saturn lower, and a thin, crescent moon a bit lower and a little farther north,” Brenda Culbertson, NASA solar system ambassador, told Kansas TV station KSNT. “The thin, crescent moon looks like a smile. To some people, the triangle of bright objects may appear as a smiley face.“ But that’s not all: Near the smiley face, two more planets, Mercury and Neptune, could also become visible to sky-watchers, in a rare alignment that’s been dubbed a “planet parade.” Here’s everything to know about the packed celestial event. When can I see the triple conjunction smiley face? Sky-watchers will need to wake extra early on Friday to catch the smirk in action. The event will take place at around 5:30 a.m. EDT, and smile down at the early morning risers for about an hour. “If you look toward the eastern horizon about an hour before sunrise, youll see the old crescent moon rising,” according to EarthSky. “Its just two days from reaching new moon phase, so it will be about 8% lit. You might also see the dark part of the moon gently glowing with earthshine, which is light reflected from Earth.” Are the smiley face and planet parade worth all the fuss? The smiley face won’t be perfectly configured, therefore, you’ll have to use your imagination just a bit, EarthSky says. The smiley face will be tilted on its side, with one eye (Venus) brighter than the other. But how often do the planets smile down at us? The alignment is extremely rareand given it will be viewable all over the world, the event may feel a bit like a celestial call for unity. Mercury and Neptune will be nearby, but the brightness of the triple conjunction will mean they’ll be tough to spot. What’s the next event for sky-watchers? If you can’t make it out of bed earlyeven for a glimpse at a cosmic grinthis spring will bring lots of other special celestial happenings. In early May, the Eta Aquarids meteor shower will reach its peak. NASA says that will be a smile-worthy sight, too. “Fast meteors can leave glowing ‘trains’ [incandescent bits of debris in the wake of the meteor] which last for several seconds to minutes,” the agency shared. “About 50 meteors can be seen per hour during the peak of the Eta Aquarids.”
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E-Commerce
It was only a matter of time: The official Trump store has just released a Trump 2028 hat, and it proves that the Presidents comments about running an unconstitutional third term were not an empty threat. The new hat appeared online today on President Trumps merch store. It retails for $50 and comes in classic MAGA red and white, with some added stars in a large sans serif font that takes up nearly the entire front face of the hat. The hat is yet another example of how Trump uses merch to walk an ultra fine line between joke and reality, leveraging products to both provoke his political opponents and normalize his dodgy behavior. By this point, Trump’s merch strategy has worked to desensitize many Americans to his more extreme commentsbut if Trumps past merch is anything to go by, its clear that while his messaging may seem lighthearted, it would be a mistake to take the Trump 2028 hat lightly. [Screenshot: Trump Store] Why Trump merch matters Merch has always been a crucial mode of messaging for Trump. In 2016, the bright red Make America Great Again trucker hat was practically unavoidable. According to a report from Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner, the hats were pulling in up to $80,000 a day during the campaign. But when the red MAGA hat first debuted in 2015, no one was taking it seriously. As Fast Company has previously reported, the New York Times style section disregarded it as an ironic summer accessory in September 2015. When the Trump campaign revealed that it had spent $3.2 million on the hats, Esquire wrote that they may well go down as the Trump campaigns only lasting contribution to the political history of the Republic. Today, though, it would be difficult to find anyone who would argue that the MAGA hat is merely ironic. Its become a universally recognized symbol of Trumps ideologya form of public resistance for some, and, for many others, a propaganda-laden shorthand for intolerance. Since 2016, Trumps merch strategy has become a bit more layered, but no less on the nose. His store has expanded with dozens of hat options, including one recent iteration which read, Trump was right about everything. During the 2024 campaign, he turned a visit to a McDonalds into a T-shirt. The merch even when meta, when a surrealist hat design featured a tiny image of a MAGA hat printed onto another hat. And, in December of this year, Trump also turned the suit that he wore during his mugshot (taken before he was found guilty on 34 felony counts) into purchasable NFTs, as well as a $25 mug and $36 shirt. He further glorified the mugshot on rally posters and even in his official presidential portrait, which now hangs in the White House. Products like the surrealist hat-on-a-hat might seem like offhand jokes, but Trumps merch strategy is clearly also a powerful political tool. The endless stream of products keeps Trumps message front and center both IRL and online. And, by merch-ifying moments like Trumps mugshot, his campaign reframes, and even legitimizes potentially damaging moments to followers while desensitizing everyone else. Trump’s plan to hard-launch a potential third term Trump has been talking about running for a third term for months, initially by floating the idea as what seemed like a joke. At a speech before the Congressional Institute in January, the President said, I think Im not allowed to run again. Im not sure. Am I allowed to run again, Mike [Johnson]? I better not get you involved in that argument. Since then, hes repeatedly doubled down on the idea. In late March, Trump told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker that a lot of people wanted him to serve a third term, and that there were methods to skirt around the two-term limit established in the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. He even added that he was not joking about the idea, for good measure. Per the 22nd Amendment, no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twiceand its unclear to experts what methods Trump has in mind to get around the unambiguous limit. But what is clear, based on the Presidents new merch launch, is that hes now outfitting his own followers in his campaign for an illegal third term. And if theres anything we shouldve learned from Trumps past merch strategy, its that we need to take him at his hat.
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E-Commerce
The past few days in the stock market have been so wilda plunge on Monday, a sharp pivot upward on Tuesday, a rise with lots of oscillations on Wednesdaythat a record set by the Dow Jones Industrial Average on last weeks final day of trading has been largely overlooked. Thats unfortunate, because theres a lot to be learned from that record about how financial markets work. Im referring to the record loss inflicted on the Dow last Thursday by the three-digit share price drop of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), the large healthcare and insurance company. (Thursday was the last day of trading last week because the market was closed for Good Friday.) That price declinea whopping $130.93 a share, about a 22% dropcost the DJIA 805 points. Thats the biggest daily Dow decline ever caused by a single stock, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. The DJIA dropped 527 points that day, with UnitedHealth responsible for the entire loss. Had UnitedHealth just stayed even, the Dow would have been up close to 300 points. How could a single stock inflict that much damage on the ever-popular Dow, the pioneering market metric that was created in 1896 by financial reporters Charles Dow and Edward Jones? Its because the DJIA is an average based on the share prices of its 30 component stocks. Unlike most stock market indexes, this one is not based on its components market values. So a dollar change in the share price of any Dow componentbe it UnitedHealth or Apple, which has about 15 times as many shares outstanding as UnitedHealth doeshas the same impact on the Dow as a change in any other component. The Dow Divisor, the market metric used to calculate the value of the DJIA, means that every dollar change in any one Dow component these days moves the DJIA about 6.15 points. Even with its huge drop last week, UnitedHealth is still the second-highest-priced stock in the Dow, behind only Goldman Sachs. So the DJIA is still vulnerable to another sickening day for UnitedHealth shareholders. Or, for optimists, a sharp UnitedHealth rise could set off a sharp Dow rise. The Dow is based on share prices because when Dow and Jones created it back in the day and it had only 12 stocks, the only metric available for them to use was share price. Companies market valueswhich are used to calculate modern metrics like the Standard & Poors 500 Index, the Nasdaq Composite, and the FT Wilshire 5000 Indexwerent available 129 years ago. The day before UnitedHealths sickening plunge last week, the companys weight in the Dow was 9.1%, but its weight in the S&P was only 1.2%, according to Silverblatt. By the end of the day Thursday, its weight had fallen to 7.3% of the Dow and 0.9% of the S&P. If you do the math, you’ll see that if you had $10,000 in a Dow index fund when the market opened last Thursday, UnitedHealthcares plunging price would have cost you about $207. By contrast, if you had $10,000 in an S&P 500 index fund, your UnitedHealth loss was about $27. Thats an example of why about $9 trillion was indexed to the S&P in 2023 (the most recent date for which data is available), according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, but only about $76 billion was indexed to the Dow. Please keep all of this in mind when people mistakenly refer to the DJIA asthe market. Sure, the Dow is a long-standing, venerable metric. But despite the massive exposure that Dow changes get each day, it is not the whole stock market. For that matter, neither is the S&P 500, which was launched in 1957 and is used by many investors and institutions as a performance benchmark. But as we can see from UnitedHealths disproportionate market impact on the DJIA relative to its S&P impact, the S&P measures a lot more of the market than the Dow does. Which makes it a far more useful and accurate metric. And that, as they say, is the bottom line.
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E-Commerce
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