Delta_V

Fortunate son's don't need to paint it black because they don't get drafted to kill and die for the Senate's investment portfolio.

American healthcare is too expensive. This is particularly true of brand-name drugs. Although our nation accounts for 4.2% of the world’s population, we consume 13% of the world’s prescription drugs and pay half of the world’s costs for these products. GLP-1 drugs are a case in point...Drug companies need FDA approval before they can market a newly patented drug. Unlike other countries, the FDA can’t consider a new medication’s price or the existence of equally effective, lower-cost alternatives in reaching its decision...Once FDA approval is secured, Medicare typically covers the the drug’s cost because it is not allowed to negotiate with drug companies as other countries do...It’s the main reason the U.S. pays far higher prices than other countries...Rather than bankrupt the federal treasury or, alternatively, pass the costs on to states and tens of millions of American families, Congress should focus on lowering costs and improving the value of American healthcare.

Trump signed an executive order saying the tie-up could move forward if the companies sign an agreement with the Treasury Department resolving national security concerns posed by the deal. The companies then announced they had signed the agreement, fulfilling the conditions of Trump's directive and effectively garnering approval for the merger... the agreement includes $11 billion in new investments to be made by 2028 as well as governance, production and trade commitments. Nippon Steel will buy a 100% stake in U.S. Steel...some Nippon Steel investors are concerned about short-term financial pressure due to the scale of the additional investment commitment...

Connection: Bad Vibrations is track 1 on the Phosphene Dream album. A phosphene dream is a hallucination. White Rabbit is also about a psychedelic experience.

Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., was forcibly removed from a news conference in Los Angeles on Thursday after trying to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference related to immigration.

"I am Sen. Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary," Padilla said to Noem, which prompted several men to physically push him out of the room. It was unclear who the men were, as several were dressed in plain clothes.

Padilla's office shared a video of the incident with NBC News. The video shows Padilla being taken into a hallway outside and pushed face forward onto the ground as officers with FBI-identifying vests told the senator to put his hands behind his back. The officers then handcuffed him.

It's easy to think about the creation of the Universe like exploding fireworks: Start with a big bang, and then all the galaxies in the Universe fly out in all directions from some central point.

But that analogy isn't correct. Not only does it falsely imply that the expansion of the Universe started from a single spot, which it didn't, but it also suggests that the galaxies are the things that are moving, which isn't entirely accurate.

It's not so much the galaxies that are moving away from each other – it's the space between galaxies, the fabric of the Universe itself, that's ever-expanding as time goes on. In other words, it's not really the galaxies themselves that are moving through the Universe; it's more that the Universe itself is carrying them farther away as it expands.

A common analogy is to imagine sticking some dots on the surface of a balloon. As you blow air into the balloon, it expands. Because the dots are stuck on the surface of the balloon, they get farther apart.

Though they may appear to move, the dots actually stay exactly where you put them, and the distance between them gets bigger simply by virtue of the balloon's expansion. ... The thing we think of as the "center" of the balloon is a point somewhere in its interior, in the air-filled space beneath the surface.

But in this analogy, the Universe is more like the latex surface of the balloon. The balloon's air-filled interior has no counterpart in our Universe, so we can't use that part of the analogy – only the surface matters.

So asking, "Where's the center of the Universe?" is somewhat like asking, "Where's the center of the balloon's surface?" There simply isn't one. You could travel along the surface of the balloon in any direction, for as long as you like, and you'd never once reach a place you could call its center because you'd never actually leave the surface.

In the same way, you could travel in any direction in the Universe and would never find its center because, much like the surface of the balloon, it simply doesn't have one.

The music in FFVI was ahead of its time.

So many bangers in Cyberpunk 2077!

This song is on repeat in the nightclub run by the Tourette "sisters".