I mean there's plenty of museum exhibits in LA that feature our contributions to unmanned space flight as well. For instance at this very same museum there is a full sized engineering mockup of the Cassini probe. I think the Griffith Observatory used to have a full sized mockup of Voyager as well but I don't think its there any more. In any case manned space flight has always captured the public's imagination a lot more than unmanned flight has, with maybe a few exceptions like Hubble and Webb telescopes.

Also "Ironic that L.A. wonks...." do you also include in that the Florida wonks, and the D.C. wonks, and the New York wonks, and the Houston wonks who all have or wanted an orbiter of their own and or have other manned rockets like the huge Saturn V exhibit at Kennedy?

As I understand it, FDIC basically insures up to $250k per depositor per bank. So, as a depositor, why would I ever keep more than $250k at a single bank? If I'm fortunate enough to have more than $250k, wouldn't it be incredibly stupid of me not to split it across multiple banks so as not to have more than $250k at any single bank?
Also, wouldn't this be behavior that the federal government would want to encourage? Spreading deposits around to multiple banks so as not to place too much risk on any single bank failing? By guaranteeing the deposits of everyone at SVB, even beyond the $250k limit, and setting up a fund to do similar should other banks fail, won't this tend to encourage depositors to not disburse their money to multiple banks and help create these "too big to fail" situations?

I mean its worse than that, even. I worked for a large bank that also happened to own one of the major stock brokerages. Turned out the CEO of another publicly traded company was on our board of directors. Our CEO needed this guy's board vote for something or other. So, long story short, our CEO made a quid pro quo arrangement with the analyst at our brokerage who covered the industry that the other CEO's company was part of. One day our brokerage announces its boosting its rating on that company's stock from like AA to AAA, even though (unbeknownst to the public) the underlying analysis didn't support such a boost. Same day that company's stock rises a fair bit on the NYSE, no doubt resulting in millions in (at least paper) gains for the other company's CEO.

I have no clue how the average joe is supposed to have any idea that stuff like this is happening. Of course, there's inherent risk in trading stocks etc., but on the other hand there should be some degree of minimum protection to ensure that market manipulation of this sort can't happen, and that at least some bare minimum ethical standards are upheld. .

There's a fungus among us!

So basically, L2 is just a special, mathematically significant point in space that moves around the sun in conjunction with the Earth.

If you consider only the sun's gravitational pull, then to orbit the sun at a given distance, you have to be at a specific angular speed. At that speed, your inertia offsets the sun's gravitational pull on you. Closer to the sun = faster, further = slower. If you are too fast for the distance you're at, you head away from the sun. Too slow, you get pulled closer.

So L2 is further than earth, so to be at L2 and remain in orbit around the sun at that distance, normally you'd have to orbit slower than the earth does. But it turns out that because of the extra gravitational pull of the earth, you can orbit the sun at L2 and do so at the same angular speed as the earth. Thus you can be at L2 and always be in the same relative position to the earth.

So, how does the halo orbit around L2 work? Because of conservation of angular momentum. Head closer to the sun, you speed up, gaining inertia. Now that inertia overcomes the sun's gravity, causing you to head further from the sun. But there you slow down again, and the sun's gravity wins out over your reduced inertia. So now you head closer, speeding up again, and so on. All the while, you're really just orbiting the sun. But meanwhile L2 is moving at a basically constant speed around the sun. So as you head closer to the sun and gain speed, you overtake L2. As you go further and lose speed, you fall behind it. So relative to L2, your path is basically elliptical with L2 in the middle.

Why don't they park the probe precisely at L2, instead of doing the halo orbit around L2? For one thing, L2 is in the earth's shadow. That's not good when you're powering your spacecraft with solar power. So you don't want to be right at L2.

Why are the DoT and FAA asking AT&T and Verizon to do this? Parts of the US government are approaching private companies, hat in hand, asking for a favor, when those private companies are only allowed to exist and do business and make use of the radio spectrum in question, in the first place, at the pleasure of the United States Government? Screw that.

What should be happing? The parts of the US government worried about this should be going to the parts of the US government in charge of this and asking them to put a stop to it. To wit, the the DoT and FAA should be approaching the FCC, and they, in turn, should be ordering Verizon and AT&T to delay.

The weatherman is usually slightly off. Doesn't mean to stop listening to him.

n/t

Yes, but the evidence does not bear out discrimination against white males. What's the first argument that minorities or women make when they sue for discrimination? They point at the numbers and show that all the employees and/or all the high level employees and/or everyone who got promoted are mostly not women minorities. What's this guy going to do when the numbers show that, yeah, most of these folks are white males just like him?

Tastes like despair.

Most are uninteresting, useless, or easier to do some other way. Its great to be able to come home and talk to it and have my lights go on, or tell it what song to play from Spotify, or ask it about the weather - when it actually understands. Having tried to develop an Alexa skill for my own use, its clear how the only way to get it to react to natural sentences is for the skill developer to come up with pretty much every combination and ordering of words for which the user might convey what it is that they want. And even then, with context provided, it has almost no ability to deal with words where homynyms exist. Tell it that the user will speak a number in between two other words, and when the user says "two" or "four" in between those two words, it doesn't care that a number is supposed to go there and instead insists the user meant "to", "too", "for" or "fore". My favorite is when I tried to have it recognize the word "main" it insisted I was saying "Maine". Bottom line, its no better than other voice recognition technologies which can usually form words pretty well from the sounds that are spoken, but really struggles to chose the one that makes sense when alternatives exist.

Too big to fail = too big to jail. Its worse than this. Too big to fail = too big to punish in any meaningful way - the only thing that will get their attention is a fine or restriction on their business practices so extensive that it threatens to put them out of business or permanently cripple them - which can't ever be done because they're supposedly too big to fail. By their sheer size they have us over a barrel, and they know it, and there's nothing we can do to stop them from growing even larger - well, except for breaking them apart, but we lack the political will.

a) was Wells Fargo losing money? No. So terrible analogy. This was institutional greed, not do this or go out of business.

b) if you know that your employees are breaking the law, or reasonably should know, and you turn the other cheek, then yes, you are responsible.

c) personally, I received an unwanted credit card from Wells Fargo - I went to one branch, found out a teller at another branch submitted the application. I went to that branch to confront the teller, who was supposedly not working that day. The manager at that branch, who I also spoke to, played dumb, did nothing, refused to tell me what would happen to this teller, citing privacy, and somehow succeeded in acting completely unsuprised by my story while also claiming no knowledge. I also went back a week later to find out what she learned about the situation, since she promised to follow up. She seemed annoyed to see me, to say the least. So, no, I can't prove that she knew, or that anyone above her didn't know, but I'd be shocked if she didn't know.

"destroying the relationship" between advertisers and consumers"

This is like saying "destroying the relationship between rapists and their victims".

There's freedom of speech, but we should also have a right to 'freedom from speech' - it shouldn't be allowed to yell "fire! fire!" in a crowded movie theater just as someone advertising their business by shouting through a bullhorn outside someone's house at 3AM should also not be allowed. If someone wants to speak, there's a reasonable level of unobtrusiveness that they should not be able to exceed but many ads on the web do just that. Inventions have come and gone (VCR's, TiVO, anyone?) that could have just as conceivably "[destroyed] the relationship between advertises and consumers" (and were subjected to exactly these arguments when they started to become popular) and yet both advertisers, consumers and the relationship between them (for better or worse) is very much alive and kicking.

Interesting to know that, I've never seen it do that - in fact I'm surprised that it is aware of the difference in traffic congestion between two parallel lanes on the same freeway - usually people's cell phones can't determine their location with such precision as to differentiate between different lanes on the same road.