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To visit California's Imperial Valley is to enter a sleepy place worlds away from the glamorous boomtowns of California's coast. Pickups outnumber BMWs. Vast farms irrigated by the Colorado River stretch as far as the eye can see. Few tourists walk its hot, dusty streets.

Yet the valley lies just two hours from the beaches and swanky subdivisions of San Diego, in the hard, rocky desert terrain near the Mexican border.

Growing up, Liz Stepansky, the daughter of two schoolteachers in small town Illinois, thought teaching was the way to a stable, meaningful life.

"My dad would have students that would come back and visit him even years after they had graduated high school," she said. "And to see him develop relationships like that, it seemed like a pretty important job. I liked that."

After graduating from college in 2008, Stepansky, now 33, decided to follow in her parents' footsteps, and was ecstatic when she landed her first job as a public middle school teacher in South Carolina.

Editor's note: Following sharp criticism of how this MIT study was conducted, its authors say they will redo their analysis. Uber chief economist Jonathan Hall gives his assessment of the "inconsistent logic" leading to an undercount of hourly earnings and "a major error" in the conclusions in this post.

Roku devices and Samsung smart TVs have easy-to-exploit security vulnerabilities, according to testing carried out by Consumer Reports.

"We found that a relatively unsophisticated hacker could change channels, play offensive content, or crank up the volume," the magazine says. "This could be done over the web, from thousands of miles away."

It's last call for public comment on a Trump administration proposal that would give bar and restaurant owners more control over workers' tips.

The Labor Department has been asking for feedback, and already hundreds of thousands of people have weighed in.

Many say they say they're opposed to a rule that would allow restaurant owners to pocket tips for themselves.

Pledging to defend American businesses and workers, President Trump imposed tariffs on imported solar panel components and large residential washing machines on Monday.

Apple announced in a statement on Wednesday that it plans to accelerate U.S. investment and create thousands of new jobs.

For years Apple Inc. has been criticized for outsourcing manufacturing to China.

Apple says it plans to bring back billions of dollars it has kept in tax havens overseas, and that it will pay a one-time tax of $38 billion on its overseas cash holdings.

Aurora, a startup company led by three veterans of Google, Tesla, and Uber, has signed deals with both Volkswagen and Hyundai with the goal of putting autonomous vehicle technology on the market within three years — and doing so "quickly, broadly and safely."

The partnerships will pair Aurora's sensors and software — its machine learning and artificial intelligence technology — with two companies that together produce more than 15 million vehicles each year.

Self-driving Hyundai models will be on the market by 2021, the company says.

California regulators say Nestle may have to stop collecting a large portion of the water it bottles from the San Bernardino National Forest, because it lacks the legal permits for millions of gallons of water. Nestle sells the water under the Arrowhead label.

The State Water Board says that of the 62.6 million gallons of water that Nestle says it extracted from the San Bernardino spring each year on average from 1947 to 2015, the company may only have a right to some 8.5 million gallons. Those numbers come from a nearly two-year investigation.

We've secured our satellite. And while that's pretty cool, we're not quite there yet. We need a rocket. That used to require a having a space agency, like NASA. We don't have a space agency at NPR. But luckily for us, space is a business now, with commercial operators vying for customers. And space companies are actually battling for our business. They want to be the company that takes us to the stars.

The family of a 19-year-old food delivery worker was not eligible for any kind of worker's compensation last month after their son was struck and killed by a dump truck.

At Planet Money, we love big projects. We bought a toxic asset. We made a T-shirt. We're trying to launch a satellite into space. Doing this stuff means we can't always keep up with the news as much as we'd like. So we're launching a new show. It's the Indicator: Planet Money's quick take on a number, or a term, or a story in the news.

Going to space used to be the playground of governments, but now rockets and satellites are becoming so small and so cheap that even a podcast can launch a space mission. So that's just what Planet Money did!

Craft breweries might be about to crack open a celebratory cold one.

Under the Senate tax bill, alcohol producers would save $4.2 billion from 2018 to 2019, according to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation.

The measure would help small-brewery owners like Kevin Sharpe, the founder and president of Dark City Brewing Co. He hopes to use the extra money to expand his business in Asbury Park, N.J.

"More money means better beer, and hopefully more of it," he said.

Space is easier to get to than ever and it will change life on earth. Private companies are pouring billions of dollars into tiny satellites, new rockets, and gathering information on earth from above. To see how it all works, we are getting in on the action ourselves.

We adopt an adorable satellite, go rocket shopping, and try to figure out how to turn our little piece of the new space race into a profit.

Scroll down for our audio episodes, photos from our satellite, and to see where it is right this exact minute.

Episode 1: We're Going To Space

There is no need to charter a sleigh pulled by reindeer for your air travel to holiday destinations after all. American Airlines and its pilots have worked out a deal to staff cockpits in late December after a scheduling snafu threatened to cancel thousands of flights.

Because of what the airline is calling "a processing error" in its scheduling system, American mistakenly allowed many more pilots to take time off over the holidays than it should have.

There's more than cars at an auto show.

Auto shows are not only a place for consumers but for vendors, executives, reporters, activists, investors and consumers. They are more like conventions. With 10,000 parts on a car, that means a lot of vendors.

Last year we started to look into the satellite business. It used to be that satellites were the size of a school bus and cost a half billion dollars. But the space business is changing. Private companies are competing to get tiny satellites into orbit, driving the cost down. Commercial rockets are launching around the world, carrying satellites for universities, and farmers, and oil traders.

So we, thought, what about podcasts? Who speaks for them? Why can't they go, too? Today on the show, we go looking for our own satellite.

Despite many analysts seeing bitcoin as a bubble, the cryptocurrency continues to rally — hitting over $9,500 on Monday.

Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) about why bitcoin’s price keeps going up, whether people actually use it and what banks are saying about it.

If you read a newspaper on Sunday, there's a good chance you came across a full-page ad warning of the dangers of smoking.

The stark messages with black text on an otherwise blank page tell readers that cigarettes kill 1,200 Americans every day. The same messages start to run Monday evening on prime time television.

Americans have long expressed their political views with their wallets, but in recent months, this phenomenon has made national news. A campaign called #grabyourwallet has targeted brands affiliated with Donald Trump.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced Tuesday that the agency will repeal net neutrality rules put in place by the Obama administration. The change is seen as a victory for the telecommunications industry, while tech companies are largely in favor of keeping net neutrality.

Here & Now‘s Robin Young speaks with Tony Romm (@TonyRomm), senior editor of policy and politics for Recode.