Not sure that sort of low level access is possible while the app is backgrounded. However, automatic sleep trackers have been available without official API since what, watchOS 2? So maybe.
I was paddling with my 3 year old daughter by the shore while my 9 year old was playing with his cousin futher up the beach (and in front of the lifeguard station).
My father-in-law (late 60's) wanted to join the two 9 year olds who had swam a short distance to a sandbar, and were in knee depth water.
The old man got into difficulty, I dropped my daughter back with the family and asked my wife to have a look at her old man.
She said he was fine, he's been swimming here for years.
I recognised the pattern of short quick breaths and short quick movements. Each small wave was sapping energy from him.
I ran to help and reached him quickly. People nearby had recognised the danger but were too afraid of stepping out of their depth to help a stranger. Ultimately, nobody on the crowded beach was prepared to take any risk to themselves to help (which I can understand).
On arrival, I realised I did not know what to do. I held him above the water for a few seconds, which meant submerging myself for the same duration. He was now a dead-weight, who had lost all control. I repeated this twice more, until I felt there was a risk to my own safety.
I swam/dragged/paddled/crawled with one arm the short (12 meters) to shore. I was close to becoming exhausted myself.
Later that night over a bbq, the family asked why he simply did not turn around. The time between tiring, and panicking/exhausting he said was too short, and he was so close to reaching the sandbar.
My wife did not believe he had been in danger until that chat over the bbq.
He is alive today because one member of the family recognise the signs of drowning. Being inclose proximity to the lifeguard station which was manned, had no bearing on the outcome.
Amish or Luddite? No.
Underinvestment in technology? Yes.
Poor bureaucratic response? More yes.
The US is leading in eCommerce with FAANGs. With this trade comes very valuable data mining and 'Surveilance Capitalism' where intimate user behaviours and trends are translated into further competitive advantage.
When you look at the FAANGs. The US gets all the upside (as well as some of the downsides), but the EU gets only downsides. e.g. Amazon will hollow out retail and logistics, as well as computing infrastructure, the economic efficiencies are returned to the US as well as the rich user data.
The EU is struggling to respond in a contructive way. It really needs to create a few tech hubs, and promote new ventures.
Instead, its doing what the EU does best. Kicking the can down the street, and adding bureaucracy to appear to be doing something.
EU and its governments set the tone, though. The USG attacks tech firms only rarely, and only when there's pretty overwhelming evidence of some sort of specific wrongdoing. The EU seems to pretty routinely attack the tech industry even when there's no demonstrable harm. So tech entrepreneurs in Europe receive a pretty strong message that if they get big they're going to meddled with and certainly not celebrated. US founders don't get the same.
(Evidence of something moving around Mach 5 at high altitude, rattling the rocks, captured by seismic equipment since the 90ies. Overton Window has now been open long enough for Lockheed Martin to tentatively present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72 as something new.)
This is always an exciting question... You know, it's nice to daydream about all kinds of secret and mysterious projects. But I think another question is more about necessity, and I think necessity is what fuels a lot of politics around these kind of military projects. People pull towards both extremes and end up somewhere in the middle, which is maybe the mean of perceived necessity.
If the US is clever (NSA: this is your queue) it would find a way to use the current difficult political climate to focus on what they are supposed to do (I guess preventing war maybe) and in a relevant way for the times. The Russians basically did this with internet trolls. They took something simple (and amusing at times) and weaponised it.
I guess one would hope enough people that are both clever and uhm, ethical, work for the three-letter organisations.
nitpick: in this context, you would want to use the word "cue" not "queue". "cue" => signal for an actor to go on stage or whatever. "queue" => orderly line of people waiting to buy a movie ticket.
It's more worker/voter welfare than corporate welfare. Socialism for the middle class.
Lockheed Martin's long term profit margin is around 6-7 percent (recently above 9%). Lockheed pays more wages than it makes profits.
If you count the whole value chain, with contractors and their subcontractors, it's probably something like 50% total worker compensation (wages, benefits), 10% profits, 10% cost of capital, rest is taxes, real estate, energy and raw materials.
Real work is (comparably) cheap. With F35 budget well over a trillion dollars this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output. My 2c.
"A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation."
"Everett Rogers defined skunkworks as an "enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.""
"[T]he term [skunkworks] was generalized to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other large organizations which feature a small elite team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.".
In this sense, the projects you are talking about surely cannot be skunkwork projects, but are just ordinary cooperate projects with a huge conservative cooperate-bureaucratic structure.
Yes, and that's exactly what the post you are responding to said. Read it again: it says that the money is far more than skunkworks could possibly spend, so it's far more likely that the evaporating money is being boiled away by ordinary bureaucratic waste with nothing to show for it.
> Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower. It is bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
to me, "it" seems to refer to "[s]kunk work" and referring to skunk work with respect to "max manpower" does not sound like skunk work to me, but throwing lots of cooperate ressources (instead of a small elite team) at the project.
"It" here refers to "F35 budget". The punctuation is not ideal; I think it would be clearer something like this:
> With the F35 budget well over a trillion dollars (this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain, at max manpower), it is a bureaucratic waste with minimum productive output.
The word "Skunk" does not start a new sentence. It is in the middle of this phrase: "this is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than needed to fund maximum number of projects Skunk works can sustain". I'll agree that the punctuation isn't ideal; that phrase should have been preceded by a comma.
The poster you are responding to is correct. Sorry, I could have been clearer in wording and "it"s.
Skunkworks is great, but works while it is small and nimble. Fund it fully. But this could cost billions, tens of billions at most. Not trillions that have been spent on F-35.
Isn't the idea of skunkwork projects exactly to avoid bureaucratic waste for the sake of radical innovation?
In the true sense of the word, yes. However, the MIC and the budgets that support it have their own working definition. It's not about the ends/results, It's about the means (swallowing more and more budget).
"Serious Games" -- usually niche simulation type games -- can easily retail for $80+ for the base game, and then you pay for DLC expansions at around $20-40 a pop.
Examples: Gary Grigsby, Command: Modern Operations, Steel Beasts, etc...
Of course you're basically paying for an interactive encyclopedia in many cases and they don't typically have the repetitive addictive nature of f2p games that include in game purchases.
Then you have stuff like the paradox games with dlcs spanning years and totalling in the hundreds of dollars to buy the 'entire' game up front...
However I would much much rather pay $100 up front for a big, generally complete game than get a game that either centers around pointless cosmetic additions or requires me to spend money (loot boxes containing required items, paywalled features, pay-to-skip progression) and get me addicted to the gameplay.
A too-big-too-fail bank is using cheap short-term funding (from repos) to invest in long term assets, bonds.
The magnitude is concerning.
When confidence in overnight lending between banks reduces (because the other banks realise what this funding is for), the interest rate (measure of risk) rises.
For repo rates: 2.5% is high, 10% brings the house down, and has a blast radius that impacts the entire system.
No, that is not what is happening. The too-big-to-fail banks were lending to the repo market, and hedge funds were taking the cash to buy more assets. Then the tbtf banks decided to buy treasuries instead of lending in the repo market and the hedge funds were SOL. It's the hedge funds that were the problem. When your fund relies on overnight funding for its existence, you won't last long.
From the article:
This [repo] market, which relies heavily on just four big U.S. banks for funding, was upended in part because those firms now hold more of their liquid assets in Treasuries relative to what they park at the Federal Reserve, officials at the Basel-based institution concluded in a report released Sunday. That meant “their ability to supply funding at short notice in repo markets was diminished.”
I don't understand why we put up with these parasites on the economy. It seems too often we find out that well heeled bad actors in finance end up causing damage to the people who actually create wealth and prosperity in this country: the ordinary laborer.
I don't really see what's the crash mechanism there.
From the lender side, repo financing is collateralized so if someone can't pay, then the lender doesn't care because they've got the collateral bonds already; it's not ideal, but it's not a disaster.
From the borrower side, if someone really needs short-term liquidity and would have usually used repos but can't get any right now, then they do have available bonds that they've used as collateral for that repo, so if they really need cash then they can sell the same bonds instead of borrowing against them. Again, that's not ideal and they'll probably lose some money on an urgent sale, and their plans to earn some profit on that borrowed money won't materialize, but that shouldn't trigger a crash that would affect the whole system.
