Man Creatively Sneaks Onto Delta Flight, But Gets Caught

https://onemileatatime.com/news/man-creatively-sneaks-onto-delta-flight/

The man reportedly intended to fly with Southwest to Austin. He had a “buddy pass,” which was presumably given to him by a Southwest employee, to be able to fly with the airline on a space available basis. So he cleared security with that standby pass, though unfortunately the Southwest flight was full, meaning he wouldn’t be able to take the flight.

Desperate to get to Austin, the man then used a different strategy. He went to the gate for the Delta flight to Austin, and used his phone to take pictures of the boarding passes of other passengers without their knowledge. No one noticed this at the time, but rather this was only uncovered using security camera footage after the fact.

He then boarded the aircraft using the barcode on another passenger’s boarding pass. Now, he did sort of think this through — he didn’t simply take the seat associated with that boarding pass, since he knew it would be occupied. Instead, he boarded and then tried to hide in the lavatory. The goal was to let everyone else board, and then take whatever empty seat was left.

The problem is, there were no empty seats on the flight. So when he emerged from the lavatory and the plane began taxiing, flight attendants realized something was wrong, and the plane returned to the gate. The aircraft was met by police, where the traveler “admitted he had made a mistake and was only trying get home.” Police say the man is being held on a federal detainer at the Salt Lake County Metro Jail. The flight ended up departing around 30 minutes late.

Inside North Korea's Forced-Labor Program

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/inside-north-koreas-forced-labor-program-in-china

In late 2023, an investigator hired by my team visited a Chinese plant called Donggang Xinxin Foodstuff. He found hundreds of North Korean women working under a red banner that read, in Korean, “Let’s carry out the resolution of the 8th Congress of the Workers’ Party.” Soon afterward, the investigator visited a nearby plant called Donggang Haimeng Foodstuff, and found a North Korean manager sitting at a wooden desk with two miniature flags, one Chinese and one North Korean. The walls around the desk were mostly bare except for two portraits of the past North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The manager took our investigator to the workers’ cafeteria to eat a North Korean cold-noodle dish called naengmyeon, and then gave him a tour of the processing floor. Several hundred North Korean women dressed in red uniforms, plastic aprons, and white rubber boots stood shoulder to shoulder at long metal tables under harsh lights, hunched over plastic baskets of seafood, slicing and sorting products by hand. “They work hard,” the manager said. The factory has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite.

Power Metal: is it really about dragons?

 https://notes.atomutek.org/power-metal-and-dragons.html

Let´s play money making game.

I've recently been playing through the NES Legend of Zelda; a game I played a lot as a kid.  In the preinternet era I somehow spent enough time in this game to know every secret, every hidden door, and could beat the game in a single play through.

 

However, one aspect never really spent much time on was the "money making game" aka, the basic gambling game where you choose one of three options and randomly either won or lost rupees.  I didn't spend much time playing it as a kid, because I had the distinct memory that it wasn't a good choice, ie, it had a negative expected value (I'm not sure I would have phrased it quite like that as an 8 year old, but I digress).  Another side note, while I didn't play it much, the idea of a random gambling minigame inside an unrelated game always stuck with me, and directly sparked the inclusion of a similar concept in the game pirate2, which you're undoubtedly familiar with.

Anyway, this is turning into a long post which is just a couple links, but I was wondering if the MMG was in fact a bad value or if there was any secrets there I didn't know about.  So, I started search for the answer, and came across these two very labor intensive analyses of the game, which come from totally different angles.

The first is a look at the assembly code of the game itself to see how the RNG worked, and what exactly the distribution of negative and positive payoffs was.

The second was just a guy who played the game 500 times and kept track of the outcomes.

They both reached the same conclusion: The right rupee is the worst choice and the middle rupee is the best choice.  In fact, the middle rupee does have a positive expected value, and so you can expect to make money playing it, in the long run.