Why was the Roman legion able to decisively defeat the Hellenistic sarisa-phalanx?

https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/

 

 

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.

Credit card debt collection

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/

This was one of those articles I had bookmarked for months, and when I finally started reading it seemed like a lot of stuff I already knew.  But, it got pretty interesting towards the end.  I'd recommend reading the whole thing, but I'll quote some longer parts I found interesting here.

The rights of debtors are observed by both primary lenders and eventual debt buyers mostly in the breach. One of those rights is to a written “debt verification”, with specified information in it, and (surprisingly, if you haven’t worked in this field) despite that being the law many debts are sold in such a fashion that the buyer couldn’t produce a responsive verification even if they wanted to. That isn’t even a political claim; it’s just the engineering reality of which columns are in their CSV file.

The former advocate in me will observe that the single most effective method for resolving debts is carefully sending a series of letters invoking one’s rights under the FDCPA (and other legislation) to a debt collector who is operationally incapable of respecting those rights, then threatening them with legal or regulatory action when they inevitably infringe upon them in writing, leading to them abandoning further attempts at collection.

This effectively makes paying consumer debts basically optional in the United States, contingent on one being sufficiently organized and informed. That is likely a surprising result to many people. Is the financial industry unaware of this? Oh no. Issuing consumer debt is an enormously profitable business. The vast majority of consumers, including those with the socioeconomic wherewithal to walk away from their debts, feel themselves morally bound and pay as agreed.

Why are debt collectors so bad at debt collection? Partially it is because credit card issuers are large national institutions with large, automated processes sitting atop a legacy of corporate acquisitions, IT migrations, and similar that makes availability of non-critical information extremely fragmentary. They then want to dump that complexity through a very small pipe (CSV files) onto the debt collection industry.

And this

The FDCPA and state legislation provides for automatic damages for illegal behavior from collectors, the incidence of illegal behavior is extremely high, and a debt collector with a high school education and three months of experience will frequently commit three federal torts in a few minutes of talking to a debtor then follow up with a confirmation of the same in writing. (You think I am exaggerating. Reader, I am not. “If you don’t pay me I will sue you and then Immigration will take notice of that and yank your green card” contains three separate causes of action: (frequently) a false threat to file a suit where that is not actually a business practice of the firm, a false alleged affiliation with a government agency, and a false alleged consequence for debt nonpayment not provided for in law.)

As a result, private companies compiled databases of (public in the U.S.) court filings and organized them by Social Security number, address, and similar to allow debt collectors to identify which debtors are aware of their legal rights. In principle, a debt collector could do anything they wanted with that fact, like being extra careful to follow the law in contacting them. But the economics of debt collection do not counsel careful, individualized consideration of credit card debt.

I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce outside of it, like writing letters and counting to 30 days. (People telling me they were incapable of doing these two things is why I started ghostwriting letters for debtors.) We now have literal computer programs exempting heuristically identified professional managerial class members from debt collection, inclusive of their legitimate debts, so that debt collectors can more profitably conserve their time to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit.

 

 

The Business of Theme Parks, How Much Money Do They Make?

Despite our extended rambling, we’d like to think that you can leave with some concrete implications.  In summary, here are some of the major ones.

• Mega theme parks such as Disney and Universal find it difficult to be profitable in the first few years after opening, and have a very low project ROI.  But it doesn’t matter.
• Don’t seek to compete with Disney or Universal, unless you are them, or you can line up tremendous sources of financing.  Look for creative sources of financing.
• For investors, indoor parks are promising because they generate enough in sales productivity to be appropriate for urban retail environments.
• Regional and superregional parks are appropriate when land prices are extremely low, and the market does not have similar types of developments.  They can be built relatively cheaply.  And once built, these parks can become the landmark attraction of a market for decades.
• Waterparks are often a more efficient alternative to regional parks, in that they occupy less space but have a similar return profile.
• It’s important to define the return measure for attractions.  Very often, the partner/developer/government cares less about financial returns and more about employment, tourism, and GDP impacts.  Governments can be a good partner.  On the other hand, don’t benchmark these kinds of developments if you’re a purely private operation.

https://www.theparkdb.com/blog/the-business-of-theme-parks-part-i-how-much-money-do-they-make/

https://www.theparkdb.com/blog/the-business-of-theme-parks-part-ii-how-much-do-they-cost-and-earn/

 

The McDonald's theory of why everyone thinks the economy sucks

https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-mcdonalds-theory-of-why-everyone

The point is simply this: it’s very easy to spend a lot more these days on fast food in ways that don’t necessarily show up in inflation data. Three years ago, I might have walked down the block and ordered a Super Duper Double Cheeseburger, fries and a Diet Coke for $9.67 before tax. Now, because Uber Eats and the restaurant have correctly determined that I’m lazy and they can price-discriminate against me and I fell for their viral marketing campaign, I’ll have them deliver me a Triple Super Duper Cheeseburger Deluxe with grilled onions, plus fries and a Diet Coke — at a price of $24.25 before tax.

And don’t think this experience — or the Idaho man’s experience — is atypical. Getting fast food delivered is pretty damned expensive. In-store, fast food can be expensive too if you start messing with upgrades, add-ons and specialty items. This is why McDonald’s revenues are still rocketing up even as inflation has slowed down.