Bit he was born in the US and not in India. Why? It's tempting to dismiss this question, but let's think about it. If we look at this from biological pov, he was created from a bunch of DNAs in the US and thus "Zuck" is just a convenient way to refer to a bunch of atoms. The entire process in this case is nearly deterministic and there is no room for luck. When we throw an apple seed into earth and see an apple tree 5 years later, we don't call it luck, right? There was a reason why we were there at that time and there is a reason why only an apple tree can grow from an apple seed. Luck is really just our inability to see the reason.
Quantum mechanics and thus physics does not seem to be an entirely deterministic process. Starting say when modern humans showed up to now the current world is almost entirely dependent upon chance and thus luck.
Note strange attractors do exist, so cities would be likely to form around rivers rather than atop mountains. That however says nothing about the people or cultures that would live there.
IMHO, luck needs to be earned. There must be a reason for luck. Some may argue that some people are born smart and rich and they never did anything to deserve that. Well, even at the very beginning, when there were just a bunch of DNAs mixing up together, the entire process followed the very predictable laws of physics. It wasn't luck or coincidence. It's our interpretation of this physical process invents the identity if that child and attributes it with the undeserved luck, while in reality it's just a predictable physical process that couldn't have a different outcome.
We have no way of predicting that physical process (not by a very large margin) so reasoning about it that way is quite useless. The inability to predict (perhaps) deterministic physical processes is randomness and (un)luck.
If you have to earn luck; what is being unlucky? Someone earned a succession of crap?
It is maybe predetermined since the beginning of the universe how (un)lucky I am if only we could track every particle since the big bang (or whatever booted up time and space) but that is not very helpful if the economy crashes and I get some horrible disease just when I launched my new venture.
The unlucky is the absence of reasons to be lucky or even reasons to be unlucky. There is no science there, but I like to think about luck as money: we make an investment by doing something for others and later get back more of the same.
Isn't this expected? The capital growth is proportional to its size. Unless there is something that restricts it's growth, it will absorb all smaller players.
There's an adrenaline rush from going to somewhere where travel is explicitly prohibited, and it's not that expensive to boot. I've seriously considered going on my non-American passport but have decided not to for two reasons:
* Even though my birth country is on allied terms with NK, I'm unsure how my dual citizenship with the US would pan out. I do not want to be considered a spy and imprisoned.
* I do not feel comfortable contributing to a totalitarian economy, even if the individual citizens (guides, translators, etc) benefit a lot from payment.
And there are probably many other valid reasons not to go, but those are the most immediately obvious to me.
For some people it's not an adrenaline rush but a strong curiousity about what the US gov doesn't want you to know. Like all the warnings I received about travel to East Germany even after the wall came down (I was working for a defense contractor at the time). Project security warned us that there would be spies hiding behind every bush.
When we got to Checkpoint Charlie there were just a few tourists milling about the small section of wall that remained, and an old German couple renting a hammer and chisel so you could chip off a piece of the wall yourself. When we spoke to the old couple they suddenly became alert and asked us, rather loudly, if we were Americans. Immediately, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench look up, and a young guy dart out of a doorway and start walking our way. We took the hammer and chisel and started chipping at the wall while keeping an eye on the locals nearby, who suddenly seemed very interested in us. An older man standing close to the wall reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter but did not light the cigarette hanging from his mouth, an obvious signal to other members of his surveillance team.
When a German couple posing as tourists came up and asked us where we were from we recognized that they were obviously trying to recruit us to spy for the Eastern Bloc. But we were too clever, pretending that we were drunk and did not speak English, and meandered back to the train station with our chunk of the wall.
FWIW, a friend is a dual US-Canadian citizen and visited without problems using his Canadian passport. He was even allowed to take pictures, mostly unrestricted. Having said that, he went with an organized tour so the places he visited were highly curated.
I would be very worried about going to NK if there was even the slightest possibility that they could think that you were trying to conceal your U.S. citizenship from them. That, it seems to me, would actually be a legitimate reason for them to suspect you of being a spy. Not that that really matters. The North Koreans are perfectly happy to detain U.S. citizens for non-legitimate reasons. Going there as a U.S. citizen seems to me like a crap shoot with terrifyingly high stakes.
(Not that I ever really seriously considered going there before, but I am definitely not going now that I've posted this!)
A video call would be just as illegal. If he insisted on giving individual advice to NK instead of just publishing the same information then he needed to cease being a US person first.
Maybe I've become a very cynical person, but all the comments above seem very naive to me. He isn't a tourist and plays at the NK gov level. He doesn't care about the legal status of his actions. NK wants him to assist with money laundering on a very large scale and he probably wants something in return. Regular video calls with money transfers would be enough and way safer for him. So I'm asking the same question: what NK can possibly offer that can't be had in other countries and requires an in person visit?
He sounds like he might be someone with a pathological need to be relevant to authorities. Interpol, Singaporean Police, FBI, DOJ who will talk to him?
My guess would be "Joy Division"[0], meaning women brainwashed (or forced) by the state to sexually satisfy high-ranking officials as well as occasionally distinguished guests.
Is not the same at all, the ones there can be virgins at request, there is no pedophilia laws, and in general the power dynamics are extremely different when done for money than for your life.
Great work! Some insights from FANG. Two more things are necessary to make this a game changer: 1. JS level API to record RNR traces and upload them along with error reports (this will be a new W3C standard). This will be a compelling reason to include Firefox into the automation toolchain and at that point compatibility with Firefox will be mandatory. 2. JS level virtualization or sandboxing. Right now we have the iframe-level sandboxing but this granularity is too coarse because modern web apps have become really big (think of O365). We need a way to fragmentize the JS execution context into smaller docker-like sandboxes and record RNR traces for them. Rationale: big subcomponents should be isolated from each other and have separate traces. As a side effect, this new VM API will enable us to do one cool trick.
