Nivelo’s lawyer told him there was no fighting it; Ecuador wouldn’t extradite him back to the U.S., but due to an existing treaty between the two countries, Nivelo would have to serve time for the gold heist. Counting on his clean record in Ecuador, Nivelo figured his time in prison would be short. He got a year, and with good behavior, he was released after nine months.
“Listen, if you commit crime, you gotta pay. So I didn’t complain about that,” he said.
That core booster approached the platform as planned, but it unfortunately hit the water going 300 MPH and was lost, because some of its return engines failed to light. Video feeds of the attempted landing cut out upon approach, and in the live stream SpaceX provided of the launch, you could hear someone say “We’ve lost the core” but it wasn’t clear whether that indicated just the feed, or the booster itself.2/3 ain't good enough. They'll keep at it though, the landing of the two other boosters was great.
“If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.”
Psychologists determine our “paranoia” or “risk aversion” by subjecting a person to a single experiment –then declare that humans are rationally challenged as there is an innate tendency to “overestimate” small probabilities. It is as if the person will never again take any personal tail risk! Recall that academics in social science are … dynamically challenged. Nobody could see the grandmother-obvious inconsistency of such behavior with our ingrained daily life logic. Smoking a single cigarette is extremely benign, so a cost-benefit analysis would deem one irrational to give up so much pleasure for so little risk! But it is the act of smoking that kills, with a certain number of pack per year, tens of thousand of cigarettes –in other words, repeated serial exposure.
Beyond, in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy. If you climb mountains and ride a motorcycle and hang around the mob and fly your own small plane and drink absinthe, your life expectancy is considerably reduced although not a single action will have a meaningful effect. This idea of repetition makes paranoia about some low probability events perfectly rational. But we do not need to be overly paranoid about ourselves; we need to shift some of our worries about bigger things.
