I think the guy made a couple serious missteps here that created a bad situation and then made it a lot worse:
1. He got into the car carrying narcotics that he wasn't legally allowed to use.
2. He accepted legal advice without doing his homework:
"After being assured that the penalty would be light," James told Reason in an email, "it turned into a bigger ordeal than I could ever imagine."
The article makes it sound like the judge at the bond hearing advised him to plead no contest, assuring him that the penalty would be light, and he accepted that advice without any further thought. It doesn't sound like he even hired an attorney:
"The judge who heard James' case accepted the no-contest plea. Then he began stacking on penalties."
Were I in this guy's situation, I would not gone to my court date without a lawyer, a plan for getting everything dropped or sealed, and an idea of the worst-case scenario.
3. He was ignorant of the licensing requirements of his profession:
Having worked in finance for the last 2.5 years (admittedly, on the development rather than business side), it seems very unlikely to me that this fellow would have gotten his Series 7 license and started employment as a stock broker without being forced to learn the requirements for reporting legal problems like this.
The moral of the story is:
1. Do your homework, especially on criminal legal matters.
2. Do not blindly accept legal advice (or narcotics!) from strangers.
3. Mount an aggressive defense to any criminal matters.
I think firing the guy and leaving it at that is the optimal thing for BK to do. Let's agree that it probably won't be cost effective to garnish the guy's wages, in terms of legal costs to take him to court, the potential future income he'll have, etc. On BK's side, there's a lot of risk of negative publicity involved with taking him to court. I don't think being fired is being let off easy - surely this stunt will make it at least more difficult to be hired at another fast-food place.
Moving asteroids amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction.
I expect some sort of space treaty to regulate the safe operation of such a venture, and in return provide some liability limits on the required insurance. Otherwise the investors have a tiny chance of being wiped out financially if some city gets hit.
Honestly, should they not get financially wiped out if they hit a city? Or do we just let them keep their money to fund criminal defense lawyers. I want the reaction to killing people to be more than "oops, that will be expensive".
I agree with you. I expect that should a city get hit, then international outcry would lead to the confiscation of all of the investor's assets, despite being shielded by a limited liability corporation.
For that reason the investors need insurance - and a very large amount of it considering the damage that a direct hit on a major city might cause. The investors would seek some sort of limit on the liability - say 100 billion dollars, and in return they should eagerly submit to regulatory oversight of their plans, procedures and operations.
In order to insure such an asteroid moving scheme and establish a premium, insurance companies must determine a risk probability distribution, and they must know what the maximum liability would possibly be. Over many decades, there may be observations of close calls or actual damage causing situations that can inform the actuarial calculation, but at the initial point its simply educated estimates.
dude a 7m asteroid would be literally impossible to hit a city with. it's far too small - would burn up in the atmosphere at around 30km. there would be some small meteorites that would survive in all likelihood, especially as the speed would be a little slower than usual, but those are very trivial in danger. asteroids this size enter the atmosphere every couple of years naturally - occasionally over populated areas - and have never caused meaningful amounts of damage.
> Moving asteroids amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction.
Carl Sagan spoke out against research into destroying "rogue" comets or asteroids that might hit Earth. He believed that the potential for military misuse of the technology far outweighed any real collision threat.
Maybe not, at least not if they made only negligent errors. Hitting a city is hard (with the size of asteroid we are talking about here). If they didn’t do it on purpose but because of a combination of some negligent errors and extremely bad luck I’m not sure whether they deserve to be financially wiped out.
Bringing an asteroid into LEO may be too dangerous due to orbit decay.
According to this calculator, a 500ton roughly spherical rock, assuming a density of 3g/m^3 so a surface area of 3600m^2 would live for 20 years at 500km altitude.
At altitudes higher than 1000km, the thing could live for centuries, although no matter how high, orbits still get perturbed eventually and decay (in the Earth-Moon system).
(Note that at 380km altitude, the ISS is never more than 1-2 years away from burning up in the atmosphere, so it needs periodic boosts to prevent it)
What the linked article doesn't discuss is that it is possible to get a real-time notification when a trade occurs. The price of the last trade is the mid-point that you are referring to. Algo trading/HFT shops are listening for trades as well as quotes - this is how they know the price that trades are actually happening at.
All trades are made publicly avaiable eventually. The lower latency you want the more you have to pay. And some trades aren't avaiable at low latency for any price.
