Two unrelated things have been bugging me lately.
1
People use the term “literally” to mean “to a great extent” even if it is meant metaphorically. What then is the term for saying that something is literal? We need to be able to distinguish between something being metaphorical and being literal. If “literal” is not reserved for things that are literal, what replaces it with another term that truly does indicate that?
2
Two people who orchestrated shady schemes were arrested after they collapsed: Alex Mashinsky after Celsius collapsed and Sam Bankman-Fried after FTX collapsed. A long time passed between the respective collapses and the arrests. My question is this: why didn’t these individuals flee to a country that does not extradite people to the US?
I think it is relevant that Celsius and FTX didn’t just incidentally violate the law a little bit. In the first case it was a Ponzi-scheme where new depositors’ money went to pay old depositors’ rewards. Numerous public statements were evidently false. In the second case depositors’ money were used by an independent but related entity(Alameda Research) to make various crypto-investments that largely failed. These two cases involve massive violations of law.
So again: why didn’t these individuals flee to a country that does not extradite people to the US? Surely they saw that their actions were illegal? Just losing investors billions of dollars doesn’t go down well even if law hadn’t been violated. So why stay in the US and the Bahamas respectively? I’m not arguing that they didn’t break the law, ample evidence proves otherwise. I am genuinely asking why they didn’t go to Belarus or Cape Verde or something.