polemic
Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.
It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.
As a joke, that doesn't feel quite so far-fetched these days. (https://xkcd.com/353/)
(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)
It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.
Suspicously easy.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
Cripes I wish people would explain who "we" is. "Flutter Foundation"? Which is "Flock" but not "Flutter"?
Always lacking in these conversations is a proper definition of "social media". Kids want to talk to their friends, many want to be social, so if we're going to talk about the dangers of social media we need to be specific. E.g. the problems with algorythmic content are entirely different to the issues of bullying and inappropriate direct messaging. Conflating them under a "social media is bad" banner doesn't help us build healthier, safer systems.
That depends entirely on the capture device.
I'm no economist, but inflation should reflect an increse in growth and productivity. The fact that these coins don't tend to consistently devalue might say something about how useful they are for doing the job of a real currency.
The real world is resistent to clean abstractions and abstractions are distressingly subject to change. What made your row unique today is quite likely to become non-unique in the days/months/years to come.
Always use surrogate keys. Your future self will thank you.
Constructing a ship of sufficient redundancy / self-repair capability that can carry embryonic life to another star seems like something we could achieve. The engineering problems seem hard but quantifiable, and the resources required are likely available. If humanity decided tomorrow that we needed to put "a human" on another planet, I think it could be done (sent) within a lifetime. (surviving there, another matter)
OTOH the scale of resources that would need to be deployed to begin construction of a Dyson sphere would seem to be immense, let alone the systems required to harness it for anything useful.
Apparent efficiencies in public infrastructure works might be short-lived in a centrally directed economy and/or hides deep inefficiences elsewhere in the system.
(It might also be that 1960s stucco houses are preferable to dense apartment living for many people, and that Op misses the forest for the trees in the wider context of why and for whom anything is built anywhere).
I'm not in the USA or China though. Take with grains of salt.
Here in New Zealand there is a military transport option but it's always breaking down and, by all accounts, nowhere near as comfortable as a commercial carrier.
However there's also the church in the rock which is absolutely stunning and worth a visit. https://www.temppeliaukionkirkko.fi/en/index/nimi.html#
There was a lot of research into statistical models of slips – in particular boudler movement and how they break up – which didn't really work.
It turned out that game engines with good dynamic object desctruction are pretty good at modelling them, and they were able to get much better results using the game engine vs statistical models.
That entire website should be banned from Google.
It's certainly convenient that various security and privacy concerns align, but as many comments here point out, they don't stand up to much scrutiny, and they certainly don't warrant this level of policy response.