It <i>is</i> an inelegant solution. It&#x27;s not something you want to scale up. It&#x27;s not something &quot;right&quot; by Kant&#x27;s categorical imperative. The lesson to take from this story isn&#x27;t &quot;keep every train running, no matter how little economical sense it makes it&quot;. Such an attitude, universalized, would indeed be a disaster for the world.<p>No, the lesson is that when running and optimizing systems, we should not forget <i>why are we having them in the first place</i>. They are there for us. Our willingness to make an occasional exception to cater for another human in need, at the cost of efficiency, is what makes us human.<p>Think of all those tourists who regularly get injured or lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by helicopter S&amp;R teams. From purely economical perspective, this is burning money. We should leave them to die, because the costs of fueling a chopper and risking its destruction, not to mention lives of highly-trained personnel, are great and the money could be better spent elsewhere. And yet we train S&amp;R teams and fly the choppers, because we chose to. Ruthless economic efficiency is not the end goal.