And because it was fiction, and we had suspended our disbelief to enjoy a vision of a different world with guys that are inherently trustworthy, and because there was a confirmed terrorist plot to commit mass murder that literally could only be thwarted with this move.

Don't conflate temporary acceptance of a premise with real-world values, that's like being the guy that responds to the trolley problem with "I would simply remove the one person from the track, saving everyone and refusing to engage with this conversation."

It's actually about restrictive zoning preventing sufficiently dense housing and high quality public transit.

Unfortunately, the Nest app is already pissing me off too much by trying to get me to give it more data and/or convert to a Google Home app, and constantly asking me to allow my power company permanent control over my thermostat for a small one-time Amazon gift card (no? what an incredibly untempting offer) so I can only imagine how annoying it would be to have two of the damn things.

Home automation is of course a completely unnecessary luxury, but it's also a little silly that we have access to such powerful computers and sophisticated software and it's still somehow an entire hobby just to get your lights to turn off at night, or your place to regulate your temperature in an energy efficient way. Why is it so hard to get your computer-controlled HVAC to talk to your computer and do what you want??

Are the experimental physicists usually the ones holding the shovels?

Yes, but automating and commercializing a process makes it inherently different. Just because everyone has always been welcome to drink from the village well, that countless generations have worked tirelessly to dig, maintain, and improve, doesn't mean that there's no basis for complaint when Nestle sticks a pump down it and starts draining the aquifer to bottle and sell.

The lack of an existing law (or custom) against new behavior doesn't actually render it necessarily non-grotesque.

They don't have a piece of paper and a calculator as backup?

Did you mean ODD? OCD doesn't make a lot of sense for the rest you've written.

This is pretty straightforward to explain.

With dividing by zero, any number you multiply by zero becomes zero. There's no other way to get zero through multiplication. So, the only sensible thing to divide by zero is zero (since "What times zero equals six?" doesn't have an answer).

But because anything multiplied by zero is zero, even if you divide zero by zero you have an undefined answer. Zero divided by zero could be anything! So that's also not meaningful.

The square root of negative one, however, only has to be defined once to get meaning out of all negative square roots.