I know someone who developed a load of the underlying code. It's a lot of bodging, and sensors being ran past their nominal lifespan. Some of them just go a bit unreliable, and the error accumulate until it starts triggering errors.
The scale based ones are quite common in the UK. It's designed to detect someone putting 2 things into the bag at once.
Unfortunately, it requires the weight to actually be correct, to be programmed in properly, and for the scale to work properly.
Even with problems, it still lets 1 staff member man 8 tills, however, which speeds things up considerably.
More likely too many motives that fit.
The hosts of the Great British Bakeoff would do something similar. If a contestant got overwhelmed and started crying, they would stand close to them and swear continuously. It made any footage unusable, as well as breaking the contestant out of the mental loop that worked them up.
That's also before accounting for the various ground scientists who would rapidly become aware through the private channels. Someone appearing on the ISS would leak beyond containment before anyone could think to cut phone communications, let alone implement it.
Compared to telefragging someone on live tv? Also, on the balance, the media coverage would likely help knock loose some more funding for NASA, if only to try and figure out what the f*** happened.
Scientists are not good at keeping secrets, particularly not of this level. Also, the ISS is remarkably public. It would be obvious they were hiding something, at the very least.
Would I expect to spend some time "volunteering" in a research lab, more than likely. I doubt it would get to dissection level. The risk/cost would be low enough that I would take it.
The International Space Station. The sheer confusion value would be amazing, particularly if I stayed quiet about how it happened ("I went to bed, then woke up floating here. I've no clue how it happened").
I would get to cause a major incident of complete chaos, with little to no harm. I would get to experience space and weightlessness. I would also get a near guaranteed lift home (eventually). There's also almost no way it could be kept quiet, so I get to be a minor celebrity for a while.
So how do you see deflation going then? Particularly deflation of the defacto reference currency for most of the world?
As far as I can tell, it would make the disruption of covid look like a minor market blip. And that's without looking into how the various chain reactions would play off and amplify each other on the global stage.
They do have different uses, as well as "flavours".
E.g. if you end up in fairyland, you'd likely expect something more child friendly and whimsical. If you end up in the land of the fey, that's a far scarier prospect.
It's also akin to having different words for dwarf, elf, orc, and human. They are all big, with 2 legs, 2 arms and a head on top.
There's a difference between pumping the brakes and throwing a grenade into the fuel tank. A large scale economic collapse would be devastating. The world economy is so interdependent now that even minor disruptions cause problems.
I'm all for pumping the brakes, but we either need to stop gracefully, or have an alternative to jump to.
They almost stopped using helmets again, too. The number of head injuries skyrocketed. Thankfully, someone pointed out to command that the helmets weren't causing the injuries, but converting fatalities into injuries. They hadn't been recording head injuries on corpses.