I think it is not a for stretch invoking "money laundering" is a knee jerk reaction to seeing crazy business model that doesn't make sense --> something fishy must be going on. While the neighbor of incompetence maybe malice they are rarely home, and if they are even more rarely seen in the house.
I know that when I first learned of movie pass years ago and it was explained to me. It made literally no sense how they'd turn a dollar despite it being explained to me more times than I can count.
I also remember thinking it sounded like some alternative scheme was going on. However I probably acted more paranoid than the rest and decided to pass on getting cheap movie tickets.
That was an entertaining read. Takes me back to a course in IO psychology I took on workplace motivation.
Intriguing as it was in some sense, the "models" that are hypothesized in this field are both hilarious and ridiculous. They are at best ad hoc representations of anecdotal information.
I think the only redeeming portion is relating all of this posturing to some sort of Darwinian understanding of expressed phenotypes with in corporate culture. Instead of reproduction via valued phenotypes. It's task assignment via phenotypes (typically irrespective of gender although that's a different discussion obviously).
The reason these types of classification structures fall apart from my view suggests a form of causality or even a form of determinism I've never been comfortable with. This is shown further with post hoc justification.
All that said I still enjoy reading this kind of stuff, if nothing else then to understand how different people group/classify/model the world around them but group/subgroups.
I am certainly on your side when it comes to mass rail transit being a really good solution for inter-city transportation. Especially now in the age where intra-city transit is so easy with uber/lyft.
The problem as it stands is land easements. Acquiring land in the US for larger social benefit at the expense of the land owner is generally A BIG FUCKIN NO NO. This premise has essentially locked many well planned rail projects from the get go. This just isn't a problem for the promise of self-driving car technology. Further more the opportunity cost argument is really weak. Al la "had we not spent so much money trying invent self driving cars we could have improved our rail system X times over ect." Because we have developed so much other technology out of that quest.
I dream of a day where there is a high speed rail system that connects the entire west coast. It would be a GIGANTIC boon for trade and commerce IMO.
In retrospect though it was more to do with me not understanding how to use generator functions to better control memory bloating.