The point is that 'just keep trying' would not have been a good strategy.

On French highways there are context-dependent speed limit signs which look exactly like normal signs but with a small additional panel below which tells you when they apply. Eg, big 70 in a round red circle, with a small picture of a car towing a trailer below. Eg https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F... which obviously only applies to cars with trailers.

Google maps (on my phone, not built-in to the car in any way) would constantly tell me that the speed limit of the road was that of the last such sign regardless of the specificity.

If you Google the name of a UK car insurer with some likely keyword like 'claim' or 'accident', you get paid listing from people offering two 'services'. a) 'call connection', which means that you call their premium-rate number and they just put the call through to the right company's phone line while charging you per-minute. b) 'claim management', you fill out a form on their website, they submit it to the actual company's website, and take a percentage of your claim. Neither of these are illegal, Google has promised to not take ad money from the first type, but in practice don't remove ads fast enough to make it unviable.

Consumer-facing companies now, ludicrously, have to do their own SEO to make sure they appear top of search results for their own name, and some even pay Google for ads to themselves. But clicks are more valuable to scammers than to legit businesses, so the former can always outbid the latter.

If you went back in time to an age where people were working hard on changing lead into gold and your mission was to help them succeed as soon as possible, your best bet would probably be something like teaching them the decimal place value system, or how to express algebraic problems as geometric ones. But if you also told people that this knowledge was the key to solving the two problems they were working on, "how to make very pure versions of a substance", and "how to understand what makes specific types of matter different" you would reasonably have been regarded as deluded.

You have pointed out that when the machine locks out, there is an actual reason behind it. I don't think anyone claimed that it's simply triggered by an RNG or a timer.

However, why are the machines this opaque and difficult to keep running? I think the point has been clearly made, that an incentive structure optimises for low reliability. Nothing you said contradicts this.

There have been genuine cases where accountants, bank managers, and so on have embezzled large sums of money, including in cash, and spent it all untraceably on things like feeding a gambling addiction.

Thus, the two companies extracted an exorbitant rent for the formerly public goods they controlled. The fact that some of this rent went to inefficiencies of running two separate companies on an illusionary arm's length basis does not really improve matters.