I don't know what to tell you if you still believe that political contributions or spending are a determinative factor in politics rather than a trailing indicator (and a poor one at that).

Even in terms of corruption, this is by far the smallest concern and barely worth noting in the scheme of things. Besides the obvious revolving door for lobbying and legal firms, there is so much money at play in the ex post facto bribery industry, between speaking fees and bulk book sales and low interest and forgiven loans that Citizens United might as well be dust in the wind.

Agreed -- "is a term of the sum" is such an inverted way to look at it.

Better I think would be to say "the result in column i and row j is the sum of product of elements in column i of the left cracovian and column j of the right cracovian".

And even by this definition the example given doesn't seem to track (and the strangeness of sometimes saying "+" and sometimes not, and having both "0" and "-0" in the example is bananas!):

   {  3  2 } {  1  -4 }  =   {  5   -2 }
   { -1  0 } { -2   3 }  =   {  0    2 }


   3 * 1 + -1 * -2 == 5 -- check
   3 * -4 + -1 * 3 == -15 -- what?
   2 * 1 + 0 * -2 == 2 (okay, but shouldn't this be in the lower left, column 1 dotted with column 2?)
   2 * -4 + 0 * 3 = -8 (now I'm really missing something)

I'm a skeptic as well, but calling it a "scam" is a bit extreme. I think QC proponents are acting in good faith, and I believe that it is worth chasing a little longer since we don't yet have a convincing model for why QC will or won't work (although I think the Gil Kalai's work in this area is intuitively correct I don't think that we have a physical explanation for why quantum error correction would not work).

The current emphasis on NISQ systems is a bit of a desperate measure because the most we can get out of such systems is evidence that quantum computing can work in theory; they do not advance us towards having a workable quantum computer.

Without doing further research, what are some ways that the laws could have evolved in this direction?

I practically guarantee that for each idea you will be able to find a municipality that tried it and found that it didn't work for what in retrospect were very obvious reasons.

The fact of the matter is that society was changing, and that was it. Places where cars go are not compatible with places that people go and cars were getting cheaper and more common and more necessary all the time.