The loop's problem was that it had no decision in it. Condition was
health, capability, currency sink and fail state all at once, so every
event pushed the same way and there was nothing to weigh against
anything else.
This is the axis the loop turns on instead:
A tractor is slow and made of tin, and nobody looks twice at it.
An armoured car survives being shot at, and everybody notices it.
Five cars from a field tractor to an armoured car. Money buys them
permanently rather than paying a repair bill, so progress climbs while
any single drive still declines. There is deliberately no best one - a
quiet errand down cold roads wants the thing nobody reports, a run into
a district that already knows your face wants the thing that survives
what happens next.
Kept honest by a pairwise test rather than a glance at the table: every
rung has to be more conspicuous than the one below by at least the
geometric mean of what it gains in toughness and speed. The armoured
car failed it on the first pass - 3.7x tougher for 1.4x the attention,
which is a strictly better car and would have collapsed the choice back
into "drive the newest thing". Repriced to 3.6, because being
undercover in an armoured car ought to be close to a contradiction in
terms.
Catalogue and state only; nothing reads it yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
