The hypothesis spec and intro file Singapore as an affluent countercase whose forcing functions might interrupt the sequence; section V recodes it as a High-Competence Hospice on fertility ~1.0. Dynamism and fecundity are different tests, and the recode means the dynamism test did not get to run.

Below-replacement fertility among high-capability cohorts is already an observable in the spec. A competent state that stops replacing its people fails the hardware path; Singapore is then a split (governance held, replacement did not), not a miss.

The countercase list and the graveyard list are not scoring the same sequence. Israel's row is growth-orientation maintained by threat plus story; Singapore's statutes were the substitute for selection. If that substitute keeps competence and fails replacement, interruption is true only for the competence slice.

The four-step cascade writes T- → R- as necessity: a safety-seeking orientation cannot tolerate empirical truth. Singapore is then diagnosed as empirical competence in service of a comfort telos — T- with R+ — so the second arrow fails on the prize specimen.

The ratchet and the fertility inversion can run without a necessary lie: a welfare coalition can compound obligations while the statistics office still publishes real numbers. Once Singapore is allowed to be careful with data and still comfort-seeking, T- → R- is not doing identification work.

Section IV scores the USA as Terminal (present) and section V counts a zero escape rate including that live country; the conclusion says the West is a high-risk zone, not a locked terminal phase, while section IX still says year zero of a 10-year race. A live country cannot be the completed fail and the open window.

Crossover, "terminal" as trajectory, and the decade-as-AGI-race can be different registers. Even then, escape-rate zero counts a still-existing state as a finished case, so irreversibility after crossover fights the claim that reversal is still live.

Rome's named T+ technology is conquest plus Mediterranean integration, a one-time gain. The innovation stall is geography filling up, not abundance-then-comfort. Severan pay raises are then a state paying an army it still needed, filed as preserving power rather than growing capacity.

If the engine was conquest, the stall is a full basin, which every land empire hits. Debasement can still be a fiscal cheat. It does not show that abundance removed the forcing function; the forcing function named in that row was the frontier, and it closed.

Stakeholder franchise qualifies veterans as Guardians. The same section's Rome precedent is that stakeholder franchise failed when soldiers who were beneficiaries controlled emperors. The design uses the capture class from its own specimen as a qualification. Claim-mode is design requirement, not present operation.

Five-year rolling qualification stops a hereditary caste. It does not stop people currently paid by the state from voting on the obligations that pay them. The Praetorian failure was beneficiaries holding the veto, not inheritance.

Parenthood is a different filter from the fiscal ratchet-break. The hardware path says high-capability people have fewer children; counting "raising a child" as qualification weights the franchise toward whoever still reproduces — the later firewall's demographic bet — not a break of obligation growth.

Section V kills Singapore on fertility ~1.0 despite maximum competence, and keeps China "not yet a Hospice" because ~5% GDP growth is not hospice performance. Those are different meters. China's working-age population is already shrinking; if fertility is the hospice test, that row has already failed.