The government enlisted a research team to observe if their new plumbing system caused lead poisoning.

The previous plumbing system saw many affected by sudden lead poisoning, and the government was eager to get rid of the problem, as it was bad for PR. The people involved would be informed and compensated for their participation in the small study of one hundred homes. The research team created the plumbing system, and was ready to put them in. “We don’t want the number of homes affected to exceed five,” the government told them, “If it does, see what you can do to fix it. If you can’t, we’ll reevaluate your involvement in this project.” The research team was motivated and got to work immediately. Soon, the plumbing was in the homes. The observation went well but through a narrow margin. Of the one hundred homes with new plumbing, five saw any evidence of lead poisoning. “Alright,” the government told them, “We’ll move forward with the project. We’d still like to see that rate where it is, preferably lower, when we expand to one thousand homes.” The project continued. The development team tweaked the system, and nine hundred additional homes were given the new plumbing with fair compensation through granted permission. And once again, the team observed the number of homes affected by lead poisoning: five in total. “Amazing!” the government praised, “You’ve gone from five percent lead poisoning to half a percentage point. Keep it up! We’ll be expanding now to a hundred thousand homes.” Once again, the development team tweaked the plumbing, just slightly, and implemented it into the one hundred thousand homes with full compensation and granted permission; here they found only five homes total were affected by lead poisoning. “This is unbelievable,” the government crooned, “These are some of the lowest rates we’ve had for lead poisoning in this area ever. We’ll expand to the whole city and surrounding area, one million homes!” Now, what counted as a home at this point was pretty loose, as many businesses and public spaces were now included in the proceeding tweaking, compensating, and granted permissioning, but nonetheless, there were one million involved “homes” in observation. And once again, there were only five homes with lead poisoning. The government was praised for its effective implementation of a well-designed plumbing system, with a mere five in ten thousand rate of lead poisoning, the lowest in the country. They subsequently pulled the research team in for contractual plumbing design and fairly compensated them for their critically dazzling work. They had only one major request: “Can you see to it that the affected homes are treated personally? We’d like to get that number to zero if we can.” But the research team was frustrated and had no faith they could do it. “How,” they bemoaned, “are we going to make those burnouts quit drinking paint?!”