In brief - a church in the US asked all their parishioners some questions. From this they concluded the 99% of the US was religious
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, (really), but this could have been from a time in society when 99% of people attended church on Sunday - in general across the population. Then only some were truly religious. So then the sample for the survey would have been extremely, if not totally, similar to sampling from the General Store.
The other was an Australian company with a relatively high unit cost, charged the incoming Production Director to reduce this cost - and he would get a bonus on the result. He managed this by winding up production allowing the cost of the machinery and other fixed costs to be spread over more units. So he got his bonus and moved on
This sounds like shifting costs. I've done a lot of 'effort shifting' in my time. I think about it and when I'm honest with myself, some of my projects have just shifted the effort.
Here's one example: People as me to re-run existing queries (for new date ranges) in SQL every month. At one time there were 50-100 of them, took me 2-4 days each month near the beginning. So I created a tool using Excel VBA, ADO, T-SQL, where they could choose their rerun, choose a clientID, a date range, and run them themselves. I called it "efficiency" but one person called it "effort rebalancing" (they still liked it though).
Fortunately my main term for the tool was "Rerun Self Service", which did honestly pay tribute to the reality that it wasn't really automating the process, it was just providing self service option. Saved me a lot of busywork every month though, and I got famous for the one thing everyone in the companies I work for NEVER believes until I come on the scene---That a combination of Excel/Access, VBA, and T-SQL can be
extremely useful and is not outdated! "Me" not because I am so great, just Me because generally I'm the first person to come along with that combination of stuff in my toolbox.
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