Care to gauge?

So this started out with a spellcheck for Gauge, which revealed the following insightful examples:

e.g.1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/14/happiness-index-britain-national-mood

Excuse me? Maybe Britain’s trying to pull a Bhutan and keep the populace happy with media splashes of Prince William’s wedding (though I think Jigme Wanchuk ranks as hotter). BUT gauging Britain’s happiness index to steer government policy sounds like candyfloss for a nation that’s cutting expenditure on education, and on housing benefits, to cleanse the poor from larger cities and get this, paying millions in compensation to nationals unlawfully ‘rendered’ to US prisons and tortured in cooperation with British intelligence. Apparently India intends to imbibe the happiness index. Well, a few are laughing.

e.g.2 http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0408-hance_barometer.html

I’m all for saving biodiversity. However, making overarching catalogues of Species and Their Status such as suggested seem reminiscent of Casaubon’s Dictionary of Mythologies in the Victorian novel, Middlemarch. As an environmentalist, would you be a function of an index/ of change? Why not use that money to fund local, sustainable initiatives to save said species? Mm?

e.g.3 http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgetingk/article/109155/how-to-gauge-your-middle-class-status?mod=bb-budgeting

Wow. I wonder how them middle classes would manage without that one. If one were to say, read and know, the chances of my functioning as an aware member of a nebulous middle class perhaps increase less than that of becoming a function, again…

I think we’re overemphasizing the Metre Gauge and overlooking the Broad Gauge here.