So I built a simple statistical model of the compensation share of national income, one that basically correlates a bunch of variables and then lets you see how variable Y changes when you tweak variable X (see the data note below for details).
Setting the difficulty is no help, it just tweaks the variables.
Tweak one variable every three weeks, and see what increases your click-through rate, the percentage of potential customers who are are clicking on your ad when they see it.
The model means that where once Google had to shut down entire server banks in order to perform service or for other reasons, it can now temporarily tweak another variable like cooling in order to maintain a much higher general level of output, saving time, energy and money.
If you wanted to alter the historical scenario, you could tweak six external variables: inflation, unemployment, G.D.P. growth, war or peace, the mood of the country, and incumbency status.
The earth's ability to constantly tweak all those variables?
If one tweaks a few variables on gilt yields, the Bank's computer spits out a loss of £8bn sometime around 2020.
The best the next London mayor can hope to do, whoever it may be, will be to tweak some of the variables in the hugely complex funding, legal and planning equation that generates new London homes.
And if you can identify and try out some of those variables and tweak them along the way, that can inform much better decisions later on down the road and really advance where everybody is now.
You can tweak one or two variables and see how that affects the system.
