“The lesson of the TCP sawtooth is that in an unpredictable and changing environment, pushing things to the point of failure is indeed sometimes the best (or the only) way to use all the resources to their fullest. What matters is making sure that the response to failure is both sharp and resilient. Under AIMD, every connection that isn’t dropping the ball is accelerated until it is—and then it’s cut in half, and immediately begins accelerating again. And though it would violate almost every norm of current corporate culture, one can imagine a corporation in which, annually, every employee is always either promoted a single step up the org chart or sent part of the way back down.”