🦔Delta's CEO said AI will boost profits by 50% by setting a different ticket price for every passenger in real time. The airline uses an AI system called Fetcherr that generates a unique price for each shopping request. Delta told Congress last year it was not using personal data for individualized pricing. Its investor presentation described building toward offers for "you, the individual." Airlines are exempt from FTC pricing oversight.
My Take
This is what AI does for a company like Delta. It doesn't make your flight better or your bag show up faster. It watches how you shop and figures out the most you'll pay before you close the tab. Consumer Reports found Uber and Lyft charging 42% different prices for the same ride at the same time, and the House Oversight Committee found one case where two people got quoted $76 and $24 for the same trip. Delta is building the airline version of that, and every carrier will follow because the economics are too good to pass up.
Walmart told us this week that families are choosing between gas and groceries at $4 a gallon. Delta's answer to those same families is an algorithm that squeezes them for every dollar they have left. Airlines are exempt from FTC pricing rules, state laws are preempted by federal deregulation, and the CEO told Congress one thing while telling investors another. When people ask me where the trillions going into AI actually end up, I think Delta just gave us one of the most honest answers we've gotten.
Hedgie🤗
You could move to New York City.
Rent an 852-square-foot apartment for $5,503 a month.
Blow $500 on three “first dates” a week and somehow remain single for six years.
Finally meet someone you like, then discover they’re “not really looking for anything serious right now.”
Get a master’s degree so you can qualify for an internship.
Apply to 147 jobs, get 93 automated rejections, and finally find an “entry-level” position requiring five years of experience.
Eventually land a six-figure job and still need a roommate to make rent.
Pay federal income tax, New York State income tax, AND New York City income tax because apparently living there is a three-level subscription.
Learn that a “quiet neighborhood” means the sirens only come by every 20 minutes.
Pay $27 every day for a sandwich (no sides) because the place has exposed brick and a handwritten menu.
Take the subway to work every morning and develop the useful skill of pretending not to notice absolutely anything happening around you.
Spend 45 minutes traveling three miles.
Carry your groceries home six blocks because parking near your apartment is more of a philosophical concept than an actual possibility.
Have “owning a washer and dryer” become one of your primary measures of generational wealth.
Walk past a mountain of trash bags on your way to a restaurant with a Michelin star.
Tell your friends back home you don’t need a car while spending $46 on an Uber because the subway is delayed again.
Go to Central Park when you want to remember what trees look like.
Spend your twenties telling everyone you could NEVER live anywhere else.
Then one day you visit your cousin in Iowa.
He has a house with four bedrooms, a garage, a yard, two cars, four kids, and somehow pays less than you do for the apartment where your refrigerator touches your couch.
But hey.
The NYC bagels are incredible.
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
@SantellaCynthia@LionelMedia@RealCandaceO Trying to stay relevant? Being an American hero never loses its relevance. You really should read up on James Earl Ray. Seriously.