Daily Archives: 20 May 2026

Not a Chance

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In an article about the future of travel coming to us in just 20 years, this prediction jumped out at me. From Scott Fleming, Aon‘s Director Aon Travel Practice:

My [AI travel booking] agent will know the places I like, it will have insight into my finances, my budget, my risk tolerances, all my preferences from the kind of room I like to my pillow type[.]

As British royal butlers and secretaries and other staffers, royal and commoner, British or elsewhere, routinely demonstrate, not even personal staff can be trusted with such personal information in such quantities and breadth. I’m certainly not going to trust a robot or other software package with all that information.

Government Union Extortion

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Five unions that operate the New York State-owned (through the Metropolitan Transit Authority) Long Island Rail Road went on strike—all 3,500 members—and stranded 300,000 residents, keeping from their jobs and errands. The strike lasted 3 days before the government capitulated and gave (I assume; the agreement parameters remain unreleased to the public) what these public unions demanded.

Never mind the baseline from which those union members were proceeding.

At $49.92 in wages before overtime, a Long Island Railroad engineer makes $103,000 per year. Even in an upscale city like Plano, Texas, on a relative cost of living basis, that works out to an equivalent annual income of $66,000 to live in Plano.

Significantly, the cost of commuting to/from work in Plano is more than 50% cheaper than in LIRR’s New York.

Yet the city allows this extortion to punish its residents because, well, the LIRR unions are all public unions, which is to say, run by the city.