Interesting.

Also, Apple reports paying more than this for the 12 months ending in September 2024: $29.749 billion.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q4/FY24_Q4_Consol...

I would love to see the following be factored in if it isn't already:

1. airline ticket holder minutes wasted due to flight delays and cancelations.

2. amount of jet fuel wasted on empty flights for the purpose of keeping gate privileges.

3. money spent attempting to acquire or merge with other airlines and attendant FTC defense preparation.

4. (any and all other wastes of revenue that do not get invested in the consumer and instead are paid by the consumer).

There is more to the story than the price per mile. And that's not even opening the can of worms that is the quality and comfort of the flight for the consumer...

It appears that taking advantage of human imperfections and irrationality are taking up more and more of companies' strategies and time.

You've got folks thinking constantly about advertising, pricing strategies, dark patterns, network effects that prevent or discourage churn, etc., in ways that tend to exploit flaws in the consumer's decisioning process or gaps in their knowledge, to the consumer's disadvantage.

It feels rare to see an actual new valuable product or improvement.

The referenced study is quite the doozy:

> We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group ... to write an essay. We recruited a total of 54 participants...

> We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain activity in order to assess their cognitive engagement and cognitive load, and to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. We performed NLP analysis, and we interviewed each participant after each session. We performed scoring with the help from the human teachers and an AI judge (a specially built AI agent).

> We discovered a consistent homogeneity across the Named Entities Recognition (NERs), n-grams, ontology of topics within each group. EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support...

And then: "...in this study we demonstrate the pressing matter of a likely decrease in learning skills based on the results of our study."

I'm not sure "likely decrease in learning skills" is quite right here.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872v1