News and notes from around the interweb:
- Only in Vegas: Gratuity, service charge, and tip – all billed separately by Cosmopolitan. Would you like $26 water or to charge your laptop? That’ll be $50.
This Cosmopolitan room service bill with auto gratuity, 22% tip, and $10 service charge is going viral on the "Mildly Infuriating" subreddit. (via /u/redditdanis) pic.twitter.com/Fwh0WSBijY
— Las Vegas Locally (@LasVegasLocally) November 28, 2025
- For your health, you should get out of your plane clothes right away as soon as you arrive at home or at your hotel. (HT: @crucker)
- The Wall Street Journal covers Citi’s messy shut down of people who used a link to apply for Strata Elite that wasn’t intended for them but that wound up very well for the customers (waived annual fee, waived spending requirement to earn the initial bonus). What is strking to me though is this line,
Over the years, banks have closed many workarounds for racking up points, such as a rebate promotion more than two decades ago that let a man claim $25,000 worth of miles by buying $3,140 of pudding
Exsqueeze me, baking powder? Dave Phillips a.k.a. Pudding Guy on FlyerTalk did this with Healthy Choice pudding, no banking products involved, and the story was memorialized in the Adam Sandler / P.T. Anderson film Punch-Drunk Love.
- People will pay a premium for Waymo over Uber. And, it turns out, Uber drivers will take less money not to have to deal with you, too!
There are a variety of reasons for this (Multiple orders at once, older vehicles/worse drivers, etc) but a cute one I’ve seen a many times I’ve used Uber courier is a husband and wife spending time together.
Think about it like a date where you also get paid! https://t.co/y3jEySk2tT
— Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi) November 27, 2025
- U.S. Transportation Secretary wants flights to be a more somber affair. Meanwhile on the other side of the earth:
✈️ Woman boldly asks stranger to get drunk on flight, sparking an unexpected mid-air friendship! Cheers to spontaneous travel moments!
Well, looks like she's taking "mile high club" to a whole new level! https://t.co/JPnPMYgM38 pic.twitter.com/u0umv6Xpws— Dr. CZ (@AngelMD1103) November 27, 2025
- Aerolineas Argentinas is profitable now and “is acquiring 18 new planes (Airbus A330neos and Boeing 737 MAXs), retrofitting its long haul aircraft (including with a new business class), and introducing Wi-Fi throughout the fleet.”
- Yikes in the face of Air India recalcitrance, the U.S. threatened to pull support for the Air India Boeing 787 crash investigation.
The private view among many American government and industry officials is that the evidence so far points to Air India Flight 171’s captain, Sumeet Sabharwal, who died in the event, having deliberately crashed the plane.
…At the crash site, Indian authorities initially wouldn’t let American investigators take their own photos of the wreckage, according to people familiar with the matter. They also moved some of the wreckage before U.S. investigators could examine it.
…U.S. government and industry officials believe the captain likely moved the switches to cut off fuel supply, the Journal has reported. The captain remained calm while the first officer seemed to panic, exclaiming in the final moments, “Oh s—!” according to people familiar with an air-traffic control recording.
My sister and her boyfriend delivered for UberEats for quite a while, mostly as a first-pass “what restaurants might we want to try eating at” screen.
Delivering for UberEats makes something easy that’s otherwise awkward: go hand out for 3-5 minutes in random restaurants, and see what the general vibe is. This is particularly helpful for the sort of random ethnic take-out places that they enjoyed.