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Neither government shutdown nor IT outage can stop the merger of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. On Oct. 15, Seattle-based Alaska achieved one of the first major tech milestones of the combination. All new bookings made after that day for travel on either airline took place on Alaskas reservations system, or passenger service system (PSS) in airline parlance. And all existing bookings at Hawaiian after April 22, 2026 were moved over to the platform. This is what Charu Jain, senior vice president of merchandising and innovation at Alaska who is overseeing the guest-facing technology integration of Hawaiian, calls the selling cutover. The idea is that the reservations in Hawaiians PSS will drain out of the system until none are left by the night of April 21, 2026. Alaska will then turn off the Hawaiian system and the combined airline will run entirely on one platform. Simple, right? Not at all. PSS is the heart of the airline, says Jain. Everything guest-facing is connected to the PSS systems. That customer centrality is why getting the PSS cutover right is so important for Alaska, especially as it aspires to become a global competitor to the big U.S. carriers American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. Alaskas $1.9-billion takeover of Hawaiian is premised on the idea that a larger, more expansive airline is a stronger competitor. In its case to regulators, Alaska executives promised more growth and competition as a single larger airline than as two smaller carriers. Federal regulators agreed and signed off on the deal in September 2024 after Alaska committed to certain consumer protections. They include guaranteed free-family seating, not blocking new competitors at the Honolulu airport, and continuing to serve rural small communities in both the state of Alaska and Hawaii. These commitments have not slowed Alaskas integration of Hawaiian. In addition to the selling cutover, the carriers secured a single operating certificate that allows them to fly as one, rather than two, airlines at the end of October. And, in August, they launched a new, combined loyalty program, Atmos. Still, the full PSS cutover in April remains one of the most challenging technical feats of any airline merger. If any portion of the PSS cutover does not go well, it could screw up reservations for hundreds to many thousands of people, says Henry Harteveldt, aviation analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group. The presence of risk is omnipresent to cutovers. Every byte of data, from travelers personal details to whether or not they paid for or are entitled to a checked bag, must move from one platform to another. For Alaska and Hawaiian, that means moving the latter from a platform powered by travel tech company Amadeus to one run by competitor Sabre. One only has to look back to March 2012 when United Airlines cutover to Continental Airliness PSS system for an example of what can go wrong. Travelers faced issues checking in for flights that resulted in long queues, lengthy call center holds and some flight delays that hit its reputation for years after. We want this to be something [travelers are] not anxious about, says Jain. We want it to be a non-event. The stakes for Alaska are even higher today than they were a month ago after two tech-related disruptions. On Oct. 23, an IT outage forced the airline to cancel more than 400 flights and then, on Oct. 29, a global outage of the Microsoft Azure system affected both the Alaska and Hawaiian websites. The airline has engaged Accenture to conduct a full top-to-bottom audit of technology to avoid future IT-related disruptions. Jain says Alaska is already implementing recommendations from the audit that is expected to wrap in a few weeks time. Savanthi Syth, an airline analyst at Raymond James who has observed several airline mergers including Alaskas combination with Virgin America in 2016, says the October issues should not affect the PSS cutover. They are using a well-established practice of drawing down bookings on the Hawaiian system, she says. This means there will be very few if any bookings left on the Hawaiian system when the cutover happens, minimizing disruptions. There is a very good reason to believe Alaska can pull this off without a hitch: It has done it before, successfully using the drain-down approach to the PSS cutover with Virgin America. Amy Burr, the CEO of Sky VC who led the integration of Virgin America into Alaska at the former before leaving the airline in 2018, says draining down reservations in the smaller airlines PSS dramatically derisks the cutover. The Virgin America combination provided Alaska with the muscle memory to execute future mergers like with Hawaiian, she adds, noting that she is not involved in the current process. Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska, told investors last December that one reason they were confident in their ability to carry off a smooth merger was because the majority of people who executed the Virgin American integration are [still] here. Alaska is still not taking any chances. The airline plans a number of table-top trials of the cutover before April to make sure it has worked out all of the details, says Jain. At least one mock flight is planned for testers to do everything from check-in to boarding and finding their seat using the combined platform to ensure everything goes smoothly. And, Alaska will reduce its schedule on April 21 and 22 a Tuesday and Wednesday to reduce possible strain on the system. Alaska will also set up a command center in Honolulu Hawaiians largest base to oversee the cutover. The process, so far, appears to be going smoothly with no notable hiccups during the selling cutover or move to a single certificate. For us, the biggest honor, the biggest compliment we can get is silence, says Rodrigo Ramos, the regional general manager of North America at Sabre.
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E-Commerce
Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissionsand global temperatures with themkeep rising. When it seems like were getting nowhere, its useful to step back and examine the progress that has been made. Lets take a look at the United States, historically the worlds largest greenhouse gas emitter. Over those three decades, the U.S. population soared by 28% and the economy, as measured by gross domestic product adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. Yet U.S. emissions from many of the activities that produce greenhouse gasestransportation, industry, agriculture, heating and cooling of buildingshave remained about the same over the past 30 years. Transportation is a bit up; industry a bit down. And electricity, once the nations largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has seen its emissions drop significantly. Overall, the U.S. is still among the countries with the highest per capita emissions, so theres room for improvement, and its emissions havent fallen enough to put the country on track to meet its pledges under the 10-year-old Paris climate agreement. But U.S. emissions are down about 15% over the past 10 years. Heres how that happened. U.S. electricity emissions have fallen U.S. electricity use has been rising lately with the shift toward more electrification of cars, and heating and cooling and expansion of data centers, yet greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are down by almost 30% since 1995. One of the main reasons for this big drop is that Americans are using less coal and more natural gas to make electricity. Both coal and natural gas are fossil fuels. Both release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they are burned to make electricity, and that carbon dioxide traps heat, raising global temperatures. But power plants can make electricity more efficiently using natural gas compared with coal, so it produces less emissions per unit of power. Why did the U.S. start using more natural gas? Research and technological innovation in fracking and horizontal drilling have allowed companies to extract more oil and gas at a lower cost, making it cheaper to produce electricity from natural gas rather than coal. As a result, utilities have built more natural gas power plantsespecially super-efficient combined cycle gas power plants, which produce power from gas turbines and also capture waste heat from those turbines to generate more power. More coal plants have been shutting down or running less. Because natural gas is a more efficient fuel than coal, it has been a win for the climate in comparison, even though its a fossil fuel. The U.S. has reduced emissions from electricity as a result. Significant improvements in energy efficiency, from appliances to lighting, have also played a role. Even though tech gadgets seem to be recharging everywhere all the time today, household electricity use, per person, plateaued over the first two decades of the 2000s after rising continuously since the 1940s. Costs for renewable electricity, batteries fall U.S. renewable electricity generationincluding wind, solar, and hydro powerhas nearly tripled since 1995, helping to further reduce emissions from electricity generation. Costs for solar and wind power have fallen so much that they are now cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas. Fourteen states, including most of the Great Plains, now get at least 30% of their power from solar, wind, and battery storage. While wind power has been cost-competitive with fossil fuels for at least 20 years, solar photovoltaic (PV) power has only been competitive with fossil fuels for about 10 years. So expect deployment of solar PV to continue to increase, both in the U.S. and internationally, evn as U.S. federal subsidies disappear. Both wind and solar provide intermittent power: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. There are a number of ways utilities are dealing with this. One way is to use demand management, offering lower prices for power during off-peak periods or discounts for companies that can cut their power use during high demand. Virtual power plants aggregate several kinds of distributed energy resourcessolar panels on homes, batteries, and even smart thermostatsto manage power supply and demand. The U.S. had an estimated 37.5 gigawatts of virtual power plants in 2024, equivalent to about 37.5 nuclear power reactors. Another energy management method is battery storage, which is just now beginning to take off. Battery costs have come down enough in the past few years to make utility-scale battery storage cost-effective. What about driving? In the U.S., gasoline consumption has remained roughly constant, but fuel efficiency has generally improved over the decades. Sales of electric vehicles, which could cut emissions more, have been slow, however. Some of this could be due to the success of fracking: U.S. petroleum production has increased, and gasoline and diesel prices have remained relatively low. People in other countries are switching to electric vehicles more rapidly than in the U.S. as the cost of EVs has fallen. Chinese consumers can buy an entry-level EV for under US$10,000 in China with the help of government subsidies, and the country leads the world in EV sales. In 2024, people in the U.S. bought 1.6 million EVs, and global sales reached 17 million, up 25% from the year before. The unknowns ahead: What about data centers? The construction of new data centers, in part to serve the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, is drawing a lot of attention to future energy demand and to the uncertainty ahead. Data centers are increasing electricity demand in some locations, such as northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, and Atlanta. The future electricity demand growth from data centers is still unclear, though, meaning the effects of data centers on electric rates and power system emissions are also uncertain. However, AI is not the only reason to watch for increased electricity demand: The U.S. can expect growing electricity demand for industrial processes and electric vehicles, as well as for the overall transition from using oil and gas for heating and appliances to using electricity that continues across the country. Valerie Thomas is a professor of industrial engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre. Certainly a headline designed to draw ire from many readers, myself included. The author advocates ruthlessly optimizing your time, from missing important events with loved ones to declining social events. The goal? In his case, he built a company worth $20 million and set himself up with financial freedom for the rest of his life. My gut reaction was, Thats no way to live a life. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I poured all of my energy and time into my job. I wore the badge of long hours and unlimited availability, replying to emails long into the evening as I worked on projects. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Then I had kids. I began working remotely. In no way did this keep me mediocre. In fact, Id argue that work-life balance improved my career. Learning to focus my impact If you think you have 100 hours to work each week, youll undoubtedly find ways to fill 100 hours. When I became a parent, my extra time disappeared. I couldnt reliably work outside of business hours. Even my work within business hours changed, since small children are frequently sick or school is closed for various holidays. I became brutally efficient with my time. I learned to think of my work in terms of the results it produced, not the hours I put in. I advocated for better apps and tools at the company that could help the entire team do more with less time. I taught myself how to use automation tools to keep tasks humming in the background. Work smarter, not harder became my mantra. I wasnt willing to sacrifice time with my family or a career Id worked hard to build. I had to figure out how to get more done with less effort so I could enjoy a balance between work and life outside of work. Learning adaptability and empathy Being a parent taught me to be more adaptable. Kids dont wait for your schedule. They dont conform to your ideal workday. You have to pivot quickly to Plan B when Plan A fails. I became a manager early in my career, and Im now embarrassed to say that I was a very rigid thinker. I couldnt understand when life got in the way of work. I assumed that other people were bad at managing their time. Having kids made me more empathetic. I saw how life outside of workeven for reasons unrelated to childrenhappened, and deserved compassion. I wasnt mediocre by being more adaptable and empathetic. I became more human. The entire team benefited from flexibility. As a manager, I let my team know that I trusted them to get work done, without micromanaging oversight. And if something unexpected came up, we would adjust. Leading by example At work, people take cues from other employees, especially those senior to them. If a company claims to be flexible but your manager sends Slack messages while on vacation, its a pretty good indicator that you shouldnt expect any work-life balance. Or how about the job that provides zero coverage when you take time off? You return to a pile of work and spend the next week working extra hours to catch up. Not exactly restful if youre punished for taking time off with more work. The more I embraced work-life balance, the more my team followed suit. If my kids were sick (or I was sick), I took the day off. I took fully unplugged vacations during the year and encouraged others to do the same. We set up internal systems so that anyone taking time off had adequate coverage. Most importantly, my kids have seen how much I prioritize work-life balance. Im there to pick them up from after-school activities. They know that being sick means resting and recovering, not pushing through. When my son was little, someone asked, What do you want to be when you grow up? He responded, I want to work from home. It was a proud moment for me, because I knew that my efforts to model work-life balance were paying off. Do I have a multimillion-dollar business, like the author of Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre? No. But his priorities are just that: his prioritiesnot a universal truth. Pursuing work-life balance is a worthwhile career goal. Dont let anyone tell you otherwise. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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