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Semafor • 5 days ago

AI price war begins

Users are increasingly looking for value as well as capability.

New Republic • 5 days ago

The Gambling Scandal That’s Roiling the NCAA

Sports are governed by rules. Those rules separate a ball from a strike, a fumble from an incomplete pass, and foul balls from a fair. Without rules, sporting events are nothing more than random people getting some exercise. And without people to enforce those rules, there is no integrity, no fairness, and no genuine competition.By those standards, college sports is currently the world’s most lucrative workout club. A state judge in Texas ordered the NCAA earlier this month to reinstate Brendan Sorsby, a quarterback at Texas Tech University who has admitted to placing bets at sportsbooks on, among other things, his own team at a previous school.The NCAA had refused to reinstate Sorsby while it conducts an investigation into the scope of his gambling policy violations. He then sought a temporary injunction that would allow him to continue playing in 2026 and “clarify” his status before he would have to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft later this summer. The judge sided with Sorsby; the NCAA has vowed to appeal.Sorsby’s case is far from the only legal battle that the NCAA has found itself in in recent years. But the lawsuit speaks volumes about the constitutional crisis in which collegiate athletics now finds itself—and the shortcomings of the NCAA’s solutions. As long as it resists treating athletes like workers, these problems will only get worse.The most recent crisis for college sports began in April when Texas Tech announced that Sorsby, who had transferred there from the University of Cincinnati in January, had entered an inpatient treatment facility for gambling addiction. NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from placing bets on collegiate or professional sports.Sorsby is far from the first athlete to be embroiled in a gambling scandal since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and paved the way for its widespread legalization by states. But his case may be the most egregious one on record.According to court documents filed in May, Sorsby wagered more than $90,000 on online sportsbooks over a four-year period. He used accounts registered to friends and family members to evade detection by sportsbooks and school officials. His claims of addiction are also hard to dispute: In an 18-month span while attending Indiana University, for example, he reportedly placed a minimum of 2,900 bets on various sports.“It became a habit for me to bet,” Sorsby told the NCAA in a statement, according to ESPN. “My betting became a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps. I lost complete control of my addiction. I now realize the apps controlled me and I did not control them.”The news outlet reported that Sorsby placed at least 40 bets on Indiana University football while playing for the school. The bets were small amounts—ranging from a single dollar to slightly more than $100—but each represents a massive ethical breach. While major sports leagues have adopted a wide range of rules on sports betting over the past few years, none of them allow players to bet on their own sport, let alone their own team.According to court documents reviewed by The Athletic, Sorsby also claimed that he had “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.” At the time, he noted, he was on Indiana’s scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart” and “no reasonable chance that I would play.” Sorsby reportedly claimed that he had never used nonpublic information when placing the bets—which is both unverifiable and extremely hard to believe.None of this mattered under the most recent version of the NCAA’s ban on sports betting by student-athletes. Current rules prohibits student-athletes from placing bets on any sport that the NCAA sponsors, even at the amateur or professional level. The NCAA voted last November to restore its ban on betting in professional sports after federal prosecutors charged multiple NBA players and coaches for their alleged roles in illegal gambling operations.NCAA athletes who violate the organization’s gambling policy can face permanent loss of eligibility. Under NCAA rules, Texas Tech declared Sorsby ineligible after the NCAA opened its investigation into him in April. The school claimed the right to request Sorsby’s reinstatement to restore that eligibility on his behalf. In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA in May, Sorsby claimed that he faced imminent and irreparable harm if the organization did not reach a decision on his eligibility soon. The deadline to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft is later this month, which would be his last chance to play in the league for its 2026 season. If the NCAA does not reach a decision until after that deadline, Sorsby argued, he could face the loss of both his final year in college football and an entire year in professional football.Judge Ken Curry agreed and granted Sorsby’s request for a temporary injunction, concluding that he was likely to prevail at trial. Curry also scheduled the trial date for February 8, 2027—two weeks after the 2026 college football season ends. As a result, even if the NCAA were to ultimately prevail on the merits, Sorsby will already be out of college athletics. (The judge, for the record, did not attend Texas Tech as an undergraduate or as a law student.)Legal disputes between the NCAA and college athletes aren’t uncommon. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss successfully challenged the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility, for example, in Mississippi state court earlier this year. But the Sorsby ruling struck the college sports landscape like a thunderbolt because it called into question the NCAA’s basic ability to sanction players for egregious policy violations.“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome—which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the organization said in a statement after the ruling was issued.The university is not a party to Sorsby’s lawsuit, but has expressed a strong interest in having him play in the upcoming season. Sorsby was among the most highly sought players in the transfer portal this spring. Texas Tech struck a NIL deal with him in January that could bring the fifth-year quarterback roughly $5 million for one season of play.“I’ve heard the word ‘integrity’ used a great deal in the last 48 hours,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement on Wednesday. “As someone who has dedicated his career to college sports, I, too, believe integrity is central to our industry’s success. I also think integrity applies on more than one front. The integrity of sport matters. So does the integrity of how we treat a 22-year-old who sought help, entered residential treatment, and is working every day toward recovery. These two things don’t have to be in conflict.”Hocutt’s voice appears to be a solitary one. There are widespread reports that other schools and conferences may try to collectively punish Texas Tech for the scandal by refusing to schedule games against them at all levels, effectively freezing its athletics program out of competitions. Texas Tech has responded by threatening to pursue litigation if the other schools try to hold the school accountable for enabling Sorsby’s tactics.College football coaches and officials were openly horrified by the prospect that a court would require a player who admitted to betting on his own team to play in the upcoming season. “As someone who grew up reading about the Black Sox Scandal, and seeing what happened to Pete Rose and just understanding how bright that line seemed to be in all of American sports, I’m stunned that there would be a question at the court level that this is acceptable,” Scott Stricklin, the athletic director for the University of Florida, told ESPN.It is hard to not draw comparisons to baseball’s own gambling scandals, which had a seismic impact on the sport itself and led to fundamental changes in how it operates. The Black Sox scandal, in which several Chicago White Sox players helped gamblers fix the 1919 World Series, led Major League Baseball to create a commissioner’s office with far-reaching powers to regulate the sport’s integrity.Baseball had other advantages that the NCAA lacks. Thanks to a controversial 1922 Supreme Court ruling, Major League Baseball enjoys a free-standing exemption to federal antitrust law. Other major sports leagues are also exempt from antitrust law to some degree by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows teams to collectively negotiate television deals without fear of anticompetitive charges. The NCAA, on the other hand, has faced a decade of legal struggles precisely because it lacks an exemption. The greatest blow came in 2021 when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision that found some of the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law. That ruling opened the door to the NIL era, where players can be compensated semi-indirectly for the use of their name, image, and likeness rights. During oral arguments and in the ruling itself, justices sharply castigated the NCAA for its long-standing opposition to compensating players while reaping millions of dollars in profits from their labor.“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”The NCAA evaded legal scrutiny for so long for a variety of reasons, but at least partly through sheer inertia and its byzantine structure. While the NCAA has a governing board and a president—currently Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts—it is also a largely decentralized organization. Individual schools wield significant power through the various conferences that also oversee college sports, like the Southeastern Conference and the misleadingly named Big Ten Conference. Many of those schools are also public universities, which means they are governed directly by state governments to varying degrees.As a result, it is hard to even describe the NCAA as a sports “league” in any meaningful sense. One crucial difference between NCAA sports and professional leagues is the absence of collective bargaining, which sets ground rules between players and owners. Instead, college athletes are free to accept NIL money and transfer almost at will. Sorsby, for example, is currently facing a lawsuit from the University of Cincinnati over a $1 million exit fee in his NIL contract that the quarterback has not yet paid since refusing to play in last year’s bowl game and transferring to Texas Tech.To “save” college sports from the daunting threats of antitrust enforcement and a robust market for athlete compensation, the NCAA and colleges are doing something unthinkable these days: asking Congress to pass legislation. One bipartisan proposal, the Protect College Sports Act, was drafted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell. It would impose new restrictions on transfers and eligibility that strongly favor schools and constrain student-athletes.Some of college athletics’ top voices, such as former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban, embraced the bill earlier this month during Senate hearings. But significant obstacles remain. The SEC—the conference, not the financial regulator—and the Big Ten said they opposed the bill, in statements earlier this week. Though their reasoning was vague, the bill would prevent conferences from breaking away from the NCAA to form a more lucrative “super league” of top schools. It would require them to potentially share more broadcast revenue with other schools.The NCAA also has not yet endorsed the bill. ESPN’s Dan Murphy noted last month that it lacks one of the organization’s main demands: to bar athletes from being classified as employees, which could open the door to collective bargaining. It would be fitting if the NCAA missed out on vital legal protections because it wanted to preserve its original sin of uncompensated labor.A collective-bargaining agreement would’ve been helpful in the Sorsby case. When major-league players cheat and gamble, they are punished by the procedures laid out in their collective-bargaining agreements, with no role for meddling state judges to override things. Saban lamented during this week’s hearing that “right now in college football we have no rules.” He’s right, but it may be even more accurate to say that the NCAA hasn’t been playing by any rules all along.

New Republic • 5 days ago

I Moved to New York to Pay More in Taxes—and I’m Glad I Did

At last week’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias, the longtime blogger turned centrist Substacker, moderated a panel with two Democratic members of Congress from big blue states—Tom Suozzi, who represents part of Long Island, New York, and Adam Gray, who hails from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He ended up making a remark that immediately struck me. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week. “The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the information needed to make informed comparisons.My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values. Even if it meant paying more.It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train station with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provides to those in need better.Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.

New Republic • 5 days ago

Trump Hits Record-Breaking Low in Polls as Aides Leak: He’s “Furious”

Donald Trump’s polling just crashed to new lows. He’s hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points in numerous surveys, something no other president has done—ever. Trump also is at 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. And this is the first time Democrats have led Republicans on inflation since the 1970s. It’s no accident that this comes as sources around Trump tell CNN that he’s “furious” because the media didn’t make his latest Iran bombing look strong and powerful. These stories are linked: His failure to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is causing the very cost spikes that are tanking his approval and his party’s chances in the midterms. We talked to Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has extensive experience in midterms. She explains how Trump’s travails are translating into new pickup opportunities in surprising places, parses a new poll showing Democrats up 10 in the generic House matchup, and explains why 2026 reminds her of Democratic routs in 2006 and 2018. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.