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AI models designed to closely simulate a person’s voice are making it easier for bad actors to mimic loved ones and scam vulnerable people out of thousands of dollars, The Washington Post reported.
Quickly evolving in sophistication, some AI voice-generating software requires just a few sentences of audio to convincingly produce speech that conveys the sound and emotional tone of a speaker’s voice, while other options need as little as three seconds. For those targeted—which is often the elderly, the Post reported—it can be increasingly difficult to detect when a voice is inauthentic, even when the emergency circumstances described by scammers seem implausible.
Tech advancements seemingly make it easier to prey on people’s worst fears and spook victims who told the Post they felt “visceral horror” hearing what sounded like direct pleas from friends or family members in dire need of help. One couple sent $15,000 through a bitcoin terminal to a scammer after believing they had spoken to their son. The AI-generated voice told them that he needed legal fees after being involved in a car accident that killed a US diplomat.
Billionaires have found one more way to funnel our tax dollars into their bank accounts: sports stadiums. And if we don’t play ball, they’ll take our favorite teams away.
Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion-dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.
A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl: State Farm Stadium.
That’s where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was finally built after billionaire team owner Michael Bidwill and his family spent years hinting that they would move the Cards out of Arizona if the team didn’t get a new stadium. Their blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying over two thirds of the $455 million construction tab.
And State Farm Stadium is not unique. It’s part of a well established playbook.
Here’s how stadiums stick the public with the bill.
Step 1: Billionaire buys a sports team.
Just about every NFL franchise owner has a net worth of over a billion dollars — except for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned by half a million cheeseheads.
The same goes for many franchise owners in other sports. Their fortunes don’t just help them buy teams, but also give them clout — which they cash-in when they want to get a great deal on new digs for their team.
Step 2: Billionaire pressures local government.
Since 1990, franchises in major North American sports leagues have intercepted upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer funds from state and local governments to build stadiums.
And the funding itself is just the beginning of these sweetheart deals.
Sports teams often get big property tax breaks and reimbursements on operating expenses, like utilities and security on game days. Most deals also let the owners keep the revenue from naming rights, luxury box seats, and concessions — like the Atlanta Braves’ $150 hamburger.
Even worse, these deals often put taxpayers on the hook for stadium maintenance and repairs.
We taxpayers are essentially paying for the homes of our favorite sports teams, but we don’t really own those homes, we don’t get to rent them out, and we still have to buy expensive tickets to visit them.
Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth from which we’ll all benefit. But numerous studies have shown that this is false.
As a University of Chicago economist aptly put it, “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”
But what makes sports teams special is they are one of the few realms of collective identity we have left.
Billionaires prey on the love that millions of fans have for their favorite teams.
This brings us to the final step in the playbook: Threaten to move the team.
Obscenely rich owners threaten to — or actually do — rip teams out of their communities if they don’t get the subsidies they demand.
Just look at the Seattle Supersonics. Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz owned the NBA franchise but failed to secure public funding to build a new stadium. So the coffee magnate sold the team to another wealthy businessman who moved it to Oklahoma.
The most egregious part of how the system currently works is that every dollar we spend building stadiums is a dollar we aren’t using for hospitals or housing or schools.
We are underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford.
So, instead of spending billions on extravagant stadiums, we should be investing taxpayer money in things that improve the lives of everyone — not just the bottom lines of profitable sports teams and their owners.
Because when it comes to stadium deals, the only winners are billionaires.
Last September, a longtime Las Vegas journalist named Jeff German was shot and killed. The person charged in his death is a public official German investigated. There were other investigations German hadn’t completed when he was murdered, including one about a Ponzi scheme. Reporter Lizzie Johnson picked up where he left off, reporting a story about a scam that, as scams so often do, enriched a few at the expense of many:
Jager had told Mabeus about the opportunity to make money in August 2019, during a couples trip to Mexico, she said. She felt flattered to be included.
“We were a little nervous, but we trusted him,” Mabeus said. “Because we were friends and belonged to the same church, the red flags were heart-shaped. I was like, ‘Wow. We are really lucky to be involved in this investment.’”
The next month, she and her husband wired over $140,000. Ninety days later, the first interest payment of $18,000 arrived, right on time. The couple continued adding money, until they reached a total of $680,000, she said.
“There was never a hiccup,” Mabeus said. “My bishop was involved and invested, and so were my closest friends. A lot of people were told to keep it quiet.”
When she and her husband, a former Major League Baseball pitcher who worked for a medical device company, divorced in June 2021, Mabeus agreed to take the investment as alimony. She planned to rely on the dividends, along with child support payments, to remain at home with her daughter and three sons. A former elementary school teacher, she hadn’t worked for 13 years.
Now, Mabeus hung up the phone, horrified.
She tried to call Jager. No answer.
“Word is spreading like wildfire,” Mabeus remembered. “People are texting left and right. No one is getting responses.”
Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding, she thought. She told herself that she’d know for sure the next day, when the quarterly interest payment was scheduled to hit her bank account.
But when Friday arrived, the money didn’t. All her savings, Mabeus realized, were gone.
Armed with a handy metaphor, Jesús Rodríguez braves the misery that is The Scrum Waiting Outside George Santos’ Office — and comes out with a gonzo-lite chronicle of futility and fuckery. Just burn it all to the ground, please.
But consider this last remaining donut. Deconstruct it, for a second, from the outside in. The glaze: a gooey, cloudy substance that varnishes the ring of cake, pure glucose soon to strike the palate. Then, the cake itself: yeast and enriched wheat flour and palm oil and more sugar, congealing and forcing one’s salivary glands to go into overdrive. Thirty-three grams of carbohydrates that fuel a sugar rush but leave your hunger totally unsated. At the literal center of it, a hole — emptiness.
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