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YouTube star Jack Doherty, 22, was arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Friday after a physical dispute.

Sinema has acknowledged having a romantic relationship with Matthew Ammel but argued that she can’t be sued in North Carolina because she has no connection to the state.

Luke Weaver has an explanation for his struggles since arriving in Pittsburgh.

Laura Cress has the highlights from Gamescom, the biggest gaming convention in the world.

The start of the college football season also means the return of College GameDay.

Emergency crews found “a fully involved hidden subterranean structure.”

Some wondered if Bichette had the arm to make the shift to third base. 

AI Tax Increases Are Like The Tractor Tax Proposals Of Old

Authored by Bruce Thompson via RealClearMarkets,

President Ronald Reagan famously described Washington politicians' solutions to every problem as "if it moves, tax it." That is exactly what many in Washington today want to do with artificial intelligence.

As Wall Street Journal chief economic commentator Greg IP wrote recently, a growing number of experts believe there is "a simple answer to AI job losses." Tax it. His column described a petition signed by 1,000 economists, including 17 Nobel laureates, pleading for higher taxes on AI to prevent "large scale" job losses.

Reagan knew what he was talking about. He grew up in the Midwest in a small town surrounded by farms, and he surely remembered a time when politicians wanted to tax tractors, a new technology driving change. In the early 1900s, the tractor was revolutionizing farming, and politicians were pushing proposals to tax the tractor and prevent the loss of farm jobs. Rep. Willian Connery, a Massachusetts Democrat and Chairman of the House Labor Committee, was a leading advocate of taxing tractors and other labor-saving machines to stop mass unemployment.

The introduction of tractors was the most revolutionary change in our history, affecting millions of jobs and driving millions off the farm. Between 1910 and 1960, nearly 10 million farm workers lost their jobs and 25 million people left their farms for the city. The benefits of the tractor were enormous. Farm production soared, food prices dropped, and the U.S. provided enough food to feed people around the world.

The farm revolution transformed the American economy, creating growth, and increasing prosperity. Millions of farm workers were freed from back-breaking labor and found better jobs in the city. An NBER study called tractors the "engine of growth" and estimated they doubled per-capita GDP and created millions of jobs.

AI promises a bright future of technological and scientific progress, increased productivity, and a more prosperous economy. Like many changes in the past, there are concerns about the impact on jobs. But taxing AI would be just like taxing tractors, a futile knee jerk reaction to change.

Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of terrible tax ideas floating around Washington. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a 50% tax on the equity of AI companies. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have proposed new taxes on data centers. House Democrats have proposed a new tax on AI computing powers, and others have proposed a tax on robots. If it moves, they want to tax it.

None of these tax increases are a good idea. Raising taxes on AI would slow investment, curb innovation, and only help our foreign competitors. Just like a tractor tax, a new AI tax would only slow new technological advances that will benefit everyone.

Rather than taxing AI, Washington should focus on assisting those jobs which have been most affected by automation, such as entry-level jobs. Congress should consider targeted tax incentives for entry-level employment, including payroll tax relief and job training for junior workers. Helping young workers get started is a much better response to the AI revolution than trying to stop it with a tax increase.

Bruce Thompson was a U.S. Senate aide, assistant secretary of Treasury for legislative affairs, and the director of government relations for Merrill Lynch for 22 years.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/04/2026 - 20:55

Level 4 advisory cites widespread kidnapping, terrorism, landmines and other dangers.

Taylor Townsend was told she’d be the next Venus or Serena. She was to be Coco before Coco. 

A.J. Ewing got what interim manager Andy Green called a “reset” Friday, as the rookie center fielder’s season has gone a bit sideways in the second half. 

Despite the field-trip reversal, officials caution the financial problems are far from over.

The probe was launched by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s office and is being led by former New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino, according to multiple outlets. 

Much of Stearns’ time Friday was spent discussing what has gone wrong (plenty) and right (a bit) with the club’s infield. 

Emergency crews rushed to a ritzy San Francisco golf course Friday over a hazmat incident that left one person hospitalized. The SF Fire Department responded to the Presidio Golf & Concordia Club for an incident involving muriatic acid and chlorine, the department said. San Francisco Fire Department crews work at the scene of an active...

Online Betting Adoption Goes Parabolic: First-Timers Triple, Gen Z Overtakes Millennials, And Football Season Hasn't Even Begun

Online betting is off to the races - and this summer the adoption curve started looking like a hockey stick.

According to a new analysis by Bank of America - which can see every ACH, debit and credit card payment its customers make to and from sportsbooks, horse-racing platforms and prediction markets their own customers make: 

• Roughly 5% of BofA customers sent money to an online betting platform in July.
• The number of online bettors is up 40% since the start of the year.
• The number of first-time bettors in June and July was more than triple the January level.

The bank credits the summer spike to the World Cup and "promotions and buzz" around prediction markets, and fair enough: every adoption curve has a catalyst. What matters is what the base looks like once the catalyst passes, and here the seasonal pattern is instructive. First-time users jump with every major sports season, and the 2025 football season - which the bank defines as September through February, so it sweeps in the NFL, college ball and most of the NBA and NHL - produced 22% more first-timers than the year before. Each season enrolls a larger freshman class. The class that enrolled this summer was three times the size of January's, and it arrived right before the busiest stretch of the calendar.

Nor is this something people try once and forget. Per a CivicScience survey cited in the note, 34% of online sports bettors wager weekly and 23% bet daily; fewer than one in five are the several-times-a-year Super Bowl crowd. That is the engagement profile of a social app, not a lottery ticket.

The turning point

By generation, Gen Z (48%) and Millennials (40%) accounted for 88% of online betting activity in July. Gen X managed 9%; Baby Boomers, 3%. And as recently as this spring, Millennials were the larger group. Gen Z overtook them this summer - a shift BofA describes as a "turning point" in the composition of online bettors.

BofA defines Gen Z as anyone born after 1995, which means the oldest members are turning 30 this year and the cohort came of age alongside legal, app-based sports betting. BofA points out that younger consumers have consistently been first to adopt every emerging digital platform - crypto, BNPL, online marketplaces - and that betting appears to be following the same script.

When it comes to income - betting activity is split almost evenly across terciles - 37% lower, 34% middle, 29% higher.

Oh it's investing!

According to a BofA survey conducted in March, 20% of respondents said they consider sports betting a form of investing, with Gen Z twice as likely as everyone else to say so. Across every generation, buying event contracts on a prediction market was more likely to be classified as investing than placing a sportsbook wager.

Prediction markets have listed contracts on almost anything - whether a politician sips water on camera during a speech, how many flu cases the year will bring - dressed in the language of derivatives: standardized, exchange-traded, resolved at a point in time. BofA notes that prediction markets, crypto, retail trading and sports betting all share "community participation and real-time pricing," which is a polite way of saying they share a user interface. To a generation raised on the Fed put, zero-day options and a community tab, a football game is simply another underlying.

And then there's  the red tape...

Naturally, the regulators have noticed - and, naturally, their first move is a jurisdictional fight. The CFTC's position, per BofA's public-policy team, is that certain event contracts traded on federally regulated exchanges are derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act and therefore federal turf. State and tribal regulators counter that contracts tied to sports and entertainment are gambling with extra steps and belong under existing state gaming, licensing and consumer-protection law. Lawmakers from both parties and both chambers have filed bills. The CFTC has also opened a rulemaking on perpetual futures and issued an advisory warning event-contract venues away from sweepstakes-style rewards and prizes "based on pure chance" - the sort of promotional program that helped fill the summer's freshman class - and, per BofA Global Research, is trying to draw a brighter line between prediction markets and sportsbooks by targeting in-house market making, incentive programs and "casino style odds."

None of it slows adoption. Arguing over whether a contract is a "derivative" or a "wager" is an argument over who gets to regulate and tax the growth, not whether the growth happens. By the time the rulebook is written, the users will already be there. Most of them already are.

And it's not even football season yet...

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/04/2026 - 20:30

There’s one understated key to making the marriage work, though.

He has pitched in just one career playoff game, and it came at the end of a blowout last October in the ALDS. 

Rachel Frislid, a 62-year-old grandmother on the brink of retirement, was found unconscious by a family member inside her Sayville home around 8:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Cannabis Gummies Harm Driving Performance Hours After Use, Study Says

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The use of commercially available cannabis edibles impairs people's driving ability, even after several hours of consumption, a study has found.

Published in the JAMA Network Open journal on Aug. 31, the peer-reviewed study looked at simulated driving performance after the consumption of cannabis edibles.

Conducted in a Canadian hospital, the study analyzed data of 40 people aged 19-45 years. They received gummies containing delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis that causes brain-altering effects. Various combinations of THC and placebo edibles were given to achieve four doses of THC exposure - 0 mg, 2 mg, 10 mg, and 20 mg.

The study measured the standard deviation of lateral position (SDLP), which assesses how drivers adjust lane position and is used to evaluate the effects of medicines and illegal drugs.

Researchers found that SDLP was "significantly increased" at 20 mg and 10 mg doses compared with the placebo at two and five hours post-consumption, suggesting greater difficulty in maintaining lane position.

Reaction time and the standard deviation of speed were "negatively influenced" among drivers due to THC exposure, the study said. The individual's willingness to drive was also found to have "significantly decreased" at 20 mg exposure, according to the study.

For the highest dose of 20 mg, whole-blood THC concentrations peaked at 3.4 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL). This falls within the 1 to 5 ng/mL limits for drivers set by some U.S. states.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto highlighted the link between driving impairment and blood THC levels in an Aug. 31 statement.

All peak blood THC concentrations in the study were below or near common thresholds used for roadside enforcement, the statement said. This was true even among those who consumed the highest dose.

"Many people may underestimate the impairment caused by cannabis edibles," Dr. Christine Wickens, co-author of the study, said in the statement. "Our findings show that commonly consumed doses can significantly affect critical driving skills, reinforcing the need for caution when making decisions about driving after use."

The study was funded by a grant from Public Safety Canada. Two authors reported conflicts of interest, including receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies.

In an April 20 statement, the University of Colorado Anschutz also reported similar findings. In these studies, people were made to use a driving simulator before and after consuming cannabis.

Cannabis was found to affect driving performance, especially lane-control measures, such as lane departures and weaving. Inhaling cannabis showed smaller and less consistent changes, while edible cannabis resulted in "more noticeable impairment, including slower speeds and increased lane variability and departures," the statement said.

US Cannabis Reclassification

In the United States, the Trump administration recently reclassified cannabis, or marijuana, under the Controlled Substances Act. On April 23, the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration announced placing some cannabis products under Schedule III of the Act.

Schedule III drugs are deemed to have lower abuse potential and are accepted for medical use. The classification is only applicable to cannabis items approved by the Food and Drug Administration or regulated by a state medical marijuana license.

The American Trucking Associations (ATA) has raised concerns about public safety risks arising from the reclassification.

In an April 24 statement, Brenna Lyles, ATA's vice president of safety policy, highlighted concerns about rescheduling cannabis without proper safeguards to preserve the U.S. Department of Transportation's (USDOT's) testing authority for workers carrying out safety-sensitive jobs.

"Absent clear protections for USDOT's marijuana testing authority, a policy shift could undermine the Department's drug- and alcohol-testing program and weaken highway safety," Lyles said.

"That risk is compounded by the lack of a reliable, widely accepted standard to measure marijuana impairment, whether roadside or before a driver gets behind the wheel."

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/04/2026 - 20:05