Irregulars
Note: Thanks for everyone's patience as I get acclimated to the new system. This week's newsletter should be coming from the right place, and hopefully land in your inboxes. If you're having any issues or have any comments about the changeover more generally please send them to mail@scammerdarkly.com.
Immigration
It pains me to acknowledge that we have once again entered a familiar and acutely unbearable period in our national discourse - presidential election season. This year, with only the GOP nomination up for grabs, candidates trotted out a laundry list of petty grievances the party has chosen to center itself around, aping its Complainer in Chief. Unfortunately for most of them, grabbing planks from the fever swamps of the Online Right hasn't resonated with voters.
One issue does hold sway with not only ardent Republicans but self-styled Independents as well: immigration. A plurality of Americans 'disapprove' of the Biden administration's handling of immigration and the Mexican border. Unlike culture war grievances, the right has made hay with the country's shameful treatment of migrants entering from Central and South America.
It is an important distinction, because Americans hold far more positive views towards immigrants as a concept. An overwhelming 68% think immigration is a good thing, and while there are concerns about the vague concepts of 'crime' and 'the economy', the number of Americans who think immigrants are coming to take their jobs has declined significantly in the last two decades. They do characterize the 'situation at the Mexican border' as either a crisis or a major problem, however. Why?
All the available data on immigrants indicates they are less likely to commit crimes, create more jobs than they take, do better in school, and pay their taxes even while receiving no benefits. So why on earth are we constantly hearing about the government spending billions to deal with the people trying to enter our Southern border? It makes sense that our cop-obsessed government would dump funding on CBP to apprehend people attempting illegal crossings, but why are legal ones causing such issues, if those migrants are positive contributors to the country?
One glaring problem is that migrants cannot work for long periods of time after entering the US. Asylum seekers must wait six months to receive a work permit, and delays for green card applicants can take even longer. Many of the poorest migrants enter through the Mexican border, and they are expected to find a place to live for half a year or more, with no income, while the government spins its wheels processing their paperwork.
This is why we hear about border towns in Texas overwhelmed with migrants - feds will often release these people post-processing with no money, no job prospects, and nowhere to go. It's why NYC's mayor claims the migrants bussed into the city will cost billions. We've got tens of thousands of migrants stuck in legal limbo, unable and in fact prohibited by law from earning their keep - if they're caught working, they could be deported and lose their chance at legal status.
Much of this stems from laws passed in the 80s and 90s, and in recent years immigration has become such a radioactive issue for the cowards in Congress that even bipartisan attempts to make life easier for asylum seekers have gone nowhere.
It is a perfect encapsulation of the American legislative and administrative state that we have outdated laws actively costing us billions a year and inflicting untold human misery on millions of people whose only crime was trying to enter this country legally. We have record low unemployment and companies begging for the sort of basic service and industry labor these migrants could provide, and our government insists on lengthy waiting periods, forcing them into shelters or onto the streets of places where they're treated worse than animals.
A primary reason these laws remain so immutable is, of course, that the Republican party knows immigration is one of the few issues where its policies resonate with voters. Its governors and mayors demonize immigrants along the border, whipping their cruelest voters into a blood frenzy with each new set of bodies floating in a river or tangled in razor wire. They proudly display videos of desperate families camped out in the dirt to show how utterly broken our immigration system is - one they refuse to fix.
Nor is this a uniquely American problem - the Tories have passed draconian work requirement laws in post-Brexit England to force out the few skilled immigrant laborers they haven't already scared off. Macron caved to right-wing zealots in French parliament to pass immigration restrictions that Marie fucking Le Pen celebrated as a victory.
Embattled politicians or opposition parties trying to gain power can easily demonize a certain type of immigrant to gin up racial resentment among a large enough portion of a certain type of voter and pass punitive laws popular with the type of loud, unpleasant person they encounter online or at political events. The reality is that even in these divisive times, people like immigrants, and the concept of immigration more broadly, but the quiet majority has no say in matter. Meanwhile, Western countries continue to use desperate migrants as political pawns, forcing them into perpetual instability and humiliation in the name of the only type of racism you can discuss openly in polite company.
AI
Another week, another raft of stories about our utterly idiotic AI future. What industries is this half-baked technology disrupting now?
Turns out, if you feed an entire book into an AI tool, it will spit out a mangled version of said book that makes no sense. This would be a problem if you were trying to, I don't know, become a celebrated author by cribbing the works of your contemporaries. But if your goal was to rip off authors and sell scam versions of their books on Amazon, you'd be in great shape:
Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.
Is it a little funny that Mitchell's book was titled Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans? Yes, absolutely, but it also really sucks that authors are now in charge of policing the largest e-commerce site in the country which, ironically, began as a cut-rate bookstore, to remove pirated works run through a shitty AI bot.
Nor does the AI rot on Amazon end there. Companies using ChatGPT to mass-generate listings for Amazon's marketplace has spawned another grimly funny phenomenon:
Ahhhhhh, I love it. So much to unpack - the number of drawers, the lack of assembly required. I have never been more afraid for human jobs like 'looking at a photo of a filing cabinet and writing a two sentence description of it' which, if I'm being honest, should be the kind of brain-paralyzing work we should have figured out how to automate a decade ago, but here we are.
Elsewhere, Google continues to rip off journalists by indexing and boosting AI-generated chum in its Google News feeds. We've talked about Google's embrace of AI content, which would seem to fly in the face of its professed mission of providing relevant, topical information to searchers. Of course, the company long ago abandoned its principles in favor of shoving the maximal number of ads into your eyeballs, a thing they can do with impunity because they've also spent decades conspiring to lock competitors out of the Finding Stuff Online business.
And while AI is lousy at recreating original works or writing product descriptions, it is extremely good at terrifying worried parents:
“It was my son’s voice on the phone crying, telling me ‘Mom, mom, I’ve been in a car accident!’ ’’ Trapp said. Instantly, she felt rising panic. Images of her son Will, away at college on California’s Central Coast, flashed through her mind: him lying on the side of the road in a pool of blood, or trapped in an overturned car.
Nor do the dangers of voice imitation end there - enterprising scammers have taken to YouTube with AI clones of celebrities to trick seniors out of their money:
Many of the ads rely on AI voice cloning paired with decontextualized video of the celebrity, while others play a short, real clip of a celebrity, then pivot to the scam with a different actor or voice clone after grabbing a user’s attention. Other ads don’t have celebrities in them at all but direct to the same scam websites and are being posted by the same advertiser.
The ads direct to websites offering some version of “Relief Direct Aid.” This is a type of scam that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has warned about: “Scammers steal money from the public through fake HHS websites and social media schemes … by offering fake HHS grants,” HHS wrote about the scam.
AI authors will sell you mangled versions of your favorite books on Amazon, while AI scammers use your child's voice to plead for bail money, which you can offset by going to the site AI Steve Harvey insists will help you get obscure government grants. You might be wise to these scams if you've read the latest post on I'm Sorry But I Cannot Fulfill This Request-News, but maybe you missed it, buried beneath a bunch of ads for filing cabinets.
Fanatics
I am not an active fan of American sports, having shifted my loyalties instead to a handful of European (and UK) soccer clubs who find new and delightfully continental ways to upset me. Nor was I, when I was an avid American sports fan, the type of person who'd buy team merch. Until recently, I was only vaguely aware of a company called Fanatics, which if you'd asked me a few years ago I might have confused with the company that makes giant stickers to put on your wall.
But now, like many sports-enjoying Americans, I have become involuntarily aware of Fanatics because its founder is very wealthy and very conspicuous with said wealth, which has made him famous in the way film agents or overbearing basketball dads are famous; proximity to talent.
What Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics has done - aside from inserting himself into more star-studded Instagram posts than should be possible for a schlubby Philly Jew who started an e-commerce logistics company in the 90s - is aggressively take over the sports apparel and paraphernalia world.
This means that if you are buying 'authentic' American sports gear in the year 2024 (or 2023!) you are most likely buying from Fanatics. Fanatics operates the official NBA and NFL stores, sells NHL hats and jerseys, MLB gear and baseball cards (it recently bought Topps), MLS jerseys and merchandise, Formula One stuff, a bunch of European soccer team merch (ugh), and more.
Basically, Rubin's approach to sports licensing has been to offer leagues aggressively priced deal packages, and offering to take over their entire e-commerce operation and streamline it. This is, understandably, attractive to the sports leagues, who would prefer to worry about the sports and less about supply chains and manufacturing. Rubin can offer cheaper, more comprehensive services than a Nike or Adidas, which sounds great on paper.
So, how do these deals translate for the fans? Here is an excellent Defector piece detailing what this year's Christmas looked like in the world of Fanatics gear, but for those of you not subscribed allow me to pull a few choice images:
Each one of these pictures (and there are so, so many more) is a real delight. Paying whatever exorbitant cost for an 'authentic' jersey from NFL Shop Dot Com and it arrives with a logo the size of a Tic Tac or the wrong team's name emblazoned across it. I love it so much.
This is the problem with hitching your business wagon to a guy who spends whatever time he's not partying with his cool celebrity friends outsourcing his production to, presumably, the lowest cost option available and, also presumably using some mishmash of automation and maybe even AI to generate the designs for this dreck.
I do feel for the fans of all the teams that got fucked up gear, because I too suffer from a mutated version of that gene, but it is a load-bearing metaphor for the financialization and commoditization of pro sports by its ghoulish billionaire owners (of which Rubin is one!) that the only team merch you can buy - because a clout-chasing gremlin bought up all the rights - is chintzy dogshit that may actually have your bitter rival's team on it to boot.
Wayne LaPierre
Back in October 2020, we reflected wistfully on some of the early Main Characters of this newsletter. Optimistic delight in the impending demise of the de-facto leader of the NRA was, to put it mildly, a bit premature. Back in those halcyon days, I assumed that multiple legal battles combined with civil and criminal investigations would be enough to force LaPierre out of the NRA, and hopefully public life, forever.
I was wrong, obviously, but now the person perhaps most responsible for the proliferation of America's deadly gun culture is finally out at the NRA:
The NRA said LaPierre, 74 years old, cited health as the reason for his decision to step down and said the resignation would be effective Jan. 31.
Really, the NRA is struggling under the weight of lawsuits, a precipitous drop in membership and revenues, and the impending civil trial in New York which could have forced LaPierre out anyhow.
As to the IRS investigation into the NRA and LaPierre's seemingly flagrant tax violations? Not much has been written about that recently, which is why it's a good thing we have ProPublica, who just dropped secret recordings of the NRA's former PR firm plotting to do tax fraud to cover LaPierre's lavish lifestyle. Maybe that will be enough to actually charge any of these people with crimes? Who knows.
Whatever happens at trial, it is good that LaPierre is out, because while the NRA may remain a noxious force in American society, LaPierre was so influential and ruthless that he pushed its agenda far more effectively than many or even most could. So let's raise a glass to one of America's most villainous shitheads who is finally out of power, and hope his decoupling from political influence means he will finally pay for some of his many crimes.
Short Cons
Fortune - "A consumer action group is accusing Starbucks of exploiting customers via its gift card and app payments, forcing them to enter a spending cycle where they will never be able to fully spend the remaining balance of prepaid amounts."
Forbes - "Google will pay $700 million and make changes to payment options on its mobile app store to settle an antitrust suit brought against the company by the attorneys general of 36 states and the District of Columbia, the company announced Monday, the tech giant’s latest effort to tackle growing regulatory oversight into its size and power."
Seattle Times - "Seattle-based Zillow is suing real estate listing services across the United States, arguing the services are forcing out a Zillow subsidiary to maintain illegal monopolies."
Reuters - "A federal judge on Thursday rejected technology company RealPage’s bid to dismiss consolidated lawsuits claiming it conspired with major residential property owners to artificially inflate rental prices for multifamily housing across the United States."
FT - "Merchants who have been suspended from selling goods on Amazon’s marketplace are turning to a cottage industry of lawyers to regain access to their accounts and money, amid growing scrutiny of how the retailer treats independents."
Reuters - "Amazon said a U.S. law immunizing internet platforms from claims over third-party content on their websites should block a new consumer lawsuit accusing the company of profiting from unlawful casino-style apps."
Defector - "It's rarely quite as easy to see as it is in this instance, when irresponsible, ideological, plausibly deniable discourse is the policy. The debate can only ever continue; the resolution will arrive without any visible fingerprints, as a story about something that just happened."
TechCrunch - "Rothenberg also found increasingly inventive ways to attract widespread attention to his relatively small shop, many of them centered on organizing expensive parties for founders."
The Guardian - "The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money."
POLITICO - "Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign account balance has grown for the first time since he left office over two years ago, inching up from $7.7 million to $7.8 million over the past six months."
Know someone thinking of buying custom Fanatics jerseys for their favorite sports superfan? Send them here!