Two things are true about private equity and youth sports, and Washington just picked the wrong one to act on.
This spring, Eli Manning's firm, Brand Velocity Group, agreed to buy RCX, a youth-sports company, a real bet that kids playing flag football and travel ball is a business worth building. Weeks earlier, Senators Booker and Murphy introduced the Let Kids Play Act to ban private equity from youth sports entirely, force investors to sell within two years, and make them personally liable for what the bill calls "junk fees."
Here is the part nobody says cleanly. The complaint is not made up because there is evidence that some rollups did buy up local leagues and tournaments and stack on stay-to-play fees until a Saturday of kids' soccer cost a family a car payment. That is real, and parents feel it.
But banning private capital from an entire category is not a fix, it is more like central planning with a youth-sports logo. You do not get better leagues by outlawing the people funding the fields and the refs, in reality you get fewer of both.
The real solution is simpler. Name the abuse, force the fees into daylight, and let better operators win the parents the honest way.
Colombia just held their election.
They require voter ID and use paper ballots. They hand-count the votes of each station one by one. No machines or mail-in ballots due to security concerns.
~24 million votes.
It was all done in a couple hours.
This would just turn the biggest AI companies into permanently entrenched state-backed oligarchs & make it impossible for upstarts to compete, because the government would have an interest in thwarting their success.
It's pure socialism. Look to Venezuela and Cuba for outcomes.
AI did not fire anyone...
More than 92,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in the first five months of this year. Meta cut about 8,000 in May, roughly a tenth of the company, Upwork shed nearly a quarter of its staff, and Wix a fifth. Almost every announcement pointed at the same culprit... artificial intelligence.
Jensen Huang sells the picks and shovels for this entire boom and has every reason to play along. He refused. He called the story that AI is taking the jobs a lazy narrative, and then he said it more plainly than any layoff memo dared: "You're not losing your job to AI, but to someone who uses AI better."
He is right, and the distinction matters more than it sounds. AI did not walk into Meta and let eight thousand people go. Leadership did, and a good share of those cuts are over-hiring from three years ago finally coming due, with AI handed the blame because it reads cleaner than admitting you staffed for a future that did not arrive. Wix even said the quiet part out loud, blaming a strong Israeli shekel right alongside AI. A currency swing does not restructure a company. People do.
Here is what it means for you, whether or not you ever set foot in tech. The line is no longer human against machine. It runs between the people who turn these tools into how they actually work and the people who treat them as a threat or an excuse. One group is about to do the work of five and the other is about to be the five.
Pick the side you are building toward. The middle is already gone.