Wealth tax criticized by billionaires and Gavin Newsom would levy a one-time 5% tax on residents worth over $1bn

A controversial proposal in California to impose a wealth tax on billionaires has gained enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November, state officials announced on Wednesday.

The news is set to intensify an already heated debate around the tax, which has pitted tech moguls and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, against the labor unions backing the measure.

• Gary Bartley, UBC's head groundskeeper, is prepping pitches for Team Canada's World Cup training.
• He said he has learned a great deal about his trade, even after 48 years on the job.
• At 66, Bartley said the World Cup is a career highlight and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gary Bartley, 66, who is helping prepare the training pitches that Team Canada will use during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been in the industry since 1978, but I've never taken on a project this big before. Working on the World Cup is like working on the Super Bowl.

As the University of British Columbia's head groundskeeper for the National Soccer Development Centre (NSDC), where Team Canada will train during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this is already a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Even after 48 years on the job, it's still a huge learning opportunity at 66. I've had the chance to work with some of the top pitch managers, professors, and educators in the field, and it will really change how I work moving forward.

A typical day as a head groundskeeper

I started in turf care in 1978, when I was a teenager. My first job was on a golf course, and I worked my way up to a superintendent position before moving into sports equipment sales. Through that role, I was introduced to the people at the Vancouver Whitecaps, a professional soccer club that trains at the NSDC, and about 11 years ago, I joined the team at UBC.

When the Whitecaps are training here, which is usually five days a week, I get to work at 7 a.m. Before the players arrive, my team of seven is out on the field cutting grass, repairing divots, and doing whatever prep work is needed for the day's session.

The Whitecaps usually arrive around 10:30 a.m., and one of us stays nearby to help with any watering needs. Once training is finished, we're repairing divots, cleaning up the pitch, and preparing it for the next day. On non-training days, we're usually doing maintenance work, such as vertical cutting or top dressing. Our normal shift runs from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Getting the pitches World Cup ready

The World Cup hasn't changed our workday too much, but the main difference is that we've had to raise our standards and maintenance practices to meet FIFA's requirements. As a training site, we've got to keep conditions as close as possible to the main match pitch to ensure things are equal and fair for all teams.

Over the past few weeks, we've gone through major renovations since the Whitecaps finished training here in May. It was a very labor-intensive process. We carried out heavy verticutting, top dressing, overseeding, and re-sodded parts of the pitches.

Working on divots and repairs is physically hard work, and, even more so, mentally tedious. Walking-mowing the two pitches takes three mowers about 2.5 hours, and our staff can cover around 20,000 steps in a typical morning doing that.

Learning from experts has been so rewarding

The biggest surprise has been the level of detail involved. We're used to maintaining pitches for Major League Soccer, but FIFA's attention to detail has been eye-opening. They have invested a great deal of time and effort in researching improved agronomic practices and maintenance procedures.

I've got to learn about this from leading scholars from the University of Tennessee and Michigan State University, which has changed how we'll approach our practices moving forward with the Whitecaps. It's been a really rewarding process.

I've also been amazed by the level of detail around the whole tournament, from security to hospitality to guest services. These are areas you take for granted and that were on the periphery of my attention, but it's become clear how much work goes into staging the World Cup at this level.

It's a career highlight

My family is very excited and proud that I'm involved in this. I wasn't a soccer fan before I joined the Whitecaps. Now, I'm still not a fanatic, but I am a fan.

It's very rewarding to sit and look at a pitch and realize that world-class soccer players will be training on it. It makes you want to make it the best possible.

I got into this industry 48 years ago because I loved it, and I still do. Being as old as I am, it's amazing to have the opportunity to be involved in the World Cup and put an asterisk beside my career.

Love or hate Amazon, its 23-26 June Prime Day event is a good time to snag discounts on tech, fashion and more, including much-loved brands such as Anyday and Caraway

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

You don’t have the wait until after Turkey Day: early summer is actually one of the best times of the year to snag a deal. Amazon is kicking off its annual summer sale on 23 June, and just as Christmas songs start playing in stores two months early, the company and many other retailers are slashing prices in advance.

We’ve handpicked 31 of the best deals based on products the Filter has tested and loved in the past, including discounts on some of our favorite brands such as Field Company, Anyday and Caraway. If you want to shop at Amazon, we’ve handpicked products that are actually worth your money, and very few require a Prime subscription. If you prefer other retailers, we have oodles of those too.

Best tech deal:
AirPods Pro 3

Best home deal:
Levoit Tower Fan

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. [...]

Cook said Apple wouldn’t use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories. “We can’t do everything,” said Cook. “We know what we’re good at.” [...] Cook said during his time working in the electronics supply chain, from IBM to Compaq to Apple, he had never seen a commodity price swing like the one from the past six months. “This is a hundred-year flood,” said Cook. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs. The trash can Mac Pro held its $3000 starting price for six years, despite its specs remaining effectively unchanged in that span.

So when Apple raises prices on the iPhone 18 Pro models this September (and, presumably, launches the folding iPhone “Ultra” with an eye-watering price), expect those prices to stick. And if Apple expects RAM and SSD component pricing to continue rising through 2027 — which is what many anticipate — they might build that into the pricing now. Raise prices by (say) $200 now rather than $100 this year and another $100 next year.

Also, credit to Tim Cook for taking this one personally, months ahead of the iPhone 18 launch, rather than leaving it to John Ternus to serve up a surprise shit sandwich in his first keynote as CEO.

As the pornography platform has exploded in popularity, a side industry has emerged: middlemen who encourage young women into the industry, then take a large cut of their earnings

Markuss Hussle wants his online students to understand one thing: he knows how to make money. There is no subtlety involved. He gives an hour-long presentation in one video, sitting next to his silver Lamborghini. In another, he splices his money-making tips with footage of a ski weekend with his friends in Courchevel, in the French Alps, including shots of private jets, helicopters and a girlfriend in a fur coat. He claims the trip cost $100,000 (£75,000). He shows off his watches and his swimming pool and talks about how his mother worked three jobs as a cleaner until he “retired her” and bought her a home by the sea.

If you were not paying close attention to the spreadsheets and presentations interspersed with the motivational lifestyle content, you might guess he was offering guidance on how to trade shares or invest in cryptocurrency. There are a lot of performance graphs and much discussion of account management, optimisation, scaling, working smart and tripling profits.

• OpenAI says more than 230 million people use ChatGPT for health and wellness advice each week.
• Researcher Karan Singhal leads the effort to grow that number by improving the company's technology.
• Singhal spoke with Business Insider about his work in providing medical context in ChatGPT.

OpenAI is pushing further into its health research as more people turn to ChatGPT for pressing medical questions.

More than 230 million people use the tool for health and wellness advice each week, according to OpenAI. That growth is partially thanks to researcher Karan Singhal, who spoke exclusively with Business Insider about the company's lofty healthcare ambitions.

Singhal leads a high-stakes goal: make ChatGPT so good on health that it changes people's lives for the better, avoids calamity, and sways the skeptics. He wants to aid a shift he already sees underway, in which more patients trust OpenAI's latest model as a "protector in their care journey."

OpenAI's GPT-5 model family is the company's first to be trained specifically at every stage of development to be better at health advice, he said.

"You definitely want the models to be ahead of everything else," Singhal said.

At OpenAI, healthcare has grown into a top priority

Before joining OpenAI, Singhal made his name as a researcher at Google, helping develop a series of AI models known as Med-PaLM, specifically designed for medical questions. Since then, Google has cut investment in Med-PaLM, Singhal said, because AI developers favor general-purpose models.

In the middle of 2024, when Singhal joined OpenAI, GPT-4o was the company's flagship model. It would later come under fire in lawsuits alleging that it had encouraged suicidal ideation and given harmful advice. Those lawsuits are still unfolding — OpenAI has denied liability and wrongdoing.

In the meantime, the company hasn't shied away from health-related use. In fact, it has dug in further.

Singhal said that when he joined, he felt a "responsibility" to improve the quality of the models' health answers. He quickly set about building a new team of health researchers, and kicked off partnerships with more than 200 physicians — a bet, as he put it, on "aggregating the wisdom of the crowd."

About a year later, he helped launch HealthBench, a series of evaluations that the company created with the physician group to measure AI systems' health capabilities.

"Once you know how to evaluate it, it becomes a lot easier to improve it," Singhal said.

OpenAI's latest free model, GPT-5.5 Instant, scored better than both physician-written answers and GPT-4o in tests, the company said Thursday. Comparing billions of anonymized messages about health, they also said they found a 71% drop over the last two months in responses that were flagged for inaccuracy.

There's pressure to keep those improvements going for both patients and clinicians who use the tools. Singhal said he's seen doctors rapidly adopt ChatGPT for Clinicians and other AI tools, and he doesn't feel that hospitals and clinics are resistant to AI.

"If you think about the adoption of technology in healthcare broadly, it's actually incredibly, insanely fast," Singhal said.

Singhal wants ChatGPT to get to know you better

Google Search has, for years, been the dominant peddler of healthcare information online, connecting users to websites like WebMD. Singhal sees chatbots as an upgrade, where back-and-forth conversations give people more specific advice.

One of the biggest challenges to getting valuable health information from a chatbot is how little it knows about the patient. A doctor might have your medical records in their hand or know you from a yearslong relationship. OpenAI is trying to simulate both.

For one, in January, the company announced a health-focused product within ChatGPT that connects to health apps and lets users upload medical records. Singhal gave the example of uploading his sleep data from his Apple Watch. He let the app analyze it, and learned that he was missing out on deep sleep because his bedroom was too warm.

ChatGPT Health still has a waitlist more than five months after its launch.

Singhal's team sees the effort to make an AI model seek additional information as a top priority: a chatbot should ask questions like a doctor would, so it can say the right thing.

The team also wants to make the case that AI can bring value to everyone in health, not just "power users."

"People's adoption will only move at the speed of people's readiness in practice, and so you have to guide people towards that, especially as the technology improves," Singhal said.

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