Good morning.

It’s Thursday, December 4 — prime time for the annual debate over when it’s “acceptable” to put up the Christmas tree. Spoiler: everyone already did it the moment Halloween ended, and the rest are still pretending they’re “not holiday people” while secretly enjoying the lights like the rest of us.

New York is entering that cozy-cold era where your apartment insists on being either tropical or arctic, nothing in between. Decorations are popping up faster than your will to stay productive, and the city smells like a mix of pine, hot chocolate, and mild seasonal burnout.

Thanks for all your feedback — you’re helping shape this little newsletter monster into something even more fun. Enjoy the read, and stay festive… even if you swear you’re not that person.

Today’s stories:

• Child-care centers become Wall Street’s new darling

• Twenty-five million kids get starter investment cash

• Six figures now equals “financially fragile” America

• Luxury cosplays poverty in immaculate fake station

• Midtown chaos softened with giant sparkly spinner

• Billionaire trips publicly, tech bros applaud wildly

• Shoplifter swallows jewel; police await… retrieval

• OpenAI scrambles as Google steals spotlight

• New HIV cure works without rare mutation

• Startup lobbies to ban DJI, wins big

  and more…

Wall Street popped on Wednesday after a weak ADP report boosted hopes that the Federal Reserve will finally trim rates next week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 408 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite posted smaller but steady gains.

ADP said private payrolls fell by 32,000 in November — a sharp miss from the expected +40,000. Investors, ever the optimists, took that as a green light for a rate cut at the Fed’s Dec. 10 finale.

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Congrats, You’re Poor at $140K

A Wall Street manager went viral for announcing that a family of four is basically “poor” unless they make $140,000 a year. According to his math, everyone is one daycare bill away from collapse. His budget reads like a luxury shopping list: $32K childcare, $23K housing, $15K food, and a mysterious $22K for “other essentials,” which feels like candles and coping mechanisms. Economists instantly roasted him — calling his take wrong, delusional, and “the worst poverty analysis ever.” But even they admit the federal poverty line is way too low for modern life. So yes, it needs updating… but maybe not straight into six-figure meltdown territory. Green says he’s not talking about literal poverty, but “precarity,” which is economist-speak for “life feels like hanging by a thread.” Welcome to America. 

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Toddlers are the hottest real estate trend. Child care is now the hottest niche in real estate — because parents are desperate, waitlists are eternal, and investors finally realized toddlers are basically a guaranteed revenue stream. The U.S. child-care market is headed from $65 billion today to about $110 billion in a decade, so of course developers are foaming at the mouth. Early education centers are wildly undersupplied, especially in all the “child-care deserts” America created when everyone fled cities during the pandemic. Demand is so insane that half the country has three kids competing for every open slot. Investors love this energy. Properties for early education are popping up for sale, leases are getting longer, and developers are launching giant funds — like Fortec’s new $100 million pot — to build more centers and treat child care like the next senior housing or medical office boom. The pitch is simple: triple-net leases, predictable rent, good credit tenants, and parents who will pay anything to get their kid off a waitlist. The business model is basically: kids always exist, parents always work, and Wall Street loves a sector where profit margins are double-digit and tantrums don’t affect cash flow.

The Dells just gave 25M kids baby brokerage accounts. Michael and Susan Dell are tossing $6.25 billion into so-called Trump accounts so 25 million kids can start life with a tiny investment portfolio. It’s the largest donation to U.S. children ever — because nothing says “support” like handing a 6-year-old an index fund instead of childcare.

Starting 2025, newborns get $1,000 from the government; the Dells are giving $250 to older kids who missed the cutoff. It’s basically Baby’s First Robinhood Account, but regulated.

The starter money won’t grow into much on its own, but the whole point is to nudge parents into saving more. Corporations can now jump in too; Dell Technologies will match grants for employee babies. Babies out here collecting matching contributions while adults can’t get a raise.

A Stem Cell Transplant Cures HIV

A man has become the seventh person ever to be cured of HIV after a stem cell transplant — and the big twist is that his donor cells weren’t even HIV-resistant. Scientists long thought you needed a rare mutation (the CCR5-delta32 one) to wipe out the virus, but apparently… maybe not. He received the transplant back in 2015 while being treated for leukemia, and after chemo nuked his immune system, the new donor cells rebuilt it — minus the HIV. This follows the “Geneva patient,” another case where a person was cured without the mutation, though some researchers wanted more time before calling it official. Now, with this new patient, the evidence is stacking up: an HIV cure may not require the mutant sci-fi cells everyone assumed were mandatory. Scientists are cautiously excited; the rest of us are just relieved something good happened in medicine for once.

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Sam Altman hits panic mode. Sam Altman just declared “code red” at OpenAI because Google’s Gemini 3 is out here doing backflips while ChatGPT is wheezing in the corner. Altman told staff the vibes will be “rough,” which is tech bro for “our rival just dropped a better toy.” Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dumped ChatGPT after two hours with Gemini 3 and basically wrote Google a love letter online. Painful. OpenAI is now shoving all resources into fixing ChatGPT and delaying its plan to slap ads everywhere. Meanwhile, the company is still losing money, still spending like a teenager with their parents’ credit card, and still somehow valued at $500 billion. Tech is truly a religion.

The billionaire-backed plan to cancel Chinese drones. A 25-year-old founder, Blake Resnick, wants to kick Chinese drones out of U.S. skies and replace them with his very American — and very expensive — Brinc drones. And he’s backed by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. Police departments love DJI’s cheaper, better Chinese drones, but the U.S. is planning to ban them unless the NSA personally blesses them. Brinc’s drone costs $20K (DJI’s costs $15K), charges itself in a metal birdhouse, and is already being tested in Arizona, where it spends its time catching boyfriends who lie about having guns. Resnick has spent nearly $700K lobbying to get DJI banned — an impressive move considering his company barely sells anything. But if the ban goes through, he wins big: instant market share and a valuation that pretends profit is optional. China slapped sanctions on him, which he proudly framed like a diploma. The whole situation is classic America: if you can’t out-innovate the competition, call it a national security threat and buy yourself a drone fleet.

Bryan Johnson takes 5 grams of shrooms on camera for science. Billionaire Bryan Johnson livestreamed himself taking 5.24 grams of shrooms in a weighted blanket while Grimes DJ’d in the background — all under the banner of “science” and his quest to live forever. He wore a giant brain-scanning helmet from his own company, making the whole thing look like a corporate ayahuasca retreat sponsored by Windows XP. Over a million people watched. Tech billionaires showed up on video to praise him like he was Moses descending from the mountain instead of a guy tripping face-first into a sleep mask. Marc Benioff compared him to a biblical figure. Naval Ravikant called him a “one-man FDA.” Everyone agreed regulators ruin vibes. Johnson missed all of it because he was too busy hallucinating under an eye mask.

The Bougiest Thing to Ever Happen Underground

Chanel took over a New York subway station, proving once again that fashion will cosplay poverty before it ever experiences it. A$AP Rocky, Jon Bon Jovi, Kristen Stewart, Solange — all pretending they’ve used a MetroCard in the last decade — strutted around an abandoned C-train station like it was Versailles with tile damage. The clothes were peak Chanel fever dream — “jeans” made of silk, “flannels” made of bouclé, tweed leopard print for girlbosses who haven’t seen sunlight since 2019. One model had a coffee cup hanging from a handbag chain. Finally, Chanel admits caffeine addiction is the only universal luxury. There were opera gowns, flapper dresses, sparkling everything. The subway has never been this clean, this shiny, or this delusional.

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NYC builds a giant Christmas carousel to distract you from Midtown. New York just opened a two-story Christmas carousel in Greeley Square, because spinning in circles between Penn Station and the Empire State Building while tourists stare is peak holiday spirit. The giant double-decker ride will be twinkling away through January 6, operated by the 34th Street Partnership — a group clearly determined to make Midtown feel magical despite its… personality. It runs daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and tickets are $7, which in NYC is basically free. Buy them online if you enjoy paying convenience fees for convenience.

Man eats Fabergé pendant worth $33K. A New Zealand man was arrested after allegedly swallowing a $33,500 Fabergé pendant in a jewelry store. Yes, he tried to shoplift by eating an 18-karat James Bond Octopussy egg. Shockingly, it did not work. The jewel — dripping with diamonds, sapphires, and a tiny gold octopus — “has not yet been recovered,” which is police code for “we’re waiting for nature to deliver the evidence.” He’s also accused of stealing an iPad, cat litter, and flea treatment. Truly a crime spree powered by chaos.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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