Good morning. ‘Tis the season to jump on a plane and fly cross-country to see the fam, which often means a big change in weather: Coldies go warm, Warmies go cold. Some tips for avoiding temperature-related conflict on your trip:

• Warmies traveling to cold weather: Try not to brag about how much warmer it is where you live. Don’t say that 55 feels cold to you now, or that being in this 12 degree air makes you ‘like super sad.’ The Coldies know all of this - they live it every day. Also, bring the energy down - you radiate warmth, and it scares them.
• Coldies traveling to warm weather: Resist the urge to wax poetic about how easy it is – too easy, really – to live in this warmth. Coldies are better, tougher people - you know it, we know it, Warmies know it - but part of wearing the ice crown is not bragging about it, lest you freeze a Warmies’ fragile ego for the rest of history. Oh, and try to enjoy the warmth. It’s not a sin to sit out in the sun. Who knows, it might even feel sort of nice.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.97 minutes to read.

“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.”

–Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

Last week, a school district in Missouri containing 14,000 students voted to switch to a four-day week. The catalyst? Issues with teacher recruitment and retention.

It’s not alone either. 140 other school districts in the state have made the same move, representing more than a quarter of Missouri’s entire public education system. And over recent years, dozens of districts in Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma have also cut one day of class per week, citing many of the same reasons seen in Missouri.

• At least 800 districts are using four-day school weeks this year, up from around 650 before the pandemic, per Paul Thompson, an Oregon State professor who studies the topic.

🇺🇸 Big picture: There’s really no other way to put it – America is dealing with a growing shortage of teachers. In August, there were ~360,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools when compared to before the pandemic, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing an overall drop of more than 10%.

And this trend doesn’t appear poised to reverse itself anytime soon.

• The US education sector currently hires just over 0.54 employees for every open position created, close to its lowest-level on record (set earlier this year).
• The proportion of US college freshmen who intend to major in education has fallen from between 10% and 13% in the early-1970s to 4.3% in 2018. The number of graduates who majored in education dropped by more than half over that same period.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): Calling all 15,000+ classrooms using the DONUT: How would you deal with America’s teacher shortage? The best answers will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.

Submit a response here.

⚖️ A former Nazi secretary was convicted yesterday for her involvement in over 10,000 murders at a concentration camp. Irmgard Furchner, 97, worked as a stenographer and typist at the Stutthof camp in occupied Poland from 1943 until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945. Furchner made headlines in mid-October, when she briefly went on the run weeks ahead of her court date. As she was a juvenile when the offenses occurred, Furchner was tried in an adolescent court in Germany, and her sentence will see her placed on juvenile probation.

🇦🇫 The Taliban indefinitely banned all women in Afghanistan from attending universities yesterday. The move came just over a month after Afghan women were barred from parks, gyms, and swimming pools across the country. And in March of this year, the Taliban government failed to deliver on its commitment to reopen secondary schools (middle/high schools) for girls. A US State Department spokesperson said the latest ban “will have significant consequences for the Taliban.”

🇨🇳 China reported its first official Covid deaths in over two weeks on Monday and Tuesday. Beijing this week also confirmed its health officials are changing the way they count Covid deaths. Moving forward, only people who tested positive for Covid and died from lung damage caused by the virus will count towards the official tally. In other news, a recent WSJ report found crematoriums in the Beijing area are currently working “24 hours a day” to keep up with a recent surge in requests.

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Delta Airlines is expected to begin rolling out free Wi-Fi for passengers as soon as early 2023, the WSJ reported yesterday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

And while not independently confirmed as of this writing, the move wouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The airline experimented with offering free in-flight internet in 2019, and Delta CEO Ed Bastian has said for years that he wants in-flight internet to be fast and free, the WSJ reports.

But much like trying to score an open-ice breakaway on the opposing goalie in pond hockey, there are a couple of blockers sitting in the way. A 2021 Intelsat survey indicates the two biggest barriers to increasing passenger inflight Wi-Fi adoption are its high price point and “poor internet connection.”

• Price points: JetBlue is the only airline currently providing free Wi-Fi to all passengers, subsidized by ads. Other airlines offer a variety of pricing models, ranging anywhere from $2 to $50 per flight – or even $500+ for annual passes.
• Speed: Viasat, Delta’s satellite internet service provider, advertises download speeds of around 20 megabits per second on each device. Other in-flight Wi-Fi companies utilize air-to-ground systems, which top out around 10 Mbps per plane – and when shared across devices, offer barely enough bandwidth to check email. (Median US download speeds for mobile and fixed broadband are around 75 Mbps and 189 Mbps, respectively.)

✈️🛜 Zoom out: Like winter in Game of Thrones, more changes to in-flight Wi-Fi are coming. United, American, Southwest, and Alaskan Airlines have all announced a variety of tech and pricing changes this year – plus Hawaiian Airlines announced a deal with Starlink in April to offer free Wi-Fi on flights starting in 2023.

Congressional negotiators unveiled a $1.66 trillion spending package yesterday, aimed at avoiding a government shutdown ahead of Friday’s midnight deadline.

The 4,155-page bill (😳) features over $770 billion in non-defense discretionary spending, a 5.5% increase over last year. It also calls for nearly $860 billion in defense funding, representing a 10% annual bump.

• The new spending package contains all 12 annual appropriations bills Congress must pass to fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year (through September 2023).

📑 Odds and ends… This so-called omnibus spending package also contains a group of bills unrelated to the federal budget (hence the term “omnibus”), including:

• A measure that would ban TikTok from all government-issued phones and devices.
• Legislation to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act that, among other things, would increase the threshold needed for Congress to object to a state’s presidential electors.
• A bill that would change the design of 401(k)s and similar retirement plans, with the aim of improving savings opportunities for workers.

👀 Looking ahead… Leaders from both parties have signaled their support for the legislation, which is expected to pass both chambers and be signed into law sometime before the Friday midnight deadline.

+Dive deeper: From the Left | From the Center | From the Right

💬 Quoted…​​ “I know that the Pentagon is being hacked… so can’t we hack the taxi industry[?]”

Two men, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, allegedly conspired with Russian hackers to infiltrate the JFK airport taxi dispatch system, per a federal indictment unsealed yesterday. Once in, the men were reportedly able to move specific taxis to the front of the queue – which sometimes took hours of waiting to get through – and began charging drivers $10 to skip to the front of the line.

• Prosecutors allege the pair were able to manipulate as many as 1,000 taxi trips per day over the course of the scheme, which lasted from November 2019 to November 2020.

🖼👍 Stat of the Day: There's a new most-liked Instagram post of all time, and it belongs to Lionel Messi. The Argentinian soccer star's carousel post showing him holding the World Cup trophy and other photos currently has 68.9 million likes, surpassing an egg photo from 2019 that was the previous record-holder with 57.8 million likes.

🤯 Did You Know?... 75% of all US employees have had a romantic relationship with someone they work with, per a new LiveCareer poll of 1,100 workers.

📖 Worth a Read: Unmasking a TikTok Creator Who Doesn’t Really Exist → (VICE)

😳 Ok… yes, it’s impossible to not sing along to your favorite jams, but think of your productivity, too. Lyrics are distracting, especially when working with words. You might accidentally incorporate them into your work, and get caught between a landslide and champagne supernova.

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• ☝️ An estimated 4+ million Argentinans gathered in Buenos Aires yesterday for the country’s official World Cup victory celebration parade; the national soccer team eventually had to be airlifted out via helicopter after their bus route was completely overrun with fans.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏦 Wells Fargo was ordered to pay a record $3.7 billion fine by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• 🪙 Binance reached a deal to buy the assets of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager for just over $1 billion; Voyager had previously agreed to sell its assets to now-bankrupt FTX.
• 📈📉 Markets: Nike reported $13.32 billion in revenue for last quarter, up 17% year-over-year; the company’s shares rose 10% in after-hours trading. | FedEx reported fewer packages moved through its system for the fourth straight quarter, resulting in a 24% annual drop in profit. | Tesla shares fell 8.1% yesterday to a more than two-year low of $137.80; that’s down from $300+ as recently as mid-September.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏀 Mat Ishbia, the billionaire CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage, has agreed to buy the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski; the reported deal values the teams at $4 billion, which would nearly double the NBA’s previous record for largest-ever acquisition (the Nets sold for $2.35 billion in 2019).
• 📺 Netflix’s new ad-supported tier was the company’s least-popular plan in the first month it was offered, accounting for 9% of all new sign-ups per analytics firm Antenna.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖✍️ Google is developing an AI-powered tool that can translate bad handwriting into a more legible format; its initial applications are aimed specifically at doctors’ notes and prescriptions.
• ⚡ The US Postal Service announced plans to purchase 66,000 EVs for its delivery fleet by 2028, and to only purchase EVs starting in 2026.
• 🪐 The Mars Perseverance rover has begun placing the 10 cylinders containing samples for return to Earth. | NASA’s InSight lander, which spent the past four-plus years carrying out experiments on the Martian surface, may have finally died due to obstructed solar panels.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ☀️ Today is the Winter Solstice, aka the darkest and shortest day of the year.
• ⚠️ A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California yesterday, killing at least two people and knocking out power to nearly 80,000 homes.
• ⚖️ A New Jersey lawyer is suing to challenge Madison Square Garden’s state liquor license after she was identified with facial recognition and thrown out of a Rockettes show due to the fact that she worked at a legal firm involved in an active lawsuit against MSG.
• 📑 The House Ways and Means Committee voted 24-16 along party lines to release redacted versions of former President Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 📧 The five emails that career-focused individuals need to send before New Year’s.

+Correction: In yesterday’s section, we said “kidults” make up 25% of the ~$9 billion in toy sales per year. In reality, the ~$9 billion figure represents the total money spent on toys by kidults, which is 25% of the ~$36 billion in annual industry sales. This is the 33rd correction out of the 246 newsletters we’ve published so far this year.

Joel Strasser has broken nearly a dozen world records with his impressive facial hair.  

Most recently, the Idaho man bested himself by setting a new world record for most baubles in a beard. His last record was 686 baubles – and this year, he fit 710. 

• "My technique has evolved and gotten a lot more specialized over the years that I've been breaking the record," Joel told Guinness World Records. "I found that if I take my time and really focus on the individual strands of beard hair and small groups of hair, I can manage to fit so many more in there."

🧔 Unbeardlievale... Joel also holds the records for most paper straws in a beard, most golf tees in a beard, and most toothpicks in a beard, to name a few. 

Can you name the movies described by the following poorly-explained plots?

1. Shoeless cop destroys a building
2. Man finds affordable living space in NYC
3. Old cowboy can’t accept new technology

(keep scrolling for the answers)

👆 Check out the referral prizes you can get, just for introducing people you know to little old us. 

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone who you think would like the DONUT. Once you hit each milestone, you'll get an email with a link to claim your prize. (Pro tip: there's no need to ration points, you're entitled to a prize at each tier.)

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1. Die Hard (1988)
2. The Terminal (2004)
3. Toy Story (1995)