🌏 Chase chases check fraudsters

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HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

The Chase “infinite money glitch” is actually not infinite at all. In fact, the bank is now suing people who took part in the TikTok-viral check fraud trend.

Robinhood is getting into politics. Specifically, it’s letting customers bet (invest in derivatives premised) on the outcome of the presidential election.

Boeing is officially sticking its hand out to the stock market. The company dropped the prospecti for its $19 billion equity cash-raise.

The planemaker didn’t exactly mince words about why it’s asking for money. Among the “Risks Related to Our Business and Operations,” it painted its ongoing machinist strike as an existential threat.

Thanksgiving is becoming a competition of the bottom (price) feeders. Target is trying to out-cheap Walmart and Aldi and become the holiday’s grocer of choice for the budget-conscious.

Nation’s McFlurry machines to get faster repairs

A running joke among both fans and critics of McDonald’s is that the fast food chain’s McFlurry machines are always broken. But now a court ruling might make it easier to bring the machines back online — seriously.

The U.S. Copyright Office issued a key exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that gives McDonald’s locations the “right to repair” their McFlurry machines. Previously, they had been frozen out of the process by digital “locks” designed to protect the manufacturer’s intellectual property.

Will the jailbreaking of such critical treat infrastructure lead to a dessert renaissance? Quartz’s Francisco Velasquez explains what the ruling means for America’s sweet teeth.

The AI industry is thirsty for success

People drink water, as do plants and animals. But so do computers, especially the ones that run artificial intelligence training models. What’s even worse, according to a report from JPMorgan Chase and the ERM Sustainability Institute, is that a lot of the water used to keep data centers from melting down during their intense computing comes from places that have a lot of extra water to spare.

A mid-sized data center uses the same water every year as a town of up to 50,000 people; last year, all of America’s data centers used a collective 75 billion gallons of the stuff. A fifth of that was coming from so-called “stressed” watersheds to boot.

Quartz’s Britney Nguyen explains just how permanently parched the AI industry has become, as well as whether its human customers will be able to coexist with it.

MORE FROM QUARTZ

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🥪 A class-action lawsuit says Subway was skimping on its sandwich meat 

🧠 AbbVie is buying an Alzheimer’s drug for more than $1 billion

✂️ Elon Musk postures that he could cut nearly a third of the federal budget — $2 trillion “at least”

✈️ American Airlines flew its longest-distance flight ever

🚙 Volkswagen is planning shutter factories and lay off thousands of workers

SURPRISING DISCOVERIES

NFL teams run through at least 80,000 Smucker’s Uncrustables a year. And that’s just among the teams willing to disclose their consumption of the league’s favorite snack. (paywall)

There’s an 81-year-old dropping $70,000 a year on his “biohacking” habit. The investor and real estate developer is trying to reverse the aging process.

Medium’s CEO says AI content is up tenfold since the start of the year. It’s another place where cash-grab so-called “slop” content is proliferating. (paywall)

More teen girls dabble in cannabis than boys now. Both groups were reporting way less usage in 2021 than they were in 2011.

At least 2,500 people RSVP’d to a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in New York City. In a surprise twist, one of the attendees at the raucous event turned out to be Chalamet himself. (paywall)

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Our best wishes on a safe start to the day. Send any news, comments, existential corporate threats, and Uncrustable coupons to [email protected]. Today’s Daily Brief was brought to you by Melvin Backman and Kevin Ryan.