1) Not great! “Dozens of CVS Generic Drug Recalls Expose Link to Tainted Factories: The chain’s branded drugs were recalled about two times more than those of its biggest rival, Walgreens”
One factory making CVS-branded pain and fever medications for children used contaminated water. Another made drugs for kids that were too potent. And a third made nasal sprays for babies on the same machines it used to produce pesticides.
The drugs were among those sold by CVS Health Corp., the largest US pharmacy, under its store-brand label before being recalled.
Other chains have seen their share of recalls for their own store-branded medications. But over the past decade CVS’s have been recalled about two times more than those from Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and three times more than those from Walmart Inc., a Bloomberg analysis of public records found. Both CVS and Walgreens say they offer more than 2,000 store-brand health and wellness products; Walmart declined to say how many it had for sale, but its website indicates it has many of the same drugs available as CVS and Walgreens do under its Equate store brand.
CVS Has Many More Store-Brand Recalls Than Rivals
Over-the-counter generics with safety concerns in the last decade
Source: Food and Drug Administration data
This potentially dangerous pattern has roots in the quality of the factories from which CVS sources its generic medicines, the findings show.
There’s little incentive for large drug purchasers like pharmacies and hospitals to choose suppliers based on quality, said Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Rather, they often choose the lowest-cost manufacturing contracts, which Schulman’s research has found leads to lower-quality medicines. “The best way to make a low-price product is to skimp on quality and that’s what we’re seeing over and over and over again,” he said.
2) Sad, but, true. Ezra Klein makes this point all the time. Aaron Blake, “The incredible low-information voter How much are Americans paying attention to politics? This little.”
I’m sorry to say this, dear reader, but you will not be deciding the 2024 election. That’s not a reflection on you personally (I value your readership dearly), nor am I diminishing the power of your vote (vote!). It’s just a fact of the matter that people reading campaign politics newsletters in June 2024 are not generally the ones who will be on the fence and making crucial calls late in the campaign.
The decisive voters are going to be those who have little to no idea what you and I have been talking about for the past five months — quite literally…
But it’s hardly the only evidence that many voters simply haven’t engaged with the 2024 campaign or politics more generally on the most basic of levels.
To wit:
1 in 5 voters in the Yahoo/YouGov survey said either that they didn’t know about Trump’s Manhattan verdict, that Trump was not guilty or that the trial was ongoing. That includes 2 out of every 5 registered voters under the age of 30.
A majority of independents have said they’ve heard only “a little” or “nothing at all” about Trump’s classified-documents indictment, according to Marquette University Law School polling.
Just 1 in 5 voters in a May Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were familiar with Trump having said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Republicans, especially, will often tell pollsters things about Donald Trump and his legal problems that are simply wrong.
Voters also believe strikingly wrong things about the economy, including a majority believing we’re in a recession and half thinking unemployment is at a 50-year high. (Unemployment has actually been at 4 percent or below for its longest stretch in those 50 years.)
None of this means that we’re bound to see big shifts in the 2024 election once voters start paying more attention.
It’s likely many people will go on being unfamiliar with these things through November. And even if people do engage with the substance of these issues as they make their voting decisions and start seeing campaign ads about these things, we’ve seen how polarization can negate the impact of them. The vast majority of Americans are now familiar with Trump’s guilty verdict in Manhattan, and he lost one or two points, at most.
But nor should we discount the fact that, in a close race, low-information voters who could well decide things could be going on a bit — or even a lot — more information than they are now.
Simply put, research shows that most fathers are particularly skilled at fostering independence in their children. And these social trends point to why children need the positive influence of their father in their lives more than ever. Years of lived experience, backed by parenting research, teach us that the effective nurturing of children requires not only the capacity to “hold them close,” but also the ability to “let them go”—something fathers seem particularly apt in preparing children to do.
Research based on observations of mothers’ and fathers’ different psychological dispositions and behaviors in parenting has consistently found that both mothers and fathers influence multiple aspects of child development, but they do so through different processes. These studies show that fathers tend to be particularly attuned to developing children’s physical, emotional, and intellectual independence—in everything from children making their own lunches and tying their own shoes to doing household chores and making decisions for themselves after they have left home. Fathers are also more likely than mothers to encourage children to take risks, while also ensuring safety and security, thus helping children develop confidence, navigate new transitions, and bravely confront unfamiliar situations.
It is exactly this fostering of independence that is needed in greater supply among the rising generation. Paradoxically, our culture today is one where too many young people are unfortunately under-nurtured in fractured families, while others are over-nurtured by helicopter parenting and prolonged sheltering.
One of the ways to make family formation more appealing to young adults is to promote more of the building blocks of sustainable relationships, including maturity, competence, and personal responsibility. As O’Rourke concluded,
To make marriage and childrearing more attainable for young adults, parents must allow (or encourage) their children to take on the responsibilities of young adulthood. For marriage and family life to prosper, young people must become more independent, not less.
Other Positive Influences of Fathers
The benefits of loving and involved fathers go far beyond simply fostering independence. Research shows that fathers are much more than just a “second parent” in a child’s life. Involved fathers can bring numerous benefits to their children’s lives that no other person is as likely to bring. Too often as a society, we minimize the virtues and strengths of fathers and the unique role they can play in their children’s lives, despite the significant and growing body of research that shows otherwise.
For example, in an article in Marriage and Family Review, professor William Jeynes reported a meta-analysis of 34 studies with more than 37,000 participants that found statistically-significant effects highlighting the unique role of fathers in child rearing. Fathering had a statistically significant connection to a number of outcomes, including psychological well-being, emotional resilience, improved social relationships, and higher academic achievement. This was true for both boys and girls of different ages.
“Based on the results, a clear theme emerged,” Jeynes remarked in an IFS blog post about the study, “while mothers often tested as being more nurturing in their relationship with children, fathers tended to be more involved in preparing children to deal with life.” He added:
The results also suggest that there is often a balance established when the unique role of the father is combined with the distinct role of the mother. Granted, there is clearly some overlap in the advantages provided by father and mother monitoring. Nevertheless, mothers consistently demonstrated higher average levels of patience and nurturing than did fathers, but fathers tended to have higher expectations of their children than mothers and tended to emphasize the preparatory aspect of child-rearing more than mothers did.
Fathers also play a unique role in the emotional development of their children. When fathers respond to children’s emotional distress, they are more likely to focus on fixing the problem than they are addressing the hurt feelings. This seeming “indifference to the emotion” may not appear nurturing but becomes very useful as children grow older, as children tend to seek out and share things with their dads precisely because of their measured, problem-solving responses. The “indifference” actually becomes a strategic form of nurturing in emotionally charged situations.
A central predicament of the Biden campaign is how to persuade voters to abandon Donald Trump.
“In 2012 the Obama campaign turned a nice guy, Mitt Romney, into a piece of crap,” Steve Murphy, a co-founder of the Democratic media firm MVAR Media, told me. “You can’t do that to Trump because everybody already knows he’s a piece of crap.”
Not only do voters know that Trump is corrupt, a liar, narcissistic and venal, his supporters have repeatedly found ways to slide by his liabilities.
In April, before the former president was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, and again earlier this month, after he was found guilty, YouGov asked voters:
“Do you think someone who has been convicted of a felony should be allowed to become president?”
In April, before the verdict, Republicans were decisively opposed to a felon becoming president, 17 percent in favor, 58 percent opposed (the remaining 25 percent not sure).
In June, after the conviction, Republicans somersaulted: 58 percent said a felon should be allowed to become president, 23 percent were opposed, and 19 percent were unsure.
YouGov also asked voters: “Do you consider falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star a serious crime?”
In six pre-conviction polls from June 2023 to April 2024, the share of Republicans saying it was a serious crime to falsify records was consistently in the 27-to-29 percent range. In June, after Trump’s conviction, the Republican percentage fell to 9 percent.
This has been a continuing pattern for Trump loyalists.
In 2011, well before Trump’s presidential campaign, P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute) asked members of different denominations whether “elected officials can still perform their public duties in an ethical manner even if they have committed immoral personal acts.”
White evangelical protestants were by far the most adamant in rejecting politicians with histories of personal immorality. Just 30 percent said a politician compromised in that way could perform in an ethical manner if elected to public office.
In 2016, when Trump became the Republican nominee, P.R.R.I. posed the same question. This time, 72 percent of white evangelical protestants said a personally immoral politician could conduct himself ethically in public office, the highest percentage for all the denominations queried.
In other words, trying to set a meaningful standard of decency for Trump is like trying to catch an eel barehanded.
But we should reserve some of the blame for ourselves. Americans are eager customers of the products that industrial-scale animal husbandry provides: milk, eggs, beef, chicken and pork. They arrive on our supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic or in cardboard cartons from vast factory farms perfectly suited to serve as petri dishes for the evolution of novel pathogens — novel to humans, anyway. We have surrounded ourselves with chattel animals, raised and milked and fattened and slaughtered and plucked and butchered in staggering numbers. It’s no surprise that sometimes they give us their viruses.
One contributing factor to the looming threat of H5N1 is that it has spread among poultry flocks. Quantity of hosts correlates with the quantity of opportunities, and there are, by one authoritative estimate, about 34 billion chickens alive on Earth at a given moment. Most of those are in big commercial operations. What makes such scales dangerous is not the inhumanity involved (that’s a separate issue) but the abundance and concentration of animals. Evolution is a numbers game like roulette, though with higher stakes, and for a virus, even in a single host, the numbers are often huge.
One particle of a flu virus replicating in an animal might produce 100 billion more flu particles in a few days. Those offspring will contain many random mutations, which are raw material for evolution. The more spins of that roulette wheel, the greater cumulative chance that the pearly ball will land on a number that breaks the bank.
There are reasons H5N1 probably won’t evolve from an avian virus transmitted in feces into a human virus of the airways, capable of killing millions of people. It would need a combination of long-shot mutations: changes in how it copies itself and in what sorts of cells in what parts of a host’s body it infects and whether it can remain lethal while floating through indoor air. Combining all those changes into one incarnation of the virus is highly unlikely. But odds against any unlikely event go down as the number of chances goes up. That’s how evolution over the ages has given us mammals that fly (bats), birds that swim (penguins), insects that live within elaborate social systems (ants) and the duck-billed platypus.
One area where those improbable mutations might be brought together is in the udders of dairy cows. Cow udders are hot spots for copious replication of the virus, and some new research (albeit not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that udders may contain both cells with receptors hospitable to bird flu viruses and other cells with receptors hospitable to human flu viruses. If a bird flu and a human flu happened to infect the same udder cell at the same time, they could swap sections of their genomes and emerge as a hybrid capable of causing a pandemic.
If. Probably won’t. Could. Nothing is certain about how an influenza virus will evolve until it happens.
6) Great perspective on the Indian election in Good Authority.
In nine of India’s largest states, the BJP’s vote share increased in 2024, and in another five states it decreased by about 3 percentage points or less. Significant losses were limited mainly to five major states.
Here is another important piece of context: In 2014, when the BJP first came to power with a legislative majority, its vote share was significantly lower than the vote share that it won in this election. In other words, even though the BJP just lost its majority in the legislature, it remains more popular with voters today than it was when it first came to power ten years ago!
The deeper story in 2024
What that tells us is that the real action in 2024 was where the BJP won votes and how those votes translated into legislative seats. The BJP’s problem in 2024 was not a massive erosion of its popular support. Rather, the challenge was that its popular gains did not help it win many seats, whereas its popular losses cost it quite a few seats.
To illustrate, consider the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where BJP support historically has been very weak. The party’s vote share increased by more than 7 percentage points from 2019. But it still won only 11% of the vote in 2024. Perhaps these gains will serve the BJP well in future elections if support continues to grow in Tamil Nadu. But, for now, that growth did not actually help the BJP win any seats in the state.
Now think about Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state. In 2019, the BJP won nearly 50% of the vote and about three-quarters of the state’s 80 seats. In this year’s election, the BJP saw its vote decline to about 41%. It is still a major force in Uttar Pradesh. But that decline was enough to make it a really close race between the BJP and the rival alliance headed by the Samajwadi Party, a regional party. In such a close race, the BJP managed to win only about half as many seats as it did in the last election.
An analogy for U.S. readers
So, imagine that Joe Biden made modest gains in red states like Wyoming or Oklahoma but lost some ground in purple states like Michigan or Wisconsin. His gains would probably not be enough to win any more electoral votes in those traditionally red states, but those losses would likely cost him electoral votes in swing states. Something similar happened to the BJP.
It is always tempting to look for a big national story to help make sense of an election outcome. But in 2024, there was no big national trend. As has often been true in India’s national elections over the past 30 years, we see really different patterns from state to state. The BJP’s performance was a mix of gains and losses. The same is largely true for the Congress party – the largest opposition party – whose national vote share only increased by about 2 percentage points.
7) This is great from David French. Worth a gift link. “The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day”
That some capitalists will turn on democracy, or at least show indifference to its fate, when it seems that democracy might impede the accumulation of wealth is useful context for recent developments in the 2024 presidential election.
According to Sam Sutton, writing in Politico, several Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who backed Donald Trump and then spurned him after the Jan. 6 insurrection have now returned to the fold, with open arms and open wallets. They are, he writes, “looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.”
For these donors, President Biden’s efforts to enforce antitrust law and “tighten rules around markets and mergers” are such a threat to their financial interests that they’ve abandoned the misgivings they entertained in the wake of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. One must also imagine that there is some unhappiness with Biden’s efforts to create and preserve a tight labor market that puts more income into the hands of ordinary workers. Whatever their grievance, these business leaders have come to believe that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”
Of course, this idea is nonsense. There is no way in which the Democratic Party constitutes a threat to capitalism. At most, the party’s program of regulation, redistribution and higher taxes may shrink, ever so slightly, the profit rate for some of the nation’s wealthiest shareholders. But when compared with Trump’s promise to destroy the regulatory state and siphon the public coffers into the accounts of his billionaire friends and allies, even modest intervention on behalf of consumers and labor looks like the harbinger of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The truth is that regimes of corrupt, personalist rule — in which authoritarians wield the state to reward friends, punish enemies and secure their fortunes — are much less prosperous than the alternative. It’s not as if Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a shining city on the hill for the MAGA right, can claim to possess anything like a dynamic, growing economy. And the big-ticket items on Trump’s supposed second-term agenda — large tariffs on most goods entering the United States, the total politicization of the federal bureaucracy, including the Federal Reserve, and a plan to systematically deport who he says are tens of millions of undocumented immigrants — would plunge the country into turmoil and economic disarray.
As Anthony Scaramucci, onetime communication director for the former president, told Politico in a striking critique of Trump’s billionaire supporters: “You need a democracy to have effective capitalism. If you don’t, you get cronyism. You get oligarchy. You get crony capitalism. You get arbitrary and capricious administration to the law, which reduces people’s tendency to invest in your country.”
Frustrating as hell that presumably smart people have their thinking so warped by a bottomless desire to accumulate wealth that they cannot see this.
9) It honestly never ceases to amaze me just how thoroughly Trump has rotted not just the base, but the institutional framework of the Republican Party. Michele Goldberg on the state party in Colorado:
The Colorado Republican Party last week sent a mass email with the subject line, “God hates Pride.” The missive denounced Pride Month as a time when “godless groomers” attack what is “decent, holy and righteous.” It included a clip of a sermon by a famously misogynist pastor named Mark Driscoll, with thumbnail text proclaiming, in a nod to the slogan of the obscenely anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, “God hates flags.” The party also posted on the social media platform X, “Burn all the #pride flags this June.”
These messages, which have rocked Republican politics in Colorado, are the latest demonstration of how Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has thrown state parties into turmoil. But they’ve also set off a furious backlash from within the party, an indication that beneath a veneer of pro-Trump unanimity, old-school Republicans are locked in a power struggle with the fanatics, trolls and conspiracy theorists Trump has empowered. It’s a strange dynamic: A bloc of conservatives who’ve mostly capitulated to Trump is still fighting Trumpism, as if the two things can be separated.
10) Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern pull no punches on the Supreme Court’s medication abortion ruling:
On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout. And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.
The ruling, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, grew out of arguably the most obscene case of judge shopping in recent memory. A far-right Christian nationalist law firm called the Alliance Defending Freedom brought together a group of anti-abortion doctors and dentists in 2022 to serve as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against mifepristone. (The Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, which is the first medication in a two-part regimen that ends a pregnancy, in 2000.) The plaintiffs argued, falsely, that the drug is extraordinarily dangerous to “women and girls,” sends countless patients to the hospital with life-threatening conditions, and should never have been approved. The ADF called the phony association the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and incorporated it in Amarillo, Texas. Why Amarillo? Because just one judge sits in the federal courthouse there: Matthew Kacsmaryk, who worked as an anti-abortion activist before former President Donald Trump appointed him to the bench. Kacsmaryk and his colleagues have rigged the rules to ensure that any case filed in Amarillo gets sent to him, a departure from the standard procedure of random assignment.
11) Thomas Mills went camping in the Smoky Mountains and has some interesting observations:
This year, I met a woman who spends a lot of her time traveling around the country. She’s been on and off the road for the past seven years since she retired from teaching.
Somehow, we figured out that we were both Democrats and started talking a little politics. She’s originally from Louisiana and now lives in a small town in north Georgia. She said most of the people she knows are Trump supporters. In campgrounds, she feels them out by bringing up immigration. Depending on their response, she decides whether to bring up current events.
I think she’s right. Strip away everything else and immigration is the great divider both here and in Europe. To conservatives, immigrants are a symbol for everything that threatens their way of life. They are “others.” They bring new customs, languages, and religions. Those newcomers are replacing the people and businesses that are fleeing for more prosperous areas. Small town groceries are replaced with tiendas. Catholic churches are thriving while traditional protestant ones age and die.
In Europe, the right is emerging in response to the influx of immigrants and people of color. Right-wing parties won big in France and Germany in the European Parliament elections last week. In Sweden, where my daughter lives, the far-right has been rising for the past couple of years, even though they had their first setback in the EU election. Still, immigration seems to be the defining issue that drives people from center-right to far-right and even from centrist to center right…
I left the park on Thursday, heading south from the Gatlinburg entrance to the one in Cherokee. I stopped for gas at the first station I saw on the right side of the road. Inside, a bulletin board was covered by dozens of decals with a sign that read, “Decals for sale at front.” Many were pro-Trump, some reading “Make America Safe Again,” a refrain I also saw on billboards. One had Trump as Rambo, carrying some sort of huge gun that read, “Trump: Taking our country back.” Another had an American flag that read, “If you hate this flag, I’ll help you pack.”
The whole scene left me dismayed. The decals described a country that only exists in the fevered minds of people living in fear of threats exploited by right-wing media and Republican politicians. The fact that the proprietor displayed the decals so prominently and proudly showed both that he’s not concerned about losing business over his extremist views and that they’ve become mainstreamed for too many Americans. After three days of relative calm and serenity, it was a rude reminder of our jolting reality.
Americans have become significantly more likely to identify as liberal in their views on social issues over the past quarter century. In most annual measures since 2015, they have been about equally likely to express having liberal views as moderate and conservative ones — reflecting a shift from Gallup’s earliest measures, when liberal perspectives on social issues were a firmly minority viewpoint.
Meanwhile, Americans still lean conservative on economic issues, but the percentage leaning liberal has been trending up slightly.
Both trends toward more liberal views than in the past are driven by U.S. Democrats; neither Republicans nor independents have become more liberal in their views over time. These trends on social and economic views are separate from the slight long-term increase in Americans’ description of their political views, broadly, as liberal…
Bottom Line
Compared with 2004 and 2014, Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats have become more liberal in their views on both social and economic issues, but not at the same rate. The growth in liberal views among Democrats has outpaced that in conservative views among Republicans, which were already the dominant position among the latter group. As the ideological makeup of political independents has remained steady, the liberalization of Democratic views has altered the national averages on both social and economic issues.
Americans’ views on economic matters, broadly, still lean more conservative than liberal, despite a growing number of Americans who identify as economically liberal. However, in the wake of landmark changes on LGBTQ+ rights, legalization of marijuana in much of the country, and the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, the nation is now less conservative than in the past on social issues, with equal shares identifying as liberal, moderate and conservative.
Here are three charts showing fiscal discipline for every president since Ronald Reagan. They show three things.
First, Republicans raise a lot less revenue than Democrats. Second, Republicans blow up spending while Democrats keep it under control. Third, as a result, deficits generally get worse under Republicans and improve under Democrats.
There’s a bonus fourth chart at the bottom that shows annual GDP growth. Democratic presidents rank first and third, so there’s obviously no penalty for Democratic policies.
POSTSCRIPT: Is the spending chart unfair to Donald Trump since it includes a lot of bipartisan COVID spending? Sure. But his second budget was 6.3% higher than his first one. He was on track to blow up spending all on his own.
13) Wild! “Every Elephant Has Its Own Name, Study Suggests: An analysis of elephant calls using an artificial intelligence tool suggests that the animals may use and respond to individualized rumbles.”
14) Amongst all the awfulness out there, good to see some genuine progress, “Dr Pepper Ties Pepsi as America’s No. 2 Soda.” As I’ve probably mentioned, many days I get most of my liquid consumption from Diet Dr Pepper. And Diet Pepsi is absolute trash.
There is a new contender in the cola wars, and it isn’t a cola. It’s Dr Pepper.
The 139-year-old soda brand is now tied with Pepsi-Cola as the No. 2 carbonated soft drink brand in America behind Coke. The regular versions of Pepsi and Dr Pepper are neck-and-neck in a spot that Pepsi has held nearly every year for four decades, according to sales-volume data from Beverage Digest.
Dr Pepper’s new ranking follows a steady climb over the past 20 years. Its ascent is a product of big marketing investments, novel flavors and a quirk in Dr Pepper’s distribution that put it on more soda fountains than any other soft drink in the U.S. At the same time, consumption of regular Pepsi has fallen as its drinkers switch to Pepsi Zero Sugar or migrate to other drinks.
The overall Pepsi brand, including Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar, remains the No. 2 soda trademark in the U.S., though its market share has been slipping. Coke has more than twice the market share by volume of any of its rivals.
Dr Pepper is one of the oldest soda brands in the U.S. — older than Coca-Cola or Pepsi. It was invented in 1885 by Charles Alderton, a pharmacist and soda-fountain operator who wanted a drink that evoked the aroma of the drugstore where he worked in Waco, Texas. His syrup combined 23 flavors, including cherry and vanilla, with other fruits and spices. Coca-Cola was invented a year later, followed by Pepsi-Cola in the 1890s.
Coca-Cola emerged as the most popular fountain drink, while Dr Pepper retained a stronghold in the South. The cola wars began in the 1960s, when PepsiCo launched its Pepsi Generation campaign. It cast Pepsi as the hip, upstart cola for young people and Coke as old-fashioned.
Pepsi didn’t catch Coke, but it reached a close second. Pepsi-Cola has held the No. 2 spot nearly every year since 1985, when Beverage Digest began collecting data, except for a stretch from 2010 to 2013, when Diet Coke unseated regular Pepsi to grab second place.
The $97 billion U.S. soft-drink market is largely organized into red and blue camps, representing the packaging colors of Coke and Pepsi. Each has its own distribution network, and each competes for national restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Dr Pepper, which is owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, has alliances with both sides. Any soda fountain with Coke brands or Pepsi brands probably has Dr Pepper on it, too.
That ubiquity has helped introduce Dr Pepper to more people, said Keurig Dr Pepper’s chief marketing officer, Andrew Springate, who has worked with the brand for the past two decades.
In 2004, Dr Pepper was tied with Sprite in sixth place. Its market share has climbed steadily since then. During that time, Springate said, the brand has kept a consistent marketing theme, focusing on Dr Pepper’s unique taste. Dr Pepper’s marketing spending includes large investments in college football, he said.
Dr Pepper now has strong sales across the country and is growing fastest among Gen Z drinkers, Springate said.
Consumer surveys showed that people like to drink Dr Pepper as a treat, so the brand has leaned into the idea of a sweet indulgence, he said. Noting a trend of younger consumers’ seeking out unusual flavors, Dr Pepper has introduced such variations as strawberries and cream to attract new drinkers. Some of them then become fans of traditional Dr Pepper, he said.
The new flavors have also proven popular among Hispanic consumers, a growing demographic in the U.S.
And, yes, the fact that somehow Dr Pepper worked it out that it is often included with both Pepsi and Coke fountain machines is pretty amazing and something for which I am very grateful.
15) Drum on the Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling:
It’s pretty obvious that this is literally not a question of law at all. Is it a “single function of the trigger” if you merely keep the trigger depressed to fire multiple rounds but you have to rhythmically “bump” the rifle after every shot? What law is going to decide that?
Thomas’s best argument, I think, has nothing to do with how a bump stock operates:
On more than 10 separate occasions over several administrations, ATF consistently concluded that rifles equipped with bump stocks cannot “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
….ATF abruptly reversed course in response to a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. In October 2017, a gunman fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 more. The gunman equipped his weapons with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes. This tragedy created tremendous political pressure to outlaw bump stocks nationwide.
This is true. It’s pretty obvious that ATF changed its rules for purely political reasons, not because it genuinely believed bump stocks turned rifles into machine guns.
In any case, what happened is the usual thing. Even though this case is based on statutory language, not constitutional issues; and even though it depends on a very delicate interpretation of a single phrase; and even though both sides essentially agree on the particulars—despite all that, the conservatives all voted one way and the liberals the other way. And by an amazing coincidence, all nine justices decided that this delicate statutory interpretation matched their ideological preferences. How about that?
16) This is definitely not for everybody, but given my line of work, I found this fascinating and enjoyed digging into the details, “Representativeness versus Response Quality: Assessing Nine Opt-In Online Survey Samples”
Social scientists rely heavily on data collected from human participants via surveys or experiments. To obtain these data, many social scientists recruit participants from opt-in online panels that provide access to large numbers of people willing to complete tasks for modest compensation. In a large study (total N=13,053), we explore nine opt-in non-probability samples of American respondents drawn from panels widely used in social science research, comparing them on three dimensions: response quality (attention, effort, honesty, speeding, and attrition), representativeness (observable demographics, measured attitude typicality, and responding to experimental treatments), and professionalism (number of studies taken, frequency of taking studies, and modality of device on which the study is taken). We document substantial variation across these samples on each dimension. Most notably, we observe a clear tradeoff between sample representativeness and response quality (particularly regarding attention), such that samples with more attentive respondents tend to be less representative, and vice versa. Even so, we find that for some samples, this tension can be largely eliminated by adding modest attention filters to more representative samples. This and other insights enable us to provide a guide to help researchers decide which online opt-in sample is optimal given one’s research question and constraints.
17) Loved the movie “Hitman” (now on Netflix) and really liked this article, “The Real Reason Netflix’s New Hit Could Make Glen Powell a Star: The secret to being a leading man isn’t just being a Ron. It’s being a Gary.”
18) And damn did I love this profile of Powell. Consider me a huge Glen Powell fan now.
19) Nigeria has turned into an economic basket case. Really, really unfortunate for the people who live there:
Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria is projected to drop to fourth place this year.
The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies.
The crisis is largely believed to be rooted in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the currency, which together have caused major price rises.
A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted….
On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward.
Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day.
Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk.
20) I mean, yeah, there’s plenty of corrupt money in US politics, but, geez…”$800,000 wire transfer from billionaire donor to US Chamber raises curtain on dark money“
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce received an $800,000 wire transfer from billionaire donor Hank Meijer days after it endorsed his son, then-Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), in a contentious 2022 primary, according to previously unreported internal emails reviewed by The Hill.
Within days of the transfer, the Chamber spent $381,000 on “Media Advertisement – Energy and Taxes – Mentioning Rep. Peter Meijer,” according to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
But because the ad — titled “Thank you, Rep. Peter Meijer” — does not explicitly advocate for his election or defeat, the pro-business lobbying giant did not have to legally disclose the donation from Hank Meijer, the co-chair and CEO of the Meijer chain of superstores. It also did not have to disclose any other potential contributions behind the $1.8 million it told the FEC it spent on “electioneering communications” that cycle.
Emails obtained by The Hilllay out the timeline of the endorsement, donation and ad buy just weeks before the Aug. 2, 2022, House GOP primary in Michigan. Campaign finance experts told The Hill that the emails pull back the curtain on a surge of “dark money” in U.S. elections, spending where the ultimate source of the money is not publicly disclosed.
“They’re exploiting a legal loophole to help them conceal the sources of election spending in this race,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC), which filed a complaint during the 2020 cycle alleging an individual later identified as Hank Meijer tried to obscure separate donations by using a limited liability corporation (LLC) to donate to another super PAC supporting his son.
“And they’re doing it in a very sophisticated way, but ultimately the voters suffer as a result,” Ghosh added.
21) This is cool, for some reason a new Covid-influenza combo vaccine is more effective than the two vaccines given separately.
There could be a combined Covid-19 and flu shot in our future, although it won’t be ready for this year’s flu season.
On Monday, vaccine maker Moderna announced positive late-stage trial results for its Covid-flu combination vaccine it calls mRNA-1083.
Calling the outcome of the late-stage trial “breakthrough results,” Moderna’s Chief Medical Affairs Officer Francesca Ceddia told CNN that people in the trial who got mRNA-1083 showed an improved immune response compared with those who got the standalone flu and Covid vaccines that are available now. The results were true even for people in the trial who were 65 years and older. Generally, older people don’t mount as robust a response to vaccines as younger people do.
“When we think about the combination vaccine, we often only think about the element of convenience, one shot instead of two, but what is really, really breakthrough is the fact that you not only offer that advantage, you also offer the proof of clinical benefit. I think this is the most important message,” Ceddia said.
22) Mark Robinson gets the New York treatment. Good stuff, even if they didn’t interview a certain NC State professor, “Mark Robinson Is MAGA’s Great Black Hope The North Carolina gubernatorial candidate has no experience and few accomplishments. But he sure is mad.”
23) My favorite part of this story is how good my virtual zoom background– a photo I took of my office from the perspective of my webcam– worked for this interview in my bedroom.
About Steve Greene
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