A couple of days ago at lunch I bought a Coke Zero and really struggled to remove the cap. One of the pieces that holds it on hadn't been perforated and it took a serious yank to finally pull it loose.
Meh. Bad luck. But later in the day I bought a carton of milk. When I opened it the next morning the same thing happened, and I yanked the cap so hard I splashed milk all over the room.
The next day I bought a bottle of water and it happened again. This time I was finally savvy enough to realize it was intentional—though I couldn't fathom the reason. Then, by chance, the Wall Street Journal explained everything:
In 2021, [Coca-Cola] introduced a design that connected some of its plastic bottles to their caps as a test in Germany and Spain and subsequently expanded it to other European markets. The change helps more caps get recycled with their bottles rather than thrown in the trash or on the ground, the company said. It also complies with a European Union directive set to take effect this summer, which has pushed Coke’s rivals to follow suit.
Sport Vöslauer bottle with cap permanently attached.
So that's the answer. Apparently people were tossing empty plastic bottles in the recycle bin but throwing away the caps in the trash. The new EU rules keep the caps attached, so the whole thing goes into the recycling bin.
Is it worth it? I suppose, though it really is a bit of a pain at first. After a few days, though, you get used to the cap brushing your cheek as you drink. Nevertheless, in America I'm sure it would provoke a whole series of congressional hearings from Republicans opposed to woke water bottles or something.
Our trip has been completely cat free. Not even a glimpse. But I still have some catblogging for you.
On the top is "Katzen und Fische," which I assume needs no translation. It's a 1781 painting by Martin Ferdinand Quadal in the Belvedere Museum. At the bottom, courtesy of my sister, is a picture of Charlie in the new cat scratching thingie we bought as a going away present.
Tyler Cowen points today to a new paper that investigates whether economists tend to talk their own book. That is, do they generally come to conclusions that fit their political leanings?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes, and I doubt that we need to bother with any more research on this subject. Tyler particularly directs our attention to this:
For example, we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 84% to 58%.
That's a big difference. But it's notable that even the furthest-right economists can't manage to twist the evidence any further than a 58% optimal tax rate. That's a very high top tax rate by their standards.
Now, I assume that "optimal" in this context means "the rate that raises the most money"—not the rate that's fairest or most efficient. Still, this indicates that in terms of revenue raising, top rates should be at least 58% and probably closer to 70%. In other words, about what we had before Ronald Reagan wrecked the public fisc for good.
Today we went out to visit some museums and we had to wait two minutes for our subway train to show up. Two minutes! It's outrageous. Yesterday there was a three-minute wait for our tram and then a four-minute wait on the way home. Do they think we have nothing but time on our hands?
On a more serious note, the Vienna subway is fast. From our hotel to the museums is about 10-15 minutes on the tram and about 3-4 minutes on the subway. The subway doesn't have a lot of stops; doesn't stay in stations very long; and accelerates to pretty high speeds on long straightaways. Very impressive.
President Biden has already turned over to Congress the transcript of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur. But he's claimed executive privilege to hold on to the tape recordings. The Wall Street Journal is outraged:
The privilege claim is bogus on two grounds....
Oh for chrissake. There's no need to read any further. Of course his claim is bogus. But so is the claim from Republicans in Congress that the recordings play some legitimate role in their oversight function. They've already got a 400 page report from Hur himself; congressional testimony from Hur; and a transcript of the interview—all of which make it clear that Biden did nothing wrong.
Everyone knows perfectly well why Republicans want the audio: so they can find some excerpt where Biden stutters or slips a bit. Then they can gleefully release it amidst earnest claims that it shows Biden was hesitant or untruthful or confused or no longer remembers his own name.
Republicans have honed the art of the congressional investigation into a fine art, and I admit I'm a little puzzled that Democrats haven't done the same. They ran the January 6 investigation a couple of years ago, but that's about it—and Republican Liz Cheney was the driving force behind it anyway. Beyond that, they can't quite seem to bring themselves to bash away at Republicans in the same scorched-earth style that Republicans do to Democrats.
In a way, I'm thankful for that. The Republican style is obscene. Still, unilateral disarmament hardly seems right either.
You remember Daniel Perry, don't you? He's the guy in Texas who developed a hatred of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and wrote to friends about how he planned to kill a few of them. Eventually he did. He deliberately drove his car into a crowd of BLM protesters, claimed that one of them had maybe raised a rifle in his direction, and then gunned him down before plowing through the rest of the crowd to make his escape.
A jury—in Texas—unanimously convicted him of murder and sentenced him to 25 years in prison, but right wingers were outraged and Gov. Greg Abbott promised to pardon him just as soon as he could.
That turned out to be yesterday, and Abbott has followed through. Perry is a free man because, apparently, it's now legal in Texas to kill protesters if they annoy you a lot. This is disgusting beyond words. Perry's act was a brutal, cold-blooded, violent crime motivated by a long history of outspoken racism, but because he was acting out a conservative anti-BLM fantasy Abbott set him free. I'd say it's unbelievable, but these days that's not true. It's all too believable from a modern Republican.
The New York Times tells us today that social media is rife with testimonials from women saying they've quit using birth control pills because of all the side effects. However, in a development that should shock no one, an analysis of actual data shows exactly the opposite:
Usage has been steadily trending upward in the United States; 10 percent of women had prescriptions in 2023, up from 7.1 percent in 2018. The analysis looked at prescriptions for the pill that were written and picked up. Even among those aged 15 to 34, who would be most likely to see negative social media posts, Trilliant found prescriptions had increased.
When are people going to learn?
A million likes on TikTok means nothing. It is literally background level noise.
Social media is practically designed to highlight complaints. Griping and bitching will always be its most popular activity.
Social media reveals what we're like; it doesn't shape it. In nearly every case, it simply makes public what we've been like all along.
If there are millions of women complaining on social media about the side effects of birth control pills, it's because there have always been millions of women who suffer these side effects. Some of them keep taking the pill because the side effects are fairly minor, while others have quit because the side effects are severe. A sudden surge of attention on social media merely reveals this. It doesn't mean anything new is happening.
Bottom line: social media is great for tracking the latest dance trends. For anything deeper or more important, it's crap.
Do you like pictures of butterflies? I sure hope so, because on Wednesday we visited Vienna's Schmetterling Haus and I spent some time collecting photos of the (alleged) 400 species of butterflies they boast.
The star of the show was the blue morpho, because they're big, bright, blue, and flying around by the dozens. The blue morpho is blue on the inside and brown with a large eye on the outside. They don't seem to land much, which made it very hard to get a good shot of them.
The top photo is a pair of blue morphos, showing their blue insides brilliantly backlighted by the glass of the greenhouse. The bottom photo shows another pair, one with wings spread and one with wings up so you can see both sides.
For the fourth month in a row, illegal border crossings remained steady at a high but non-catastrophic rate:
Total encounters in April came to 180,000, of which 41,000 were migrants who made appointments for asylum through CBP's mobile app. The number apprehended crossing illegally was 129,000.
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a broad challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reversing a lower-court ruling that would have undermined the watchdog agency created by Congress 12 years ago.
The CFPB case is one of several the Supreme Court heard this term that challenge the power of federal agencies, long a target of conservatives concerned about regulation and government bureaucrats whom they see as unaccountable to the public. In a 7-2 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court upheld as constitutional the bureau’s funding mechanism — which is based on profits from the Federal Reserve, rather than an annual appropriation.
This was a ridiculous case claiming that the CFPB was funded unconstitutionally because it doesn't require an annual appropriation from Congress. Instead, it draws whatever funds it needs from the Federal Reserve—which itself is self funded. This means the CFPB is doubly insulated from Congress, which supposedly created some kind of magical quandary that the Constitution prohibited. This is despite the fact that the text of the Constitution is crystal clear:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law....
CFPB funding is plainly "made by Law," which is all that's required. The details are left for Congress.
Nonetheless, the usual suspects on the Fifth Circuit were willing to uphold the right-wing challenge because, hey, that's what they do. But even the current conservative Supreme Court wouldn't play along with them. The only two who dissented from the ruling were Alito, who's hopeless, and Gorsuch, who's becoming more Alito-like all the time.
And Clarence Thomas got to write a majority opinion of some importance! That doesn't happen very often.
