Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, said Thursday its U.S. sales, profit and market share had all fallen sharply in the second quarter as consumers abandoned Bud Light following a promotion it did with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
....The company’s market share has been stable since the last week of April through to the end of June, said [CEO Michael Doukeris], while Bud Light’s share is following a similar trajectory....Overall, AB InBev’s second-quarter U.S. sales to wholesalers dropped 15% and sales to retailers dropped 14%, mainly because of the decline in Bud Light.
The decline in sales of Bud Light did indeed slow down in June, but nonetheless it's still going down. Market share of Bud Light since the Mulvaney boycott started has plummeted by a third, from 10% to 6.8%.
And all of this is over a minor online promotion that probably nobody gave a second thought to. I don't normally feel any empathy for gigantic multinational beer companies, but I feel sorry for Budweiser. There's no way they could have predicted that this would cause the MAGA right to go completely insane.
Here's an interesting chart for inflation in goods:
With a 4-month lag, the New York Fed's supply chain index predicts inflation in goods pretty accurately. The Kansas City Fed says the prediction is even more accurate if you use core inflation:
This is intriguing both for the closeness of fit and because it strongly suggests that inflation in goods during the pandemic was all about supply chain shortages and nothing else.
Yesterday the LA Times ran a Rorschach-test of a story about Akhilesh Jha, a developer who is buying up single-family homes and replacing them with apartment buildings. Everybody hates him, but he doesn't care:
In the face of a crushing housing affordability crisis and shortage of available homes, state lawmakers have approved more than 100 new laws in six years that are designed to incentivize new housing proposals and force local governments to approve them.
In Los Angeles, no one is pushing the envelope more than Jha. Besides the 33-unit Harvard Heights project nestled between the 10 Freeway and Koreatown, he has two proposals in the San Fernando Valley to tear down single-family homes and build dozens of apartments and townhomes on the sites — all efforts that never before would have stood a chance of getting built.
Akhilesh Jha in front of a home he wants to replace with a 67-unit apartment building. —Mel Melcon, LA Times
Jha is exploiting a variety of new laws that are meant to cut through red tape and allow the construction of high-density housing regardless of local opposition. If your site is near a mass transit station, dozens of restrictions go away. Provide a bit of low-income housing and other restrictions go away. In one case, Jha took advantage of a loophole that makes it easier to build if the state hasn't approved a city's growth plan. This happened to Los Angeles very briefly last year and Jha slipped in his application during the few days LA was out of compliance.
In one sense, Jha is only doing exactly what lawmakers intended. They wanted to make it harder for local opposition to hamstring new construction, and that's exactly what's happened. But Jha has been so aggressive that he's essentially prevented any local input into his projects. He just points to frequently arcane provisions of the law and tells everyone to pound sand.
So: YIMBY hero or ruthless villain? You make the call.
In 2023 so far, immigration courts have approved nearly half of all asylum cases they've heard:
There's a remarkable spread in asylum leniency by judge and by city. In Houston, judge Bruce Imbacuan has granted asylum in 0% of the 105 cases he's heard. In San Francisco, judge Gordon Louis has granted asylum in 99% of the 208 cases he's heard. Here are the numbers for all immigration courts with more than 2,000 cases over the past six years:
That's a range of 5% to 67%, and none of this is because of a few outlier judges. Each of these courts has ten or more judges and the data is for the past six years of decisions.
The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country....The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.
This could be true. On the other hand, employers have been griping forever about the lousy skills of kids these days. For example:
Maybe remote learning during the pandemic really has generated a cohort of undertrained new workers. Or, just maybe, the kids are pretty much the same as always, while employers are annoyed as always that entry-level workers have to learn stuff. It's your call.
In honor of Donald Trump's latest indictment, I want to remind everyone of something. Although Vice President Mike Pence declined to accept Trump's fake slates of electors when Congress met to certify the presidential vote on January 6, the same wasn't true of Republicans in general. A total of 59% of House Republicans supported objections to the count in Arizona and 68% did so in Pennsylvania.¹
The Electoral Count Act, passed last year, will stop this kind of stuff in the future. But 96% of House Republicans voted against it.
Bottom line: It's not just Trump. We have an entire political party that went along with the coup attempt. There were just enough non-corrupt Republicans to stop it, but it was a close run thing.
¹The numbers were much lower among Republican senators. I don't know why.
This is kind of odd. The Census Bureau reports that rental vacancies are up. This should mean lower rents, but Zillow reports that rent is on the rise:
Note that vacancy rates are for large cities and rent is for all urban areas.
In any case, I don't quite know what to make of this. Vacancies are up 6% and rent is up 1.1% over the past quarter. But if there are more vacancies, why are prices rising?
I was diddling around, as one does, on the website of the Department of Agriculture and came across a new report called "Characterizing Rugged Terrain in the United States." My first thought was the same as yours: Why does the USDA care about rugged terrain? I mean, the Post Office, sure. The Interior Department, sure. Maybe even the Army. But why the Agriculture Department?
We will probably never know, but in any case I bet you're curious about how your state stacks up, ruggedness-wise. Here you go:
Louisiana is the flattest state and West Virginia is the most rugged. Surprisingly, California ranks pretty high too. In fact, the West Coast has by far the largest amount of really rugged territory and really rugged roads:
No other region is even in double digits, but 25% of the West Coast is super-rugged and so are 37% of its roads. I would not have guessed that!
With a 4-month lag, the New York Fed's supply chain index predicts inflation in goods pretty accurately. The Kansas City Fed says the prediction is even more accurate if you use core inflation:
This is intriguing both for the closeness of fit and because it strongly suggests that inflation in goods during the pandemic was all about supply chain shortages and nothing else.
There's a remarkable spread in asylum leniency by judge and by city. In Houston, judge Bruce Imbacuan has granted asylum in 0% of the 105 cases he's heard. In San Francisco, judge Gordon Louis has granted asylum in 99% of the 208 cases he's heard. Here are the numbers for all immigration courts with more than 2,000 cases over the past six years:
That's a range of 5% to 67%, and none of this is because of a few outlier judges. Each of these courts has ten or more judges and the data is for the past six years of decisions.
Note that vacancy rates are for large cities and rent is for all urban areas.
Louisiana is the flattest state and West Virginia is the most rugged. Surprisingly, California ranks pretty high too. In fact, the West Coast has by far the largest amount of really rugged territory and really rugged roads:
No other region is even in double digits, but 25% of the West Coast is super-rugged and so are 37% of its roads. I would not have guessed that!