The beverage business isn’t exactly turning around, but the worst might be over, according to an analyst quoted by Reuters.

“Demand is getting less bad,” said Mark Swartzberg of Stigel Nicolaus, speaking during the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit. The big categories are generally in decline but rates of decline … are moderating.

Several categories, including iced tea, juice drinks, bottled water, and energy drinks, saw demand plummet during the recession. They’re all stabilizing now, but Swartzberg said their former growth rates likely won’t return any time soon.

Last month, Japan said that even if the United Nations were to agree to ban international trade in endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna, it would ignore the agreement. “It’s a pity,” Japanese negotiator Masanori Miyahira said, “but it’s a matter of principle.”

Miyahira doesn’t have to worry. The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (which goes by the much less cumbersome “Cites”) on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to reject the ban. Only the United States, Norway, and Kenya strongly supported the measure. Other nations, including those in the European Union, favored various softer measures.

Japan is by far the biggest customer for the species, which is often used for sushi: The country consumes about 80 percent of the annual catch.

Japan argues that Cites, despite its quite specific name and its crystal-clear mission, is the wrong one to regulate bluefin protection. The proper regulator, it says, is the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. Groups seeking restrictions on fishing bluefin say that body favors industrial fishing operations. They have nicknamed it “The International Conspiracy To Catch all Tuna.“

Stocks of bluefin have fallen by 75 percent due to overfishing.

The Associated Press bluntly stated in its report on the vote that “economic interest at this meeting appeared to be trumping conservation.”

One of my favorite thought leaders (Nobel Prize winner), Paul Krugman, explains how he thinks about the current China syndrome, and why he believes that most of the responses that he hears from fans are missing the point.

He focuses on three questions:

The macroeconomics of Chinese currency intervention, the fallacies of elasticity pessimism, and the political economy issue of how to deal with Chinese intransigence.

Capital Export, Elasticity Pessimism, and the Renminbi (Wonkish)

Agree or disagree?

I don’t like wearing suits. In part, this is simply a question of personal taste — I find them uncomfortable and overpriced, and I don’t like the way they look. But it’s also a question of principle. Suits — and the other trappings of “respect” that go with them, like titles and sir’s and the rest — are the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.

As a result, when I go to events I try to avoid wearing a suit if I can. But sometimes not wearing a suit just feels really out of place. When you show up to a room of people in suits wearing a t-shirt and jeans, people don’t think you’re taking a brave stand on principle; they just think you’re unkempt.

Yet these things do change. In the 1950s, college kids went to class in suits and addressed their professors as sir. The 1960s changed all that. Today, at most colleges, wearing a suit to class would be the weird thing to do.

This seems like a traditional collective action problem. If one person doesn’t wear a suit, they seem weird, but if everyone doesn’t wear a suit, they’re all fine. But the idea of doing political organizing around not wearing a suit just seems bizarre. It’s hard to know who to organize — each event has a different group of people — and even if you could find the people and they agreed with you, asking folks to join a no-suit pact just seems weird.

So suits are emblematic of this strange kind of politico-cultural issue — a political question that’s not amenable to a political solution. And yet, from the 1960s, we know that these battles can be won. Does anyone know how?

“Tennessee, you are worthless!” wrote someone on Find the Shake, a real-time, user-generated tracker of McDonald’s (MCD) Shamrock Shakes. This was a response to a fellow Tennessean who had complained: “I LIVE IN A VAST SHAMROCK SHAKE-LESS WASTELAND.”

Luckier are the folks in and around remote Greenville, Ill. “Rte 127 right off of I-70,” advised a burping, green-lipped person there.

The site fills a need because McDonald’s now offers the once-ubiquitous shakes only at select locations. Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle says Find the Shake is “poorly designed.” Quite so. It’s also true that following the advice of a random person online is rarely a good idea. So if you’re thinking of heading to the Greenville Mickey D’s (say, from Tennessee), it’s probably a good idea to call ahead.

Given that he’s writing for a San Francisco paper, Hartlaub couldn’t help but inject some P.C. into his account. “Thank you McDonald’s,” he wrote, “for not running the marginally xenophobic commercials that we used to get in the 1980s … where everyone was talking like the Lucky Charms leprechaun, wearing cheap green hats, dancing badly and saying the word “blarney.”

Yes. Because the time has come to put a final end to marginal xenophobia, particularly when it’s aimed at the downtrodden Irish-American community.

You didn’t want to know this, but Hartlaub also gives us the stark nutritional facts on Shamrock Shakes: The 16-ounce version has 550 calories and 13 grams of fat. “But the shakes also have 13 grams of protein, which sounds sort of healthy,” he writes. “Take that, health police!”