Current Affairs

Accountability of We The People

Remember: every time you look at the credentials, track record, personality and fitness for office of any prospective or actual Donald Trump appointee, remember that this appointee may end up in his administration because enough electors thought it was a good idea to make Donald Trump the President.
We The People, collectively, gave Trump this opportunity to lead the USA.
So if I find anybody on my social media sites or platforms who I know voted for Trump, whining about his appointees, his actions as POTUS, or his approach to governance, I am going to pretty quickly remind them of that fact.
Anybody who voted for Donald Trump owns the accountability. No hiding, bullshitting or handwringing along the lines of “but I didn’t think he really would do all of those things!”. If you try that last line with me, prepare to be ridiculed. You don’t like it? Too bad.

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Friday round-up

1. Diversion 101 – Attack the opponents
This article explains how the current focus of GOP partisans and hardcore supporters of Donald Trump is on attacking Trump’s critics outside of the Republican Party – the media, presumed liberals and other lower forms of life.
The likely explanation for the focus elsewhere is that right now Donald Trump is not doing much of anything that makes sense or which is defensible. Hence the reversion to “oh look! there are bigger assholes over there!” tactics.

2. How to Spot Deceit 101 – divergent and changing stories
One of the easiest ways to detect lies and bullshit being deployed to explain actions and events is to carefully analyze the ways in which the actors are explaining those actions and events, and whether those explanations change over time.
Since lying, by definition, involves making shit up, once you have more than one actor, or actors who are disorganized or complacent, it is usually only a matter of time before narratives and explanations created at different times begin to clearly diverge.
Once that begins to happen, it becomes rather obvious that bullshit is being disseminated.
This Washington Post article explains that in the case of the firing of James Comey, the actors reporting to the President, in the space of 24 hours, created two divergent stories of the events leading up to his firing. Then, not to be left out, the POTUS himself, in interviews, created a third totally divergent story.
This is not evidence of mere bullshit. One of more of the actors in this farce has been disseminating 24-carat whoppers. The totally divergent nature of the narratives leaves me unconvinced that any of the narratives released that far is anything like the truth.

3. Impeachment 101
For those of you using the I word (as in Impeachment), you need to remember that according to a SCOTUS ruling in the case of a judge who was disbarred for corruption following a State Senate trial, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one.
This means that, under the catch-call of “other high crimes and misdemeanors”, the US Senate could theoretically convict Donald Trump of almost anything. Just like they tried to convict Bill Clinton for lying about a blow-job.
If you ever get to watch any impeachment proceedings, you need to remind yourself that this is not a legal process, with all of the required checks and balances and due process. For example,. there is no jury vetting or voir dire process to weed out biased or incompetent jury candidates. The jury is the entire US Senate.
Because impeachment is a political process, this, almost by definition, means that it can be abused in the service of practical politics. This has happened in the past. The ideal way to resolve directional issues in US political governance is via full free and fair elections, not post-hoc persecution of opponents. There are already some disturbing “third world” tendencies creeping into US politics (as exemplified by the “lock her up” rabble-rousing about Hillary Clinton) and any further drift in the direction of retributive actions based on slip-shod legal manouvering will further erode the credibility of the US system of representative democracy.

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The pathology of Donald Trump – there is no Grand Plan

David Roberts from Vox wrote a Tweetstorm the other day about the behavior pathologies of Donald Trump. I took the liberty of unpicking it from Twitter and enclosing it below.
Basically, like Jay Rosen, Roberts believes that Trump’s behavior is not part of some personal Grand Plan or strategy. As Rosen says, the White House is not a ship of state governed by many. The Executive Branch is entirely Donald Trump, with all of the personnel constantly reacting to Trump’s latest outbursts or actions.
Here is Roberts’ take on Trump:

I want to riff on the point I made here, which I still think is central to our current political, uh, situation.
“Theory of mind” (ToM) is a concept in psychology. To have a ToM is to interpret the behavior of others as reflecting inner states. It is to interpret behavior as issuing from, and evidence of, desires, beliefs, intentions, fears, etc.
Humans typically develop ToM early, around 2-3. There are raging debates about whether various animals have ToM, or if so what kind.
People on the autism spectrum have difficulty w/ ToM — difficulty connecting behaviors to mental states, difficulty “reading” behavior. Autism-spectrum presents one kind of ToM problem: a rich text to be read, but a reader with difficulty reading.
There is, however, another (I suspect) more rare ToM problem, namely: sophisticated readers over-interpreting a text. Typical adults are drawn almost irresistibly to see behaviors as indicators of complex mental states – persistent beliefs, desires, etc that are stable, persistent across time and contexts .
Here’s the thing: Trump, by all indications, does not have beliefs, intentions, etc. that are stable, persistent across contexts. He is attuned to who is dominating & who is submissive *in the situation he finds himself in*. It is 100% situational, 0% persistent He seeks domination. That’s all. He does not care about, or even seem cognizant of, lying, reversing himself, switching loyalties, etc. He’s like a goldfish. No beliefs, intentions, plans, or schemes are carried from place to place. Every situation is new. There is, in a very real sense, no “mind” as such, only a set of animal impulses — seek approbation, avoid blame, dominate, win.
Here’s the problem: healthy adults are simply *not accustomed to dealing w/ someone like that*. It is a rare pathology and even rarer for someone to be so protected by money/power/family that they can succeed in life despite the pathology. Utterly novel. To find someone with that pathology in a central position of power in the US is simply unprecedented. Utterly novel. Normal people with normal ToM (including journalists) find it almost impossible to resist over-interpreting Trump’s behavior, to see it as reflective of stable, persistent beliefs, intentions, and plans. They read “mind” into his behavior. Can’t help it. And this describes the vast bulk of journalism & analysis on Trump: a desperate attempt to figure out what kind of “mind” could possibly result in this bizarre set of statements & actions. Is there some long con? Is he distracting us? Secretly a genius? Firing Comey in the middle of the Russia investigation, for example, seems nigh inexplicable. Where’s the “mind,” the deeper rationale? Does this show he “actually” wants to become a dictator? That he “actually” has inside info on what Comey knew/intended? That he’s “actually” distracting attention from the Census thing (or all the other things)? “Actually” angling for revenge on Clinton?
All of these are (perfectly understandable) attempts to apply ToM. It’s what we do, instinctively, *especially* in political analysis. The mistake is not any particular one of these theories. The mistake is *applying conventional ToM at all*. As I argued in the piece (linked way back in tweet 1), Trump is, by all indications, just a bundle of impulses. Nothing more. Most likely explanation re: Russia is not some deep, secret plot, but DT saying yes to something that felt good in the moment and then immediately forgetting about it, connecting it to nothing else. Thus the confusion why everyone keeps bringing it up Most likely explanation re: Comey is not some Machiavellian tactic, but he kept seeing Comey on TV saying not-awesome things and that gave him bad feels, made him feel non-dominant. So he made Comey get off his TV. No “mind,” just stimulus-response.
Accepting this fact — that ToM is useless, that Trump really is nothing more than amygdala — is *absolutely terrifying*. It is more terrifying than any particular ToM as applied to Trump. Stable desires & intentions, even if evil, at least *make sense*. A Trump ToM gives us the comfort of knowing that at least someone’s in charge, someone has a handle on things, even if malign.
The idea that Trump is simply doing what produces good feels in a particular situation, that he is utterly unconstrained by consistency, by past commitments or statements, by laws or norms, by *anything* — that’s there’s no “mind” as such — is chilling. What if he finds himself in a position where North Korea is giving him bad feels? Will he be able to assess a response in light of past commitments, expectations, strategy, norms, or decency? Probably not! He will seek a feeling of dominance *in the moment*. A mindless Trump, acting purely on impulse, is far more dangerous than an evil Trump, acting on grand, secret schemes.
As difficult as it is, journalists, analysts, & other political actors need to internalize this. Evil can be predicted, bargained w/ but there’s no predicting or reasoning w/ pure animal impulse. ToM is useless. Only containment or removal will work.

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Fascism in the USA? Sure it can happen here…

For me, antipathy to fascism is just a wee bit more personal than that of many Americans.
I grew up in a country that fought Fascism for 6 years in the middle of the 20th century, and where the scars of that fight were visible in my home town until the 1970s.
My grandparents were saved from death in a bombing raid in England in 1940 by a fallen door that blocked tons of rubble from crushing them in the destroyed interior of their house in Margate. If the door had not fallen where it fell, my mother’s life would have been even more chaotic than it was, and I would never have had any insight from talking to grandparents.
When I hear people in the USA making statements about dangerous political movements along the lines of “that can’t happen here”, I try to remind them that this was how people in most of Europe dismissed the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. Worse still numerous business leaders and other gullible people (including members of the British royal family, and Americans with names like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh) thought that Mr. Hitler was in many ways a fine fellow, unfairly maligned by the media, who was doing a bang-up job of Making Germany Great Again. They were seduced, like many Germans, by his energy, drive and oratorial skills.
Most of the warnings against Hitler and Mussolini went unheeded by populations who had had quite enough of World War I, wanted peace, and failed to see any clear and present danger.
The rise to ascendancy of dysfunctional and dangerous political systems does not happen overnight. It is a gradual series of changes, imperceptible to many citizens, until one day the terrible truth dawns (for some of them) that the country has changed, and not for the better. Some low-information people never work that out. By the time that realization takes root, the authoritarian processes of fascism have usually made dissent not only illegal, but personally dangerous.
A number of political scientists have analyzed the key characteristics of fascism and how countries governed by fascists are organized. This article summarizes the key characteristics that have been identified.
As we move forward into the future in the USA, everybody needs to read this list and start asking the awkward question “is any of this happening here, and if it is, what should we do about it?”.

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Cyber warfare – the new asymmetric style of fighting

Many moons ago, warfare had settled into a predictable pattern. Countries would raise armies, and either singly, or in alliance with other countries where they shared common interests, attempt to invade their opponents. There would be land battles, and after a while, as humans learned to command vessels on sea and in the air, those battles could occur at sea or in the air.
Eventually, wars would end either in stalemate, where the parties would reluctantly hammer out a peace treaty, or one side would win conclusively, in which case they would occupy and control the defeated side’s territory, sometimes overtly via military presence, or covertly via a client or “puppet” regime.
War was actually recognized as a process, hence the Geneva Conventions, which contained strict rules about how defeated combatants were to be treated. (Needless to say, many parties ignored the Geneva Conventions when it suited them).
This pattern of primarily land-based war based on conquest of territory and control of populations lasted right up to and including World War II.
After World War II the dynamic changed. Firstly we had the Korean War, which technically began not as a war, but a UN operation to prevent incursions. It soon became a war in all but name, but was a proxy war, with the US supporting the South and Russia and China supporting the North. It ended in a stalemate, but no peace treaty was ever signed, so technically North Korean and South Korea are still at war.
Then in the 1950’s, opposing factions in countries discovered what soon became known as asymmetric warfare. Instead of attempting an overt military action against overwhelmingly superior forces, which would have resulted in instant annihilation, the guerilla army concept was born. Groups of fighters would pick “soft” targets where they could inflict maximum damage with minimal risk. This developed further, in more urban societies, into the terrorist cell model, where largely autonomous small groups would independently plot attacks designed to cause maximum damage and publicity. Vietnam was won partly by the success of guerilla fighting by North Vietnam. The US tactics of conventional engagement and fire-fighting were ineffective for a long time, and resulted in numerous changes in US military practice. In the 1960s the IRA became active in Ireland and elsewhere, using urban terrorism tactics. Other terrorist groups sprung up in other places, using similar tactics.
The asymmetric warfare boom (excuse the pun) created all manner of challenges for law enforcement and military alike. The practitioners had in some cases made no formal declaration of war, and they were not part of a military organization. They pretended to be civilian when it suited them, but acted like military when it suited them. They regarded items like the Geneva Conventions as a quaint anachronism, silly rules written by the Big Guys.
Terrorists and guerillas are still with us. However, their tactics have continued to evolve. They have now been joined by an entirely different group of practitioners, enabled by the digital era.
Cyber-terrorists and cyber-warfare practitioners.
With the rise of the digital world, cyber-crime became common. Hackers would break into networks, steal credentials, and use them to lift money and goods.
Cyber criminals operated best in countries without a strong tradition of law enforcement. Eastern Europe and Russia became favored operation locations, due to a combination of under-resourced and corrupt policing, and governments who turned a blind eye to those activities, sometimes out of resentment against more prosperous countries.
The rise of The Internet Of Things, with autonomous devices acquiring operating systems and connectivity, has provided a rich landscape of opportunities for hackers to disrupt the lives of people and governments. Many IoT devices have little or no security, and even if security is provided, regular folks have little or no interest in activating it properly. (If you don’t believe me, take a war drive down a few urban streets and see how many people have home wireless routers that still have the out-of-box default names and passwords.)
A local example (relatively harmless, but still disturbing) was the hacking of the Dallas emergency tornado siren network a few weeks ago. There was likely no underlying motive by the hackers other than to show that they could do it, but the hack shows the way in which cyber-warfare could be used to disrupt a modern digital society.
We now have entered a new, more subtle and more dangerous era. Some countries have now adopted those cyber-criminal techniques in order to subvert peacetime processes such as democratic elections and political campaigns.
There is a good reason for this. The United States has a colossal advantage in conventional military strength. After decades of spending more money on military activities than dozens of other countries put together, we have a formidable arsenal of conventional weaponry, with enough nuclear backup to flatten most of the planet. Nobody with any sense or desire to live wants to take on that kind of military machine head-on.
So…countries that cannot compete via conventional military means are instead, spending money on cyber warfare. It is actually pretty cost-effective to pay a couple of dozen former hackers to subvert an election, compared to running a carrier group. The hackers can reside in the home country, where they are protected. Alternatively they can be officially defined as diplomats, which means that they can travel around the world, immune from prosecution in other countries, or they can live in an embassy and direct activities from there, HINT HINT.
This form of cyber-warfare is far more subtle than direct attacks on computers, and key infrastructure locations, which carry a high risk of detection. It takes the form of covert attempts to skew and influence key social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and the creation of numerous websites to promulgate and promote propaganda and other forms of deceptive reporting and analysis. The desire of platforms like Facebook to operate as common carriers (which shields them from liability for anything that is posted on their platform) also renders them largely powerless to curate and moderate information on the platform. So the platforms are really like the Wild West, vulnerable to being overloaded by falsehoods, propaganda and other forms of deceit.
During the 2016 US election cycle, there is ample evidence of overt and covert attempts to promulgate false narratives. The analysis work is still ongoing, but the reality is that a lot of the content being created during the election cycle was flat-out bullshit. Effectively the players in this new arena are part of the rise of a globalized propaganda machine. George Orwell’s analysis in “1984” looks more and more prescient by the day.
Right now, Russia wants to remove from office any political party that supports the current Western sanctions regime against it. That is their fundamental motive. They have no desire to become involved in any overt military action against the USA, so they are trying to win battles by attempting to subvert the democratic processes in Western countries that still support sanctions. Their next target is German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is up for re-election this year. Expect to see a lot of subtle attempts to influence the electoral process. This will most likely take the form

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The large pool of incompetent leaders in business and IT

When you have been in IT for 35+ years, you get to meet and work with a goodly number of incompetent leaders.
When they are genuinely incompetent, and clearly so, it begs the question “how the hell did that person get to that position”?
There are all sorts of circumstantial reasons, varying from favoritism, nepotism and reciprocity, through being in the right place at the right time, through to the main issue that is surfaced in the second paragraph of this HBR article:

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

In short, it is easy for many men to fake confidence, and many people mistake confidence for competence. The converse of this tendency is also prevalent. Solid, experienced people get overlooked in many teams and organizations because they are poor at self-promotion, often being introverts who find talking about themselves a deeply uncomfortable experience. Many people also perform better than they interview, so they get passed over for new roles because another candidate “aced” the interview. (as anybody who has studied hiring processes knows, interviews are at best an inexact way of screening candidates, and a poor-quality interview process is no better than throwing darts at candidates’ names on a board).
Women are more likely than men to be less fluent at self-promotion. Not only does self-promotion fall outside of their natural personality, it places them in a zone where they are fending off criticism from both sexes that they are engaging in artifice to advance their careers.
What I do know is that I have been exposed to many astonishingly incompetent, venal leaders over the years. Aside from their level of incompetence, the other common factor was their appalling listening skills. Probably as a result of hubris, they assumed that anything that they did not already know about could not be important, because if it was, they would already have known about it. As a result, they tended to reject inputs about their organizations that failed to match the narrative in their heads. (I once was informed by a Director-level person that a presentation that I had prepared about the failings of a delivery partner, while correct, would not have any impact because senior leaders had already decided that the delivery partner was an asset, and the presentation conflicted with that narrative, so it would be ignored). Leaders who reject information that fails to match their preconceptions will crash and burn eventually. They may seem to escape, but everybody in their organization will know what really happened, and their credibility will be zeroed.

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Voyages of Discovery – the AHCA and GOP negligence

In modern IT, I have, on way too many occasion, found myself trying to sort out a a project where, as a work colleague once said. they were trying The Nike Approach To Software Delivery.
As in, “Just Do It”.
An analysis would soon show that more often than not, said project had no detailed plan, limited structure and quite often, no clearly defined destination.
If an expedition by a human pioneer organized along the same lines had set off into the distant unknown 3-400 years ago, those were the guys that would have appeared in history books with some entry like “Met an untimely end at sea” or “was boiled alive by unfriendly natives in a distant continent”.
In other words, a project with no clear objectives or end point, no clearly defined approach to getting stuff done, and no clear structure becomes a Voyage Of Discovery, a project whose purpose, in hindsight, may well simply be to act as a warning to others.
I was reminded of these realities when reading yet another quote from a member of the Trump administration. The tweet, no matter which way you process it, speaks to a level of glib, insouciant negligence that is simply jaw-dropping.

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Proof that America and the UK are still neck and neck on some things

When I was growing up in the UK, I was in a household where sex was The Subject That Must Not Be Mentioned.
In addition, nudity, since it was seen as an obvious precursor to sex, was also a largely taboo subject. My parents’ opinion was that there were these oddball people called “nudists”, who, to the general amazement and amusement of the population, would take their clothes off and run around naked in the Summer. According to my parents, they were either weird or crackers.
When I started traveling in Europe in the 1980s, I rapidly discovered that for the rest of Europe, nudity was seen quite differently. If you were on a beach in Crete and it was 92 in the shade, with a water temperature of 80 degrees, why the hell would you want to wear any clothing anyway? I soon discovered the advantages of informal nudism in countries where nudism, instead of being seen as some form of warped behavior that clearly showed tendencies for weirdness and sexual perversion, was a perfectly logical thing to do, at least on beaches.
Fast forward to the mid 1990s when I moved to the USA. I swiftly discovered that the USA rivalled the UK in it’s lack of understanding of nudism, and it’s post-puritanical schizophrenia about sex. Apparently you could not even say “fuck” on network television, so if you did, it was bleeped out. The sheer unmitigated stupidity and pointlessness of this action (“fuck” is just about the easiest English word to lip-read) was clearly lost on legislators and TV companies. It was all about appearances. As a person who grew up dealing with the English class system and the facades that families erect to paper over all sorts of dysfunctionalities, I find the whole idea of keeping up appearances to be artifice, bullshit and nonsense.
At the time that I was relocating to the USA, Sting gave an interview to an English magazine where he mentioned that he and his wife Trudie Styler engaged in Tantric sex, and had studied it with teachers.
You can guess what happened next. The English tabloid newspapers lifted all manner of quotes from the article and printed them interspersed with ribald and juvenile speculation on Sting’s sexual habits. One implication being, surprise surprise, that Sting was a sybarite who really spent most of his night hours in orgies with all manner of women, and Tantra was just a cover story. This was all accompanied by chortling and “nudge nudge wink wink” innuendoes.
Newspapers in countries usually reflect the attitude of the country towards talking about sex. The English tabloid newspapers are juvenile, the broadsheet newspapers uncomprehending and engaging in subtle cluck-clucking, with occasional attempts at slut-shaming if the people under discussion are female.
So it brings us to the present day, and the latest piece of muck-raking by a US newspaper. The Washington Free Beacon has discovered that Rob Quist, a Democratic Party candidate in Montana who is also a musician, appears to have performed concerts at…yes, you guessed it. A nudist resort.
Quite how this amazing revelation is relevant to his qualifications to run for elected office is, needless to say, not discussed in the Free Beacon article.
The article is fairly standard tabloid smear journalism. The article produces the revelation that Quist has been seen (GASP) at nudist resorts (with the obligatory link to a nudist resort with the salacious warning “may contain inappropriate images” (Translation: Surf on over there for the smutty stuff, har har). The article then concludes with the news that the nudist resort where Quist performed has erased all mention of him from their website (Translation: See! He or the resort must have something to hide).
I am going to surf on over and donate some money to Quist’s campaign. This article is hopeless, muck-raking nonsense. It’s a good example of why I tend to pay limited attention to newspapers and mass media outlets in the USA. They have their editorial priorities all screwed and scrambled as they search for some attention-grabbing headline.

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Slogans, Dissent and other random postings

Random thoughts for the day:

1. Sloganeering
Phrases like “burdensome regulations” and “unfair trade deals” which are becoming standard utterances by members of the current Administration, are slogans. By themselves, without context or explanation, they carry no meaning. They are like a blank canvas upon which a listener can project any idea or meaning that they want.
This, of course, is exactly why slogans are so useful. They allow the listener or reader to replace analysis and information searches with projection. (see also Make America Great Again).
2. Dissent
Dissent is NOT disloyalty. Everybody (and I mean everybody) needs to understand this, so that they can defend people who are penalized or marginalized simply for uttering ideas that are temporarily unwelcome. When people who laugh in Congressional hearings are arrested, tried and convicted, this is nothing to do with “law and order” or “respect” (two more classuc slogans usef by the authoritarian and the insecure).This is about criminalizing peaceful dissent, an activity that forms part of the protections that are enshrined in the First Amendment.
3. Domestic Terrorism is real, but it’s not just Scary Brown People
Another reminder that instead of obsessing over Muslims, we should be paying one hell of a lot more attention to domestic crackpots.
4. The wonderful world of political insults
Once upon a time, the old cynical political Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson, once proposed to his staff that they should spread a rumor that one of their political opponents was a goat-fucker. When his staff protested “but sir, we all know it’s not true”, LBJ is said to have replied “well of course it’s not true. But let’s watch the s.o.b. try to deny it”.
This attempt to smear Rep. Keith Ellison is therefore not only juvenile, but stunningly unoriginal.
5. The “bring back coal jobs” myth
An explanation of what the obsession with “bring back coal” is really all about. It is empty symbolism ungrounded in reality
6. How euphemism allows us to avoid reality
Stephen Pinker’s explanation of how talking in euphemisms can allow us to dress up or obfuscate Bad Stuff.
7. Why did Fox News fire Bill O’Reilly?
This article, with its concept of brand consumers as “secondary stakeholders”, provides a good explanation for why Fox News decided to part ways with Bill O’Reilly. Ultimately, although there was no direct damage to the corporations advertising on Fox based on any effective consumer boycott, the corporations realized that the actions of O’Reilly were creating a fundamental messaging and credibility gap that they were going to have a good deal of trouble explaining.
8. the strange story of restaurant job losses in San Diego
Back in October 2006, almost unnoticed by most people, the residential condo market crashed in San Diego. That was the beginning of the property price collapse that rippled up through California in 2007, and which impacted several other over-priced areas (most notably Las Vegas, Phoenix and south Florida).
Now, somebody digging into government data has found this interesting graph showing a steep drop in food sector employment in and around San Diego. This is very interesting, in a “why is this happening?” sort of way.
There are several hypotheses being floated for the drop. One possible explanation is the increase in the Minimum Wage, but other cities that increased minimum wages have not seen this trend. Another is the flight of restaurant employees back over the border to Mexico.

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