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From Vox
The West is testing out a lot of shiny new military tech in Ukraine -
A drone operator launches a quadcopter to monitor the operation of an evacuation robot during its field testing on September 9, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine. | Mykhaylo Palinchak/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
How satellites, drones, and AI helped Ukraine’s counter-offensive.
As Ukraine turned a corner 10 days ago with a military offensive that retook territory from Russia, former Google CEO billionaire Eric Schmidt was meeting with senior Ukrainian officials. He was on a 36-hour visit to the country exploring technology’s role in the war.
“What I was interested in is what did the tech industry do to help?” he told a press conference organized by George Washington University, Zooming from a private jet flying back from an undisclosed European country.
Schmidt traveled to Ukraine not just as a former tech CEO, but as a billionaire investor in military technology startups who has served on influential federal boards advising the US government on adapting more artificial intelligence. He has prominently advocated for the US Department of Defense to integrate new tech, and his trip was a reminder of how integral advanced technologies and novel uses of existing technologies have been to Ukraine’s approach in this war.
Satellites, drones, artificial intelligence, and cyber capabilities have been central to the war since the first days of Russia’s invasion. New technologies have been working in concert with traditional military hardware, empowering Ukraine’s pushback against Russia. Little wonder that NATO has launched a 1 billion euro investment fund for innovation. A senior Ukrainian minister had appealed to Elon Musk via Twitter early on, to route Starlink satellites that provide high-speed internet over the country to keep the country connected even if infrastructure on the ground was destroyed. “Elon Musk is genuinely a hero here,” Schmidt said.
Together with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine @oleksiireznikov held a meeting with the former executive director and chairman of the board of Google, ex-executive chairman and technical advisor of Alphabet @ericschmidt. pic.twitter.com/SP18jdoaiw
The most important factors in Ukraine’s advance likely relate to the unprecedented military aid packages that the United States has provided. That assistance puts Ukraine on par with the top 20 countries worldwide by military spending. The US alone has sent over $14 billion worth of security aid since Moscow invaded, according to senior US defense official Sasha Baker, who last week emphasized that Ukraine has been “creative in integrating capabilities” from the US and other allies.
A spokesperson for the Defense Department said that the US wouldn’t get ahead of the Ukrainians in detailing what tech they have. We do know that the US, for example, has sent 700 Switchblade drones made by the Virginia-based AeroVironment, and the cyber company BlackHorse has been contracted to provide for the Ukraine mission, but it’s not clear yet how much of US assistance writ large is going to cyber and AI. Tracking all those contracts “is an entire project that, in a just world, a team of people would be summarizing in real time,” says Jack Poulson, founder of the nonprofit watchdog Tech Inquiry.
But experts and former military officials said that there are several firsts in this conflict, and one of those has to do with the outsize role of relatively cheap commercial technologies like Musk’s satellites and small drones. For American experts, Ukraine is a case study for understanding how these new technologies operate in a conventional land war alongside all the other weapons the West is sending.
“There’s always this silly and, frankly, faux either/or narrative on technology in war,” says futurist Peter Singer, co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. “It’s very clear that technology, and in particular, new technologies matter, and have been incredibly important, but are they the only important thing? Of course, not.”
Tech at war: satellites, drones, AI, and cyber
Former US defense officials told me that much of the advanced technology that Ukraine is using is commercial and off-the-shelf — in other words, useful innovations that you don’t need to be a military leader to purchase.
That might not sound revolutionary, but it stands in contrast to the Pentagon’s attempts to integrate already-developed products or technologies, which have at times been thwarted by the institution’s complex bureaucracy and tech workers’ protests against enabling the military. “We’re actually seeing that relationship happening in Ukraine and seeing it in real time, and so you’ve got commercial companies that are running to help,” says Jim Mitre, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Program at the RAND Corporation.
Satellites are not new, but small, commercial ones are a major emerging space for venture capital and new startups. And they have contributed to Ukraine’s ability to understand Russian troop movements and track potential war crimes through intensive open-source data collection.
Small commercial drones have been an important part of the Ukraine story too, and they’re doing everything from finding Russian forces, providing target-quality data for artillery strikes, and conducting battle-damage assessments. Both Ukraine and Russia are deploying loitering munitions — small armed drones that can hover in the air for hours and then drop explosives on a target — and in some cases have been used in swarms. And much has been made of the Ukrainians’ success in using the lightweight, armed Bayraktar TB2 drone; the Turkish company that makes it refuses to sell the unmanned aerial vehicle to Russia.
Though facial recognition had been used in limited ways in Afghanistan, now Ukraine is using it at scale. “This is the first major conventional conflict where you’re seeing face recognition deployed,” Singer, who co-manages the firm Useful Fiction that has advised the US Air Force and major military contractors, told me. “Start thinking with your sci-fi hat on.”
Another example of AI playing a role has been in the context of new apps that can be used in information operations, such as a tool from the company Primer that can do voice recognition, transcription and translation services, and may be being used to analyze intercepted Russian communications.
Many analysts predicted that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine would spell hard-core cyber attacks. The fact that nothing major has gone down, however, may be in large part due to the work of cyber defenders behind the scenes, at commercial companies and in Western governments. “There’s been an incredible amount of cyber activity, incredible,” says Singer. The example he cited was of Ukrainian hackers infiltrating electric-vehicle charging stations in Moscow and putting on the screen an anti-Putin slur. That was cute, says Singer, “However, what actually mattered is besides defacing the screen, they shut down the operations of the charging stations. They hit the internet of things. They used digital means to cause physical change in the world.” Countries have used that capability covertly before (such as in Israel’s Stuxnet attack in the mid-2000s on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure), but here is the first time perhaps it’s happened in a conventional conflict.
Large-scale military hardware endures as Ukraine’s not-so-secret weapon, but even that operates within a larger technological context. Candace Rondeaux, a researcher at the Washington think tank New America, points out, “It’s the combining of these technologies in certain ways that has been unique.” She acknowledges the centrality of the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), the precision rocket-launcher made by Lockheed Martin that the US has sent to Ukraine to defend against Russia, but adds that in itself it’s insufficient. It’s a targeting system that requires good information and intelligence. “For that information to flow, you’ve got to have communications platforms, and the means by which to securely communicate where things are, when you want to strike them,” she said.
“It’s not HIMARS that’s winning the war for the Ukraine, nor is it traditional artillery duels,” according to Mitre, who worked as a senior Defense official until earlier this year. “It’s their ability to process information at a faster clip than the Russians that is having a big impact here.”
The breadth of information operations has led Brendan McCord, a hedge-fund manager who previously authored the Department of Defense’s first AI strategy, to describe this conflict as the first broadband war. “We fought networked wars for some time, but always in the narrowband sense,” he told me. Rather than depending on small bandwidth, low-speed data transmissions, Starlink has given Ukraine “this incredible advantage,” especially in terms of transmitting high-quality video.
“Ukraine feels like it’s a half a generation ahead on integrating the technologies that it’s using into novel war-fighting concepts,” he added.
What it means for the US
All the newly forged connections are between the US private sector and Ukraine. And the rallying of US companies is obviously not entirely altruistic.
“If you’re a defense company, what you’re hoping is that Ukrainian generals are going to be asking the US military to provide your capabilities to them,” Gregory Allen, a researcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “And that’s just a degree of intimacy between the supplier and the warfighter across nations, that is kind of unprecedented.”
That intimacy was on display in June, when the first business executive to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded was Alex Karp, the CEO of the data analytics military and intelligence-agency contractor Palantir. “There has always been a relationship between the defense-industrial complex and private companies, but it is possible that the visibility of CEOs is notable,” says Margarita Konaev, a researcher at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Executives of major US defense contractors have bragged about how they’d profit from arming Ukraine. Silicon Valley companies are jumping into the mix. And, in an extraordinary move, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will keynote a US military contractor conference — speaking directly to US weapons makers.
Going forward, experts are watching how advanced technologies are being used in the battlefield to understand what lessons might apply to US policymakers. Lindsay Gorman, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund who recently served in the Biden administration on the National Security Council, says the focus of much of Washington is on how Russia’s invasion relates to China’s military power and potential scenarios for an attack on Taiwan. Others cited how quickly Ukraine has adapted new technologies and whether the US could follow suit.
For Schmidt, the lesson so far is the urgent need for government to make room for tech. The Ukrainian parliament, for instance, quickly changed a law at the onset of the war to put all of the Ukrainian government’s information in the cloud. “They should have done that before,” he said, “but the point is, the war gave everybody a political excuse to do the right thing.” Schmidt also emphasized the importance of engaging with the country’s crowd-sourced hackers.
But some experts were much more skeptical about tech’s prominence in the first major conventional war in Europe in more than a generation. “What is the role of tomorrow’s technology in today’s war?” asked Konaev. “To an extent it still remains quite limited.”
Even Mitch McConnell’s “perfect” candidate might not win in Colorado -
Joe O’Dea, a construction company CEO and first-time candidate for office, celebrates the Republican nomination for US Senate over state Rep. Ron Hanks at Mile High Station in Denver, Colorado, on June 28, 2022. | Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post
Republican Joe O’Dea says he’ll buck his party and Trump.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has publicly lamented the quality of Republican Senate candidates ahead of the 2022 midterms, saying they potentially cost his party control of the chamber in 2022. But he has identified Joe O’Dea, the Republican challenging incumbent Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado, as an exception.
“We think we can win this race,” McConnell reportedly told donors in July, calling O’Dea “the perfect candidate.”
O’Dea, a first-time candidate and businessman, is running as a dealmaker willing to buck his party and its figurehead, former President Donald Trump. He’s not a candidate in the mold of a typical MAGA Republican in that he says President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election, and that he hopes Trump doesn’t run again in 2024.
In a state that has trended blue over the last few election cycles and where Trump is deeply unpopular, a candidate further to the right probably wouldn’t succeed. Democrats were certainly banking on that. During the GOP primaries, Democratic groups spent roughly $4 million on ads designed to make far-right candidate Ron Hanks, who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, look like the true conservative in the race and more appealing to GOP voters than O’Dea.
O’Dea nevertheless won the nomination, and now Democrats have to fight the perception they helped create that O’Dea is, by comparison, a moderate. Bennet has the edge: He’s nearly nine points ahead in the polls on average, according to FiveThirtyEight’s estimate, and the Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democrat.” That’s a comfortable lead, but one that the polls might be overestimating and that O’Dea, with McConnell’s help, could feasibly overcome in the weeks before Election Day.
Should O’Dea succeed in Colorado, national Republicans might take that as a sign that they shouldn’t be leaning so heavily into Trumpism in swing states, especially where independents and unaffiliated voters make up a sizable share of the electorate that they need to win. But if he still falls short as anticipated, then the party’s right wing could take that as more reason to dig in their heels.
How close is the race really?
In late August, the Cook Political Report changed its rating of the race from “likely Democrat” to “lean Democrat,” spurring a flurry of headlines about how Colorado was more competitive than anticipated. “[T]his is a race we need to consider competitive, given that’s how both parties are treating it,” the Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor wrote at the time.
Bennet’s lead has recovered since then, according to an August poll by Public Policy Polling, and Mike Stratton, a Democratic political strategist based in Denver, attributes that to an improved national environment for Democrats. Biden’s approval ratings are up, and the base appears to be coming home in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. A series of Democratic legislative wins, including the Inflation Reduction Act and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, appears to be helping as well.
But Republicans are still holding out hope. Greg Brophy, a former Republican state senator who ran for governor in 2014, said that Colorado, which has a plurality of persuadable unaffiliated voters, is not immune to potential national polling errors. He argued polls could be underestimating how close the race is. And when Bennet previously won reelection in 2010 and 2016, he was up against Republicans who were perceived to be the easiest to beat among their primary opponents, Brophy added. That’s not the case this time.
“I do believe it’s really competitive. O’Dea seems to be the perfect candidate for Colorado,” Brophy said.
An August poll commissioned by the Republican Attorneys General Association and conducted by GOP strategist Dave Sackett of the Tarrance Group backs up Brophy’s optimism: It showed Bennet ahead by only 1 percentage point. A flurry of coverage sizing up O’Dea’s odds followed. Democratic pollster Craig Hughes discounted that poll because there isn’t much publicly available information on it — only what was published by the Washington Examiner, which didn’t include the toplines or methodology details in its report.
Aside from the GOP poll, there’s not much to indicate trouble for Bennet. At this point, he even appears to be outperforming his margins from 2010 and 2016, when he won by less than 2 percentage points and 6 percentage points, respectively.
“I don’t see a lot of evidence that this race is closer than expected,” Hughes said.
There are still several weeks before the election. In that time, the tide of the race could change if the national environment shifts in Republicans’ favor. Though gas prices are down from their peak a few months ago, an unexpectedly bad inflation report earlier this month could dampen Democrats’ messaging on the economy. A big cash infusion from a McConnell-linked super PAC or other outside groups — something made more likely by Republicans’ concerns about their chances in other Senate battlegrounds like Arizona and Pennsylvania — could also shake things up, though Bennet still has a huge cash-on-hand advantage.
“McConnell is going to spend money here to go after Bennet if he’s vulnerable,” Stratton said.
O’Dea is running as a moderate. Democrats say he’s anything but.
Democrats’ meddling in the GOP primary ultimately backfired on them. They tried to elevate Hanks, a Trumpier Republican Democrats believed Bennet could easily defeat, but instead helped boost little-known O’Dea’s name recognition and shape his image as a moderate.
“Hanks was rated one of the most conservative members of the statehouse,” said one ad by Democratic Colorado, which is primarily funded by a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Ron Hanks — too conservative for Colorado.”
Another ad, also by Democratic Colorado, highlighted O’Dea’s past donations to Democrats, including Sen. John Hickenlooper and Bennet, and his support for Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill in an effort to call into question his conservative credentials.
“Joe O’Dea is not who he says he is,” the ad says, as the words “Joe O’Dea: Republican?” flash across the screen.
Those characterizations might help O’Dea among Colorado’s potentially persuadable unaffiliated voters, who made up 46 percent of the electorate as of September. And the GOP’s counting on that image to narrow the race.
“Thank you, Chuck, for pumping up Joe’s name ID, and we’ll see you in November,” Brophy said.
O’Dea is an increasingly rare breed of Republican. He didn’t question Biden’s win in 2020. He has said that Trump “could’ve done a lot more” to stop the January 6 insurrection, which he has referred to as a “black eye on our country.”
He has touted the fact that he is the only Republican nominee for Senate without a Trump endorsement. He has said that he would concede his race with Bennet if he loses, unlike many other Republican candidates this year. And though he has said he would vote for Trump again over Biden if it came to it, he’d rather back another Republican nominee in 2024, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Though, by supporting DeSantis, O’Dea isn’t putting much distance between himself and Trumpism. DeSantis, who has recently stoked culture war battles by sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and signing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, would be a Trumpian candidate.
“I think O’Dea is benefiting from a very, very low bar of expectations for Republican Senate candidates right now. The fact that he’s not a full-on fire-breathing MAGA person has given him more credence with the national press. But it doesn’t mean he’s in touch with where Coloradans are,” Hughes said.
O’Dea does have some policy positions that set him apart from his party’s right wing: He supports Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill and Democrats’ same-sex marriage bill, would give Dreamers full legal status, would not vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act (though thinks it should be amended in ways he hasn’t yet specified), and has criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. He’s focused his campaign on pocketbook issues, though is still throwing plenty of red meat to the base: for example, supporting a border wall and tackling crime with more policing in Democratic cities.
Democrats are now trying to combat the notion that O’Dea is a moderate. Bennet campaign press secretary Georgina Beven said that O’Dea’s views are “too far-right” for mainstream Colorado politics and that he’s still a “Trump apologist” because he believes the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago is a “political stunt,” despite his efforts to distance himself from the former president.
“Voters here see O’Dea for what he really is, another rubber stamp in the Senate for Mitch McConnell’s radical agenda,” she added.
Two competing issues defining the race
As in many other battleground states this cycle, the economy and abortion are among Colorado voters’ top priorities — and issues where both candidates perceive weakness on the other side.
Colorado is one of only a few states that has codified abortion rights at any stage of pregnancy and is home to a big-tent pro-abortion-rights constituency. Even though abortion is protected in Colorado, the notion that O’Dea could become a vote for further national restrictions on abortion is looming over the race.
“The choice issue has come home in a big way for Bennet. Republican women here are pro-choice,” Stratton said.
O’Dea has cast himself as a moderate on abortion who would restrict access to the procedure more than Roe did, but who wouldn’t vote to ban it completely. He said that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe was wrong and also came out against Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, calling it “reckless and tone deaf.”
He has said that he would support a bill in Congress protecting abortion rights up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. That puts him in line with much of the Senate GOP caucus, who’ve signed on to 20-week national bans in the past. And like many Republicans, he’s explicitly said that he would not support “late-term” abortions (a non-medical term that typically refers to abortions after at least 21 to 24 weeks of pregnancy) unless medically necessary and in cases of rape and incest. He also opposes taxpayer funding for the procedure and supports parental notification for minors receiving the procedure.
“He’s landed on trying to bring some stability to a really challenging issue,” Zack Roday, O’Dea’s campaign manager, said.
Overall, O’Dea has a traditionally conservative stance on abortion, albeit one he has tried to characterize as middle of the road. The Bennet campaign, however, has been urging voters not to take O’Dea at his word when it comes to protecting abortion rights.
“Joe O’Dea isn’t being honest with Coloradans. He approves of all of Trump’s radical Supreme Court justices who just overturned Roe v. Wade, opposes our state’s law that protects reproductive freedom, and supported a ballot measure in 2020 that would’ve imposed an abortion ban here, without exceptions for rape and incest,” Beven, Bennet’s press secretary, said.
O’Dea has said that he would have confirmed all of the justices that Trump nominated, called the Colorado law “reckless” because it permits abortions at any stage of pregnancy, and voted for the ballot measure that would have banned abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Bennet’s campaign hopes the fact that 59 percent of Coloradans support abortion access will spur voters to back him — or, at least, depress GOP turnout for O’Dea. Bennet has since sought to exploit O’Dea’s perceived weakness on the issue and made it a key pillar of his reelection campaign.
Still, as in other contests, the economy is front and center in the race. Colorado voters’ top priorities are inflation and the economy, according to a September poll by the ACLU of Colorado. As a member of the party in power, Bennet may have a hard time winning over Coloradans who are financially hurting. Whether or not economists say the US is in a recession, it’s clear consumers are feeling the pinch of higher prices.
O’Dea, a fiscal conservative who supported Trump’s tax cuts, is counting on the economy being the issue that ultimately decides the race. Both O’Dea and Bennet have recently run Spanish-language ads designed to sell their economic policies to Latino voters, with O’Dea positioning himself as the “voice of working-class people” and promising to reduce gas prices and inflation without going into any specifics. For his part, Bennet touts his support for pandemic aid to small businesses, renewable energy sector jobs, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the American Rescue Plan, which included a temporary expanded child tax credit that Bennet fought for.
How persuasive the candidates are remains to be seen. But voters looking for an alternative to Democratic economic policies or who want more traditional Republicans in the Senate could make the race a closer one than it currently appears.
O’Dea’s pitch to independents still might not be enough to diffuse Democrats’ arguments that O’Dea is too right-wing for Colorado. Nevertheless, this is a race to watch; as Stratton said, “He’s the profile of a Republican that would do best in this environment.”
Progressives have welcomed migrants. Now they need to house them -
Migrants who crossed the border from Mexico into Texas exit a bus as it arrives into the Port Authority bus station in Manhattan on August 25, 2022 in New York City. | Getty Images
YIMBYism for migrant policy.
I’ll let you in on a dirty secret about journalism: Most of what we write — good, bad, or otherwise — is as evanescent as yesterday’s rain. Readers may get most of their news in digital form rather than paper these days, but the old adage still holds true: Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap.
Every once in a while, though, writers on deadline produce something of lasting value, an insight that illuminates not just today, but the past and the future both, something that helps explain why we are where we are.
Sam Bowman, John Myers, and Ben Southwood’s article “The housing theory of everything,” published a year ago in Works in Progress, is just such a key. “Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment,” they wrote. From Covid to slow economic growth to climate change to falling fertility, they all had one root cause in common: “A shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live.”
Their argument was as simple as it was true: So long as housing supply remains constrained in the most economically productive cities in the US, so would the country’s potential. Whatever else the US wanted to do — solve climate change, reduce economic inequality, make it easier for people to have as many children as they wanted — fixing the long-running housing problem had to come first. Everything else was just hot air.
Once you begin to understand the housing theory of everything, you start to see it everywhere. Including on a small, well-heeled island off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard where last week scores of migrants were shipped via jet by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a stunt as inhumane as it was, sadly, likely politically effective for them with many Republican voters.
Passion vs. policy
Make no mistake, what DeSantis and other Republican governors like Greg Abbott of Texas are doing as they send thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities far from the border — like some Twitter trolling done in real life, with real people — is almost entirely for their own political glory. DeSantis received a standing ovation from GOP voters at a political event in Kansas on Sunday.
If DeSantis thought that the mostly Democratic citizens of Martha’s Vineyard would respond to his stunt by treating the migrants who arrived on their island the way he would, the governor was mistaken. The migrants, who were fleeing Venezuela, received a warm welcome from locals before they were voluntarily sent onward to a military base for humanitarian support.
As the headline of a Jonathan Chait piece in New York magazine put it, “DeSantis tries to prove liberals hate immigrants as much as he does, fails.”
But if it’s clear that the people of Martha’s Vineyard or New York City or Washington, DC, don’t hate immigrants and will mobilize to welcome human beings who are innocent pawns in a political game, that doesn’t mean that they will put their weight behind the policies that are really needed to support the masses of migrants who want to come to the US for a better life.
That’s because perhaps the No. 1 thing that migrants need — and for that matter, lots of American citizens as well — is more housing in the cities that have jobs. And whatever the leaders of those mostly deep blue cities may say when DeSantis or Abbott drops a busload or planeload of migrants on their doorstep, they seem unwilling to deliver it — and too many of their constituents apparently feel the same.
Refugees are welcome here — they’ll just have nowhere to live
In Martha’s Vineyard, the affordable housing problem is so acute that the island’s only emergency-room-equipped hospital has been operating with a quarter of its staff jobs unfilled, according to the Washington Post. When the hospital’s CEO offered 19 jobs to health care workers in January, every one of them was turned down, in large part because even doctors couldn’t afford to find a year-round place to live.
Or take New York City, which I call home and where you can often see “Refugees Are Welcome” signs in the windows of nice brownstones, side by side with fliers decrying a new development. Between 2000 and 2020, New York expanded by more than 800,000 residents, yet fewer than 450,000 new apartment units and single-family homes were built during that time. Not surprisingly, in May the median rent in Manhattan reached a record $4,000 — though if you’re willing to make do in Brooklyn, you could get by with $3,250.
And San Francisco? Well, San Francisco’s leaders seem to treat housing construction like golf, where the idea is to get the lowest score possible; community opposition and restrictive regulations mean that the city is on track to build just 3,000 housing units this year, with an average building cost that is the highest in the world per square foot. (Though somehow, San Francisco still approved more new housing units per 1,000 residents between 2010 and 2019 than New York.)
Even worse than the cities are many of the suburbs that surround them. In suburban counties from Nassau and Westchester outside New York to the commuter towns surrounding Boston, even fewer housing units were added per 1,000 residents in the previous decade than in New York City itself. That in turn pushes low-income residents farther and farther away from jobs, putting further weight on economic growth.
As “The housing theory of everything” put it, even as everything from TVs to cars to refrigerators have become cheaper to buy on an hours-worked basis over the past 50 years, housing in major cities has become much, much more expensive. As a result, people who weren’t lucky or privileged enough to buy at the right moment are forced to spend more and more of their household budget if they want to live in a New York or a Boston or a San Francisco.
Living up to the rhetoric
It’s true that the US does face a border crisis. An average of 8,500 migrants and asylum-seekers are intersecting with officials each day, what Axios termed a “strikingly high number,” and cities along the border are struggling to deal with the flow.
It’s also true that people will keep coming. Between economic factors, the pressure of climate change, and the drive for safety, the flow of migrants from the south is only likely to increase in the years and decades ahead.
Republican officials have their own solution to that challenge: attempt to stop the flow at the border by the harshest methods possible, and make political hay while doing so. If progressives want to live up to their rhetoric, they need to support the policies that will build the housing supply needed to absorb the flow of newcomers — and in doing so, help reduce the extreme costs of living that hamper longtime residents as well.
Otherwise, refugees and migrants may be welcomed — but they won’t be welcome to stay.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
From The Hindu: Sports
Suryakumar Yadav leapfrogs Babar to third spot in T20 rankings - Yadav impressed with a classy 46 during India’s four-wicket loss to Australia in the opening match of their three-game series
Shabelle and Sekhmet shine -
Queen's Pride and Duffy catch the eye -
Remediesofspring, Vulcanic, Turf Beauty, Walking Brave, Star Romance and Dominant excel -
Lewandowski to wear Shevchenko's Ukraine armband at FIFA World Cup - Robert Lewandowski met former Ukraine captain and coach Andriy Shevchenko at Warsaw's national stadium to collect the armband which he will wear at the Qatar World Cup to symbolically represent Ukraine
From The Hindu: National News
NMC bats for integration of modern medicine with Ayush - Every medical college in the country must have a ‘Department of Integrative Medicine Research’
Andhra Pradesh: West Godavari expects 5.47 lakh tonne paddy yield in kharif -
U.S. aerospace firms in TS to explore opportunities -
Abhirami's suicide: Satheesan asks govt. to rein in banks - State government blames Centre's SARFAESI Act
AKFI and State kabaddi bodies wash hands of U.P. food-at-toilet incident - A purported video of the incident showed cooked food was stored in the toilet at Saharanpur's Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Stadium from where kabaddi players took it themselves
From BBC: Europe
Putin warning: What does Russian military call-up mean for Ukraine? - Ukraine’s advances prompt Russia to launch a partial military mobilisation, raising the stakes.
Danish queen tests positive for Covid day after Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral - Queen Margrethe II attended Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and is now Europe’s longest-serving head of state.
Germany nationalises gas giant amid energy crisis - The German government is taking a 98.5% stake in Uniper, one of the country’s biggest suppliers.
War in Ukraine: Fact-checking Russian claims that Nato troops are fighting in Ukraine - President Putin has said Western military advisers are actively involved in Ukraine.
Turkey’s Erdogan: Russia’s Putin willing to end war - As Ukraine reclaims more land, the Turkish leader says Russia aims to end the war as soon as possible.
From Ars Technica
2022 Amazon Fire 8 HD tablet sports 30 percent faster CPU - Amazon updates its 8-inch tablets after two years. - link
US lawmakers escalate pressure on Chinese chipmaker YMTC - YMTC is alleged to have violated export controls by supplying NAND chips to Huawei. - link
Why do car companies build concepts? We ask Audi’s product planner - Designers don’t run car companies, so what’s the business reason behind it? - link
World’s oldest heart preserved in 380 million-year-old armored fish - “These fish literally have their hearts in their mouths and under their gills.” - link
$35M fine for Morgan Stanley after unencrypted, unwiped hard drives are auctioned - “Astonishing failures” over a 5-year span. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Why are white prison gangs the scariest? -
Because they had a fair trial and still ended up in prison
A powerful Emperor advertised for a new Chief Samurai. Only three applied for the job: a Japanese, a Chinese and a Jewish Samurai, -
Number One Samurai, “Demonstrate your skills!” commanded the Emperor.
The Japanese samurai stepped forward, opened a tiny box, and released a fly. He drew his samurai sword and “swish”; the fly fell to the floor, neatly divided in two!
“What a feat!” said the Emperor. “Number Two Samurai, show me what you can do.”
The Chinese samurai smiled confidently, stepped forward and opened a tiny box, releasing a fly. He drew his samurai sword and “swish, swish”; the fly fell to the floor, neatly quartered!
“That is skill!” nodded the Emperor. “How are you going to top that, Number Three Samurai?” Number Three Samurai stepped forward, opened a tiny box, release one fly, drew his Samurai sword, and “swoooooosh” flourished his sword so mightily that a gust of wind blew through the room. But the fly was still buzzing around!
In disappointment, the Emperor said, “What kind of skill is that? The fly isn’t even dead.”
“Dead, schmed,” replied the Jewish Samurai. “Dead is easy. What takes REAL skill is circumcision”
A male whale and a female whale were swimming off the coast of Japan when they noticed a whaling ship. -
The male whale recognized it as the same ship that had harpooned his father many years earlier.
He said to the female whale, “Let’s both swim under the ship and blow out of our air holes at the same time and it should cause the ship to turn over and sink”.
They tried it and sure enough, the ship turned over and quickly sank.
Soon, however, the whales realized the sailors had jumped overboard and were swimming to the safety of the shore.
The male was enraged that they were going to get away and told the female “let’s swim after them and gobble them up before they reach the shore.”
At this point, he realized the female was becoming reluctant to follow him.
“Look”, she said, “I went along with the blow job, but I absolutely refuse to swallow the seamen.”
After watching Finding Nemo, a man runs out to the pet store and buys a clown fish -
He brings the fish home and puts it into the tank, but after a few days notices that it doesn’t seem at all settled in its new home.
He remembers that in Finding Nemo, the clownfish live in an anemone, so he returns to the pet store and asks the clerk if they have any for sale. The clerk tells him they do, but explains there is a far less expensive solution. The clerks says to go down to the flower shop and buy a fern, pull off a few of the fronds and arrange them in the tank. He says the clownfish really just wants to feel hidden and this will do the job for a fraction of the price.
So the gentleman follows the clerks advice, buys a fern, arranges the fronds in the corner of his tank and sure enough the clownfish swims right in and seems completely happy.
He steps back, satisfied with the solution and thinks to himself, “With fronds like these, who needs anemones?”
