Minnesota cities are apparently learning the hard way that the batteries on electric buses do not work well in cold temperatures. That's the bad news, but the worse news is that Duluth's low temperature today is only 24F, and in the real part of winter, Duluth routinely sees -40F. So those buses are pretty much out of operation until April. What a shame that the state of Minnesota doesn't have a first class university system with engineering schools where experts in the matter could inform transit officials of the ugly reality of thermal (Arrhenius) acceleration and its impact on batteries. For that matter, an ordinary city bus with a "mere" 50 gallon tank can go about twice as far and refuel in five minutes. So why anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me.
Oh, wait....really, the ability of human beings to look past the obvious is quite amazing. In other such news, here's a fascinating article by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that is remarkable for something it shows, and even more remarkable that the researchers don't really comment on how remarkable it is. Take a look at the graph in the "highlights" section of the first page, and you should notice two remarkable things.
First, in 1976, nearly as many men were murdered by their spouses/lovers as were women. Given that violent crime is generally speaking about an 80-90/% male phenomenon, it is really remarkable that women in the mid-1970s were just about as murderous as were men. Perhaps we ought to blame disco for this? But note; only passing interest is paid to this by the DOJ, presumably because it interrupts the narrative of "blame the male."
Next, from 1976 to 1997 or so, the rate of "androcide" plunges by about two thirds, and again, the DOJ does not offer any hypotheses as to why this might be. To me, this is appalling, since if we understood what went on, we might be able to replicate it and save hundreds of lives annually.
But that noted, my hunch is that we're not going to be able to replicate it. If you look at history, the big thing that was happening in family law in the 1970s was that states were adopting no fault divorce, as lawyers around the country had noticed that perjury was rampant in divorce cases as spouses desperate to get out of bad marriages were accusing their spouses of adultery, abandonment, and abuse. It's also at this time that most states got out of the alimony business, reducing the "cash haul" for divorcees.
And so my hunch is that the big reason that androcide rates dropped--and femicide to a degree as well--is that a fair number of men who were "married to crazy" suddenly could afford to divorce crazy without financial ruin, and the conditions that were leading to androcide were defused. This is certainly something I can glean from my (no kidding) reading of mid 1980s era "Ms. Magazine", where the writers and editors complained vociferously about how men who were divorcing their wives were making out like bandits, and compared to at fault divorce with alimony, they certainly were. Also worth noting is that women might have been less likely to "divorce crazy" because of financial vulnerability--something the feminists would also have told us at the time.
And unfortunately, the men (and women) who divorced crazy are now dying off, so it's going to be hard to interview them and figure out "how did you come to realize that your marriage was not just bad, but dangerous?".
Worse yet, when I looked up intimate partner murders in 2017, I found about 1500 men and 700 women had been murdered by a spouse or lover. That's an increase of about 15% for femicide and 40% for androcide, which means that femicide is more or less keeping pace with population growth, and androcide is going along at twice the rate of population growth. We might somewhat bitterly joke that the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 has achieved its goal of promoting violence against women and men alike.
More seriously, I think these statistics reflect the fact that intimate relationships are uniquely difficult because the heart is involved, as well as shared assets, and (e.g. "you and me 4-ever") partners also have the innate assumption of permanence. Couple that with the fact that only 10% of intimate partner murders are preceded by recent violence, and you're going to see it's a hard nut to crack--and that the nutcracker we're using now is basically made of balsa wood.
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