Since I’ve been telling people this for years, I find the sudden revelation that the batteries of electric cars drain more rapidly in cold weather pretty amusing. From the Tom Krisher at the Associated Press:

DETROIT (AP) — Cold temperatures can sap electric car batteries, temporarily reducing their range by more than 40 percent when interior heaters are used, a new study found.

The study of five electric vehicles by AAA also found that high temperatures can cut into battery range, but not nearly as much as the cold. The range returns to normal in more comfortable temperatures.

Many owners discovered the range limitations last week when much of the country was in the grips of a polar vortex. Owners of vehicles made by manufacturers including Tesla, the top-selling electric vehicle company in the U.S., complained on social media about reduced range and frozen door handles during the cold snap.

I think there are plenty of use cases for electric cars, particularly in eastern cities without strong public transportation systems, but the argument in their favor is a lot harder to make north of the Mason-Dixon line. Driving an electric vehicle in rural Minnesota, for example, would take a special kind of dedication.

There’s a pretty good backgrounder on the U. S. asylum system at RealClearPolicy from the organization No Labels:

Though the government shutdown has ended, the debate over immigration continues in Washington. Last week, the Trump administration enacted its new policy of sending asylum seekers back to Mexico while their immigration cases were being heard. And just hours before President Trump delivered his annual State of the Union address, a caravan of more than 2,000 migrants reached the southern border, according to Fox News; many of these people are expected to seek asylum once at a port of entry or in the United States.

They omit a few things. The first is that, although the U. S. statute on asylum extends asylum to people with “well-founded fear of persecution” the legitimate sources of the fear are for political or religious reasons. Women fleeing their husbands are not eligible for asylum, for example. That was a reform introduced unilaterally by the Obama Administration without Congressional approval. Also, fear of crime is not a cause for being granted asylum under the statute.

Another is that although it is true that after World War II we accepted significantly more refugees, circumstances were different than they are now. The U. S. population was 120 million rather than 330 million as it is now. Additionally, the percentage of immigrants in the U. S. in 1948 was about 8% rather than the 15% (or more) it is today.

At this point there doesn’t seem to be any reason to expand the cap on the number of asylum-seekers who are ultimately granted asylum. In 2016, the last year for which we have numbers, we accepted 20,455 asylum-seekers, about a quarter of those seeking asylum in that year. The maximum we will accept is 50,000.

If we were to reduce the number of economic migrants entering the country illegally, expanded the number of judges and other officials reviewing asylum petitions to eliminate the backlog of application, and the number of asylum petitions granted were to rise to 50,000, I would favor raising the ceiling. As it is the large number of economic migrants who enter the country illegally should be seen as crowding out legitimate asylum-seekers.

I agree in principle with this editorial in the New York Times. Excessive fees should not be charged to read public records:

One bright spot of the Trump era is a greater public understanding of the rule of law and the institutions and individuals who sustain it.

But concerned citizens who wish to keep up with court cases — not to mention journalists covering them — face a barrier: the byzantine and overly expensive Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, more commonly known as Pacer.

Pacer, a 30-year-old relic that remains unwieldy to use, is a collection of online portals run by the administrative arm of the federal court system. It was designed, at least in principle, to provide online access to the more than one billion court documents that have been docketed in federal courts across the country since the advent of electronic case filing.

But the public can gain access to these public documents online only by paying significant fees. Pacer charges 10 cents per page to view electronic court documents — or up to $3 for documents exceeding 30 pages, which are common. It’s easy to burn up $10 just by looking up rudimentary information about a single case.

But I think this is a bridge too far:

here’s also an admirable bill that was introduced last year in Congress, the Electronic Court Records Reform Act, that goes a step further than what is being sought in the class-action suit. It would make all documents filed with the federal courts available free to the public. (In 2017, the Supreme Court, often a late adopter of new technologies, made virtually all of its new court filings freely available online.) The legislation also would mandate needed updates to Pacer, including making documents text-searchable and linkable from external websites.

The federal government shouldn’t be in the business of financing commercial news organizations. Web sites, particularly web sites that can support significant numbers of concurrent users while maintaining reasonable page load times, are expensive to build, maintain, and host. They aren’t “free”.

The Times is rent-seeking here. Fees should be whatever are necessary to keep the site going rather than being set at a level that defrays the costs of companies that turn around and charge for their papers or access to their web sites.

I want to commend John Dingell’s valedictory message to the American people, quoted at the Washingont Post, to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

Think about it:

Impoverishment of the elderly because of medical expenses was a common and often accepted occurrence. Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today.

Not five decades ago, much of the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth — our own Great Lakes — were closed to swimming and fishing and other recreational pursuits because of chemical and bacteriological contamination from untreated industrial and wastewater disposal. Today the Great Lakes are so hospitable to marine life that one of our biggest challenges is controlling the invasive species that have made them their new home.

Read the whole thing.

I have my issues with Mr. Dingell and more broadly with dynasties but his farewell message should be read and reflected on.

This seems like an opportunity to remind people of some very good advice from Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker:

There are some people who say you shouldn’t have any weakeness at all – no vices. But if a man has no vices, he’s in great danger of making vices out of virtues, and there’s a spectacle. We’ve all seen them; men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity. We’ve seen people who told the truth, through the Heavens fall, and the Heavens fell. No, no nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around. Then you’ll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of a whole city.

That’s very Apollonian in its way and something sorely needed nowadays.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are outraged at the notion that we might actually remove our troops from Afghanistan:

History shows the great danger in failing to distinguish between fighting wars and deterring them. That’s especially true now that the authoritarian nations of Russia, Iran and China are seeking to dominate their regions and sometimes join forces against U.S. interests.

One lesson is that keeping troops abroad is often cheaper than bringing them home. An unwavering commitment to the defense of Western Europe under NATO prevented the Cold War from becoming a hot one. Some 300,000 U.S. troops across Europe deterred Moscow for decades until the Warsaw Pact imploded.

They can’t seem to get their heads around the idea that Afghanistan is not Germany. There has never been a cohesive modern state in Afghanistan. We aren’t detering the Russians or Chinese there. We’re trying to pacify the Afghans themselves. A bare handful of American soldiers were killed in Europe after the conclusion of World War II. More of our soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan practically every year since 2001. If we’d experienced the kind of resistance in Germany we’re experiencing in Afghanistan, we’d’ve left there, too.

Afghanistan is a country of zero strategic interest to the United States as long as they’re not hosting Al Qaeda bases. We can’t even supply a base in Afghanistan without paying off the Pakistanis. There are cheaper ways to prevent Afghanistan from hosting Al Qaeda bases than propping up a state there, the purpose of counter-insurgency operations.

The reason that we have more Javerts than Valjeans is that it’s more fun to be a Javert than a Valjean. Maybe temporarily but people should remember that Javert dies in despair while Valjean dies content.

We will all die. More of us should be able to say “I die content” at the end.

Here’s the conclusion of Robert D. Atkinson’s Washington Post op-ed on the first step to the road to recovery in healing the U. S.’s relationship with China:

Rather than dismiss the threat Chinese innovation mercantilist practices pose to the U.S. economy, jobs and national security, the Washington establishment needs to publicly acknowledge that the threat is serious and that China needs to be confronted — not only to protect the U.S. economy and national security but also to save the very soul of the global trading system. Only then can we engage in a productive critique of the Trump administration’s tactics, including its over-reliance on tariffs and its unwillingness to assemble a global coalition of the willing to pressure China to reform. Denying that China’s actions pose a grave threat and placing the blame on ourselves will only fan the flames of protectionism and cause even greater harm.

I suspect hie recommendation will fall on deaf ears. Too many people are making too much money from things as they are.

I think that Dana Milbank doesn’t get it. Here’s a snippet from his latest Washington Post column:

Forgive me, but would anybody mind if we declared a moratorium on Democratic apologies?

I don’t doubt many public servants have done things worthy of regret. But it’s becoming difficult to keep up with the sorry spectacle.

Let me explain. Continually changing standards means you always have to say you’re sorry.