Posted on 06/07/2017 12:11:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Axios is reporting that President Trump suggested putting solar panels on the new Wall with Mexico. The article wonders where the idea came from:
Where this idea might come from: A proposal to cover the wall with solar panels was among those submitted when the U.S. requested designs earlier this year, according to the AP. Companies winning contracts and asked to build prototypes may be announced this month.
That’s one place it might have come from. But I consider it an obvious idea, which means the President might have come up with it himself. And when I say “obvious,” I mean it is obvious to people who understand the power of persuasion.
Case in point, consider this quote from my blog post in November of 2015, about a year before the first Wall bids were submitted.
Now let’s keep thinking big about what this “wall” actually is. I can imagine a bullet train operating inside the wall, with shops and entertainment on each side, at least within the gateway city. I can imagine solar panels all along the top. I can imagine condos built into the wall. You can add more ideas. The point is that “wall” is thinking small. Think gateway city.
You can see the rest of that blog post here.
Many readers of this blog have wondered about the spooky accuracy of my Trump-related predictions for the past 2 years. Some have wondered on social media if I was somehow causing things to happen or just doing a good (or lucky) job of predicting. I’d like to propose a third option: People who understand persuasion think alike.
Putting solar panels on the wall is persuasion. It isn’t construction. It isn’t politics. It isn’t border security. It isn’t climate protection. It is pure persuasion. If that isn’t already obvious to you, consider how hard it would be for critics to argue against a green energy project, even if that is just an add-on feature to the wall. It changes the frame.
My hypothesis is that people who understand persuasion are likely to come to similar conclusions about things, and those conclusions will not agree with 98% of the public. Want more evidence of that? Take a look at linguist and persuasion expert George Lakoff’s take on President Trump’s Twitter strategy. You’ll see it is similar to what I’ve been telling you for a few years now. That’s not a coincidence. Lakoff is looking at the situation through what I call the Persuasion Filter, same as me.
We all have our own filters, informed by our training and life experiences. People who only know politics see only politics. People who are trained only in economics will tell you to follow the money. And trained persuaders will tell you persuasion is usually the predictive variable.
When you see experienced “persuaders” agree on a topic, it doesn’t mean one of them got the idea from another. It probably means there was one obvious persuasion-related play and those with training recognized it at the same time.
What an amusing and brilliant idea to completely screw the Left.
Cover the top of the wall with solar panels, then sting barbed wire all along the edges of the panels.
Problem:
They will have to be on the south-facing side, where they are open to random pot-shots by south-living shooters.
Stupid idea.
They would be to power the electrified portions of the wall, right?
Would need large capacitance storage for the laser beams.
Reminds me of the story about the “Pearly Gates”.
One day, St. Peter goes to God and says, “There is a mob from Detroit at the pearly gates, and they want to be let in”. God told him to let them in and St Peter returned breathless a few minutes later and told God, “They’re gone...they’re gone”. God asked, “The mob from Detroit?” St. Peter said, “No, the pearly gates”.
Same with the solar panels.
Why?
Sun bump
Didn't Art Bell quit his radio program after claiming someone was shooting towards his "KINGDOM OF NYE" property?
Doesn’t the sun rise in the east and set in the west? Couldn’t you make the top in a saw tooth configuration with panels facing in both directions?
Electrify it ?
Countin’ flowers on the wall
it don’t bother me at all!
I live pretty far north so I always think in terms of south-facing but I guess that’s not so important down on the border.
Not just solar panels, how about a two way set of elevated speed mag-trains that run from the Gulf to San Diego area, with spur connections to San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Pheonix. All the panels along the whole lenth could provide more than enough power to motivate several trains in each direction. The remaining power could be used to charge battery/capacitor banks that sit in reserve for the motion activated lasers that shoot anything between the sets of walls
Ripoffs and shots-at.
You know the ripoffs will be huge.
Cost of wall: $x.
Cost of solar panels for wall: $10x.
Put them on ground level on the north side of the wall.
Put a water aqueduct running along the top and suck salt water out of the gulf and convey it to Kalifornia where they can desalt it using solar panels or fill up the Salton Sea.
Because the cost of maintaining them and repairing them and replacing them when they get vandalized will far exceed any economic benefit they might generate.
I like this idea but I would like to offer an improvement. You could evaporate the salt out of the water on the way from the Gulf to California. You could have a third wall with the water pipes and staged pumping stations along the way, and the solar panels along that length will power the steam distillation process.
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