Jan. 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
10:07
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey everybody! | |
| Once you all get in here, I'm going to give you a quick tutorial on some high-level concepts of engineering for the border security. | |
| And what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to find a workaround for the stalled political process. | |
| So we've been depending on politics to solve our border security situation, and I see ridiculous things such as I see politicians talking about engineering solutions. | |
| If I see a president talking about steel versus concrete, I say to myself, well, this is sort of a special case, at least he's in construction, but he's not an engineer. | |
| President Trump knows a lot about construction, but he's not an engineer. | |
| People in his business hire engineers because they're not engineers. | |
| Nancy Pelosi, not an engineer. | |
| Nobody in politics, at least I can't think of any, who are actually engineers. | |
| So if we could depersonalize the topic and hand it over to the engineers, we'd win. | |
| And I want to show you what that would look like. | |
| And again, this is just highly conceptual. | |
| Alright, so here's some wall engineering. | |
| On this axis, we have population density. | |
| The higher the population, the more you're going to want a wall. | |
| And the lower, the less you need one. | |
| Here's why. If you have a, let's say, a border area that's out in the middle of nowhere, and there's nobody on either side for miles, all you really need is a drone. | |
| Because if you see somebody in the drone, you send out the Border Patrol and they drive over and they pick them up. | |
| So in those cases, you don't need much. | |
| If it's low density, there's not much around. | |
| You might need some drones and sensors, maybe a little fence, sort of like Israel does. | |
| You know, Israel is mostly a fairly unimpressive low fence. | |
| What we call their wall isn't a wall at all, except in very few places. | |
| The places you need a solid wall are where you have lots of population on each side and there's an obvious reason for that because if somebody hops over the wall they immediately can disappear into the city. | |
| So the more population density The more you need something that will slow down the people trying to get over. | |
| Because if it takes a while to put a ladder up and to get over, at least there's some time for people to say, hey, somebody's trying to get over that wall. | |
| Let's send somebody over. | |
| Somebody said that Lucky Palmer's company is working on this end of the spectrum. | |
| That's true. And I would not bet against Lucky Palmer to have a good solution, that is. | |
| So, in order to take it to the last level of getting politics out of it, don't you think it would be fair If the local city, the only ones who care about walls, I mean, really, the only place you need a wall is where people can jump over it and just disappear into the city. | |
| So don't you think the city should be the one to decide if they want a wall? | |
| It would be one thing for the government to make the funds available, but it would be another thing for the city to say, we prefer to live with the risk, even though we could get rid of it, or at least mitigate it. | |
| Now, have you seen it explained this way before? | |
| Have you seen it explained that your population density is not the only variable, but it's probably the biggest variable? | |
| And if you realize that this is a somewhat of an engineering decision, and it's not so much a political decision, and if you want to get the politics settled the right way, you want to do it as locally as possible. | |
| So when the people in El Paso say, we built a wall and it worked, well that's probably true. | |
| Because El Paso would be a densely populated place compared to other places. | |
| And if somebody says, we don't need a wall out in these low population areas, you should agree with them. | |
| Because why do you need a wall there? | |
| It's just cheaper to send out a patrol car when the drones or the sensors spot them. | |
| Somebody is saying, totally incorrect, Scott. | |
| Well, you can give me a reason, and I will look for your comments here. | |
| In all of these things I do on Periscope, I'm always open to the counterargument. | |
| But you're dumb, Scott, or you don't know anything is not really an argument. | |
| Somebody says, that's BS. The coyotes will take that route. | |
| Yes. Let me be clear. | |
| If you build walls here, The coyotes and people trying to get across will go down to wherever they can get across. | |
| But keep in mind, the point is that the security here is exactly as good as the security there. | |
| Because the security in low-density areas is that it takes a long time to get to the border, you know, and you're going to be exposed and visible the whole time you're approaching it. | |
| And then once you get past, you're also exposed and visible for a long time again. | |
| So it is incorrect to say in this model that this is less security than that because that's not the case. | |
| This line is drawn in a way conceptually to say that everything on this line is just as good as everything else because you don't need a wall where you can see the people walking for miles. | |
| You just go get them. | |
| Well, the arresting them and letting them go is obviously a separate question. | |
| Somebody says that's a lot of payroll over time. | |
| I don't think so, because I think that this is the lower expense mechanism. | |
| When I say that engineers should be involved, you should know that engineers always, always put the cost of something At near the top. | |
| So no engineer is going to develop a system that's the inexpensive way to do something you can do cheaply. | |
| So you should trust that the engineers are going to look at all of the costs, you know, the people, the maintenance, the construction, they're going to look at all that now and in the future. | |
| That's what they do. Trust the engineers to look at all the factors. | |
| That's what they do. | |
| Somebody says we should hire the illegals to build the wall. | |
| You know, I think that's probably a terrible idea because most of the wall building is with equipment. | |
| In other words, there's probably not a lot of manual labor in most of this wall work. | |
| Possibly with the fence stuff, but even that's probably equipment. | |
| Your model is too simple. | |
| Border security is more than the wall. | |
| Well, that's what a conceptual model is. | |
| It's a simplification. | |
| So if you understand this, you understand the basic point that the density of the area is the main driver of what kind of security you want to put there. | |
| If you understand that, then it takes all the politics out of it. | |
| And if we need any politics, let the city who is a candidate for a wall Have a local vote. | |
| If the local people don't want a wall in their own city to protect their own people, I would say we should probably respect that, even though they can get through the city and out. | |
| But if that's what they want, maybe the federal government should at least respect that decision. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there's a good argument for the federal government to not respect that decision because it is the federal government's ultimate responsibility. | |
| But as a compromise, as a compromise, maybe that would work. | |
| Yeah, it's a matter of national security. | |
| You are correct. | |
| It probably, you know, I don't know that the city should have an option of no security. | |
| Build small tests? | |
| Yeah, the border is hard to test small because the problem is if you do anything on the border on a certain section, it's just going to cause people to go to the less protected section. | |
| Have you read the major academic studies on this topic? | |
| No. Has anybody? | |
| I think they'll start digging lots of tunnels, Scott. | |
| Well, it's hard to tunnel...yeah, I suppose they could build tunnels, but we're pretty good at detecting tunnels now. | |
| Our tunnel detection technology is pretty good. | |
| And I always wonder, why couldn't you put tunnel detection technology into the wall itself? | |
| Isn't that a thing? | |
| Wouldn't it be easy to build the tunnel detection actually into the wall and then if somebody disables it, you know where they are? | |
| All right, that's all I want to say on this topic. | |
| I just wanted to frame it that way, and I'll keep it short. |
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