Episode 372 Scott Adams: Quick Tutorial on Using Engineering to Take Politics Out of the Wall

Date: 2019-01-12 | Duration: 10:10

Topics

Remove politics and immigration issues can be resolved Whiteboard: Wall engineering Time to turn it over to the engineers for what’s needed Engineering priorities look at cost and effectiveness

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> [!note] Rough Transcript
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> This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

## Transcript

[0:07]

hey everybody uh once you all get in here I'm going to give you a quick tutorial on some high Lev 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 installed uh political process so we've been depending on politics to solve our border security situation and I see ridiculous things such as uh I I see politicians talking about engineering Solutions you know 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 pososi not an engineer nobody who in politics at least

[1:10]

engineer nobody who 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 all right 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 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 cuz if you see somebody in the Drone you send out the border patrol and they drive over and they pick them up all right 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

[2:10]

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 uh 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 you know to 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 all right yeah yeah somebody said that uh uh lucky Palmer's company is working on this end of the spectrum that's true uh and and I would not bet against lucky Palmer to 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

[3:11]

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 the government to make the funds available but it would be another thing for the city to say we we prefer to live with the risk even even though you know we could get rid of it or at least mitigate it
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 um 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

[4:13]

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 cuz 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 down a patrol car when when the Drone SP or the sensor spot them so uh somebody is saying totally incorrect Scott well you could give me a reason and I and I will look for your comments here um 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 not really an argument somebody says that's BS the coyotes will take that rot yes it doesn't yeah let me be clear

[5:13]

rot yes it doesn't yeah let me be clear if you build walls here the coyotes and people trying to get across will go down you know 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 all right so it is incorrect to say in this model that this is less security than that because that's not the case th 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 all
all right uh well the arresting them and letting them go is obviously a separate

[6:16]

letting them go is obviously a separate um
um 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 when I say that Engineers should be involved you should know that Engineers always always put the cost of something at near the top right so no no engineer is going to develop a system that's the inexp that's the expensive 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 the people the the maintenance the construction they're going 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 um somebody says we should hire the illegals to build the wall you know I think that's probably a terrible idea

[7:16]

think that's probably a terrible idea because most of the wall building uh is um with equipment in other words there's probably not a lot of manual labor in most of this wall work possibly with the f stuff but even that's probably equipment
um 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 uh 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

[8:17]

people I would say we should probably respect that you know even though they can get through the city and out but if that's what they want you know maybe the maybe the federal government should at least respect that decision
um yeah I mean there's a good argument for the uh 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 um it probably you know I don't know that the city should have an option of no
security um 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

[9:18]

protected section have you read the major academic studies on this topic no has anybody uh I think they'll start digging lots of tunnels Scott well it's hard to tun 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 wanted to say on this topic I just wanted to frame it that way and I'll keep it short talk to you later