108 thoughts on “Trump on the Solar Wall”

  1. Yes, they were covering that on the news today. See through solar panels for a wall on the boarder. And the Mexican govt. is standing in line to pay for that. Maybe we could eliminate the transparency, since Trump knows nothing about that, and just wear hard hats so you are protected from the drugs flying over the wall. Or just put up some signs, Don’t throw your drugs over the wall…

  2. 50 peso fine for throwing bags of drugs worth more than 1,000,000 pesos over the wall.

  3. Here’s my prediction: If there ever IS a wall, within three months any part of it that is moderately accessible will be covered with graffiti. My other prediction: No wall.

    1. My prediction: For those who have seen the movie “Idiocracy”, it will happen within our lifetimes, if this trumpshit continues.

  4. Thunderf00t has a couple of take-downs of this on youtube

    If the wall was stupid, making it solar is doubly-stupid…

  5. Spoken like the man that he is — one who has never given even a moment’s serious thought to matters of public policy.

    1. I disagree somewhat – one who is not capable of (as in doesn’t have the equipment, as in a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic) generating a serious thought on matters of public policy. Or anything else.

          4. Been savin’ these words up for a while; might as well spring ’em on you guys, I figure. 🙂

      2. “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken

    1. @Barry An article in the HuffPo by a poet & a humanities prof [PhD Comparative Literature and Film Studies] – on a major civil engineering project…

      No costings whatsoever. Limited discussion on electrical distribution. No thought to maintenance. Dodgy comparison of solar & coal costs where no mention is made of the solar subsidies that are built into the calculation! The negative effects on the local wildlife. The hidden environmental cost of solar panels themselves.

      One option is to have concentrated solar thermal farms [see link below], near existing power lines, as close to the users [cities, industry] as possible. I don’t know enough to compare it fairly with solar panels – but from the pics you can see the merit of a few large farms rather than a strip going through the middle of nowhere. It would at least limit the negative environmentals somewhat.

      On the political side: building it on Mexican land with Mexican labour? Trump would have some trouble spinning that one, given his commitment to #MAGA. I guess he could manufacture the components in the USA, giving the work to a few of his billionaire buddies, & thus treble the cost? 🙂

      1. On the political side: building it on Mexican land with Mexican labour?

        Stuff the political side. The Egyptians eventually worked out who was doing their tomb robbing – it was the tomb builders. Use Mexicans to build the Byoootiful Wall and it’ll have an undocumented trapdoor every 100m. And they will be at 100m intervals because the mericans with 300ft tape measures would only find about 1 in 10 of the trapdoors.

        1. @Gravel I don’t know much about the tomb builders, nor the span of years they had to perfect their art [hundreds of years with skills passed father to son]. But, I kind of recall the architects & masons on the inside of knowledge re secret chambers & various dead fall traps were walled up with the dead royalty – to go on the ‘journey’.

          To foil info getting out to robbers? Of course that would require these people to be segregated from the common builders & their own kin for life. And perhaps tongues cut out too?

          Or maybe that’s an Indiana Jones film I’m thinking of. 🙂

  7. This is the kind of comment that a significant number of Americans will go ‘yeah, good idea’ to, because, like Trump, their conceptions of what border policing means have all been drawn from episodes of Texas Ranger and Knightrider. If you know almost nothing about anything then it sounds like common sense.

  8. A. I thought the drugs were coming through tunnels. A wall doesn’t really address that.

    2. I thought the wall was supposed to be a really big, beautiful, wall. Won’t it be too tall to throw 60 pounds of stuff over? What are they using? Catapults?

    C. If they are using catapults why stop at drugs? Why not bombs? Or confetti?

    4. What is this solar wall going to power? You know The Donald is trying to be green, here. He’s doing his part on climate change (which as we all know is a hoax).

    2. The solar power would do two things. Supply electricity to the electric fence that will be needed since the solar panels won’t stop anything and provide electricity to all the trump hotels and casinos that will be built along the boarder.

      2. Corporate-government synergy — all part of the Trump Family plan to monetize the US presidency.

    3. Catapults? Fetchez la vache🐮

      Trevor Noah had a hilarious bit about the drug throwing last night🤓

    4. Uh oh, we better not build this wall. If they already have catapults, you can bet they have siege weapons as well…

      Then again, our GMO crops may allow us to hold out should a siege arise.

      OK, I need to make this into a board game. US builds wall at Mexico. Canada builds wall at US. Mexico and/or Canada lay siege. You can play certain cards at certain times. If you’re the US and food supplies are running low, you have a limited number of GMO cards to play. Other cards to play are gun distribution (population control strategy), one nuke card, etc. You can use diplomacy to get other countries to send you supplies or do damage to Mexico/Canada, you can try and spread religion to the other sides of the walls to make some enemies sympathetic so they will sabotage the walls in different ways…

      You can also play as Mexico or Canada, which provide their own challenges and require strategizing against the US and have their own unique abilities, as well as different points for attributes. For example, Canada is higher in intelligence and diplomacy, but the US is higher in warfare, farming, and weapons production.

      There are so many possibilities. And the game is called “BUILD THAT WALL!”

      1. This is awesome!

        “You can use diplomacy to get other countries to send you supplies or do damage to Mexico/Canada…”

        The time for strategic patience is over, my dear. We.are.screwed. if we’re planning on diplomacy getting us anywhere. Game over!

        1. Well, assuming the starting point for the US is a President Trump, you can try a coup, but it’s a low-percentage play and the loss state is chaos, riots, military curfews, etc. If you succeed, it could be the first step to bringing one of the walls down, and you at least get an immediate +8 in diplomacy.

          1. Also, if diplomacy doesn’t work, that might be what you want to spend the nuke card on 😛

            Actually, let’s say you get a random number of nuke cards at the US every game, and it can be anywhere from one to four. If diplomacy isn’t working, nuke one of the countries that is refusing to help you. The other countries then have to either choose to help you, or risk getting nuked, not knowing whether you have any left or, if you do, which countries you might use them on (based on the resources you need. You don’t want to nuke a country if they have the most food stores and you need food, same for earth metals, oil, etc.).

      2. To paraphrase Clausewitz, siege weaponry is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.

      3. Is Strategy & Tactics still around? Because I would play that game if they published it.

        1. @busterggi Was the game called “Strategy & Tactics”? S&T published many board wargames & a monthly magazine.

          Perhaps you are thinking of the ancient, very good for its day “Tactics II”?

          A superb board game now is “Napoleon 4th Edition” which uses wooden blocks to simplify the game mechanics & to add a Fog Of War factor [opponent has limited information]. Not cheap. Best played in costume with copious French wine & shoulder shrugging!

          See here: https://rivcoach.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/news-napoleon-4th-edition-is-available-now-from-columbia-games/

    5. Once the wall’s got electric juice, they can embed southern-facing vending machines and microwaves in it. Could be how the Donald plans to get Mexico to pay for his wall.

      1. Could be a great boom for bottled water. We need more of that. Maybe the whole damn wall could be underwritten by Coke or Pepsi?

    6. You know The Donald is trying to be green, here.

      It’s some sort of blood complaint.

      1. @Diane ~ lovely word.

        Trebuchet sounds like a rack for grilling meats [or broiling as they term it in the colonies].

  9. He might just be our first encephalitic president. So that’s kind of progressive, right?

    1. Would also be much stronger and thinner than plexiglass, as we would know.

      No, I’m not a nerd, I swear.

      1. I knew what he meant too, and isn’t there a question as to whether women can ever be nerds? 😉

        1. No question to me. Hell, I dream of one day marrying a woman who will do a marathon of TNG and DS9 in their entirety at least once a year with me!

          And she’ll also play videogames, go to Comic Con (and we WILL dress up, damn it), and love my enormous…movie collection 😛

          Alas, I’ll probably have to settle for someone “normal.”

          1. My favourite is Voyager, which I’ve almost finished watching again at the moment. And there’s no room in my (very large bespoke) cabinet for anyone else’s movies! 🙂

            I’ve only ever been to one Comicon type event – a ST themed one. That was at least 25 years ago, and I had to go on my own because none of my friends were interested. I had to drive about 4 hours to get there, and come back the same day, and it wasn’t very well organized.

          2. Voyager is pretty good, but, at least to my eye, the characters just don’t flow and develop as well as the aforementioned series, nor are the storylines quite as intriguing and varied.

            I love TNG because it’s a show that’s just as much about philosophy, ideas, discovery, and what it means to be human (or Klingon, or android, or Tamarian, etc.). I love DS9 because it became a space saga full of politics, intrigue, warring factions, wondrous new beings and organizations (The Dominion is so awesome and interlaced with so many fantastic details), and pure human drama in a fascinating setting. I merely like Voyager because it has more cool Star Trek stuff, but it never felt like a cohesive whole with significant ideas behind it like the other two.

            TOS has always been too campy for me (I’m 32, but perhaps if I was older I could swallow it), and the other series need not be mentioned.

            Want to rank captains (no, that’s not a euphemism!) with a quick explanation of their placement? It’s fun!

          3. 1. Picard. No explanation necessary.

            2. Janeway. Tough. Smart. Rational. Kind. Fair. Woman. At my age (53) I still remember how tough it was for women to be accepted in leadership roles 20-30 years ago.

            3. Kirk. Just because he was the first one I knew when I was young. When I watch now, I’m frankly appalled by his management style and sexism, but I didn’t notice that when I was a kid.

            4. Archer. I didn’t watch much of this series because I spent a lot of the years it was on in and out of hospital, but what I saw I thought he was a good captain. I always felt the series had a difficult premise though because it was 100 years before TOS, but we were already beyond some of the technology imagined for that series.

            5. Sisko. I just didn’t like his personality at first, though he grew on me as time went on. There are still episodes in DS9 I haven’t seen either because I couldn’t get the channel it screened on in NZ where I was living at the time. I’ve caught up with most of it since. I didn’t like Kira Nerys much either, and the religious stuff annoyed me a lot. Even though I wasn’t an atheist back then, the idea of any reasonably intelligent person using religion to dictate their life was still stupid to me.

            Your turn.

          4. Well, let me start with a little preamble about DS9 first: all those problems you had with the show and the characters were exactly the same problems I had throughout the first season. Once I got past the first season and saw the characters grow and situations become dynamic, my feelings completely turned around at some point. I went from finding Sisko boring, rash, and dismissive to brave, caring, and deeply emotional. The religious stuff seemed terribly stupid and dull at first as well, but as time went on and I learned the role it played in the Bajoran people’s lives (and, by extension, the politics of Bajor and, by further extension, their war with the Cardassians and some of the mysterious motives of The Dominion), it became utterly fascinating. Everything about the show that seems either dull, silly, or superfluous at first ends up being a critical component. That’s what made me really fall in love with DS9: so many things are presented and you figure that most of it is just window dressing, but it all turns out to be pieces of the larger puzzle that fit perfectly together. Additionally, if you don’t like, say, the religious stuff at first, by the end of the series you’ll find that this part of the narrative provides rich commentary on how religion affects people, politics, ethnic strife, the promotion of authority figures, power, war, and much more.

            Here’s a tip: the entire series (actually, all of them!) is on Netflix, and if it isn’t on NZ Netflix, you can get right around Netflix’s regional restrictions by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network). If you don’t know, it’s super easy: if you use Chrome as your browser, just install an extension like BetterConnect, turn it on, and voila (a different browser like Firefox will have similar extensions)! You’ll be able to watch anything from any country (this also works for any site that restricts videos to certain regions, like Youtube). If you’re having any trouble, just look it up. It will take you a maximum of two or three minutes to figure it out.

            So, if you’re willing, give DS9 a shot again and watch all the episodes in order. The first season can be a bit of a slog, but it’s very important in setting up the characters and the world. By the time you get to the third season, you’ll be absolutely hooked, and from then on the series is one of the best ever put on television (especially once The Dominion and The Founders show up).

            Phew! OK, now we get to the captains.

            1. Picard — Most of all, I love his sense of wonder. Beyond that, he is truly the gentleman of captains. Always brave, but controlled. Cares for his crew, but knows he can’t get too close because he knows a ship that large runs on discipline and an authoritative leader. Will do anything to ensure the safety of his ship, his crew, and his mission.

            2. Sisko — for all the opposite reasons of Picard. He can be headstrong, but when he ends up in some of the situations he later encounters in the series (I won’t spoil it), his strength of character and stubborn manner become crucial to success. He never gives up on the people he loves, especially his son. Deep down, he cares deeply for everyone in his life.

            3. Janeway — Strong, brave, and will always find a way. The perfect captain for the situation in which the Voyager finds itself. Does an admirable job holding together and even growing the bonds between a crew that can be at odds with one another. Mostly pragmatic at heart.

            4. Kirk — A wild and brash captain. Wouldn’t make it in today’s Fleet, but I bet he would make a hell of a drinking buddy!

            5. Archer — tried to watch a couple of times. Didn’t care 😛

  11. I think, if you build a wall, a wall with solar panels is not the worst idea. If feasible, it could pay for itself.
    If a serious prize (I’m thinking of a few million US$) is offered for the company or university with the best idea we might get some good ones.

    1. @Nicky

      No. It’s a bad idea. If you HAVE to have a wall or fence then have a wall or fence.

      Then build huge, concentrated solar farms near cities, near to the existing electric grid system & roads. Save billions of dollars on construction & upkeep. Plus less harm to the environment overall.

      1. I don’t understand the environmental harm that several commenters have mentioned. (I’ve been away for two weeks and just catching up on all this.) If the wall were built, how would putting solar panels on it cause more environmental damage than building a solar array of the same area somewhere else?

        1. Lou – from what I have read, a main concern would be regarding wildlife, disruption of habitats, etc. And, if you have ever been to Big Bend National Park, you would quickly realize the magnitude of the craziness of building a wall along the entire border.

          1. I lived in Texas and know the importance of the border for wildlife. I know the wall is crazy. But the interview was about the solar aspect of the wall, not the wall itself. People were saying that this aspect of the wall was crazy, and the comment I responded to specifically addressed the added harm of a solar system given that the wall would be built.

            So an environmental argument against the solar aspect of the wall would have to show it causes more environmental harm than the wall without solar panels. I haven’t seen such an argument.

        2. @Lou I am not a techy so mistakes below are likely! The environmental harm resides in the immense wastage of a 3,200 km long solar strip rather than efficient shapes positioned nearer to people & existing infrastructure].

          Solar is always on for efficiency/saving & thus needs to be converted to a form of energy that can be stored [heat, raising or spinning weights, battery etc] for periods when the grid doesn’t require the energy.

          Inefficient to service panels high up on a fence & the team & spares have to get there. Nightmare to inspect.

          Panels on a fence can’t efficiently track the sun across the sky. And you wouldn’t want all those tracking mechanisms in the middle of nowhere. Thus forced into an inefficient fixed panel system.

          Solar is DC & needs tech to convert it to AC at a useful transportable high voltage connecting to the power grid – the voltage has to be slightly higher than grid voltage. The electricity has to be conditioned for use, by a grid-connected inverter or chaos. Many, many inverters & other fiddly boxes, power cables all along points close to the 3,200 km solar strip.

          It is senseless to build a solar strip & then deliver the energy to points where it can be used. Better to build enormous solar farms [or ranches] every few hundred miles near existing grid, near a workforce, near consumers. At those places you have factories & warehousing & homes – all partly to service the ranch & to store spares.

          Speculation: The 3,200 km solar strip will be an excellent amplifier for disruptions to the grid caused by solar flares – the design would have to have protections. I dunno if this is a real problem or not.

          1. Speculation: The 3,200 km solar strip will be an excellent amplifier for disruptions to the grid caused by solar flares – the design would have to have protections. I dunno if this is a real problem or not.

            Naaah, I don’t think that’d be a significant issue. As you say, you’ll need to have “short” segments of “solar wall” gathered electrically to a local DC->AC converter, phase adjuster, and step up transformer, to then plug your power into a HV transmission line for shipment to market. Those “short” wall segments won’t get enough voltage induced over their length (say, 20km) to cause significant problems. The long-disance “gathering” grid, OTOH, would need redundancy built in, appropriate switching and local fault-detection logic. Which is perfectly do-able.
            What has caused several problems in recent years is the “grid” running closer to capacity, and closer to the limits of the protective switches, without enough capacity to shunt load onto other circuits (because everything is running closer to capacity). You can design around that, but it does increase costs appreciably. You might ned to, for example, run 4 sets of power lines, each one intended too take 33% of the projected load (one phase of three) so that a tripped circuit can be shunted onto the spare circuit while repairs are carried out on the failed circuit. Other schemes I’ve seen use 5@25% – it varies on the capital equipment you’re running and your tolerance of disruption. It’s a well-understood part of engineering which is invariably undermined by beancounters who couldn’t change the batteries in their personal sexual massagers, but can sure balance a spreadsheet. Trump’s sort of people, in other words.
            I’ll get popcorn. And rubber boots.

        3. There’s this thing called the Rio Grande river that runs along the border – plopping a fence in the middle of it would disrupt hundreds of miles of natural ecology.

        4. Lou,

          I can’t speak for anyone else but the wall related environmental harm I mentioned in a comment down below was not aimed at a solar panel wall specifically, but rather any kind of barrier spanning such a range. Barriers much smaller than Trump’s proposed border wall have caused serious wildlife issues.

          Being that there is no rational reason or purpose for this moronic border wall that would make enduring the environmental damage doubly frustrating.

          1. Yes, I know the wall is crazy. I used to fight for a Rio Grande wildlife corridor when I lived in Texas. I was just wondering why it was a bad idea to make it solar, if it were to be built.

  12. The border with Mexico is already solar (just look up) and already see-through. Problem solved, Mr Presidunce Trumputin, now put that money back where it helps cancer patients, children, the disabled and the elderly in nursing homes.

        1. Well, it does all sound cray and it wouldn’t surprise me bigly if he did use the term. Amazing and beautiful don’t fit there, so….

  18. I think it would be cheaper for the government to just buy all the drugs the drug producers care to make at whatever price necessary to be, and remain, their customer of choice. Certainly if you figure in all the costs associated with our decades long War On Drugs.

    Not talked about as much, but another thing I really dislike about this moronic wall idea is the ecological damage it would do. Not just the immediate effects of such a civil engineering project, but the longer term effects on wildlife.

    1. Big Pharma wouldn’t go for that. The War on Drugs drives up the demand for oxies, roxies, and cottontail fentanyl.

      1. Fentanyl goes by the street name “cottontail”, does it? Ms Fungus-specialist Potter would … actually, she’d probably need an explanation.

    2. Could some drugs be used as insecticides…natural or semi-natural?

      Nicotine is an insecticide.

      At the very least farmers could get high while managing crops.

        1. Don’t give the Tobacco Growers Association any ideas

          My Dad remembers being taught about using nicotine to control the slugs in the kitchen garden during rationing. The tobacco companies have known about this alternative use for a long, long time.

    3. Fill it with the creatures from the swamp the Donald has drained in the nation’s capitol … oh, wait, nevermind.

  21. I think Mr Trump should be encouraged, if for once his proposal is not reactionary or pandering to religious fundamentalists.
    Let’s face it, the world is stuck with him for at least, yes at least, the next 3.5 years, whether we like it or not.
    The ‘wall’ was an election promise, and presidents tend to try to carry those out.
    So let us not ridicule when for once he has an idea that is not totally negative,
    (I secretly hope that some support from the ‘left’ in these “positive endeavours” will kind of liberate him from the grip the Christian Ayatollahs have on him).

  22. I will charitably attribute the transcribers misspelling of “Crazy” (“cray”) to their incredulity at what they were hearing.

  24. If it is built, future generations will hail “the wall” as a prime example of human induced allopatric speciation.

    Especially if it’s transparent, because now, species can compare notes.

    When the reasons given by the elected highest office in your government for why you should build a wall you can see through sound like a bad joke from a standup comedy act, and yet he’s serious… I’m not really sure how to finish that thought.

    1. Trumps use of the word “transparent” struck me as interesting. I have this theory an advisor used far too many long words while telling Trump that the economics of the wall had to be open to scrutiny – “absolutely transparent” i.e. no favouritism nor self interest given that Trump’s nominally in the business of construction.

      And Trump took it literally, slept on it & threw that into his babble to seem informed. Overnight he imagined his own reasons why a see-through wall was a great idea.

      2. Trump père had “transparent” on the mind since its the word he used to gaslight the nation when describing the four-versions-and-counting of his Russian-collusion meeting told so far by Trump fils.

  25. Hold on a sec… is he suggesting solar lighting and transparent panels (to prevent people getting killed by flying bags of drugs)or solar *electrification* of the wall(s)?!
    Either way, this is a terrible idea with its detrimental impact on wildlife et al and their migration patterns.

    1. @Smokedpaprika The scheme giving Trump a hardon is the one presented by Tom Gleason [Gleason Partners LLC] – a 70 yr old geezer out of North Vegas. Gleason happens to know some people who know Trump. Think about that for a moment…

      There’s pictures of Gleason’s design in the below link. It uses a hell of a lot of concrete [presumably prefab & pre-stressed maybe] in a peculiar 30 degree angled back from vertical cross-section with a built-in ground-level walkway on the US side. The cross section looks ‘designed’ to resist a Humvee or light tank trying to break through south to north & the walkway could be a kind of tank trap. [all my speculation – the tank bit]

      Following the 30 degree angle – one has concrete below eye level. Then at eye level it’s a strip of bulletproof/ blastproof windows. Above that is a strip of solar panels at a BAD angle [60 degrees from vertical is closer to what’s needed for catching maximum rays down Mexico way]

      Then above that is a vertical section with open struts that holds the SECOND STRIP of solar panels. At the correct angle, supposedly tracking the sun somehow, very far from the ground, a tough job to service from either side.

      It’s a dog’s breakfast

      All this is useless without 10s of thousands of guards, movement sensors, IR [or similar] CCTV, lights, guard rest rooms, vehicles for said guards, K9s, roadway, 100 metres of cleared ground both sides of the wall & comms equipment. Then there’s the maintenance infrastructure.

      The idea that a bag of drugs could hurt/kill someone as it lands from the Mexico side is farcical. That would be very bad luck – more chance of being hit by space rock I think.

      Notice how the top solar strip shadows some of the bottom strip: http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-solar-border-wall-mexico-images-2017-6/

      1. I hope the service roads & structural concrete are of emission absorbing concrete or some such. Just getting those large sections of concrete to site would require around the same number of trucks [I estimate] as could be used end-to-end to line up along the wall. Say 80 truck journeys per kilometre.

        Very conservatively estimate a multiple of 10 for the other wall materials plus the roadway aggregate & topping etc.

        800 truck journeys per kilometre at the bare minimum – unknown journey length, but in the 100s of miles I suppose. Carbon footprint hell.

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