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.
To: 2ndDivisionVet I want President Trump to announce that he is building a 60 foot solar panel wall the full length of the US-Mexico border!
12 posted on 5/31/2017 7:19:55 PM by outofsalt ( If history teaches us anything it's that history rarely teaches us anything) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
Offhandedly thought of LA’s Disney Hall where they had to dull Frank Gehry’s asymmetric fun-house design because its mirrored surfaces were literally toasting nearby condo owners.
I figured that would be your reason. And I can’t totally disagree with you. But I wonder if the panels were angled north, with concrete on the south side, a lot of potential damage might be damaged.
Sure, because government property is never, ever vandalized in the U.S. right?
Neither is private property. Let’s not build anything!
https://www.reckli.com/en/company/research-innovation/solar-concrete/
Build a fifty foot tall concrete wall and then if people throw rocks at it then they're stupid. Hang expensive and breakable solar panels on it for them to throw rocks at then you're stupid.
As I wrote before, if they’re facing north with concrete on the southern side they can’t just throw rocks and hit the glass panels. Add a lexan barrier over the glass and they’d be almost unbreakable. There’s a reason you hire engineers and designers. They solve problems.
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