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Greetings again everyone. Still pretty much the occasional lurker here. Guess I'm just a weird lurker by nature, hehe. Anyway, here lately I've been doing some trolling on some right wing websites, and surprise surprise this Trump wall business is a routine topic. Anyway, I recently interjected myself in a wall thread by asking these guys just how effective they expected a wall to be even if one were built. Well, let's just say "very" was pretty much the response by many. I did bring up the fact that Mexicans are aware of teamwork and construction technology, and we're talking about a bloody wall, haha. And that given the money in drugs and contraband, and the desperate motivated nature of immigrants, any wall will be overcome quite readily. I brought up the fact that in Mexico, they do indeed have rope, grappling hooks, pickaxes, shovels, ladders, cherry pickers, powder actuated concrete fasteners, and Home Depots. Then I brought up explosives...homemade, purchased like tannerite, or stolen/acquired by cartels from mining and demolition companies. I mentioned thermite, and its utter cheapness and ease of production. Well, none of this dissuaded them in the slightest. Let me say, that what many envision is something along the lines of the behemoth Israeli wall, with the guard towers. The guard towers played huge in their argument. And the border guards having listening equipment like soldiers to detect power tools etc. It was about this point that I just abandoned ship, because, it was getting to be like a religious argument with everyone just going round and round and getting nowhere.

Well, now they're hammering this DarkPulse Technologies fiber optic sensor technology that supposedly will detect people walking up to the wall, scaling, or in any way manipulating the wall. Basically, these guys are annoying me, and while I can think of some counters to this technology, I wanted to see what you guys here on SDNET had to say. Let's imagine that you are a cartel guy or a coyote in Mexico, and you are tasked with smuggling immigrants or contraband into the U.S. Facing you is basically the best Trump wall one could reasonably expect built. We're talking 7-10 meters of concrete. It's got watch towers, maybe there's even a trench on one or both sides, though no one's mentioned a trench yet. Razor wire at the top. And it's got some sort of pressure sensor technology to alert of breach attempts and tunneling. Also expect to have to deal with the occasional drone and vehicle patrol. What do you do? Keep in mind, that if the immigrant flow is reduced to a trickle, it's still pretty much a win for these guys.

And yes, I am aware that drug cartels can easily move a lot of product with drones, catapults, and giant slingshots, and whatnot, haha, though I've yet to even mention that. But still, any and all ideas you have are welcome.

Here's the company website for darkpulse.

http://www.darkpulse.com/bordersecurity/

Much thanks.

Odds are it'll never come to that. Trump will tell Homeland Security to go with the low-bidder and/or a company he owns, who will then not just half-arse but quarter-arse the construction process, and the resulting wall will be falling to bits by the midterms.

Assuming of course that someone doesn't finally point out that illegal immigrants have been the Confederacy's go-to source for all the crappy jobs since they had the Emancipation Proclamation forced on them and lots of campaign donors will be very unhappy if their cheap expendable labour is taken away, at which point he'll either hilariously flip-flop on one of his biggest campaign promises (and get away with it if he's racist enough about it) or do something hilariously unwise like try to relegalise indentured servitude.

Zaune wrote:Odds are it'll never come to that. Trump will tell Homeland Security to go with the low-bidder and/or a company he owns, who will then not just half-arse but quarter-arse the construction process, and the resulting wall will be falling to bits by the midterms.

Assuming of course that someone doesn't finally point out that illegal immigrants have been the Confederacy's go-to source for all the crappy jobs since they had the Emancipation Proclamation forced on them and lots of campaign donors will be very unhappy if their cheap expendable labour is taken away, at which point he'll either hilariously flip-flop on one of his biggest campaign promises (and get away with it if he's racist enough about it) or do something hilariously unwise like try to relegalise indentured servitude.

Yeah, I know the odds of it even happening are slim at best, and even if it does happen it'll probably be little more than glorified cyclone fencing. Or so shoddily constructed it'll soon look like the non-touristy bits of the Great Wall. But, these guys really think an "A" level wall is possible. And regardless of whether it happens or not, I'm trying to prove to them that a wall itself is a really dumb ass idea and will be ineffective even if well implemented. Maybe I'm wrong. If they layer enough technology within the upper end of any reasonable wall budget, could it really work?

Well, the fundamental question is, how much would a highly effective wall cost- one with continuously manned guard posts and all?

[Notably, you need guard posts with big enough garrisons that "just bribe a guard" is not a realistic possibility]

The Israeli 'wall' is about 440 miles long. Making a good faith attempt to estimate its cost, it seems to be somewhere between one and two billion dollars, plus an uncertain upkeep cost. Let's estimate 1.5 billion dollars, just so we have a place to start. The border is slightly less than 2000 miles long, so naively we might assume that the construction cost would be about 6.8 billion dollars (1.5 divided by 440 to get cost per mile, then multiplied by 2000).

Now, much of our wall would have to be built in far more forbidding and unpleasant conditions, which affects costs by an uncertain amount. I think it would be very naive to expect this wall to cost less than 10 billion dollars in light of that.

Furthermore, upkeep costs are a big deal. The Israeli wall works in large part because it has armed guards who have orders to shoot to kill if anyone tries to sneak past the wall. A wall that's intended to keep people out with armed guards stops working very well if you can't find or don't want to pay enough guards to keep it operational. Or if you stop telling them they can shoot to kill after a few dead pregnant women show up on the other side of the wall, forcing you to hire more guards to adopt functional nonlethal strategies.

Let's at least try to casually estimate the upkeep costs of the wall. For one, there's physical maintenance. How long will a stretch of wall remain intact and functional without repairs under desert conditions? Hard to say. I think fifty years would be grossly optimistic. 25 years might be pessimistic, but it sounds about right to me. If so, then we can roughly model maintenance costs as "rebuild the wall every 25 years." If so, then every year we end up spending 400 million dollars on this task, assuming the cost of the wall is what I estimate.

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Now, how about those guards? A wall that works without a strong guard force is going to be much more expensive to build- even the biggest, strongest wall can be circumvented eventually if nobody stops you. And you can't just park one guard every twenty miles or something, because that won't be effective for obvious reasons.

Suppose you need two guards per mile of wall (or more likely, one squad of eight per four miles of wall). This seems pretty minimal by the standards of actually guarding a wall so that it cannot easily be penetrated. However, it implies a force of four thousand guards to cover the two thousand mile wall. Moreover, there have to be at least three shifts of guards at all times, plus guards who work on weekends... Assuming the guards work forty-hour weeks, filling each guard 'slot' requires at least 4.2 employees to fill a 168-hour week. Making allowances for things like sick leave and vacations and holidays, it's probably more like 5 guards on the payroll for each slot that must be filled on the wall. Maybe more, but "five people" is a good estimate. So you need about twenty thousand guards.

How much money does paying one guard cost? Well, most of the guards will have to work in small buildings out in the middle of a howling wilderness. They have to LIVE in a small community in the middle of a howling wilderness. They'll spend a lot of time outdoors in places where the temperature routinely exceeds 110 degrees Fahrenheit, et cetera. I can't imagine getting a large number of able-bodied, competent, bribe-resistant people to agree to do a job like that for less than, oh, $50,000 a year. And I suspect I'm being optimistic.

If my assumption is correct, twenty thousand guards cost a billion dollars a year.

Then there are additional costs to maintaining the guard force itself- like air conditioning, fuel for their vehicles, the staff it takes to coordinate all the guards and handle their payroll and equipment and stuff. I have no idea how to begin to estimate the costs associated with that, but I doubt they're small enough to be negligible when you're talking about a force of 20,000 guards.

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So we have (10 billion up front) plus (0.4 billion per year) plus (1.0 billion per year) plus (costs of maintaining a force of 20,000 guards in isolated desert areas).

Does that count as a reasonable budget for Trump's wall?

If so, then it gives us a basis for planning. If not, then we can confidently expect that some of the expenses will be skimped on: fewer guards, reduced manpower at night or on federal holidays, et cetera.

...

Note that I made a lot of assumptions here and I know that- please do not attack me for making assumptions. By all means attack me if any one of the assumptions is factually correct, but can we focus on the accuracy of the planning assumptions, not on the fact that estimates were made?

Among my assumptions:
-Construction is not inherently more expensive in the US than in Israel
-It costs less than twice as much to build a mile of wall in the desert on the Mexican border than it does to build said wall on the West Bank.
-Physical maintenance of wall facilities won't cost more than just rebuilding the wall from scratch every 25 years, but also won't cost much less.
-Two guards per mile is "enough," but not "way too many."
-You can find twenty thousand reasonably incorruptible, competent guards willing to work in the desert on the Mexican border for fifty thousand dollars a year.

And of course I have no idea what the upkeep costs for the guard force itself are.

=================================

My wife suggests that we could save a lot of money by building the wall around Donald Trump instead. Then we'd have only about 0.01 miles of wall, cutting costs by a factor of roughly 200,000, lowering the price point to something more like, oh, tens of thousands of dollars? A hundred thousand, given that we can't have 1/10th of a guard on patrol?

At which point we probably really COULD get the Mexicans to pay for it. Does anyone know how to say 'GoFundMe' in Spanish?

the problem with building a wall around Donald Trump is that it would have to be big enough to house his ego or it would just burst and a wall that's a couple parsecs per side would be quite expensive indeed.

Honestly though if you were willing to accept the PR-disaster it would cause you could probably replace some of the guards with automated MG turrets and it wouldn't surprice me what Trump would so out of touch as to not see the problem there.

that said the biggest problem with the wall is really conseptual rather then practical as it's not really viable to build wall big enough that illegal immigrants couldn't just build a raft to bypass it, nor is it really viable to hire enough guards to police such a wall.

A full length-documentary I found with five minutes:


There is also Penn and Teller also had an entire Bullshit episode devoted to the topic of mexican immigrants overcoming the wall (proposed way back in the Bush era). They literary hired a bunch of actual immigrants, made them build a replica of the wall and then had them get over it (yes, really). Under it, over it and through it. They did, in about five minutes and common tools. You can find it under "Penn and Teller's Bullshit: Immigration".

Just as history told us with the Berlin Wall which had guard towers, trenches, armed soldiers, the works of the age. People STILL got over it and that was a small fraction of the 2000 miles US-Mexico border. Not to mention the examples of immigrants flooding Europe from the Middle East. Putting more technologies like that can be circumvented, disabled or outright bypassed. They need to figure out how only once and then the method be spread.

The only way to really stop immigrants is to a, change their country to be not cartel-ran shithole you can best escape from or b, deterring them by ruthlessly shooting them on sight although I'd doubt even that would work.

Or c, create a system of central registry of citizens that would make staying and working here illegally near-impossible. As well as reform the immigration process so the people can come in legally and with filters, education and requirements to be something else than decade-long administrative nightmare. That is certainly one way to stop illegal immigrants and get legal immigrants. But of course that would be the sensible option that actually would work, thus unmentionable.

A wall will pose a significant obstacle, but it will not work as a deterrent. If you are desperate enough to cross the desert by foot and with only the possessions you can carry to a country you'll be a shadow-citizen of, you're already beyond deterrent. Drug cartels will barely be even hindered as they have far superior resources than average illegal immigrant to circumvent. Maybe small-time drug dealers and smugglers, but not carrier ones with connections, methods, creativity, etc.

Zaune wrote:Odds are it'll never come to that. Trump will tell Homeland Security to go with the low-bidder and/or a company he owns, who will then not just half-arse but quarter-arse the construction process, and the resulting wall will be falling to bits by the midterms.

Supposing that the first brick is laid by the end of this presidency is giving the wall idea more credit than I think it deserves...

Drug cartels are already using submarines, trebuchets and drones. A wall isn't a problem for them.

Vendetta wrote:

Zaune wrote:Odds are it'll never come to that. Trump will tell Homeland Security to go with the low-bidder and/or a company he owns, who will then not just half-arse but quarter-arse the construction process, and the resulting wall will be falling to bits by the midterms.

Supposing that the first brick is laid by the end of this presidency is giving the wall idea more credit than I think it deserves...

Especially given the increasing odds that his Presidency won't make it through a full four years before impeachment.

Immigrate legally


100% bypassed

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will continue to fight the good fight, simply out of principle, haha, but it's an uphill battle. I find it hard to believe anyone really thinks a mighty wall is imminent, but, it's for all intents and purposes a religion to certain people. I highly doubt the funds will ever materialize. And even if they did, magically, the administration will still have a huge uphill battle ahead. They'll be tied up for years in court with eminent domain lawsuits. And there's the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona which vows to be uncooperative. So, more time in court. And then we know how government projects often go, with price overruns, extensions, etc. And if it's not completed by the end of Trump's administration it's dead, and Trump even finishing one term is questionable to say the least. So yes, it is ridiculous. But yet they persist. Hence why I was taking the approach I was, attempting to undermine the very notion of a wall as an effective deterrent/barrier.

And hey, I saw this on Liveleak yesterday. https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=15b_1494702679

A drone is used to do what they describe as a drone base jump, but is really a drone drop. Anyway, a guy dangles from a drone, drops, and then deploys a chute. The drone is quite impressive...lots of props. I don't know much about drones, like what the battery life would be, or what challenge recharging it may present in the desert, but I'm pretty sure an industrious coyote could rig something up and make use of the technology to get at least limited numbers of people over even the most impressive wall. You just have to lift someone high enough to get over the wall while clearing the sensor field. Anyway, if there were serious money involved, I'd find a way to get under, though, or over any wall, and I can't see why these guys can't accept what properly motivated people are capable of achieving.

Anyway, if there were serious money involved, I'd find a way to get under, though, or over any wall, and I can't see why these guys can't accept what properly motivated people are capable of achieving.

Wishful thinking and rascism. Not just plain rascism, but wishful rascism. We have a long, big complex problem in the making in the entire developed world about labor and difficulty of umploying non-highly trained people. There are many facets of the problem, several of which revolve around the increase of technology, globalism, etc. That problem has been reduced to "illegal immigrants took your jobs". It's a lie, but its a lie a lot of people can believe and thus the actual problem is ignored.

Marko Dash wrote:Immigrate legally


100% bypassed

Have you tried doing that?

If I was born in Mexico, you can bet your ass I'd be through that thing in 15 minutes. I'm smart, I'm creative, and I have absolutely zero training at penetrating walls, but The D would have to try a lot harder than that to stop me. Worst Case, I swim like a fish.

Marko Dash wrote:Immigrate legally

100% bypassed

If the US were willing to admit 1% of its population as legal immigrants every year, like we were in the late 19th and early 20th century, I strongly suspect we wouldn't have an illegal immigration issue. We didn't then, not really. But today the percentage is about 0.1%, which means there's a large unmet demand for immigrant labor, predictably driving a black market.

Seriously, that's how supply and demand work. I don't understand why there are so many people who favor laissez-faire free markets, and don't understand why we have an illegal immigration issue.

Simon_Jester wrote:

Marko Dash wrote:Immigrate legally

100% bypassed

If the US were willing to admit 1% of its population as legal immigrants every year, like we were in the late 19th and early 20th century, I strongly suspect we wouldn't have an illegal immigration issue. We didn't then, not really. But today the percentage is about 0.1%, which means there's a large unmet demand for immigrant labor, predictably driving a black market.

Seriously, that's how supply and demand work. I don't understand why there are so many people who favor laissez-faire free markets, and don't understand why we have an illegal immigration issue.

I suspect that they don't really know what "laissez-faire free markets" mean that said I suspect large portion why the immigrant labor is in such high demand is that it's illegal and therefore you can bypass those pesky rules meant to protect workers, so having more legal immigrants wouldn't solve the issues as legal immigrants would be more likely to complain about bad/illegal treatment by employers then illegals would.

Find some guards receptive to bribes/threats. Have them open the gates as needed.

Of course, as clever as all of these solutions are, the best way to breach the Trump wall is still clear:

Kick him out of office before its finished.

Well if the wall doesn't work on its it could be supplemented by landmines. How many and how in-depth do you think they would have to be to make a difference?

I'm actually kind of surprised he hasn't suggested it yet.

Tribble wrote:Well if the wall doesn't work on its it could be supplemented by landmines. How many and how in-depth do you think they would have to be to make a difference?

I'm actually kind of surprised he hasn't suggested it yet.

Don't give them ideas.

Their are more than a few Republicans who would just love to blow up little Hispanic children with land mines.

Landmines would be more effective deterrent than walls. The problem is that it would require someone admitting that they want border-crossers to be killed on sight, which thankfully still be considered overly bloodthirsty.

Even though they already try to funnel people into the worst parts of the desert for just that purpose.

If you have some money, you can very easily bypass a hypothetical wall by buying a plane ticket to any airport in the US, flying over on a tourist visa, then "missing" your return flight.

Zwinmar wrote:Even though they already try to funnel people into the worst parts of the desert for just that purpose.

I think the difference is that with funneling people into dessert they can claim they're not really "trying to kill border-crosser on sight" where as with land-mines that's pretty much impossible as mines are meant for only 1 purpose.

Lord Revan wrote:

Zwinmar wrote:Even though they already try to funnel people into the worst parts of the desert for just that purpose.

I think the difference is that with funneling people into dessert they can claim they're not really "trying to kill border-crosser on sight" where as with land-mines that's pretty much impossible as mines are meant for only 1 purpose.

Call it whatever you like, it is still premeditated murder. Only with land mines you actually give them a warning at the perimeter.