Written by a true believer in the CAGW religion.Well, using that phrase, garnered from the garbage dump that is the denialosphere (e.g. sites like WattsUpWithThat.com, run by a college dropout), pretty much destroys any credibility you may have had. Cheerio.
Now how about that wall?Dave, I agree that there is going to be a migrant crisis in the initial stages of the collapse. I don't think a wall will help ... an 8-year old child can climb it in seconds.
Gerry-
Glad we agree on the coming migrant crisis.
Science says: walls work.
https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israels-border-walls-A-case-study-For-Trumps-mantra-574517
After breaking ground in 2010, Israel completed the 242-km. (150-mile) fence in December 2013 at a cost of around $450 million. Whereas about 9,500 Africans crossed into Israel illegally in the first six months of 2012, less than three dozen did so in the first six months of 2013, at which time the major components of the barrier had been completed. Illegal immigration through Sinai dropped to 11 cases in 2016 and 0 in 2017. The fence also has dramatically reduced the smuggling of contraband into Israel and there have been no security breaches from Sinai since then (although the local ISIS-affiliated group has fired rockets at the Israeli Red-Sea resort city of Eilat on a few occasions).So now that you are armed with a real world case study - i.e. "science" about "how an actual wall works as a key component to a total border security system", versus an 8 year old girl propaganda video - and we agree on the migrant crisis to come, what about that wall? We don't want to be a science denier, do we?
Maybe I’m missing something in this debate but after the financial crash, won’t people be trying to LEAVE the US? Mexico will be one of the more desirable countries to be in.
The video of this 8-year old girl shows that a wall is ineffective. I did climb walls when i was young, and I confirm, they are all climbable with the right gear.
The science (empirical observation) shows that WALLS + ARMIES are effective as long as the armies are present.
Without armies, any wall can be climbed by a 8-year old girl.
On top of that wall never solved issues at their core. The Berlin wall never solved the differences between the east and the west. The Israeli wall will never solve the differences between Israelis and Palestinians. The Peace Wall in Ireland does not bring peace in this country. The Wall of Shame in Lima will never solve the differences between the rich and the poor. And on and on
Mexico will be one of the more desirable countries to be in.I don't think so. This chart of Mexico's oil production explains why:
The video of this 8-year old girl shows that a wall is ineffective. I did climb walls when i was young, and I confirm, they are all climbable with the right gear.The video shows the girl free-climbing the wall. That's climber speak for using just hands and feet. Also in climber speak, is the concept of aid climbing. Using devices to hold & hoist one's weight up a rock wall. Here's the aid version that renders an undefended border wall useless:
Which brings us to this:
The science (empirical observation) shows that WALLS + ARMIES are effective as long as the armies are present.I'll agree, except to diverge by pointing out that armies are what you used to need to defend a wall. Now we have AI, and killer drones, and it would be relatively simple to put machine guns with sensors along a wall. Or use landmines, or whatever other deterrents one might wish to deploy. It all depends on how serious one is. In my view, the immigration debate is horribly unsophisticated on all (both?) sides. The immigration debate ought to begin with a determination of the carrying capacity of the land. Once determined, the next step is to select a population buffer below that level to account for the inevitable string of bad years, and then decide how to manage to that level. Can the US support another 100M people? Great. Let's discuss who we'd want to fill those spots and why. Is the US already beyond carrying capacity? Then it shouldn't accept any more people and devise a way to get back below the carrying capacity buffer level as humanely as possible. Without knowing how much sugar is left in the vat, we're really not demonstrating much in the way of sophisticated reasoning in the population/immigration debate. And you know what? It would probably cost about a quarter of a single day's worth of the Fed's not-QE pumping ($500M) to conduct that study. Yet it doesn't happen. Any guesses as to why the nation prioritizes higher stock prices but knowing the most important and basic information any society should really know about itself?
So Gerry, you discredit WattsUpWithThat.com because it has views contrary to your and it’s run by a college drop-out? That’s an incredibly weak argument since Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, James Cameron, and a panoply of other highly intelligent, highly successful people are all college dropouts.
With regards to the 8 year old girl climbing the wall, I wonder if you actually watched the video. First, she was assisted by a taut belaying rope the entire time which prevented her from falling. Second, when she approached the top where there were no handholds, she went around the side. The handholds on the side would not exist on a complete wall. Third, one particularly adept individual does not mean the majority of others will have her skill. By using your logic, if we have Harry Houdini in a jail cell or in handcuffs and he manages to free himself, does that mean jail cells and handcuffs don’t work? No, obviously not.
Walls do work. That’s why China built one. The Israeli walls pointed out by DaveF work. The Berlin Wall worked. Walls built around virtually every prison on the planet work. A few exceptions of people getting over or under a wall do not obviate their obvious utility. Even Obama built a wall around his property in Washington, D.C.
I’m afraid your arguments just don’t hold water.
But perhaps we should expand the concept to barriers rather than just walls. Barriers involve both active and passive measures. And although no barrier is 100% effective, they don’t have to be. They just have to work most of the time. And given the right measures being applied, they will.
Chris-
I’m in total agreement that immigration policy should be entirely about carrying capacity. Total 100% agreement.
How many people do we want here? If we want to let in new people, what sort of people do we want? Just anyone? Smart people? Stupid people? People with skills (language, and education) that will help us as soon as they arrive? Do we just pick people at random? [Do we do that when hiring workers? Just hire workers at random?]
Regardless of what our immigration policy actually is, having people able to physically circumvent whatever said policy happens to be, is probably not the right thing.
Israel’s case says that - in the main - walls work. Nothing is 100%, but I’ll take 98%. That’s good enough for me. And if you have it defended by CBP, drones, vehicles, and sensors, the 8 year old girl will be hard pressed to flee from them using whatever she can bring with her during her climb and descent.
That’s probably why Israel’s wall was so effective. The wall was a critical physical component of a total border protection system.
I’m guessing they have ladders over in Africa. And ropes too. And yet…that Israeli wall did pretty well. That’s why I like case studies of systems actually deployed rather than what-if stories, pictures, and videos of little girls doing whatever. The case study represents what performance we might be able to expect if we deploy a similar system here.
Last point. If we do have a flood of migrants coming - “fleeing poverty”, driven by either of peak oil, or climate change - its practically a criminal act to leave the border undefended.
Chris: “In my view, the immigration debate is horribly unsophisticated on all (both?) sides.
The immigration debate ought to begin with a determination of the carrying capacity of the land. Once determined, the next step is to select a population buffer below that level to account for the inevitable string of bad years, and then decide how to manage to that level.”
END QUOTE
If I remember correctly that was the gist of the debate that resulted in shattering the management team of the Sierra Club a decade or two back. Quite the civil war for a while there.
I have held for some time now that immigration and free trade are two issues where the will of the majority has been stymied by an alliance between those who benefit from it on the right and left. It has amounted to an economic carpet bombing of one group by another. And, over time, as demographic change allows policy that would have never been possible previously, a political carpet bombing as well.
Complete with vermin like Krugman, who provided intellectual cover for the obvious lunacy, emerging decades later amid the still bouncing rubble to admit he may, possibly, have been just a little outside the plate on that one…
This is like the Brexit debate. There will be no prisoners taken. And don’t be surprised if rules are not implemented according to Hoyle. It is a collision of world views and the future.
This weekend I tilled a truckload of horse manure, 6 trash cans filled with composted grass clippings, and about 400 pounds of composted chicken manure into my garden… no illegal labor was used in this endeavour. That’s about all the influence I have on this political booby trap. 
Will
Last point. If we do have a flood of migrants coming – “fleeing poverty”, driven by either of peak oil, or climate change – its practically a criminal act to leave the border undefended.Carrying capacity is probably the most important consideration in immigration policy. It would perhaps be the only one if migrants were simply fleeing a situation in their country that had nothing to do with us. However, consider the possibility that they are fleeing extreme poverty, environmental degradation and violence that exists in large part due to military and political intervention by the United States in their internal affairs. This intervention has been going on since at least the 1950s and serves to protect American corporations in their role of funneling wealth from the periphery to the center of the empire, and, in particular to the elites. If this is indeed the case, it puts us in the position of being responsible to a large degree for their need to leave, and yet unable to accept them due to carrying capacity issues. Of course, this is just the normal state of affairs in a world of overshoot - a plethora of predicaments with no good solutions. One thing that would help is for us to stop meddling down there and perhaps give some support to make life a little more viable in places like Guatemala and Honduras.
I agree, White Oak. Central America has been a basketcase ever since western fruit companies decided to turn it into their own private farm. And the Panama canal. And the “war on drugs”. Nation destroying at its finest.
As to determining our carrying capacity, what baseline will we use? Today’s oil consumption? Predictions of 20 years from now? Zero oil consumption? In the latter case we are overpopulated right now.
I agree with most of the wall, defend and limits comments. And, I’m glad the UK has that Chanel thing. But, doesn’t it make you sick? The “western world” screws people and planet, then, closes the door.
F**k you losers!
Right, but Mexico is the 12th largest oil exporter in the world. They live more simply and can get by with less oil. They are better at taking siestas in the palapa by the beach. The US would be hit harder being the world’s second largest oil importer. The US only produces 5x as much oil as Mexico yet they still need to import so much. US production will decline more sharply. If it wasn’t for the Fed paying for the shale oil industry with printed dollars, the US curve would look worse than Mexico’s. I suspect that the powers-that-be at some point realized that peak oil was real so they prop up both Tesla in a vain attempt to transition away from oil, and the shale oil sector to try to buy some time. But it won’t work.
I am not gung-ho about a Wall. It requires a lot of infrastructure support; manpower, detention centers, and repairs. And once people are “in” they are untraceable as is the case today. The Great Wall of China doesn’t keep out Mongolians, it is a tourist destination. It seems better to manage the incentives of those who come by denying benefits to the undocumented. Workers should be paid into a bank account that must have a work visa to be established. Penalties on employers who hire the illegal would help. Guest workers should have a permanent address (where they come from) and a temporary address where they can be found here. I do not know all the benefits the undocumented currently enjoy but if they were eliminated, it would be impossible to be here. For those who get a work permit, then their withheld taxes could be returned to them when they return home. Be generous but manage the incentives.
Right, but Mexico is the 12th largest oil exporter in the world.That's either very old data you've got there, or it is gross exports, not net. Mexico is now a net importer of oil. Here's the data. Here's consumption (down, but still just over 1.8 mbd):
And here's the production chart again, but presented slightly differently and with the consumption line overlaid:
The prospects for any nation decline severely once they become a net importer of energy.
Just how it is.
Mexico being riddled with corruption and soap-opera level ruling family drama is going to do some dumb stuff politically and monetarily, as they have historically done.
Maybe not, but the odds are quite strong.
This will mean a falling peso, and an increase in social and political unrest.
Maybe not, but the odds are quite strong.
I’m on the road so i googled it and got wikipedia. Data from 2016 so it says
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_oil_exports
I’m on the road so i googled it and got wikipedia. Data from 2016 so it says https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_oil_exportsMark - yep. That makes sense. Amazing what a couple of years can do, eh?
One of the best in my opinion. I must admit that I have not gotten much out of the comments as they only tangentially relate to the discussion. It makes me think that many – not all, mind you – are uncomfortable about assessing non-financial types of capital and making the tradeoffs that are necessary. I’ll be getting a copy of the book.
…when things get bad? I can see it becoming irrelevant, unenforceable, in effect evaporating. Might an adequately bestial regime patrol it with drone-mounted machine guns?
And in which direction(s) might the flow go? Depends on wherever the resources are, I guess, and what differential exists. I have this mental picture of thousands of desperate people fleeing in both directions at once and no-one really in charge.
you discredit WattsUpWithThat.com because it has views contrary to your and it’s run by a college drop-out? That’s an incredibly weak argument since Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, James Cameron, and a panoply of other highly intelligent, highly successful people are all college dropouts.AO, the people you name were doing well at university but left because they began running highly lucrative or promising businesses. Anthony Watts, on the other hand, tried for FIVE years to get a BS degree and just couldn't. He left to become a low-level employee of a radio station, or something similar. If you cannot see the differences there, it would explain your other mental SNAFUs, like preferring Creationism to evolution, and predicting a new Ice Age. I would prefer not to engage further with you, if you don't mind ... life is too short. Forgive me if that seems rude. Chris's comments about ladders are on point. Walls are symbolic, nothing more.