The Focus Fusion Society Forums Reframing fusion, managing expectations Campaign – Peace sign vs. don’t mess

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  • #963
    Rezwan
    Participant

    Pulling from another thread, regarding our current logo (attached below):

    tcg wrote: I have to agree with Jamesr. The peace symbol, which originally was created by the Nuclear Disarmament movement — it is formed by superimposing the semaphore flag symbols for N and D within a circle — does not have universal appeal. I am unfortunate enough to live in a very conservative county ( Orange, California ) and this symbol is generally regarded as representing weakness, surrender, and stoned kooks with no guts. Personally, I like it and it fits the hB11 reaction perfectly, but it carries a lot of baggage with many folks.

    So, I’ve been reading up on the campaign to end littering. You all remember the crying Indian? That was an initial ad campaign. Everyone remembers him. But did it stop littering? Apparently not. People who were affected by him were already disinclined to litter.

    Enter the “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign. This was much more effective, because it changed the culture of the people who littered the most. It created a shift in identity – going from people who litter because no one’s going to tell them what to do, to red-blooded patriots who don’t litter, and guard the land from other litterers.

    The campaign’s target was only the roughly 18-35 year old drinking male group which was the most likely to litter. As an in state campaign, mainly road signs, it was originally not intended to become a cultural icon. In fact, there was discussion as to how the other Texas Highway Department message and sign, “Drive Friendly” would be affected.

    So, who is our target? We will have to try several campaigns and find out which one goes viral and shifts identity.

    #8417
    tcg
    Participant

    Originally my point had to do with the logo exclusively, but Rezwan has taken it in a new and important direction. How is the whole concept of Focus Fusion to be sold, not only now as an innovational research project, but, if it can be made to work, as a radical new type of electrical generator. An approach which would work in Berkeley would fail in Houston and vice versa. The peace symbol is only a symbol ( if I may presume ) of a larger issue, the benefit as it is percieved. For some, reduction of the overall carbon footprint would be telling, for others the savings of money would be most important. A few would like the novelty of the technology, others would just like to stick it to the coal companies.

    The people i read on this website are those who “got it” right away. They all seem to understand the importance of the work being done and the implications, but most people will have to have it explained or even sold to them. How to do this. The means would have to be diverse.

    I can only speak for the people who live around me in Southern California. We have a fission power plant at San Onofre just down the coast from us, and it has been viewed with suspicion and dread by most of us since it was built. The beach next to it has been off limits for years due to radioactive contamination, and nobody would dare eat the fish from that area. The plant is aging and nearing the point of retirement or rebuilding. To pitch support for research into a method of electrical generation which would eliminate this expensive monstrosity might bear fruit, but the same arguments would have less weight in L.A., 75 miles distant. There the savings of money on electrical bills may be telling. Both these points may be unimportant elsewhere. An isolated community near Death Valley without any electricity could be impressed by the low cost of building their own power plant.

    To return to Rezwan’s point, the approach we use must be tailored to the audience, including the symbol. The respondents to this site seem to come from diverse enough locations that I feel that they could speak authoritatively for the people around them — what would those people find persuasive about a research project now and ( hopefully ) a finished product later?

    #8423
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    Here in Michigan, it’s all about creating manufacturing jobs. Preferably green collar jobs and careers that a single breadwinner can raise a family on. Governor Granholm should have brown cheekbones for how closely she’s aligned the state’s energy policies up with Obama’s.

    Saving a lot of money on heating and electric bills is also very important here, as is protecting our Great Lakes and outdoorsy tourism industry. Politically, the west half of the state is highly conservative, while the east half (each half of the population is in ~5 to 6 counties) is equally liberal.

    But however you slice it, we have a lot of automation and tool and die shops both in production and in mothballs, along with a lot of mothballed talent to run them. Thus the economic benefits of putting Michigan back to work could be a national selling point.

    #8424
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    “”And get poor Charlie off the MTA”

    Sorry, I couldn’t resist the refrain from the old Kingston Trio song MTA. Might make a fitting campaign song, as could their Merry Minuet song.

    #8425
    zapkitty
    Participant

    That was something that I was going to bring up but was distracted by a cooling system iteration 🙂

    The logo derived from the peace symbol, at best, does nothing good or bad outside a discussion of its beneficial effects in reducing nuclear proliferation. Save it for that area.

    #8428
    Rezwan
    Participant

    tcg wrote: …the approach we use must be tailored to the audience, including the symbol. The respondents to this site seem to come from diverse enough locations that I feel that they could speak authoritatively for the people around them — what would those people find persuasive about a research project now and ( hopefully ) a finished product later?

    Yes, for each audience. Not just a symbol, but a “7 word or less” tag line.

    “The world needs fusion. Fusion needs you.” Nice for a fundraiser of the faithful, but lacks the “don’t mess” bite.

    “Don’t mess with tokamaks” – inspired by Texas anti-littering, except it tells you what not to do, not what to do. And it also makes Tokamaks the hero, if read the same way “don’t mess with Texas” is.

    “Fusion or bust” – well, people will say, “but fusion IS bust.”

    “You can’t prove it WON’T work.” – I’ve heard this before. Not very inspiring.

    “Break on through to Fusion World”.

    “Does fusion have us whipped?”

    Ah! A fusion poetry contest. Acronym poetry, where you take the first letter.

    Futuristic
    Undertaking
    Simply
    Ingenious
    Onward,
    Now!

    #8429
    Rezwan
    Participant

    Aeronaut wrote: Here in Michigan, it’s all about creating manufacturing jobs. Preferably green collar jobs and careers that a single breadwinner can raise a family on.

    Job creation is tough. The trend is irreversible. Machines and cheap overseas labor can make stuff for much less than Americans. We’re a dying breed. And people don’t want all the stuff being made, anyway. Marketers try to figure out how to get kids to consume more, but many people want to be able to hang out without much cost and just have a mellow time. Consuming manufactured goods is not a big priority. So a lot of money goes to trying to make people feel inadequate without stuff. Eventually they’ll catch on.

    Fusion will reduce the cost of things, open up markets (which will soon reach saturation), and clean up water, make some deserts bloom. (More gardening jobs!) But the job thing has its own character arc going on. We’re relentlessly making these types of jobs obsolete. Sad but true.

    Saving a lot of money on heating and electric bills is also very important here, as is protecting our Great Lakes and outdoorsy tourism industry.

    The reducing heating bills thing – I see that that’s what most people want. At the same time, the promise of fusion goes beyond that. I’m thinking of the Godzilla T-Rex movie trailer, where T-rex gets trumped by the nuclear generated leviathan. Metaphor here for heating bills being trumped by abundant energy for all your terra-forming and galactic expansion whims.

    But then again, most people see fusion as that impractical unproven thing. And ITER certainly isn’t the Godzilla of energy in that it won’t make cheap, easily distrubted energy. Wel, oK, perhaps it’s the Godzilla if you think in terms of size.

    #8431
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    The problem with Michigan is the flipside of the mass manufacturing heritage- it is and will likely remain a part of this state’s self-image for another 20 to 50 years.

    Marketing and selling gets a lot easier if you ignore or have no conscience. I believe the reason most “stuff” sells poorly is that it isn’t really needed or wanted, hence the marketing and sales letter shenanigans. FF is an oasis in that desert. Also, FF will need to manufacture wear parts, while most revenue will come from the service of providing electricity.

    A few potential taglines:

    Clean Up Your Act With Focus Fusion!
    Discover The Focus Fusion Green Career Generator!
    Train For The Focus Fusion Future at ____________ (diploma mill’s name goes in the blank)
    32 Ways Focus Fusion Can Fix _______________ (name your soapbox issue)

    #8443
    tcg
    Participant

    Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

    A couple of potential tag lines:

    1) Focus Fusion to tame a star.
    2) Step into the 21st century.
    3) Repower America.

    We might want to adopt a token, an animal representing who we think we are. I would suggest the Cheetah. For the megabuck projects like the tokamak, the Hippopotamus.

    #8449
    Henning
    Participant

    tcg wrote: Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

    Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

    #8450
    Breakable
    Keymaster

    Henning wrote:
    Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

    😀
    Every innovation seems to go in this direction – destroy jobs. We would all have 100% employment in the sustenance farming family business if not all those pesky innovations…

    #8451
    Lerner
    Participant

    Focus fusion could create jobs, but only with the right public policy shifts. By radically reducing energy costs, it would radcially cut the costs of development generally. If the thrid world debt were written off, the US and other industrializzed nations could export huge amounts of machinery to the majority of the world that needs to build more housing, clean water, schools, hospitals etc.

    Public policy also needs to resume the trend towards hsorter work hours that was interuppted 50 years ago. What is the point of having automation if it does not make our lives easier?

    #8461
    Aeronaut
    Participant

    Henning wrote:

    Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

    Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

    Two or five jobs are lost in other energy programs (such as wind or fossil fuels) my be more apt if I understand it correctly. Considering that training the regulators, engineers, technicians, even those teachers, is going to be a huge industry if FF works, I’d look for manufacturing to end up as a smallish sized piece of the pie.

    #8462
    Brian H
    Participant

    Lerner wrote: Focus fusion could create jobs, but only with the right public policy shifts. By radically reducing energy costs, it would radcially cut the costs of development generally. If the thrid world debt were written off, the US and other industrializzed nations could export huge amounts of machinery to the majority of the world that needs to build more housing, clean water, schools, hospitals etc.

    Public policy also needs to resume the trend towards hsorter work hours that was interuppted 50 years ago. What is the point of having automation if it does not make our lives easier?

    and

    Aeronaut wrote:

    Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

    Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

    Two or five jobs are lost in other energy programs (such as wind or fossil fuels) my be more apt if I understand it correctly. Considering that training the regulators, engineers, technicians, even those teachers, is going to be a huge industry if FF works, I’d look for manufacturing to end up as a smallish sized piece of the pie.
    The “job loss ratio” is only for government funded jobs; the money for them sucks investment out of more productive private uses.
    And there is no “big picture” worry about FF causing job losses; the economic explosion of activity that cheaper power will enable will create them out of thin air, in far greater numbers than any displacement losses. Consult a good modeling economist on this if you don’t believe me. Just tell him to plug in a sudden source of energy at 1/20 current prices.

    #8465
    Rezwan
    Participant

    Brian H wrote: The “job loss ratio” is only for government funded jobs; the money for them sucks investment out of more productive private uses.
    And there is no “big picture” worry about FF causing job losses; the economic explosion of activity that cheaper power will enable will create them out of thin air, in far greater numbers than any displacement losses. Consult a good modeling economist on this if you don’t believe me. Just tell him to plug in a sudden source of energy at 1/20 current prices.

    It is the nature of jobs to disappear, no matter what. Even private finance jobs.

    What’s the Matter With Wall Street?
    There are too many traders, bankers and salesmen to support the new level of business. Thanks to Dodd-Frank, the shrinking of finance will continue.

    Of course more people will come on line economically, but this overall trend of decreasing jobs to people ratio will continue.

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