From the same group that doesn’t understand joins and thinks nobody uses SQL this is hardly surprising .
Probably got an LLM running locally and asking it to get data which is then running 10 level deep sub queries to achieve what 2 inner joins would in a fraction of the time.
You’re giving this person a lot of credit. It’s probably all in the same table and this idiot is probably doing something like a for-loop over an integer range (the length of the table) where it pulls the entire table down every iteration of the loop, dumps it to a local file, and then uses plain text search or some really bad regex’s to find the data they’re looking for.
Considering that is nearly exactly some of the answers I’ve received during the technical part of interviews for jr data eng, you’re probably not far off.
Shit I’ve seen solutions done up that look like that, fighting the optimiser every step (amongst other things)
I think you’re still giving them too much credit with the for loop and regex and everything. I’m thinking they exported something to Excel, got 60k rows, then tried to add a lookup formula to them. Since you know, they don’t use SQL. I’ve done ridiculous things like that in Excel, and it can get so busy that it slows down your whole computer, which I can imagine someone could interpret as their “hard drive overheating”.
I have to admit I still have some legacy code that does that.
Then I found pandas. Life changed for the better.
Now I have lots if old code that I’ll update, “one day”.
However, even my old code, terrible as it is, does not overheat anything, and can process massively larger sets of data than 60,000 rows without any issue except poor efficiency.
They don’t understand joins? How…
60k isn’t that much, I frequently run scripts against multiple hundreds of thousands at work. Wtf is he doing? Did he duplicate the government database onto his 2015 MacBook Air?
60k is laughably, embarrassingly small. It’s still sqlite-sized.
i mean its even excel sized depending on how many columns. This is seriously sad and alarming
Hey now that’s real close to the 65,535 16-bit limit (from 20 years ago)
Holy shit if this ids lm issue that’s too funny
Sqlite can easily handle millions of rows. Don’t sell it short
How about a 6.4TB sqlite database?
Should be enough to hold 60k rows
I have an sqlite db that is a few GB in size, game saves using the format. Sadly almost all blob data, would love to play with it if it was a bit more readable
I’m not
60k is single json file
A TI-86 can query 60k rows without breaking a sweat.
If his hard drive overheated from that, he is doing something very wrong, very unhygienic, or both.
He probably mining crypto on top of running his SQL queries.
What? You don’t run your hard drives in the oven while baking brownies? It makes them zesty.
There must be more join statements than column names
Don’t know what Elmos minions are doing, but I’ve written code at least equally unefficient. It was quite a few years ago (the code was in written in perl) and I at least want to think that I’m better now (but I’m not paid to code anymore). The task was to pull in data from a CSV (or something like that, as I mentioned, it’s been a while) and it needed conversion to XML (or something similar).
The idea behind my code was that you could just configure which fields you want from arbitary source data and on where to place them on the whatever supported destination format. I still think that the basic idea behind that project is pretty neat, just throw in whatever you happen to have and have something completely else out of the other end. And it worked as it should. It was just stupidly hungry for memory. 20k entries would eat up several gigabytes of memory from a workstation (and back then it was premium to have even 16G around) and it was also freaking slow to run (like 0.2 - 0.5 seconds per entry).
But even then I didn’t need to tweet that my hard drive is overheating. I well understood that my code is just bad and I even improved it a bit here and there, but it was still so very slow and used ridiculous amounts of RAM. The project was pretty neat and when you had few hundred items to process at a time it was even pretty good, there was companies who relied on that code and paid for support. It just totally broke down with even a slightly bigger datasets.
But, as I already mentioned, my hard drive didn’t overheat on that load.
Seriously - I can parse multiple tables of 5+ million row each… in EXCEL… on a 10 year old desktop and not have the fan even speed up. Even the legacy Access database I work with handles multiple million+ row tables better than that.
Sounds like the kid was running his AI hamsters too hard and they died of exhaustion.
Excel have a limit of 2^20 rows, something more that 1M. Curious what version of excel are you using for that.
You’re correct - the standard tabs can only hold roughly 1.2 million rows.
The way to get around that limitation is to use the Data Model within Power Pivot:
It can accept all of the data connections a standard Power Query can (ODBC, Sharepoint, Access, etc):
You build the connection in Power Pivot to your big tables and it will pull in a preview. If needed, you can build relationship between tables with the Relationship Manager. You can also use DAX to build formulas just like in a regular Excel tab (very similar to Visual Basic). You can then run Pivot Tables and charts against the Data Model to pull out the subsets of data you want to look at.
The load times are pretty decent - usually it takes 2-3 minutes to pull a table of 4 million rows from an SQL database over ODBC, but your results may vary depending on datasource. It can get memory intensive, so I recommend a machine with a decent amount of RAM if you’re going to build anything for professional use.
The nice thing about building it out this way (as opposed to using independent Power Queries to bring out your data subsets) is that it’s a one-button refresh, with most of the logic and formulas hidden back within the Data Model, so it’s a nice way to build reports for end-users that’s harder for them to fuck up by deleting a formula or hiding a column.
Oh yes, I remember using power query for a few months once I started working with bigger databases, but I saw that moving to Python would be better carrer wise and never came back to excel to do actual work (but at the end everything get exported to excel)
I’ve run searches over 60k lines of raw JSON on a 2015 MacBook air without any problems.
I’d do that if I was given so much stupid access
No, its an external drive, appearently.
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My fucking events table of my synapse DB in postgres is nearly ten times as large, and I ported that from sqlite no long ago, in a matter of minutes. All of the data is on a 2*3 cluster of old 256GB SSDs, equaling about 1.5TB with Raid 0. That’s neither really fast, nor cool. But stable.
I mean if we were to sort of steelman this thing, there sure can be database relations and queries that hit only 60k rows but are still hteavy as fuck.
Unless I’m misreading it which is possible it’s awfully late, he said he processed 60,000 rows didn’t find what he was looking for but his hard drive overheated on the full pass.
Discs don’t overheat because there was load. Even if he f***** up and didn’t index the data correctly (I assume it’s a relational database since he’s talking about rows) The disc isn’t just going to overheat because the job is big. It’s going to be lack of air flow or lack of heatsink.
I guarantee you he was running on an external NVMe, and one of those little shitty-ass Chinese enclosures. Or maybe one of those self immolating SanDisk enclosures. Hell, maybe he’s on a desktop and he slept a raw NVMe on his motherboard without a heatsink
There are times when you want a brilliant college student on your team, But you need seasoned professionals to help them through the things they’ve never seen before and never done before.
Can’t be a relational database, Musk said the government doesn’t use SQL.
He said many things.
Please remember that he is a genius. Only geniuses say a lot of things.
I rest my case.
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Lol he also said cybertrucks don’t suck ;)
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yes but also why say 60K when you could have literally said anything? I mean surely the fact that he thinks 60K rows a big number is already explaining alot lol.
It’s bait.
They probably have an explanation tweet at the ready to make more sense of it. They just want enough 'hurr durr these idiot" comments before they reverse Uno card this with more context.
Based on all that has been going on, I feel like they don’t really have the capacity to think more than one step ahead. They do sth stupid and then they usually follow up with “lol joke” or “lol you can’t understand”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about 💩💩💩”
Wait, seriously?
I don’t get how people don’t see this stuff. Yea the average trumpet isn’t out there planning Jack shit. But there are think tanks that are. Remember anti-smoking campaigns. Anti climate change campaign. The precision to purchase advertising into key areas and specific demographics that would spread a message. This is ancient knowledge with modern technology.
Imagine a room full of former Wall Street, quants, established experts from fields like behavioral science and psychology. All with the singular goal to decide where to dedicate a dragons horde of wealth to maximize effect in a world where we all have anonymous pipes directly into our eyes and ears. We never stood a chance. There’s no rich socialist funding think tanks. There’s no counter. We can laugh at the yokel all we want. But the yokel is being puppeteered by some scary fuckers with intention to seize power with the new shifting Zeitgeist. Soldiers don’t need to think. But their generals are. The left are like guerilla fighters going up against an imperial army full of Patons and Eisenhower’s.
Cambridge analytical, heritage foundation, international democracy Union. We’re fucked until we actually recognize why we’re fucked
Somehow I feel over clicking without understanding of the consequences sounds like something a techbro would do
There are times when you want a brilliant college student on your team, But you need seasoned professionals to help them through the things they’ve never seen before and never done before.
Honestly, any sweet, white-haired old lady who keeps pictures of her dogs and grandkids on her desk who’s been doing data entry for 15 years could do circles around these clowns.
But she might also have the wisdom and perception to know we’re not supposed to be doing this “work” at all, which is why he recruits naive teenagers and college kids who are still emotionally immature to think that this is going to be their “destiny” or their opportunity to get into the big leagues for business.
I keep hearing things about these hires he has, I don’t think they’re naive, At least not as such. They seem to be more power hungry trust fund babies.
But yeah, people with a few years in them would be a moral liability in that line of work.
Yeah if you read more of these guys tweets they are clearly in politics. One message tried to claim trump loves kids (to be clear: in the abstract sense, not in the he definitely fucked kids on an island with Epstein sense). Then they tried to twist the words to say “why don’t you love kids”. It was clumsy like you’d expect from someone who is practically a teenager, but the core is an attempt to follow the usual right wing playbook.
music theaters also have rows, and they run on sql so logic checks out.
60k of rows is nothing. Fuck, where do you find these “geniuses”?
Tbf we don’t know how many columns there are /s
The IRS just switched columns and rows. So there’s 60k rows and 330 million columns /s
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I do data analysis for a living, I reach out to tech and complain if I can’t open a file with a million+ lines.
There’s only one reason he wants kids and not experienced adults.
He’s attracted to them?
Probably
Easily manipulated, but probably that too.
my hard drive overheated
So, this means they either have a local copy on disk of whatever database they’re querying, or they’re dumping a remote db to disk at some point before/during/after their query, right?
Either way, I have just one question - why?
Edit: found the thread with a more in-depth explanation elsewhere in the thread: https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/1900593377370087648#m
So yeah, she’s apparently toting around an external hard drive with a copy of the “multiple terabytes” large US spending database, running queries against it, then dumping the 60k-row result set to CSV for further processing.
I’m still confused at what point the external drive overheats, even if she is doing all this in a “hot humid” hotel room that she can’t run any fans I guess because her kids were asleep?
But like, all of that just adds more questions, and doesn’t really answer the first one - why?
Have you ever heard of case of overheating hard drives within the last decade?
Plus, 60k is nothing. One of our customers had a database that was over 3M records before it got some maintenance. No issue with overheating lol
I run queries throughout the day that can return 8 million+ rows easily. Granted, it takes few minutes to run, but it has never caused a single issue with overheating even on slim pc’s.
This makes no fucking sense. 60k rows would return in a flash even on shitty hardware. And if it taxes anything, it’s gonna be the ram or cpu- not the hard drive.
In my experience, the only time that I’ve taxed a drive when doing a database query is either when dumping it, or with SQLite’s vacuum, which copies the whole thing.
For a pretty simple search like OP seems to be doing, the indices should have taken care of basically all the heavy lifting.
I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I’m not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I’m doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I’m actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I’ll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.
750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we’re talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??
Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.
Pretty sure I run updates or inserts that count over 60k fairly often. No overheats. Select queries sometimes way higher.
You’ve got it all wrong, in traditional computer terminology the “hard drive” is the box that sits under the desk that collects cat fluff and cigarette tar.
/s …?
I don’t think I’ve seen a brand new computer in the past decade that even had a mechanical hard drive at all unless it was purpose-built for storing multiple terabytes, and 60K rows wouldn’t even take multiple gigabytes.
Reminds me of those 90s ads about hackers making your pc explode.
Musk gonna roll up in a wheelchair, “the attempt on my life has left me ketamine addicted and all knowing and powerful.”
I have when a misconfigured spark job I was debugging was filling hard drives with tb of error logs and killing the drives.
That was a pretty weird edge case though, and I don’t think the drives were melting, plus this was closer to 10 years ago when SSD write lifetimes were crappy and we bought a bad batch of drives.
I’d much sooner assume that they’re just fucking stupid and talking out of their ass tbh.
Same as Elon when he confidently told off engineers during his takeover of Twitter or gestures broadly at the Mr. Dunning Kruger himself
Wonder if it’s an SQL DB
Elon probably hired confident right wingers whose parents bought and paid their way through prestigious schools. If he hired anyone truly skilled and knowledgeable, they’d call him out on his bullshit. So the people gutting government programs and passing around private data like candy are just confidently incorrect
My one question would be “How?”
What the hell are you doing that your hard drives are overheating? How do you even know it’s overheating as I’m like 90% certain hard drives (except NVMe if we’re being liberal with the meaning of hard drive) don’t even have temperature sensors?
The only conclusion I can come to is that everything he’s saying is just bullshit.
They have temp sensors. But have never heard of a overheating drive.
Hard drives do get hot and need some cooling but not at 60k rows. Its either made up or their computer case is made of thermal cladding
You could query 60,000 rows on a low tier smart phone. Makes no sense at all.
Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work…
Right? There’s no part of that xeet that makes any real sense coming from a “data engineer.”
Terrifying, really.
Unless the database was designed by someone who only knows of data as that robot from Star Trek, most would be absolutely fine with 60k rows. I wouldn’t be surprised if the machine they’re using caches that much in RAM alone.
Imo if they can’t max out their harddrive for at least 24 hours without it breaking, their computer was already broken. They just didn’t know it yet.
Any reasonable SSD would just throttle if it was getting too hot, and I’ve never heard of a HDD overheating on its own, only if there’s some external heat sources, like running it in a 60°C room
Hard Drives might do it if the enclosure is poorly designed (no ventilation), but I can’t imagine a situation where it would overheat like that that quickly, even in a sealed box. 30k is nothing in database terms, and if their query was that heavy, it would bottleneck on the CPU, and barely heat the drive at all.
dude is 100% talking about ssds. NVME ones at that, he’s just stupid.
Even if it was local, a raspberry pi can handle a query that size.
Edit - honestly, it reeks of a knowledge level that calls the entire PC a “hard drive”.
Unless they actually mean the hard drive, and not the computer. I’ve definitely had a cheap enclosure overheat and drop out on me before when trying to seek the drive a bunch, although it’s more likely the enclosure’s own electronics overheating. Unless their query was rubbish, a simple database scan/search like that should be fast, and not demanding in the slightest. Doubly so if it’s dedicated, and not using some embedded thing like SQLite. A few dozen thousand queries should be basically nothing.
Yeah, no matter what way you disorganize 60,000 rows, the data is still going to read into memory once.
Why? Because they feel the need to have local copies of sensitive financial information because… You know… They are computer security experts.
Or they’re doing it on a Diamondmax 9.
I’m a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?
Seems like a good excuse to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and needs an excuse because why they haven’t completed it yet?
The whole post is complete bs in multiple ways. So weird.
If you work for a boss that fundamentally misunderstands what you are doing, then misleading them into thinking you’re ‘hard at work, making decisions with consequences’ is the theatre you put up to keep the cash flowing.
It’s one of the fundamental flows of autocracy, people try and represent what you want them to
It sounds like Hollywood tech lingo. Like when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and the designated techy character starts just saying computer words that make no actual sense in the real world, but I guess in CSI: Idiottown the hard drives have severe overheating issues.
Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.
- It only supports about a million or so rows
- It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
Not really related to what you said, but I’m still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.
The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.
An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. “Oh sorry, it’s a Microsoft limitation,” I was thrilled to say. “I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data.”
Some time ago, I heard a story of CS and Econ professors having lunch together. The Econ professor was excited that Excel was going to release a version that blew out the 64k row limit. The CS professor nearly choked on his lunch.
Dependence on Excel has definitely caused bad papers to be published in the Econ space, and has had real world consequences. There was a paper years ago that stated that once a country’s debt gets above 120% of GDP, its economy goes into a death spiral. It was passed around by the sorts of politicians justifying austerity as an established fact. Problem was, nobody could reproduce the results. Then an Econ undergrad asked the original author for their Excel spreadsheet, and they found a coding error in the formulas. Once corrected, the conclusion disappeared.
It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can’t imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they’re working with the claims databases.
Could you import the column in as text to preserve it?
Sure, but sometimes you need to do a pivot table and get transformed, or you while working you accidentally made it a number, or just because excel being excel it import the number as scientific notation, or any other case.
Diming on her own stupidity without realizing it, like all of them do
This cannot be real, wtf. This is cartoon levels of ineptitude.
Or sabotage by someone heading out? Please let this be resistance sabotage they haven’t noticed yet.
You guys arent running your software off raspberry pi’s with sdcards from the gas station?
My allowance is 5$ a month!
Look, all I’m saying is give Pis a chance.
I think my Pi could process 60k rows without overheating. And the poor thing is dangling behind my bookshelf from its power cord with a fine layer of dust coating every inch of it.
Why would you do this to that poor rPi?
Electronics get what they deserve.
This sounds like trying to do stuff in Excel? The computer isn’t overheating but the amount of memory needed is very high which would make it run poorly. They might interpret that as overheating?
It also makes sense if they are on calling the entire computer “the hard drive” like grandma and the fans kicked on.
Yeah, everyone commenting about being able to handle billions of rows easily, which obviously very true if you are worming with sql or similar.
But this is probably some finance kid, investment banker analyst, and only knows how to use Excel.
60,000 rows in excel with formulas, if not done efficiently, can for sure make you computer a little toasty.
Could be a gen 5 nvme drive without adequate cooling. Them bastards can run hot. Especially the early gen 5 drives.
But with only 60k rows would one even have enough time to overheat?
This shit sounds like when your mom tells you that the Facebook printed out her bank statement on the fax machine. I’m not smart enough to even guess how you did something dumb enough to make that happen.
How bad are you at writing queries? How does your hard drive overheat even under 100% load? Do you have it smothered under a blanket? Did you crack it up and expose it to cheeto dust? What does running a query on your, presumably, remote database even have to do with your harddrive in the first place? Are you trying to copy the entire database locally to a laptop? Do you know how to tie your shoes yet, or are you still on the velcro?
A laptop should easily handle a database of 60,000 rows. I run much bigger databases on my own laptop for development purposes.
Not if it is filled to the brim with 3 TB of porn
Delete Ass Master volume 7 to make room - that one wasn’t any good anyways.
Really went downhill after volume 3. You hope that they’ll get back on course by volume 6 at least, but alas.
I can personally vouch for that not causing a problem either.
This shit sounds like when you’re mom tells you that the Facebook printed out her bank statement on the tax machine.
My dear sweet mother asked me somewhere around 2005-06 “If we can fax paper, why not groceries, or pizza delivery?”
Apparently she had believed, for decades, that fax machines literally transported physical paper over phone lines. She has a college degree, and my family is wealthy.
Do not underestimate the mind boggling technical and scientific ignorance of old people who should know better.
🤣
I remember thinking that when I was a kid and saw a clip on PBS Kids of a kid using their home fax machine to fax their dad a picture they drew at work. I was also like 4 so teleportation was still distinctly possible to my brain
You’re not supposed to place your laptop directly in the lap of your fur suit. Always leave an air gap for ventilation, smh.
When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm
Are you telling me there’s a difference between an inner and a cross join?
Cross join is obviously faster, I don’t even have to write “on”
Maybe
Maybe
They are just making shit up and doing jack shit
I really hope so.
Literally every time someone dismisses Wikipedia, it’s because they believe something crazy that Wikipedia told them is wrong.
I checked conservapedia once, and its actually unhinged. If someone tells you to look at that, or reccommends it, they’re crazy.
Did they ever finish their own bible translation? The one they started because King James was too woke.
YES . its so unhinged . they have an entire page discussing if Obama is actually a Muslim
Flashback to 2014.
“I read a book with a typo once. Libraries are a scam.”
Libraries are a scam if they weren’t they’d still have VHS rentals.
heh
Molly White is very bright, and she makes them feel inadequate so they “have to” attack her. It’s truly pathetic.
But her last name is White so it’s a real dilemma for them.
“YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS” is such a fucking pussy-ass response, too.
God they picked out the ONE possible thing they could criticize her for, there’s like 3 other things RIGHT NEXT TO THAT
“Software Engineer” was literally right next to it.
She is vehemently against crypto. She runs the newsletter “web3 is going great” - https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
Even a gamer knows that ssdd heat up but never to that level, lol.
What kind of cheap temu ssd does he have in his laptop?
He was saving money, you know, to be efficient.
Took out the fans for the aesthetic
As a reasonably experienced “data guy,” this seems obviously laughable, but the discussion on X is scary. This guy is a savior in the MAGA world.
We can criticize and poke fun all day, but it doesn’t matter much if our message isn’t challenging the mindset of those with other opinions.
How do we make better use of our time to impact outside opinion?
I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.
The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.
They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )
If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”
This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.
So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:
- Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
- Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
- Get them to trust you.
- Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc
All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.
And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.
You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.
Wow, that was an awesome rabbit hole, thank you for the link.
If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group.
Maybe a less manipulative-sounding way to phrase that might be that we should remind people that we’re all in it together. The far right media and their billionaire buddies have spent the past decade and a half dividing us, and they succeeded. Idk what it would take to unite this country again, but it at least is a little comforting to have a clear problem statement.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters
I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer
By the very same people asking the question: What are you gonna do about it?
Where ‘it’ is your oppression.
We must make better memes
I’m not even joking, the world runs on memes now. It’s fucking stupid, but we must shitpost to save ourselves
I agree some form of consistent opposition messaging is needed.
The maga world talks in consistent themes and terminology, which creates a psychological advantage. Unfortunately, it’s playground psychology, but if that’s the game being played you need to find a way to win at it.
I can’t remember the particular phrase that was used, but I heard an argument recently that we need to be more like politicians going on an interview and ensure that we’re more on message. For example, it’s fairly obvious by now that economically, the problem is wealth inequality, but I see fairly surprisingly few people discussing that.
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That’s probably who I’m remembering; I recently discovered his work.
Compelling point. I just found that arguing with „these kind of people“ (livibg in europe, so no MAGA‘s here but like-minded, conservative fundamentalists etc.) leads to nowhere. It‘s kind of like the covid-conversations. And often I heard „you can‘t make them change their minds, so just let them be“. Still, I think this behaviour leads to isolation and separates us as a people even more.
Long story short: good question. If you found the answer, let me know.
I can only speak from my very limited experience. My father is the very example of a person who has some beliefs and tries to judge whole world through those beliefs. Everyone who doesn’t share those beliefs is an enemy. If you don’t believe in extreme opinion A, you automatically have to believe in extreme opinion B which is the opposite of A. You probably know such people.
Over last years, we yelled at each other lots of times, but that lead to nowhere. What actually helped was that finding the common ground. To make him understand that just because I don’t agree with his side, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m shilling for the other one. Not everything is bipolar. From my father’s perspective, everyone has to be either pro-Russian or pro-American (which is funny from today’s perspective, but I guess you get my point). You point out that Russia did something bad? He will tell you “Yeah and USA did <something>! You don’t have an issue with that”. And that’s the thing. To make him understand, that I DO have an issue with that. World is not a football match where you have to take a side and fully commit to it. You don’t have to go “full in” on a topic. Your opinion can be nuanced based on the actual topic, not just dumbed down into “my side thinks that A, so I agree with A. Your side thinks that B, so you have to agree with B”.
Before that I never had much success in having a proper discussion. It always ended up in a screaming match, because he wasn’t listening to arguments. He simply knew, that I had the “other” opinion, so my opinion was automatically wrong. Now he knows, that I don’t fully agree with anyone. He now somehow understands that my opinions are based on a set of principles, not on a tribalistic “my team” vs “your team”. And by understanding that, he’s more open to actually having a discussion on a topic, not just trying to convert me from “bad side” to “good side”.
And don’t get me wrong. He still believes in what he believes in. But he’s more open to accepting that not everything “his side” says is automatically correct. And that by itself is a small victory for me.
