This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles.
At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.
I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.
Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote "context is that which is scarce".
After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take?
I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.
Well, stay amazed. Topics concerning genocide in Gaza are usually flagged after reaching the frontpage, and the only comments allowed are the ones that focus on the technical implications and not the political ones. Threads about IDF abuse are whitewashed into technical victory laps, and anyone concerned with the idea of civilian casualties are fed a canned line about how the civilian death count is justifiable on a relative scale.
Where's Daddy and Lavander are both poignant criticisms of Palantir's business strategy, and I suspect this site isn't personally ready to decide whether killing-as-a-service is something they're personally okay with.
Given that it's a site run by a startup incubator with opaque moderation and a strong American bias, I would imagine that most things that make "line go up" are ok.
I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.
The nihilism you see in a lot of nerdy spaces in this vein is so upsetting. Tech workers are so unbelievably critical to the functioning of the modern world that if we collectivized and made demands, we could utterly bring the global system to a halt until those demands were met. But so many are so well sold on this "rockstar programmer" horseshit. Like by all means, get your bag, we all need to, but personally I sleep better knowing no software I've made is helping target guided rockets.
Good. Most recent takes on Gaza are from people who didn't know Israel and Palestine have been fighting for 80 years and have zero frame of reference on world history other than "war is bad they should just stop fighting".
Some other opinions go back even further and more criticize Great Britain for their mishandling of Mandatory Palestine. There are a lot of opinions that develop as both sides adjust their strategy and the borders of their theater. Writing off any development of opinion (particularly in the wake of Lavander) is a counterproductive and insular habit.
If you don't want to discuss the behavior and morality of the IDF, nobody will force you to steelman them. But some of us would like to call that into question, and dismissing our conversation with "that's immature" is a thought-terminating cliche.
Going back just to the Mandate seems like a very arbitrary point. It forgets about Egyptian colonisation of Palestine in 19th century, as well as treatment of Jewish communities across the whole Arab world, which explains a lot about the conflict and it's history.
"Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.
Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim.
Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.
How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this?
If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?
Cory Doctorow doesn't understand that there's shades of grey the world, which is a shame as he could otherwise be one of the greatest socio-tech thought leaders in the world.
ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.
I'm not sure the ICE does/did, but remember that "ethnic cleansing" doesn't have to involve (direct) mass murder (even if it often does), for instance the expulsion of millions of Germans after WW2 from their homes (even when they were already living there before Nazis came to power) :
Also, Hitler's first planned "initial solution" was, as incredible as it might sound, relocating Jews to Madagascar (which of course would still have caused plenty of misery, since the core issue was that Nazis barely considered them as human beings).
EDIT : Yeah, so after following the rabbit hole for a bit, this seems to be about "Trump's mass deportations". Which I remember him claiming himself (maybe in other words), but one should check how massive exactly they ended to be.
But one of the main gists of that article is about how Palantir is helping law enforcement with data integration. Which, as this blogpost points out, shouldn't be underestimated.
And thankfully at least some of the lawmakers didn't underestimate it : there's a reason why it's illegal to build some national databases, and combine some other less sensitive national databases.
Liberal democracy requires a balance of power, and giving too much power to the policeS (or the state in general) results in a police state (dystopia). (Including through the loophole of private companies like GAFAMs.)
You can also see it as a reminder that tools aren't neutral and scale matters.
Man his speaking and writing style get so annoying after a while and I speak as someone who has seen him talk at DEFCON and HOPE multiple times. He has got this god like reputation among the hacker community. Might there be someone who isn't as attention seeking and who isn't just trying to make catchy speeches talking about the same ideas?
I tend to agree with you on this, but it's kind of an amusing comment given the linked article's comment on memes:
"the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person."
Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm not sure that any of this negates the point.
"Above all things we should avoid often talking of ourselves and giving ourselves as an example; nothing is more tiresome than a man who quotes himself for everything." is the quote I reach for from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm
> Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm not sure that any of this negates the point.
lol what? Doctorow created "enshitification" to describe rent seeking and its behaviors, and has been creating a technocratic journalist vocab since the BoingBoing days.
Because American industry runs on illegal labor. They pick the fruit, they work in the slaughterhouses, they build the housing, they work in the kitchen prep lines.
Like go to any construction site, any restaurant -- you're gonna see a bunch of Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc.
As wages haven't gone up, Americans need cheaper and cheaper labor on the low end to be able to, like, eat, and lots of big business knows this. The GOP owned Congress under GW Bush could have locked this issue down, and if they felt so compelled they probably could have swung that during the Obama era if they were willing to push. Instead it's a boogyman they can use to rile up voters while keeping costs low.
The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.
There has always been high immigration in the US, its a country built on immigration!! Like others have said, the current levels are not higher then in the past, its just the political parties that are using it to hide the real problems of ultra rich and corporations abusing the country. In regards to changing society; what is changing? The language? Again, the US is built on immigrants. Are the Italian - Americans in NY going to stop being Italian - Americans all of a sudden? No, they will continue being who they are; maybe they will pick up another language or some new recipes for their cookbooks.
> political parties that are using it to hide the real problems of ultra rich and corporations abusing the country
Yup, same in Europe. There's constant fear mongering with racist undertones in the media about illegal immigrants and refugees, it's driving people crazy and violent against each other. All the while they're conveniently distracted from the root of their social ills.
Europe has the "pie" in form of considerable (by standards of most of the rest of the world, including US) welfare benefits. I don't think it's particularly surprising that people who have access to it today don't want to share. The legal vs illegal distinction is really mostly about that - when it's legal, it can be significantly curtailed (and the same people who are against illegal immigration saying "just go through the process" tend to also be in favor of making that process much more difficult).
I'd argue that legal immigration is changing the US more than illegal immigration because illegal immigration largely originates from other countries in the Americas and therefore more easily fits in with the USA's existing history and culture.
> Is it all that repressed guilt from invading Indian lands or something?
I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.
Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.
Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.
Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.
Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.
Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.
It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems to discuss that.
I agree on both counts at a high level, but America always had cheap labor. It is what helps us have so much disposable income compared to other countries.
This is an obvious truth around immigration that makes me question the media's motivations.
Asylum applications are often contingent upon finding and keeping employment. ICE immigration prisons sell prison labor sold to state governments and corporations.
The public debate between "Immigration is a human right" and "Immigrants are criminals" is out of touch with the actual considerations motivating the laws and policies by US institutions.
>It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist.
This is just such an absurd take. How much reality do you have to suspend to believe that corporations around the globe have all zoned in on a policy of somehow propagating a narrative through public life about immigration so that they can exploit illegal immigration.
I know we're in the anti-capitalism, anti-big-corp zeitgeist, but come on.
Most Americans are not opposed to having immigration laws. The disagreements come from whether those laws are fair and the way “illegal immigration” is used as a bogeymonster by racists. For example, when Trump and Vance were doing the “Haitians are eating cats!!!” thing recently, note how often their supporters would throw the “illegal” term around even for people who are here legally. Their concerns were quite transparently not about immigration per se but the ethnicity of the immigrants.
That controls the general immigration policy debate, too. American employers in key industries like construction depend on immigrants for cheap labor, and the unwillingness to provide a legal path for those workers guarantees that people will keep taking huge risks to come here illegally because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. I would highly recommend reading this article: note both the former cop accurately stating that you can’t arrest your way out of a market imbalance and the lack of reception for the proposals from the construction company owner trying to have a legal path for workers. These people aren’t dangerous, they’re working hard and supporting families, but they’re brown and speak Spanish so we don’t respect them and businesses love to have workers who can’t complain about mistreatment.
The reason they call asylum seekers illegal is because most asylum seekers are immigrating for improved economic opportunities, not because they are otherwise fleeing persecution from their government. If you want to immigrate somewhere for work you need to get in line for the correct visa. I would expect many legal immigrants here on HN would know this struggle. My parents did when they immigrated to the US.
The problem is that the asylum seekers are committing fraud if they are immigrating for economic reasons, and that fraud is being encouraged by the government and NGOs. JD vance, Elon, and Trump have talked about this several times but the media usually interrupts then or make a straw man argument about racism instead of covering the real issue, which is that these immigrants are being brought in as low wage, temporary laborers to undercut American workers.
That’s a lot of unsourced claims which appear to be rehashing people who famously lie for political reasons (e.g. Vance admitting that he fabricated the Haitian cat story), and you’re certainly not building credibility by pretending that they’re somehow being “interrupted” from a serious conversation.
If you have a reliable source for the claim that large numbers of people are lying on asylum applications and that this is being encouraged by the government, you should edit your comment to cite that so there’s something to be objectively discussed.
Basically because everyone here is an immigrant of some sort just maybe not first generation. Also because the vast majority of people who show up at the Mexican border are fleeing horrific violence and when you are fleeing horrific violence it is difficult to always do things by the book. And also it is a reaction to just how poorly these people that otherwise would be classified as refugees get treated. Under Trump in particular family separation became the norm and courts who oversaw immigration cases had kids as young as 4 brought before a judge without family or legal representation.
The majority are in no way fleeing “horrific violence.” That’s made up. The great majority come for jobs. Lots of job figures by the Fed are inflated by jobs going to illegals. They’re not coming from violent war zones —but even in war zones people go on living their lives, though interrupted by war. By and large it’s not the janjaweed or isil as Obama calls the other baddies.
A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people.
Some approximate stats:
Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year.
The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m.
One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by those statistics/events.
Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations. More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?
Everything you wrote is correct. However, Mexico is actually an immigration success story. The net migration flow is around zero [1].
The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.
"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.
Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.
The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.
More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]
A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.
For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)
Yep. 1-2 years is a judge. The official median is 7 years, which afaict is being quite generous. And agreed, it's gotten a lot harder even for folks most would say we should be fighting to attract.
One of the best things the US can do for its economy IMO is get back to being better at brain drain, and helping naturalize the people ready to work hard in general. They make jobs and help drive the American spirit because they basically have to. That's a tough message for people in struggling industries & towns, but it's hard to make a competitive & growing American economy when the job makers and doers are instead growing the economies of competing countries.
As a job maker, successful scientist, OSS supporter, & thankful refugee granted citizenship, immigration has become simultaneously one of the most American things to me... and one of the most bizarre.
People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that.
Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei.
Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
> People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that
I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.
> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?
I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.
> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.
They're fleeing Putin's strategically-created crises in Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. He gives you the flu, blames the aspirin, and sells you the Ivermectin.
Maduro shat the bed himself with perhaps the aid of his indoctrinated chavistas. They used to get help from Cuba. In any case, it’s their problem. Even Columbia, their neighbors and co-Bolivarians don’t like them going into their country illegally. They also want them out.
Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow the repressive government and create a new beautiful shining beacon in the southern cone.
An implication of your statement is that Putin does this to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that these people weaken rather than strengthen us.
I'm pro open borders. I see no downsides to letting whoever wants to live here, come here. I also think the US culture (think TGI Fridays and Macys) is pretty much the worst and can only improve as we import people with rich cultural histories.
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
The discussion of Palantir in the NHS is not a question of whether "Palantir are good/bad for taking NHS work," it's actually "should the NHS contract out to (and share sensitive patient data with) a company with a reputation like Palantir?"
The first question makes no sense at all. The latter question, however, is an important one for democratic governments to tackle.
I think the challenging question here is that while palantir obviously have a reputation, they're practically not that different to any of the big consultancies.
Specific to the NHS, Palantir not being a UK company was a big talking point, so yes, that's a tangible difference between Palantir and, say, Capita.
Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know.
That is an important part that a lot of people miss, if you are working with McKinsey you've basically hired some of the worst scum on the earth. Their history on human right's abuses and opioids alone is enough to send them to the shadow realm.
you're some 12yrs late on that. the academic term is hyper imperialism... a tech globalist update on the interwar term ultra imperialism (which predicted, or suggested, the current pax americana).
The strangest thing for me were the article's first two paragraphs:
> Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.
[...] During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office.
I don't really see the contradiction here? The most morally repugnant companies are often the most profitable, and the stock market sometimes (not always) follows suit. And if the protests outside their offices have decreased, that's probably just a sign that there are other things to protest against now...
he invested into the company (that is, funded the immoral work he was disgusted by and caused him to leave) by paying them for stock options while (or shortly after) working there.
Let's hypothesize that a would-be administration in a Western country would like to accomplish full Russian-style autocracy relatively quickly. Let's say they have stated publicly that their plan is to go after immigrants first, opposition leaders second. Numerically, these are two small categories, relatively speaking.
The first question is, what about the third and fourth categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process) and which?
The second question is, how would they go about identifying them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have been designed for this goal?
> The Biden administration had authoritarian, Russian style COVID policies.
During the pandemic I read various descriptions of what disease outbreaks were like during various times. Including descriptions of the plague of 1665. What is interesting is that the approach to managing outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases hasn't really changed that much. Because we discovered relatively early on what helps. (Though we no longer nail houses shut with infected people inside them and post armed guards outside).
What policies would you suggest to manage outbreaks of infectious diseases?
How many deaths do you think is acceptable? Can you pick a number?
It will be interesting to see what happens during the next pandemic. Because there will be pandemics in the future. Do you think that a population disinclined to act cautiously in a situation where correct information will be scarce for months, possibly years, is a good thing or do you think it might represent a problem.
The most sinister thing a government could possibly do would be to do as little as possible and just accept loss of human life.
Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct. The virus was still there and does not care about presidential edicts and speeches.
Given the the world still exists, I think the pre-2022 policies were a gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in the Soviet Union.
> Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct
It's also possible that both instituting a lockdown and subsequently removing that lockdown were both essentially correct. While I believe the government waited far too long to remove lockdown restrictions I don't think instituting them in the first place was the wrong decision.
You should really take into account the advent of COVID vaccines, the evolution of the disease (it appears that less lethal variants), and how human immunology works (people create antibodies if they survive the first round of a disease).
There's a tendency amongst folks who have strong opinions on covid measures to create false dichotomies and ignore how context changed over time. Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.
To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation.
* Lots of projects, most of them 'clean'
* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?
* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks.
Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want.
* All this talk about:
> Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.
Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact.
The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.
They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that.
"Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?
Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ?
I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies).
I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.
A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.
One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.
My sense working at an adjacent company and having talked with folks there is that they are more successful with their government projects than their corporate ones.
The impression I get from their involvement at one company I know of is that it’s very much the latter. I was pretty surprised to see them behaving and performing about the same as any parasitic enterprise software vendor with an integration services arm. One wonders how different they really are, and if maybe they just have very good PR and marketing.
Chalk it up as yet another case of some famous one-would-suppose impressive entity, or strata of a company hierarchy, or whatever, turning out to be pretty average, or even below average. You’d think I’d stop being surprised by now.
In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2) DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3 together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and typically not empowered to build anything.
You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to share a common plight.
In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on credit when non-Data teams report big wins.
Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate data sources, and they can avoid blame by being hired by executives as an external third party.
This is exactly what I thought TFA was getting at when it brought up politics being a problem at companies and in sectors Palantir engages with, but instead it went a much more general direction.
> Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the gatekeepers to that data source, and they typically justify their existence in a corporation by being the gatekeepers of that data source (and, often, providing analyses of that data). [3] This politics can be a formidable obstacle to overcome, and in some cases led to hilarious outcomes – you’d have a company buying an 8-12 week pilot, and we’d spend all 8-12 weeks just getting data access, and the final week scrambling to have something to demo.
I think he's seen more companies without talented Data experts than companies with that talent.
They should help the business with the evidence to make all kinds of decisions, and in a platform-team kind of way help you self serve data needed to make decisions in your team.
That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.
I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.
I’ve known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on fake, fancy “war rooms” they staff with people doing nothing useful, filled with “big board” style maps and shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren’t used anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting CEO through, let them pretend what they’re involved in is way cooler and more interesting and important than it really is, and I guess that assists sales so much that such endeavors make way more money than they cost.
I connect this with comments I heard from several major management consulting firm folks stating bluntly that the best way to communicate effectively with execs is to approach them like young children.
Life is super weird. Who knew imaginative play would be such a big thing for “serious” adults? I’d never have imagined, but it’s kinda everywhere.
IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and being able to automatically give you a view where those three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to go through every data set and manually map each field to each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.
I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was explained to me originally.
Building a panopticon is always justified as a way to fight crime and then becomes a way to control the population. Tracking women getting Plan B, tracking people buying birth control, etc.
This is a good post to explain the value proposition. It sounds like "Big Data" from the 1990s, but a very good salesperson was able to infiltrate some US gov orgs to sell the idea.
They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.
One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.
Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.
Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
> Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
It is both very self service and not very self service. That's why they employ the FDE model from the article, to actually ingrain it into the client company to the point that it becomes self service.
It's extremely hard to build such a product from scratch and have it actually be good, that's why there's no competitors. Especially providing the finely grained security controls that the article talks about, and have the platform be secure. There's a reason their security team wins the biggest CTFs half the time.
It is completely self service by now. I have my own stack for testing purposes. Of course if you want to deploy this to an enterprise things will differ, but that is the same for Snowflake, Databricks etc.
They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling.
Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations.
Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.
> Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model
AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.
One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well.
There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.
They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.
Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like than amazing tech. In my observations they could do some interesting things with data but there was no real secret sauce to dealing with the usual messyness of real world data beyond just deploying manual labor to sort it out and then do interesting, but ultimately pedestrian, analysis.
Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.
It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the choice, people will prefer to work at a company that makes computer programming its central focus, and pays better than Coca Cola does, and gives them more freedom than Coca Cola does. This is the whole "be a profit center, not a cost center" issue in the corporate world (1). So it would actually be hard for someone like Coca Cola to build a team similar to one that Palantir can provide. This is also how McKinsey etc. work: a top Harvard Business School graduate doesn't want to get hired by Signet Jewelers, selling retail jewelry in shopping malls, but if they get hired by McKinsey to work on the Signet Jewelers contract
then everyone is happy.
1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.
“ This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.” come on…
Wow, this is a great article. I had no idea what Palantir did these past 10 years, but after reading this article I can say they had amazing direction.
TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product.
Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.
It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports.
Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards.
It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.
Yeah, I was there from 2013-2016. I got to use a few of the products that would eventually turn into Foundary. I've actually hung out with the author a couple of times (I was on the AirBus deployment as well as in the building right next to the healthcare team for a while, though we didn't actually interact on any deployments).
Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same.
Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.
Essentially their competitive advantage is having access to these companies. You can't just show up at Airbus and propose to build them a system for their data flows. Palantir does that and charges multiples of the market rate.
If you want to pick winners, look for companies that hire connected companies.
In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they would have hired Palantir.
This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.
> Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance.
Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors.
TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?
It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here.
1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products:
- Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation
- Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP).
- Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though.
2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately.
3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today.
4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.
So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants.
I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
> You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs.
To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.
>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff.
When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems?
Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushback
Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few options other than speculation if one is obligated to form a conclusion on the matter.
We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules.
The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a joke in poor taste.
You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning awful consequences for the whole world.
>You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy.
All complaints, no solutions. Typical.
So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by the US.
Thats one example, there are many others.
In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something.
We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state.
> It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared.
You've misread the situation. I don't think it would be global peace and harmony if we stopped playing world police. I simply do not care. It's not our responsibility to take care of other countries while we have serious problems at home that are going ignored.
Kissinger set out for a policy that prioritized stability, communication, and mutual understanding of each others' desires to live their own lives.
If we do not "take care" of other countries (as in stop being world police, stop assisting in their problems like Clinton did with Ireland's Troubles, etc...) we would have their problems at our doorstep.
Also, there is definitely a subset of Americans that cannot stand by living well when others aren't, just because they other people were born elsewhere. This applies on all levels: Country, State, County, City, Neighborhood, block, house, etc.
What are you smoking? Have you not seen the list of all the governments that have been "removed" by the US? Most recently Pakistan which was a year ago
> It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
What is the relevance of this to the content of the comment you are replying to?
Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME.
This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption and little chance to turn things around because of entrenched interests.
I can just picture the thought process going in your head(and many others) right now. If you hate it so much why dont you leave.
> Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME
America benefited greatly from this position though, it's just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
I think there's some clarification that needs to happen, though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable interpretation, the US remains an important trading, industrial, technological, and educational world power. Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical influence allows for many strategies.
Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed. Which means access to the foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since the political forces trying to bring that about are also not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and education".
The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
What do you mean by "post-WW2 world order", in this case? Without that, it's hard to even make claims about what happens when the US stops "enforcing it" with. Does the US simply stop pouring in development aid into countries? Does it stop attracting world-class talent into research institutions, and eventually industries? Does it stop having significant heft in trade negotiations because of that?
On one hand, there are specific things that the US _could_ stop doing: not selling arms left and right, and bombing third countries. Maybe you might not call that a meaningful change in the "post-WW2 world order" – but we'd argue that's the case, since it has been a consistent feature of the post-WW2 world order.
It's also a very big leap to assume that the middle class of any country would suffer after whatever is assumed here happens. Why would you assume that Russia and China not be interested in that? Moreover, why would you assume that Russia and China would _not_ want "trading, industry, technology and education" in the absence of great power competition?
>Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed.
The US isn't going anywhere. In fact China has serious structural problems that may make all this conversation pointless. But there needs to be some sort of pathway for the global south to move forward. If that involves having China rise up and then countries accepting that all they can do is play the US and China off of each other to get the best deals out of them then thats still a step forward. If climate change comes to pass it may not even matter. The US and the West is the cause for the majority of the historical pollution yet its the unprepared global south that will bear the worst brunt of climate change. So the best I am advocating for is that the global south take one step forward and hope they don't end up five steps backwards in the long run.
>The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
As to improving the middle class, we need to understand the structural reasons why they are sinking. Decades of erosion to US institutions has led to a situation that can only change if things get really bad and the citizens really demand change..or the US elite are challenged with some real competition. I dont see how it can happen naturally in the US anymore. Every time people get fed up, there is a "release valve" or a distraction in the form of crumbs offered to people so that enough settle down or fixate on something else. We saw it after the "Occupy Wall Street Protests" with the beginning of the culture wars as well as the passing of Obamacare which eliminated the most barbaric provisions of health care in the US. It is not meaningful change but it calmed people down. This method will lead to decades of the elite retaining their leverage. I dont want to see my life pass before my eyes and no real reform ends up happening.
In terms of the second method of having the elite being challenged, We saw in the cold war how the US system had to prove itself and that led to a strong taxation on the wealthy, good institutions, positive movement for the middle class, all to show the Russians that the US led system is the best. There currently is no forcing function to return to that situation at this time.
> We saw in the cold war how the US system had to prove itself and that led to a strong taxation on the wealthy, good institutions, positive movement for the middle class, all to show the Russians that the US led system is the best.
I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the message of Russian propaganda including its American extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
>I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the message of Russian propaganda including its American extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
Uh did I say anything of the sort?
When the Cold War was going on the communist system was initially out producing and out maneuvering the US but eventually the fallacy of a communist (and subsequently fascist takeover of the government) made it inevitable that it was going to fail.
However during this fight between the two powers, the US saw great advances in the prosperity and rights of its middle class. As the USSR started to fall, we saw the beginnings of corporate takeover of all layers of the US government and it really accelerated after the USSR fell. You are making this argument that the US had it so good while ignoring how it got so good and also failing to acknowledge why it has declined so much over the last few decades. If you don't buy my argument then I challenge you to provide an alternative explanation.
I am partial to that argument, at least in the interwar period the US masses and intelligentsia were enamored with the USSR for it was new and the atrocities were not widely known, so we got the New Deal. I don't think that applies to the post-WW2 period and the fact that the US was the only industrial nation left unscathed was the real prosperity driver.
But it is all moot in the world of today where the US competitors are not providing alternatives for people to strive for. Russian propaganda of "everything sucks" works wonders to keep Russians docile and it will work wonders to keep the US middle class down as well, ending Pax Americana will do nothing to change that.
>It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
This was explained in the other post which I will reproduce here:
"looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something.
We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state."
We saw the best of the US system during the cold war. The system had to prove itself. Im not advocating for communism nor Chinese style fascism just more competition.
The third world is already taking advantage of this situation. Nearly every country in the global south has been negatively damaged by the US or Europe at some point. They don't have many options other than to tough it out and hopes the West leaves them with whatever scraps they can get by. If they got too powerful, then the West topples them over. See Pakistan or Bolivia as a recent example. Now China has entered the scene and it has provided the ability for countries to start playing the US and China off of each other to see what they can get out of both countries. Djibouti and its military bases is a small example but we see it with countries like Brazil and Pakistan as well.
How would this help the middle class in the US? Well if the elite in the US start to think they will lose out they will start to enact change that will bring the middle class up to snuff in order to better compete...and lets be honest for a moment, whatever they say goes.
If you believe that the progress is achieved when the masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating condition of the American middle class will naturally help it. What's the point in this accelerationism with allies as casualties then?
>If you believe that the progress is achieved when the masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating condition of the American middle class will naturally help it.
Thats what we have seen historically. People always demand improvements. The leadership of this country hasn't actually done it until they really have a pissed off populace at their doorstep. I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the historical precedent.
>What's the point in this accelerationism with allies as casualties then?
Americans should be first in line when it comes to who the government serves but if you just look at the US government's actions vs other governments in the west, the US government clearly does not have their citizens interests first and foremost.
Think of all the rights and regulations the EU(or hell even many third world countries) have vs the US.
It manifests itself in so many ways:
Some easy examples demonstrating small issues as well as big ones:
1. EU countries mandate physical addresses for VOIP number registration. US spends years not implementing its half assed regulations Result: Americans are drowning in spam calls
2. EU negotiates drug prices as a government and refuses to pay more than a specific %. Companies would rather get something vs nothing from the EU market. US despite being the largest market, refuses to negotiate as a government even though they have a universal health program(for seniors only but thats a different issue). Result: American made drugs are sometimes up to 10x more expensive in the US than elsewhere. A vial of insulin in EU: ~9$ USA: ~99$
3. US sends its Navy to patrol world seas, ensuring flow of goods. Result: EU does not meet required 2% of NATO spending and instead funnels that money into social services like subsidized colleges. Result: US citizens either drown with a lifetimes worth of college debt or take a chance in the Military for subsidized college after giving up 4+ years of their young adult life serving their military contract while EU citizens graduate debt free and take a gap year traveling instead.
I can go on for literal dozens of examples. I specifically chose to go from small to big to show that the problem is systemic and permeates all aspects of American life. In many ways the American system is one giant scam and they only people benefiting are people who have managed to survive in the upper echelons of the income stratosphere or are foreigners.
If the US changed its focus to be more inward, it can focus on rebuilding manufacturing which would increase jobs availability and give more power to workers which would lead to other rights for the common man such as demanding more from the government to help US peoples among many other examples.
> the US government clearly does not have their citizens interests first and foremost
I disagree, Americans just vote for that. Yes, we can talk all day long about the two party system, winner takes all, the electoral college and unfairness of everything being decided on the margins, but when the rubber hits the road, talk is cheap, action is what matters and a solid half of Americans has been consistently voting for the US government to put the interests of rich people first. The US as a whole is a beneficiary of globalism and it's on the Americans to decide how to distribute the gains, allies are not at fault.
"The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be prepared."
I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming algorithm YouTube uses with its comments.
(Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)
"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle
What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?
I’m saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they are upfront about their association. In contrast you have what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are in fact gray areas.
You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service.
So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.
I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough.
> The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well.
About "sin" industries:
> "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.
I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument.
However—please—there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims.
You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.
I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.
This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here.
Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources."
I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice).
I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task."
The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.
The cost of defending a reasonable sentiment on the internet always outweighs the benefits...because whether there are "winners" in online arguments is questionable.
It takes a lot of forbearance to express an opinion, an observation, an anecdote or provide even objective information, and move on. Or, turn the 15–20 minutes into an entire weekend; researching, analyzing, drafting, revising and publishing a report to substantiate the claims for the next guy (and for the AI scraper bots who will use for work to support the argument of the next guy).
I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
I can't help but be a little skeptical because both my wife and I have worked in either the military itself or on military technology for most of our adult lives, and while we live comfortably and have no complaints, the pay is nowhere near what you'd get in finance or ad tech or most successful B2C web companies. Quite to the contrary, rather than being compensated for the stigma, there is no stigma. Outside of comments section bubbles, the US military is a widely respected institution and the people holding these kinds of jobs have great pride in their missions and willingly accept less money to work on something they care about and believe in.
I can't comment on porn and drugs, which seem quite different.
> I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But I commend his honesty in general.
That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it.
If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.
It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.
As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well, but also interact and sell to customers.
I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual.
So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!
Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum. Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in kindergarten.
> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia.
100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration.
Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't.
The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.
I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"
I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.
There is no grey area working for a company like Palantir. Palantir is as IBM was during the Holocaust.
Apartheid Israel has used the American military industrial complex and companies like Palantir to kill a majority of civilians in Apartheid Israel's genocide in Gaza. 65% killed have been women and children; 50 children a day killed since Oct 7th. 2% of the population have been culled. And all this to stay and make money in a lucrative market.
If you listen to Peter Thiel, he uses the same propaganda talking points that Apartheid Israel uses. There is zero morality supporting or working for companies like Palantir or people like Peter Thiel.
There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before he finally put together a sentence where he said something like "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back.
Twitter has since had the videos wiped, but I'm sure they're still out there somewhere. I've seen other people like Zuckerberg dodge questions, but I've never seen a man with such wealth and power suddenly become so completely terrified.
Thanks for the link. Peter Thiel did not seem terrified at all. Surprised by the question? Maybe. It took him some time to find his words but I think the final point he made is valid (and he also had a bit of humor. Kinda the opposite of terrified)
Peter Thiel is enriching himself, fully aware that he's participating in ethnic cleansing, violence, and mass murder. If you see the video in the sibling comment, it's clear that he knows the evil he's working for, he is trading in the suffering of humanity for his own profit. And he knows we know.
You, too, don't appear to understand what the Faustian is about specifically. Guys, you should read up on something other than Wikipedia, & not embarrass yourself with dimwit attempts at allegory.
It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support neither side.)
Having said that:
65% killed being women and children is because of the demographics of Gaza, not because of any specific behaviour by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours.
It's a talking point used by a people supporting one of the two sides, blithely ignoring the realities of a complex situation.
The reality is that 50% of Gaza's adult population if female, and nearly 50% of their population is below the age of 18! In other words, their population is 75% "women and children".
In any other war, that 65% statistic would be a sign of deliberate and malicious targetting of innocent non-combatants. In the Gaza war it is the sad but usual level of collateral damage that one might expect in urban fighting. Not to mention that this number would be even lower, but is as high as it is because of human-shield tactics used by HAMAS.
The people that use this 65% statistic often do so with the knowledge that people listening to it don't know the demographics of Gaza or the vile actions of HAMAS. They're trying to convince those listening through deception. Their cause may be just in their eyes, but does that justify this kind of false debate? It's in the same category as claiming 500 people died when "Isreal bombed a hospital" mere minutes after the incident, which turned out to be a failed HAMAS rocket that landed in the parking lot and killed maybe half a dozen people.
Yes, what Isreal is doing is bad, but not "murdering women and babies on purpose" bad!
You appear to be making the case that the 65% statistic of Gazans killed by Israel shouldn't be alarming since it merely is converging on the demographic makeup of the population.
I'd argue that it is very alarming when military casualties converge on the general populations demographics and not the demographics of actual combatants.
All I'm saying is that if any other country attacked Gaza using any normal means of war, they'd end up with the same statistic. Israel is not doing anything out of the ordinary for war. The statistics you quoted is a side-effect of Gaza's demographics.
Note that I don't condone Israel's actions in Gaza. I'm just saying that those actions are no worse than one would expect, but this statistic is purposefully deceptive and is being trumpeted across the Internet specifically to make Israel look worse than they are actually acting.
You support one of the two sides above the other. That's your right. But please don't support them through chosen talking points intended to deceive the audience.
PS: One of the two sides in this war targeted civilians on purpose and failed at doing so. The other site targeted combatants and failed at doing so. Which would you say is the more superior position?
Just based on your comment, I can promise you I have payed attention to the conflict less than you and have less of a 'dog in the fight' in terms of supporting a side. I just noticed your comment begging the question regarding mortalities that reflect makeup of a civilian population being the null case in urban warfare that needs no explanation.
It's a positive claim that requires empirical support, which you aren't providing.
A quick squiz would suggest this women+children death toll is the greatest in some time by some margin, despite some quite bloody and urbanised conflicts in recent years [1]. Perhaps you have justified knowledge that this case is different than any other or just better-documented, and the deaths are unavoidable insofar as urban warfare is to be conducted.
But even if it is the case that urban warfare should be expected to be conducted quite inefficiently (to the point that combatants are successfully targeted at a rate barely greater than random members of the population), you are also taking it as a given that conducting it at all is justified and shouldn't be alarming.
That doesn't appear to be a given by military standards of developed countries:
> Destroying an urban area to save it is not an option for commanders. The density of civilian populations in urban areas and the multidimensional nature of the environment make it more likely that even accurate attacks with precision weapons will injure noncombatants.…If collateral damage is likely to be of sufficient magnitude, it may justify avoiding urban operations, which though tactically successful, would run counter to national and strategic objectives.
United States Army and Marine Corps 2017 Manual on Urban Operations, quoted in [2]
Please re-read my statements, I’m choosing my words carefully.
Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.
In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.
Gaza has ridiculously skewed demographics with fully half of the population below the age of 18. (Don’t take my word for it, just Google it.)
Hence the civilian deaths in Gaza reflect this skewed demographics. Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!) but because fifty percent of the civilians are children!
I don’t disagree with the facts. It’s just that facts are being presented without the background detail to make Israel look insanely evil. Which they are not… they just a normal amount of evil.
> Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.
You are begging the question still. Citation needed.
> In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.
That dog won't hunt. ~58k Ukranian soldiers killed + 12k civilians = 70k total [1]. 633 Ukrainian children killed [2]. 20% of the population is children but they make up < 1% or those directly killed in the conflict. You will probably take issue with the degree of urbanisation etc., but it was your example.
> Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!)
I suggest you are strawmanning the argument here — I don't think Israel is actively targeting children is an accurate representation of the concerned 'side' overall (I'm sure you can find a tweet making it). But it is plain their actions are pretty indiscriminate wrt the combatant:civilian kill ratio.
> they just a normal amount of evil.
You haven't supported this claim, and its a considerable leap from 'Gaza has a pyramid-shaped age structure'. Yet, there is data available on recent urbanised conflicts and what the 'normal amount' is.
Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately?
Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something to that effect.
Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.
Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.
So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.
Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.
Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.
Being made where though? I google '65% of women children gaza' and among the front page of results, all but one reporting that figure do not indicate that women and children were selected for. Civilian infrastructure yes (e.g., "Israeli military has relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival." which is true, considering 14 hospitals were hit directly). The exception is the State of Palestine ("The Israeli aggression continues to target civilians in Gaza Strip" [1]), and I don't believe the wording is even incorrect — when you bomb a hospital knowing there are civilians inside (whether or not there were militants), you have targeted civilians.
> Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.
Consider that is a subjective interpretation, others might find it indicates a strikingly indiscriminatory approach such that targeting is moot. That was my impression reading that figure. Let that be an answer to your initial question in the parent comment
I suspect that this is about to begin going in circles since no new arguments or evidence are being presented for your claims. So to conclude: I will reiterate that this is a matter that can be informed by empirical data, and the only data that has been provided in this thread with which we can interrogate the norms and outcomes of warfare (numbers from the example you invoked of Ukraine and other recent bloody and heavily urbanised conflicts in the Oxfam link) weighs heavily against assuming that mortalities should reflect the civilian population's demographics in a military action It strikes me as an undercooked, and insofar as it reflects reality, an appalling assumption.
Even assuming every adult male is a militant, they are killing two women/children per 1 militant. Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming: it does not matter if the goal of the dropped bombs is to preferentially kill women and children.
> Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming
Oh, I agree! The problem Israel faces is that HAMAS fighters don't wear uniforms, are often under 18 years old, and uses civilian buildings for protection.
The dilemma I see as an outsider is that I honestly don't know what else could have happened after October 7th. A bunch of dominos were set up, someone knocked over one, and things unfolded along a nigh-inevitable path from there.[1]
IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault. It's like kicking a dog repeatedly. Eventually, it will bite you, but once a dog has its teeth sunk into your calf, you're not going to treat it nicely.
Let me ask you a simple question. Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done? What alternative choices do you think would have been available to you, that the people would accept? What decisions could you have made that would "stick", that wouldn't result in you being kicked out of your position of power on the 9th and replaced by someone else willing to do something horrible that is certain to result in civilian deaths? Keep in mind that to this day there are many abducted civilian Israelis being held in Gaza as hostages.
I've been thinking about this for months and I honestly can't come up with anything.
[1] Look at what the US did after 9/11! Same setup, same story, same depressing outcome.
> Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done?
Steering well clear of the greater picture and focusing just on the man himself there are a number of people, including a block of Israeli Jews, that would strongly suspect he quietly, behind closed doors, fist pumped in delight and had a moment with a few in his circle.
They'd charge he had knowingly and with forethought been inching up the pressure on Palestine for some time in order to provoke an extreme reaction that served to justify righteous overkill.
This goes to your:
> IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault.
which I'd mostly agree with save I'd lay the blame as mostly the fault of a ruling extreme faction in Israel.
Palestine itself has also had to broadly deal with the consequences of the actions of smaller core extreme.
Your argument is that it’s ok that Israel has killed this many women and kids because they’re over represented in the population.
Most people’s perspective is that you shouldn’t kill kids and women and target civilians, regardless of anything else.
And you’re ignoring the mountain of evidence of israel deliberately targeting civilians. Just the other day the times published a thorough report on israeli snipers deliberately targeting toddlers. That truth does not square with your “it’s just collateral damage” argument.
For reference, I'm willing to accept every factual statement of the article: the doctor worked in Gaza, he saw many children with bullet wounds to the head or chest, many were single shots, etc...
A relative of mine is a nurse working in a hospital. I noticed a long time ago that her perspective on the statistics of illnesses is very skewed. She sees only very sick patients because -- duh -- she works in a hospital. Hence, she thinks every sniffle of her nephew is an emergency -- because she sees only emergency cases!
There are ~40K dead, ~100K wounded in Gaza by the war, of which half are children: about 70K child casualties of which 50K didn't die.
Parents and hospitals will prioritise children over adults. A child with multiple gunshot wounds will more than likely die on the spot and not be taken to hospital. A child with a single gunshot wound is more likely to cling to life long enough to make it into a hospital. In absolute terms, the few dozens cases mentioned in the article are just the inevitable statistics. I would be very surprised if doctors in Gaza had not treated many more such cases! I would expect a couple of hundred per hospital (there are only 32) at least.
To reiterate: None of this is in any way good, none of the children deserved any of this, and in no way is Israel innocent in the matter. It's just that it is the natural consequence of warfare in a high-density urban setting with that demo.
> Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
> Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,
I can’t speak knowledgeably about the first point (I doubt many people can, fog of war and all that) but it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals to use them as human shields.
Are you telling me that Hamas deserves none of the blame?
> it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals
This is patently false. Israel single-handedly claimed this without any evidence other than CGI render. Think about it, ALL hospitals in Gaza has been bombed by this point, but have you ever see the actual footage of Hamas command centres?
Also pretty sure there was no Hamas involved in the case below:
> In one of the most egregious cases, the Commission investigated the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, along with her extended family, and the shelling of a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance and killing of two paramedics sent to rescue her. The Commission determined on reasonable grounds that the Israeli Army’s 162nd Division operated in the area and is responsible for killing the family of seven, shelling the ambulance and killing the two paramedics inside. This constitutes the war crimes of wilful killing and an attack against civilian objects.
> Yes, what Isreal is doing is bad, but not "murdering women and babies on purpose" bad!
They are murdering children on purpose. Check the recent NY Times article by American doctors who worked in Gaza. Nearly all of them dealt with children shot in the head or in the chest on almost a daily basis. It is impossible to deny at this point that Israel is carrying out an extermination campaign there if not outright genocide.
Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know, even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you.
The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.
I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive though?
In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge?
Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
It was nothing more than a handful of interns couldn't come up with in the same amount of time. Along the way they just asked obvious questions about how we used and wanted to see our data. There wasn't any magic, there was nothing new. We can make our own reports. We were told they were going to find new insights, there weren't any.
Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance.
"""
Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.
It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel".
Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.
These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles.
"""
To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument.
You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.
If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas and builds its underground infrastructure underneath civilian infrastructure, and that military enemy kills 1200 of your citizens in an attack, that creates a fair bit of moral ambiguity.
sooo israel should use time travel?
the situation right now is a fucked up war between two bloodthirsty groups. I dont think this is the right time to think of inventing time machines...
I think by the time you’ve worked your way through more dead children than the entirety of your civilian casualties, I think you’ve lost all pretence at the moral high ground.
Do you know where the ministry of defense is located in Tel-Aviv? Right next to its biggest shopping mall, inside of which at any point you will find dozens of young soldiers wandering around in their military uniforms with automatic rifles hanging over the shoulders. I am saying this because I have been to this shopping mall many times. According to Israel's own doctrine that makes this shopping mall a legit military target, which, of course, is total bullshit. Just like the old and tired argument about "human shields" and "terrorists embedding themselves among civilians".
Imagine the reaction to Palestinians blowing up a residential Israeli apartment building with hundreds of civilians inside and justifying it by saying they wanted to kill an IDF member inside.
If the IDF member is shooting at them from the apartment building, then it becomes a valid military target. This is very clearly spelled out in the Geneva conventions.
This, but the author betrays itself once it says he's fine with the clear pro-western stance. As a politically informed person coming from the global south, I cannot but denounce western colonialism that lives on up to today.
> I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative. I am sure the engineers at Palantir sleep well at night knowing they are helping achieve that goal, and I commend them for it.
Minimizing civilian casualties is a moral imperative. I am sure the engineers behind "Where's Daddy?" are losing sleep if they have any semblance of a moral conscience. Same goes for anyone who is aware of the true nature of Israel's conduct in Gaza yet still providing cover for it.
> The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.[1] The attack was conducted primarily by the Irgun and Lehi, who were supported by the Haganah and Palmach.[3] The massacre was carried out despite the village having agreed to a non-aggression pact.
> An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
Netanyahu is a fascist inspired by Mussolini, all the Hamas talk is just an excuse to do ethnic cleansing and complete the settlement of Palestine. They will not stop at that, they will keep expanding into Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
People complain about cancel culture but this guy can go around saying genocide is good and absolutely nothing seems to happen to him as a consequence.
create a separate state for palestine under the control of hamas would only legitimise them, allow them to easily get more weapons and go on another oct 7, which will again lead to the bombings currently happening.
Bombing them to death would lead to deaths of many, many women and children cuz gaza is 75% children.
You cannot have peace with hamas, only ceasefire, and even then they havnt stopped launching homemade missiles.
The most sane solution is defeating hamas, establishing a third party control over it to stabilise the region and then return it to democracy, but israel is too trigger happy to do any progress on this field and hamas wants all of israel.
You cannot have peace on the land without destroying hamas. Not even for moral reasons. Maybe there is another solution in ur mind?
My solution, if I was in charge of Israel, would simply be to NOT order the army to destroy most of Gaza and kill tens of thousands of people, and to instead just focus on preventing incursions into Israel. I would also focus on stopping Hamas missiles by using the hugely effective anti-missile system that, conveniently, already exists.
I realise that this is not a perfect solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. It has many flaws in the long term and ignores a bunch of pressing issues. But it does have the benefit of not killing tens of thousands of people, and in that way is a hell of a lot better than the bloodthirsty rampage currently happening.
sooo prolong the problem so that when you are dead, your descendants have to deal with it and you will be free of the responsibility?
Do we forgive oct 7? what precedent would it set for other groups? that you can just go kill and rape people and there will be no response?
Self-defense is supposed to be proportional. If you're killing 30x as many people in "response", and most of them weren't in any way involved in the original attack, that's not justifiable.
> to instead just focus on preventing incursions into Israel.
So after Hamas invaded Israel, massacred over a thousand civilians (and they don't have the "collateral damage" excuse they just gruesomely raped and murdered people because they were apparently subhuman...) and kidnapped hundreds of others, Israel should have just said "aw-shucks.. well they won't get us next time". Really?
That would have actually been worse than the US government doing nothing after 9/11 besides introducing stricter TSA checks.
Now one might legitimately argue whether the reactions in either were necessarily that effective. But not doing anything would have been insanely absurd. You just can't except any non entirely dysfunctional government to behave that way.
It's a horrible situation.. but any suggestion or proposed alternative that wouldn't result in the destruction or significant weakening of Hamas is just not particularly useful (long-term at least).
A mistake? The Israelis didn't understand the extent to which Hamas views itself as engaged in a holy war. They (and many others, including me) thought that Hamas would prioritize building Gaza and providing services to its people over murder/kidnapping raids.
You're underestimating how valuable Hamas has been to the Israeli right. Smotrich called them an asset in 2015 for a reason, and Netanyahu said similar in 2012.
With Hamas in charge, Israel could avoid making new peace agreements or concessions by saying that there was "no partner for peace". The more violent Hamas got, the more cover Israel had for expanding settlements. And now Likud is already talking about what they'll do with all the Gaza land they're taking.
That's one theory. Another one is read the article.
The reason it matters is that under the second one Israel has no moral legitimacy, so saying things like moral imperative show how fucked up your morals are.
Pretty obvious difference between choosing to work towards the goals of a genocide and being threatened to pay taxes or have your property and wages seized...
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".
"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths.
"Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...
> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.
This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
> The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.
It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.
Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.
I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.
I agree with you if we're just talking about the people who work somewhere. I would say that the founders I'm referring to certainly at least partially delude themselves into believing that their intellectual prowess encompasses other realms of science, philosophy, engineering, etc. when all they did was create some software. I also do not believe for one second that these founders are actually as interesting as people have mythologized them to be.
In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.
When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”.
I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.
I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.
It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.
Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.
That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors.
I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion to philanthropy. But I don't think it worked. Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos will need to wrestle with this, too, regardless of how much they "donate" to "charity". I don't envy them their positions in life.
The book was "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by McLuhan, Marshall. You can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150.
Not every company trades on P/E. Some trade on EBITDA, others on Revenue. It's a spectrum. The more mature (code for more profitable, lower growth), the more likely it trades on P/E.
Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at here.
Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)
It's always amusing when armchair investors throw around financial metrics meant for entirely different types of companies, just to sound knowledgeable because they've heard others repeat the same lazy jargon.
Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your opinion and some links would be fine.
Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12 months).
Don't just take the average provided by something like Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write down all their estimates, take either the mean or average
Because few analysts provide quarterly estimates, you need to use annual estimates instead. But the next twelve months are going to be made of some part of 2024 plus some part of 2025. Palantir's fiscal year is 12/31/2024 so it's a bit less annoying to calculate.
Their most recently reported quarter was Q2 2024, so the next 12 months = Q3 2024 + Q4 2024 + Q1 2025 + Q2 2025[1].
Then you have to calculate enterprise value, which is easier said than done. In a nutshell, it's the total equity value + debt - cash, but there are always minor things to adjust. Equity value is the number of diluted shares outstanding[2] multiplied by today's share price. To calculate diluted shares, you will need to know the options that are outstanding on the company and use the Treasury Stock Method to assume all of the in-the-money options are exercised, with the proceeds from those options being used to buy back shares. Debt you can get from financial statements, unless the company has publicly traded debt in which case you might need to adjust for its current value rather than its book value. Cash you can simply get from financial statements, but there can be issues there too depending on how complex the company is. Add all of that together (subtract cash!) and you get Enterprise Value.
Divide Enterprise Value by NTM Revenue and you'll get a revenue multiple for this company today. But if you want to calculate what the company _should_ be worth relative to competitors, you can do the same thing for all of its competitors, then take the mean/average EV/Revenue of those comps and say "PLTR should be worth this much"
Also separately you can build a DCF if you have sufficient visibility into the future cashflows of the company.[3]
You can take some shortcuts or go even deeper in all of the above. It comes down to how much scrutiny you need for the investment you're making. Are you SAP trying to acquire Palantir? You're going to do all of the above with more detail than I explained. Are you deciding whether to rebalance a bit of your portfolio out of Palantir as an individual trader? Maybe Yahoo Finance Pro estimates are serviceable enough (I wouldn't know).
OR just find an analyst whose views on the company you happen to like and who you think is generally right and look at their multiples so you don't have to do all that legwork yourself. But you'll need to be a client at their bank to get access to their research...
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[1] Some people like to do (days left in 2024 / 365) * FY 2024 estimates and take the remaining days to make up a year * FY 2025, but that's totally wrong for many reasons, the most obvious being that investors aren't updating their models (and thus the valuation multiples those models output) on a daily basis. There's no new news about the company every single day, so estimates should be stable over the course of the quarter.
[2] NOT from the earnings report, as that "diluted shares" for EPS means something else: to simplify, it means diluted over the course of the year rather than today, which is what we want.
[3] For fast growing companies, this is harder because you need to extrapolate all the way until you get to a year with relatively low growth cash flows in order to get to a "terminal year" for a DCF analysis, but if you're projecting 10-20 years into the future, chances are you're wrong!
My pleasure! Wall Street likes to gatekeep this info (it's very simple math but banks charge millions for it) and there's a disheartening shortage of publicly available repositories with this knowledge (most of it can be automated, except for one-off adjustments you need to make for each company here and there for accounting reasons or out of the ordinary occurrences)
The bit I forgot to add is that you kinda have to do the reverse too, if you're valuing the company based on comparables: take their mean multiple, then apply that PLTR's forward revenue to get to some enterprise value, then subtract net debt (i.e. minus debt _plus_ cash now!) and get to equity value. Then divide by the diluted shares (you have to imply the Treasury Stock Method dilution in some somewhat circular Excel math) to get to a final dollar value per share
You can take this one step further and draw line charts over time with these multiples vs. comparables to see how the sentiment has changed for this stock (or for comparables) over time. And many other similar analyses...
Curious why this is downvoted. Crazy high PE / general valuation for a company that as far as I can tell mostly does IT consulting/contracting - sure they are in a growth sector - but still - plenty of other companies can do what they do.
Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.
Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
No, it's just the trading multiples derived from them that are totally wrong for the purposes of valuing the company today, because the Ks and Qs pertain to the past, which we cannot visit.
Kind of conveniently cut off the first part of the statement there. The basis of fundamental valuation, discounted cash flow analysis, looks at all cash flows, forever, into the far future until the company dies. For a sufficiently mature company, current earnings are reasonably considered a good approximation of future earnings. For a newer company that is growing rapidly and spending most of its cash on long term investments rather than current year operations, it is not. Otherwise, every new company that has no earnings yet would be worthless, or if you consider losing money to be negative earnings, you're saying they should be paying you to own them.
Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about extreme outliers.
It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense.
To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied forward P/E multiple is -100.0x.
The next day, you come to work and update your model based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now 100.0x.
Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.
> . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.
Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists. Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead
This is factually incorrect. Plenty of negative P/E companies in the market with positive implied equity value.
The least objectionable defense of my argument is that many such companies are choosing to reinvest so much of their cash flows into more growth because that creates higher NPV than the alternative. If they wanted to, they could be profitable, but they choose not to be in order to be MORE profitable in the future.
Also note EPS is an accounting metric, so it's just "theoretical" stuff. It's not cash flow. These companies in general have positive operating cash flow... including PLTR
As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them.
But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.
I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of.
The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me.
I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.
For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.
Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both).
The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.
I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)
Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.
More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)
"You could have a model of Harvard Business School that is like:
1. Harvard Business School teaches you skills that would make you good at running a company.
2. There are lots of companies that could use those skills.
3. But you don’t want to run those companies, because they make, like, ball bearings.
4. You want to run a fancy company; you want to run a hedge fund or a tech startup or something.
5. Meanwhile, the people currently running the ball bearings company would not be all that excited about you, a fresh-faced business school graduate who has never run anything, coming in to run their company, even if you did learn a lot of useful skills at Harvard.
6. Therefore various industries exist whose principal business is laundering ball bearings companies into opportunities that appeal to Harvard Business School graduates. You wrap the ball bearings company in a name like “private equity” and suddenly it is legible to the Harvard students, so they flock to it.
7. Those industries are also in the business of getting the ball bearings companies to accept the Harvard Business School graduates, which in practice means not so much “make the ball bearings company excited about its new Harvard CEO” but rather “buy the ball bearings company and install new management.”
I like this theory! And I don't think it's a cynical one either—this "laundering" could actually be really useful.
The worker gets the status and security of a tech/consulting job, while having more variety than actually working at the chemical plant, not being at the whims of their org chart, and also just the reframing probably makes it more enjoyable anyway. All the while, the important work is getting done.
I don't think it's cynical at all! I do think it's a decision-delaying choice, however, in that it treats one's work as a series of electives. The person working at the plant, gaining seniority and building deep connections is on their way to industry expertise. It's trading wealth and power for prestige. (It makes sense it's like catnip to our graduates from elite schools.)
Grafana is a better approximation. I used to say back in the day that Peter Thiel complains about no flying cars but is making a data ingesting platform with a Chart Js frontend.
So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation.
"A boring dystopia as a service."
Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|
I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.
The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt.
We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
In 2012 I was at a conference in Montreal for CS students that had Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard, bed bug registry) do the closing talk, and he was giving advice to students about what to work on. He said it out loud, "or if you want to work for evil go into the hallway and talk to the Palentir booth". It was a great moment of one man speaking truth to power in a packed room of their target audience.
> The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger.
That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on?
Pretty much every dysfunction of this society can be traced back to this attitude. Social responsibility to other people beyond your own kin is necessary to produce a society worth living in. This necessarily includes taking up the burden of teaching you the values your parents refused to teach you.
Students are adults. Teaching them that their choices have systemic consequences is not the same as forcing values on them. It might be factually incorrect, but it's not a value statement.
And I have no worries that the billionaires will make sure their views and values are aired and widely known, so students will be very much able to make up their own mind.
Sure! We just need more bureaucracy in universities to make sure it gets done. More useless classes to add to students’ debt loads! Jam it into tech and science classes in place of relevant teaching! And given that academia is 80%-90% left to extreme left, make sure it is way out of step with mainstream societal values!
Or we could just leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.
If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction.
The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.
Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program?
Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.
It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope.
That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.
Surely you have the capability of making a distinction between doctrine established for hierarchical control and a teaching a basic system of deriving ethics or morality, with the exact intention of preventing such hierarchical control within an industry that has the power to make any extreme institutional system a reality. You've seen the effects of a generation of social media technologies and how it compared to the previous generation of internet communication such as BBS, forums, etc.
I assume you've lived long enough to witness an internet stewarded by those who place ethics or morality above purely capitalistic motivation, vs. an internet stewarded by a generation of new-age, fake-ethical "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" tech entrepreneurs.
The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste.
It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.
It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.
Have you taken a university level ethics course before?
They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.
This comment is a great example of a straw man argument.
> leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.
Should be, according to what doctrine? It certainly sounds like you're attempting to establish institutional moral instruction by imposing limits on when and where morality can be discussed.
Why are we allowed to teach students astronomy but not morality? Go back further and we couldn't even freely teach astronomy. Do you remember Galileo's trial for heresy? Or Socrates' condemnation to death for "corrupting the youth"? This war for teaching the ability to capably assess ethics and morality has been waging before you, I, Hacker News, universities, the internet, the printing press...
If you don't think it was right to kill Socrates for simply spreading the message of critical thinking, then you have to accept that adults can organize to teach whatever they wish at universities, assuming it doesn't run afoul of Constitutional protections.
This is a great example of the toxic individualism our society suffers from. There is no sense of community or doing what's right for the greater good because people think they always know better.
The sad thing is that there is some truth to the parent comment.
For the most part it's an accurate representation of how morals are appropriated into institutions like academia.
As important qualities like community and a shared notion of a common good in humanity are, the system as it stands will render them according to its own interests and students will exit none the wiser. Character becomes standardized into a set of "values" of an entirely different sort.
The problem is that Students inevitably become parents, and some inevitably branch out into "other institutions" professionally, espousing Moral Character® and we're left to figure out who contaminated what?
You should write a book about how a society composed entirely of pure-bred mercenaries outlasted all other competing civilizations on the planet. I'd be very interested in reading it.
he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does.
Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles.
Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?
ah yes, invoking the age-old "wolf pack" analogy to explain the complexities of global politics—because who hasn't looked at international relations and thought, "If only we acted more like wolves marking territory"? If those are the premises (and THOSE are your premises), then no discussion about ethics is necessary indeed.
Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do.
They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.
What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR.
The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your sources are relevant. [1] is written by a science fiction author, and while it outlines how palantir is trying to get into a contract with the NHS (apparently mostly by acquiring companies that already have such contracts), it doesn't say _anything_ about what palantir did (or has planned to do) that would be detrimental to the NHS. [2] merely speculated how palantir might help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Which... Uhh... I don't see as a bad thing?
Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations.
However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
> These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.
Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry.
Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.
Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.
The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author:
Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.
Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever.
The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.
But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?
I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus:
On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).
They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well.
I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere.
The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic.
Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay).
As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8
When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
I love this discussion, and I think it's critically important for people to engage with it.
However, I cannot more strongly disagree with your implicit assumption of innocence for "category 1." Facebook alone is unquestionably more harmful than Palatir, and any purely for profit entity is by necessity intentionally unanchored to any ethical foundation at all. Facebook is known for explicitly supporting genocidal regimes abroad, and for intentionally ignoring white supremacy, child abuse and domestic terrorism here in the US, all while being very explicit about not cooperating with the government agencies responsible for combatting these issues.
To that end, I would extend your thesis to the effect that people who eschew category 3 for category 1 aren't simply abdicating social responsibility, but are hypocritically engaged in substantially more socially harmful behaviors.
Sure, Palatir leads to people dying, and sometimes those people are innocent bystanders, but those actions are the result of any engagement with the public sector. Facebook is a direct progenitor of genocide abroad and fascism stateside, and is wholly untethered from either conscience or consequence. Category 1 is worse.
I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.
> you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things
lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions
Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
"I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. "
" Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
Thiel knows how to get rich and I’ll give him that, however I would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or anything else outside of business strategy and even then I might limit it to stuff he’s working on in the past.
Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.
The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality.
At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes".
So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...]
Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor?
Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.”
Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.
>Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity.
That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay:
Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption. Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to the audience in order to justify the genocide.
Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they viewed the bombing as a model for their actions—and that is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after more than a year.
This is a well written article with some good tie bits and lots of links. The author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about Palantir, why Palantir is successful, and what makes a good employee at Palantir. As a Palantir skeptic, it made me more interested in the company, and aside from that there were some good learning resources linked in the article like books and other blog articles.
At the end of the day though, I get the feeling the author is too concerned with status and the rat race of business in America. His view of what it’s possible for someone in tech to work on is very narrow, at some point he says you can either work at google on google search or work at palantir or a few other things.
I’m thankful to the comments here for pointing out more of the bad thing Palantir has been apart of, and so while i feel this article is interesting, Palantir still sounds pretty bad.
Well written essay! I fell into a rabbit hole around his quote "context is that which is scarce".
After squinting at the linked Tyler Cowen essay, I think it's a convoluted way of saying "context is valuable and a lot of times when things suck it's because there's not enough of it". I was hoping he was going to give an operational definition of context. Does anyone have a more developed take?
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/co...
I'm amazed there's no discussion in the article about Palantir's role in Gaza and their development of Lavender and "Where's Daddy". That goes beyond the gray areas that the author mentions.
Well, stay amazed. Topics concerning genocide in Gaza are usually flagged after reaching the frontpage, and the only comments allowed are the ones that focus on the technical implications and not the political ones. Threads about IDF abuse are whitewashed into technical victory laps, and anyone concerned with the idea of civilian casualties are fed a canned line about how the civilian death count is justifiable on a relative scale.
Where's Daddy and Lavander are both poignant criticisms of Palantir's business strategy, and I suspect this site isn't personally ready to decide whether killing-as-a-service is something they're personally okay with.
Given that it's a site run by a startup incubator with opaque moderation and a strong American bias, I would imagine that most things that make "line go up" are ok.
I don't even think it's always about "line go up". I've talked to real life engineers who evidently have no ethical bar whatsoever--if the technology is cool and complex and an interesting technical problem, they'll work on it, regardless of the real-world application. "Whether my code is used ethically is someone else's problem. I just love technical challenges!" You absolutely see this mentality on HN as well.
The nihilism you see in a lot of nerdy spaces in this vein is so upsetting. Tech workers are so unbelievably critical to the functioning of the modern world that if we collectivized and made demands, we could utterly bring the global system to a halt until those demands were met. But so many are so well sold on this "rockstar programmer" horseshit. Like by all means, get your bag, we all need to, but personally I sleep better knowing no software I've made is helping target guided rockets.
Good. Most recent takes on Gaza are from people who didn't know Israel and Palestine have been fighting for 80 years and have zero frame of reference on world history other than "war is bad they should just stop fighting".
Some other opinions go back even further and more criticize Great Britain for their mishandling of Mandatory Palestine. There are a lot of opinions that develop as both sides adjust their strategy and the borders of their theater. Writing off any development of opinion (particularly in the wake of Lavander) is a counterproductive and insular habit.
If you don't want to discuss the behavior and morality of the IDF, nobody will force you to steelman them. But some of us would like to call that into question, and dismissing our conversation with "that's immature" is a thought-terminating cliche.
Going back just to the Mandate seems like a very arbitrary point. It forgets about Egyptian colonisation of Palestine in 19th century, as well as treatment of Jewish communities across the whole Arab world, which explains a lot about the conflict and it's history.
I worked there in the weird era. A couple things.
1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things.
2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent.
3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd
4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.
It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of somebody like Cory Doctorow.
Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-...
"Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.
Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim.
Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.
How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this? If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?
Cory Doctorow doesn't understand that there's shades of grey the world, which is a shame as he could otherwise be one of the greatest socio-tech thought leaders in the world.
ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.
AFAICT, "examples of ethnic cleansing" can include Russia over-representing its subject nationalities in its Ukraine cannon fodder.
I'm not sure the ICE does/did, but remember that "ethnic cleansing" doesn't have to involve (direct) mass murder (even if it often does), for instance the expulsion of millions of Germans after WW2 from their homes (even when they were already living there before Nazis came to power) :
https://theconversation.com/postwar-forced-resettlement-of-g...
Also, Hitler's first planned "initial solution" was, as incredible as it might sound, relocating Jews to Madagascar (which of course would still have caused plenty of misery, since the core issue was that Nazis barely considered them as human beings).
EDIT : Yeah, so after following the rabbit hole for a bit, this seems to be about "Trump's mass deportations". Which I remember him claiming himself (maybe in other words), but one should check how massive exactly they ended to be.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr...
But one of the main gists of that article is about how Palantir is helping law enforcement with data integration. Which, as this blogpost points out, shouldn't be underestimated.
And thankfully at least some of the lawmakers didn't underestimate it : there's a reason why it's illegal to build some national databases, and combine some other less sensitive national databases.
Liberal democracy requires a balance of power, and giving too much power to the policeS (or the state in general) results in a police state (dystopia). (Including through the loophole of private companies like GAFAMs.)
You can also see it as a reminder that tools aren't neutral and scale matters.
Man his speaking and writing style get so annoying after a while and I speak as someone who has seen him talk at DEFCON and HOPE multiple times. He has got this god like reputation among the hacker community. Might there be someone who isn't as attention seeking and who isn't just trying to make catchy speeches talking about the same ideas?
I tend to agree with you on this, but it's kind of an amusing comment given the linked article's comment on memes:
"the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person."
Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm not sure that any of this negates the point.
"Above all things we should avoid often talking of ourselves and giving ourselves as an example; nothing is more tiresome than a man who quotes himself for everything." is the quote I reach for from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm
> Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm not sure that any of this negates the point.
lol what? Doctorow created "enshitification" to describe rent seeking and its behaviors, and has been creating a technocratic journalist vocab since the BoingBoing days.
as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it worked on
Are you ashamed of that or proud?
I wonder why Americans are so against cracking down on illegal immigration. Is it all that repressed guilt from invading Indian lands or something?
Because American industry runs on illegal labor. They pick the fruit, they work in the slaughterhouses, they build the housing, they work in the kitchen prep lines.
Like go to any construction site, any restaurant -- you're gonna see a bunch of Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc.
As wages haven't gone up, Americans need cheaper and cheaper labor on the low end to be able to, like, eat, and lots of big business knows this. The GOP owned Congress under GW Bush could have locked this issue down, and if they felt so compelled they probably could have swung that during the Obama era if they were willing to push. Instead it's a boogyman they can use to rile up voters while keeping costs low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus
The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.
The current level absolutely is HIGH. Go to the border and look at it. Look at the numbers.
It’s in our face. And it’s changing our society.
There has always been high immigration in the US, its a country built on immigration!! Like others have said, the current levels are not higher then in the past, its just the political parties that are using it to hide the real problems of ultra rich and corporations abusing the country. In regards to changing society; what is changing? The language? Again, the US is built on immigrants. Are the Italian - Americans in NY going to stop being Italian - Americans all of a sudden? No, they will continue being who they are; maybe they will pick up another language or some new recipes for their cookbooks.
> political parties that are using it to hide the real problems of ultra rich and corporations abusing the country
Yup, same in Europe. There's constant fear mongering with racist undertones in the media about illegal immigrants and refugees, it's driving people crazy and violent against each other. All the while they're conveniently distracted from the root of their social ills.
Europe has the "pie" in form of considerable (by standards of most of the rest of the world, including US) welfare benefits. I don't think it's particularly surprising that people who have access to it today don't want to share. The legal vs illegal distinction is really mostly about that - when it's legal, it can be significantly curtailed (and the same people who are against illegal immigration saying "just go through the process" tend to also be in favor of making that process much more difficult).
I'd argue that legal immigration is changing the US more than illegal immigration because illegal immigration largely originates from other countries in the Americas and therefore more easily fits in with the USA's existing history and culture.
> And it’s changing our society.
Ah that's the problem. But you're ok with the fact that your grandpa immigrated and changed the society as well?
Why?
Our society kind of sucks as it is. Nice to get some new families in the neighborhood .
> It’s in our face. And it’s changing our society.
I love the irony in this statement.
(Of which I suspect you're completely unaware)
> Is it all that repressed guilt from invading Indian lands or something?
I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.
Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.
Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.
Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.
Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.
Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.
It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist. The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems to discuss that.
I agree on both counts at a high level, but America always had cheap labor. It is what helps us have so much disposable income compared to other countries.
This is an obvious truth around immigration that makes me question the media's motivations.
Asylum applications are often contingent upon finding and keeping employment. ICE immigration prisons sell prison labor sold to state governments and corporations.
The public debate between "Immigration is a human right" and "Immigrants are criminals" is out of touch with the actual considerations motivating the laws and policies by US institutions.
>It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor and competition among workers. For this reason they promote a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist.
This is just such an absurd take. How much reality do you have to suspend to believe that corporations around the globe have all zoned in on a policy of somehow propagating a narrative through public life about immigration so that they can exploit illegal immigration.
I know we're in the anti-capitalism, anti-big-corp zeitgeist, but come on.
Most Americans are not opposed to having immigration laws. The disagreements come from whether those laws are fair and the way “illegal immigration” is used as a bogeymonster by racists. For example, when Trump and Vance were doing the “Haitians are eating cats!!!” thing recently, note how often their supporters would throw the “illegal” term around even for people who are here legally. Their concerns were quite transparently not about immigration per se but the ethnicity of the immigrants.
That controls the general immigration policy debate, too. American employers in key industries like construction depend on immigrants for cheap labor, and the unwillingness to provide a legal path for those workers guarantees that people will keep taking huge risks to come here illegally because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. I would highly recommend reading this article: note both the former cop accurately stating that you can’t arrest your way out of a market imbalance and the lack of reception for the proposals from the construction company owner trying to have a legal path for workers. These people aren’t dangerous, they’re working hard and supporting families, but they’re brown and speak Spanish so we don’t respect them and businesses love to have workers who can’t complain about mistreatment.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...
The reason they call asylum seekers illegal is because most asylum seekers are immigrating for improved economic opportunities, not because they are otherwise fleeing persecution from their government. If you want to immigrate somewhere for work you need to get in line for the correct visa. I would expect many legal immigrants here on HN would know this struggle. My parents did when they immigrated to the US.
The problem is that the asylum seekers are committing fraud if they are immigrating for economic reasons, and that fraud is being encouraged by the government and NGOs. JD vance, Elon, and Trump have talked about this several times but the media usually interrupts then or make a straw man argument about racism instead of covering the real issue, which is that these immigrants are being brought in as low wage, temporary laborers to undercut American workers.
That’s a lot of unsourced claims which appear to be rehashing people who famously lie for political reasons (e.g. Vance admitting that he fabricated the Haitian cat story), and you’re certainly not building credibility by pretending that they’re somehow being “interrupted” from a serious conversation.
If you have a reliable source for the claim that large numbers of people are lying on asylum applications and that this is being encouraged by the government, you should edit your comment to cite that so there’s something to be objectively discussed.
Basically because everyone here is an immigrant of some sort just maybe not first generation. Also because the vast majority of people who show up at the Mexican border are fleeing horrific violence and when you are fleeing horrific violence it is difficult to always do things by the book. And also it is a reaction to just how poorly these people that otherwise would be classified as refugees get treated. Under Trump in particular family separation became the norm and courts who oversaw immigration cases had kids as young as 4 brought before a judge without family or legal representation.
The majority are in no way fleeing “horrific violence.” That’s made up. The great majority come for jobs. Lots of job figures by the Fed are inflated by jobs going to illegals. They’re not coming from violent war zones —but even in war zones people go on living their lives, though interrupted by war. By and large it’s not the janjaweed or isil as Obama calls the other baddies.
A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city of around 280,000 people.
Some approximate stats:
Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year.
The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m.
One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by those statistics/events.
Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations. More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?
I agree that's very bad, but shouldn't in this context "horrific violence" be kept for countries under actual war ?
(And specifically the towns where most buildings have been destroyed and most people died or fled.)
Everything you wrote is correct. However, Mexico is actually an immigration success story. The net migration flow is around zero [1].
The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.
"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.
Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.
The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.
More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]
A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.
For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/09/before-co...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...
Yep. 1-2 years is a judge. The official median is 7 years, which afaict is being quite generous. And agreed, it's gotten a lot harder even for folks most would say we should be fighting to attract.
One of the best things the US can do for its economy IMO is get back to being better at brain drain, and helping naturalize the people ready to work hard in general. They make jobs and help drive the American spirit because they basically have to. That's a tough message for people in struggling industries & towns, but it's hard to make a competitive & growing American economy when the job makers and doers are instead growing the economies of competing countries.
As a job maker, successful scientist, OSS supporter, & thankful refugee granted citizenship, immigration has become simultaneously one of the most American things to me... and one of the most bizarre.
People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that.
Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei.
Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
> People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life this election cycle. Dems glaze over that
I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.
> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?
I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.
> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.
Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.
[citation needed]
They're fleeing Putin's strategically-created crises in Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. He gives you the flu, blames the aspirin, and sells you the Ivermectin.
Ah yes Russia is the only country creating crisis abroad. I couldn't really name any other country that constantly does that as well.
Maduro shat the bed himself with perhaps the aid of his indoctrinated chavistas. They used to get help from Cuba. In any case, it’s their problem. Even Columbia, their neighbors and co-Bolivarians don’t like them going into their country illegally. They also want them out.
Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow the repressive government and create a new beautiful shining beacon in the southern cone.
An implication of your statement is that Putin does this to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that these people weaken rather than strengthen us.
Maduro is a 100% Russian product and service.
Then kick him out of office. Do a Panama and turn it around.
They did; he manipulated the results[1] to avoid leaving. What now?
[1]: https://www.state.gov/assessing-the-results-of-venezuelas-pr...
I'm pro open borders. I see no downsides to letting whoever wants to live here, come here. I also think the US culture (think TGI Fridays and Macys) is pretty much the worst and can only improve as we import people with rich cultural histories.
"Cracking down" isn't what's needed, it's reform of the immigration system in the first place.
I think Darryl Cooper's take is interesting. It's actually original sin from the Holocaust put on all conservatives, not just Germans
So why do about 60% of people who consider themselves left or far left oppose immigration?
Cooper also claims that the Holocaust happened by mistake, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to him.
I imagine for the same reasons people on the right, but it's forbidden to speak out loud
I heard no such claims, but also he hasn't finished his WWII series yet, so a little premature to dismiss him
Edit: When I said conservatives, I meant conservative values
> Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
And don't forget the UK National Health Service
Are you trying to say that working for the NHS is bad? I’d choose the NHS over a great many other things if given the option.
The discussion of Palantir in the NHS is not a question of whether "Palantir are good/bad for taking NHS work," it's actually "should the NHS contract out to (and share sensitive patient data with) a company with a reputation like Palantir?"
The first question makes no sense at all. The latter question, however, is an important one for democratic governments to tackle.
I think the challenging question here is that while palantir obviously have a reputation, they're practically not that different to any of the big consultancies.
Specific to the NHS, Palantir not being a UK company was a big talking point, so yes, that's a tangible difference between Palantir and, say, Capita.
Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know.
That is an important part that a lot of people miss, if you are working with McKinsey you've basically hired some of the worst scum on the earth. Their history on human right's abuses and opioids alone is enough to send them to the shadow realm.
That’s the main subject of the linked post by Doctorow.
I think things are getting worse, JD Vance is Peter Thiel's high-rank implant to possible upcoming Trump administration.
Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?
you're some 12yrs late on that. the academic term is hyper imperialism... a tech globalist update on the interwar term ultra imperialism (which predicted, or suggested, the current pax americana).
The strangest thing for me were the article's first two paragraphs:
> Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.
[...] During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office.
I don't really see the contradiction here? The most morally repugnant companies are often the most profitable, and the stock market sometimes (not always) follows suit. And if the protests outside their offices have decreased, that's probably just a sign that there are other things to protest against now...
when you can profit from something all rules are off.
your 401k is probably funding cocacola extract water from impoverished communities and then selling it back to them with sugar.
This:
Sorry, my English is a bit weak. What is the meaning here? Did you buy shares post-IPO?he invested into the company (that is, funded the immoral work he was disgusted by and caused him to leave) by paying them for stock options while (or shortly after) working there.
He wasn't disgusted, argues most of the work was good not bad, and did not leave for moral reasons.
FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out.
sure -- what is fomo insurance?
Think it means he bought Palantir stock?
No need to fear missing out if you are on the gravy train.
Let's hypothesize that a would-be administration in a Western country would like to accomplish full Russian-style autocracy relatively quickly. Let's say they have stated publicly that their plan is to go after immigrants first, opposition leaders second. Numerically, these are two small categories, relatively speaking.
The first question is, what about the third and fourth categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process) and which?
The second question is, how would they go about identifying them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have been designed for this goal?
Trump has said "build the wall" and then did not. Trump has said "lock her (Hilary Clinton) up" and then made no single attempt.
The Biden administration on the other hand said nothing and then spent the next four years to actually lock Trump up.
The Biden administration had authoritarian, Russian style COVID policies.
Watch what they do and not what they say.
> The Biden administration had authoritarian, Russian style COVID policies.
During the pandemic I read various descriptions of what disease outbreaks were like during various times. Including descriptions of the plague of 1665. What is interesting is that the approach to managing outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases hasn't really changed that much. Because we discovered relatively early on what helps. (Though we no longer nail houses shut with infected people inside them and post armed guards outside).
What policies would you suggest to manage outbreaks of infectious diseases? How many deaths do you think is acceptable? Can you pick a number?
It will be interesting to see what happens during the next pandemic. Because there will be pandemics in the future. Do you think that a population disinclined to act cautiously in a situation where correct information will be scarce for months, possibly years, is a good thing or do you think it might represent a problem.
The most sinister thing a government could possibly do would be to do as little as possible and just accept loss of human life.
Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct. The virus was still there and does not care about presidential edicts and speeches.
Given the the world still exists, I think the pre-2022 policies were a gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in the Soviet Union.
> Either the lockdown policy before March 2022 was correct or the sudden "back to normal" after March 2022 was correct
It's also possible that both instituting a lockdown and subsequently removing that lockdown were both essentially correct. While I believe the government waited far too long to remove lockdown restrictions I don't think instituting them in the first place was the wrong decision.
You should really take into account the advent of COVID vaccines, the evolution of the disease (it appears that less lethal variants), and how human immunology works (people create antibodies if they survive the first round of a disease).
There's a tendency amongst folks who have strong opinions on covid measures to create false dichotomies and ignore how context changed over time. Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.
"1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things."
please tell us something
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular.
Is that really any different in 2024?
lol no, it's worse... now they're building autopilot for military drones
Is HackerNews losing it's cynical touch?
To me, the purpose of a 'flat hierarchy' and this internal 'status game' are obvious - clandestine operation.
* Lots of projects, most of them 'clean'
* Nobody truly knows what everyone is working on. The competitive nature of internal politics makes sure there is plenty of rumor and gossip going around. What do you expect from a highschool popularity real-life mmorpg?
* It moves the benefit of compromising your morals right to your doorstep as an individual engineer. Work at Meta or Google and you can make your fuss about privacy and whatever else you feel they did wrong that week and feel like you're doing the right thing but still take home the big bucks. Work at Palantir and you're soon desperate to elevate your status. Oh and it so happens there's plenty of shady data analysis requests to go around and oh wouldn't you know it all the data you could ever want.
* All this talk about:
> Being a successful FDE required an unusual sensitivity to social context – what you really had to do was partner with your corporate (or government) counterparts at the highest level and gain their trust, which often required playing political games.
Why is 'social context' so unusually important? Your customers can't actually explicitly tell you what they want. Why not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
In Section 6, the author attempts to assess Palantir's moral standing, but the chosen categories—"neutral/good/gray"—reflect a biased framework. A more objective classification, like "neutral/good/bad," would have been more appropriate. This subtle shift raises questions about the methodology used to evaluate the company's ethical impact.
The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.
They are "difficult/thorny" questions only if you want them to be like that. "Health insurance companies make difficult decisions all the time" a.k.a. do we screw up our clients manually or through AI?
Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ? I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.
A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies have data that lives in separate databases and they can't easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against all their data, and make connections and correlations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously siloed.
One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard to do because the database of prescription purchases was disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my experience this is the actual hard work of producing something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS resellers will never be able to deliver on.
It’s also something you’ll never do in-house because there’s too many politics involved in getting everyone to give up their data.
Then when the CEO hires Palantir suddenly everyone has to.
Yes, it is very hard. But does Palantir succeed? Or do they like some other companies just trick customers with big wallets to buy?
My sense working at an adjacent company and having talked with folks there is that they are more successful with their government projects than their corporate ones.
We used them at a bulge bracket investment bank and they failed miserably...
The impression I get from their involvement at one company I know of is that it’s very much the latter. I was pretty surprised to see them behaving and performing about the same as any parasitic enterprise software vendor with an integration services arm. One wonders how different they really are, and if maybe they just have very good PR and marketing.
Chalk it up as yet another case of some famous one-would-suppose impressive entity, or strata of a company hierarchy, or whatever, turning out to be pretty average, or even below average. You’d think I’d stop being surprised by now.
Then again, maybe I was just seeing their B-team.
To me it seems they do https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2) DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3 together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and typically not empowered to build anything.
You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to share a common plight.
In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on credit when non-Data teams report big wins.
Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate data sources, and they can avoid blame by being hired by executives as an external third party.
This is exactly what I thought TFA was getting at when it brought up politics being a problem at companies and in sectors Palantir engages with, but instead it went a much more general direction.
He talks about it a little:
> Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the gatekeepers to that data source, and they typically justify their existence in a corporation by being the gatekeepers of that data source (and, often, providing analyses of that data). [3] This politics can be a formidable obstacle to overcome, and in some cases led to hilarious outcomes – you’d have a company buying an 8-12 week pilot, and we’d spend all 8-12 weeks just getting data access, and the final week scrambling to have something to demo.
I think he's seen more companies without talented Data experts than companies with that talent.
This makes it sound like their actual product is to be a bureaucratic/departmental door rammer?
Because the ostensible product, at least in the ‘pilot’, produced in just a single week, seems like it is pretty much guaranteed to be bad.
Huh, I feel like we have the opposite issue. We have all those teams and I’m not sure what they’re actually doing.
They should help the business with the evidence to make all kinds of decisions, and in a platform-team kind of way help you self serve data needed to make decisions in your team.
So basically data warehousing, and making it possible to do joins?
Super boring, but super important stuff, which I've seen neglected at far too many places I've worked.
Sounds like data engineering with a dash of ML.
This all just sounds like any other consulting company, really?
So it’s hygiene and structure
That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the example I gave above, you could plot the prescription purchases on a map and see that people were driving along the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate. Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating it's a pharmacy.
I used it quite a bit early on during military operations. The ability to see the timing component was key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but you could play the timeframe of records, work out the timing so you knew the order in which they visited the locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I wonder how long before it’s standard practice to track all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9 grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd protests. I’m sure an archive of that exists somewhere on a LE server.
nsa is storing everything
Visualization is a fancy package. Nobody looks at visualizations, but that's what makes people buy.
I’ve known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on fake, fancy “war rooms” they staff with people doing nothing useful, filled with “big board” style maps and shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren’t used anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting CEO through, let them pretend what they’re involved in is way cooler and more interesting and important than it really is, and I guess that assists sales so much that such endeavors make way more money than they cost.
I connect this with comments I heard from several major management consulting firm folks stating bluntly that the best way to communicate effectively with execs is to approach them like young children.
Life is super weird. Who knew imaginative play would be such a big thing for “serious” adults? I’d never have imagined, but it’s kinda everywhere.
IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make connections between separate data sets. You're not just ingesting data about purchasing information and drug convictions and so on, you're getting automatic relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and being able to automatically give you a view where those three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to go through every data set and manually map each field to each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.
I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was explained to me originally.
That makes sense and sounds really useful
Building a panopticon is always justified as a way to fight crime and then becomes a way to control the population. Tracking women getting Plan B, tracking people buying birth control, etc.
This is a good post to explain the value proposition. It sounds like "Big Data" from the 1990s, but a very good salesperson was able to infiltrate some US gov orgs to sell the idea.
So if they are dumping data out of old crufty databases and into Palantir's datastore, which one is the active database going forward? In 2024.
All of them, plus whatever next vendor they “migrate” to in three years (I’m being generous).
They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.
One is described well in the article, originally aimed at commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN, not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3 describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software. The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for 90% of software in their price range.
I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning, quality check and automation easy. After all the data is ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.
Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more benefit and locked-in they are.
It certainly sounds like they've created an excellent product both for its value to the customer as well as value to their shareholders.
That's what companies should all be built and optimized to do. That's what it's about.
"End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold claim from a single service provider.
Here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ
Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
> Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically integrated data providers" space.
It is both very self service and not very self service. That's why they employ the FDE model from the article, to actually ingrain it into the client company to the point that it becomes self service.
It's extremely hard to build such a product from scratch and have it actually be good, that's why there's no competitors. Especially providing the finely grained security controls that the article talks about, and have the platform be secure. There's a reason their security team wins the biggest CTFs half the time.
It is completely self service by now. I have my own stack for testing purposes. Of course if you want to deploy this to an enterprise things will differ, but that is the same for Snowflake, Databricks etc.
RAG?
Retrieval Augmented Generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation
Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your specific use case.
They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling.
Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system. Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional large-scale operations.
Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on Palantir's platform and benefit from their security infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with the foundations handled for you. While the product just launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time. From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to save lots of it.
> Now is the perfect time
The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up.
Palantir... Not so much
The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?
> Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model
AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.
WITCH?
Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. i.e. "large tech consulting companies" if you're feeling generous, "body shops" if you're not.
I was curious too; here's an HN link spelling it out and discussing in context of working there:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
WITCH!!
The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost tripled.
It’s quite expensive now.
I would encourage you to do your own research.
For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market understanding. HN passed on META at $100.
I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish there was a way to create a “subreddit “ here without all the Reddit noise.
One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year
HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it’s rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as well.
There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
Common sense gets in the way of gamblers instinct.
It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these large govt contracts first in their space wins.
They're like Oracle in that they focus their sales activity on the untouchable managers of managers, but their focus is on data integration and data analytics.
your own private digital cia, for hire to the highest bidder.
Palantir seems more Mechanical Turk-like than amazing tech. In my observations they could do some interesting things with data but there was no real secret sauce to dealing with the usual messyness of real world data beyond just deploying manual labor to sort it out and then do interesting, but ultimately pedestrian, analysis.
Struck me as not that different from many other consulting type engagements: It’s not something a company couldn’t just do on their own if they wanted but companies just choose to pay someone else to do a bunch of grunt work under the guise of some hand-wavy special expertise and IP.
It would be hard for, to pick a random large company like Coca-Cola, to hire a whole bunch of top school CS grads. Their IT team will always be less attractive as a job than working at a company whose whole focus is IT, and so giving the choice, people will prefer to work at a company that makes computer programming its central focus, and pays better than Coca Cola does, and gives them more freedom than Coca Cola does. This is the whole "be a profit center, not a cost center" issue in the corporate world (1). So it would actually be hard for someone like Coca Cola to build a team similar to one that Palantir can provide. This is also how McKinsey etc. work: a top Harvard Business School graduate doesn't want to get hired by Signet Jewelers, selling retail jewelry in shopping malls, but if they get hired by McKinsey to work on the Signet Jewelers contract then everyone is happy.
1: For Coca Cola paying salaries for computer people is a cost that gets in the way of their real business of selling beverages; for someone like Palantir having good computer people produces profit, that is the real business. This is always going to trickle down to the work conditions, pay, etc.
“ This ended up helping to drive the A350 manufacturing surge and successfully 4x’ing the pace of manufacturing while keeping Airbus’s high standards of quality.” come on…
Wow, this is a great article. I had no idea what Palantir did these past 10 years, but after reading this article I can say they had amazing direction.
Sounds like a modern version of an consultancy company but with a significant focus on data rather than business processes.
TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a product.
Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into the space.
It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec says no, I just want my reports.
Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the rewards.
It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g. worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the gov side of things.
Yeah, I was there from 2013-2016. I got to use a few of the products that would eventually turn into Foundary. I've actually hung out with the author a couple of times (I was on the AirBus deployment as well as in the building right next to the healthcare team for a while, though we didn't actually interact on any deployments).
Going for operation use cases was a huge win. Once novel data existed in the system (rather than just transforms of existing data), it became a lot harder to rip out. That could be as simple as having someone merge records so you know that two companies are actually the same.
Foundry was a really interesting case because it was basically an enterprise ETL platform before those became very popular + a team of people who helped you get data into it. One of the genius things about the business model was that it operated like a consultancy, but built contracts like a product company. That allowed them to charge based on the value provided rather than hours worked, then pull the best lessons from the deployment back into the main product.
Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale".
https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Essentially their competitive advantage is having access to these companies. You can't just show up at Airbus and propose to build them a system for their data flows. Palantir does that and charges multiples of the market rate.
If you want to pick winners, look for companies that hire connected companies.
In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they would have hired Palantir.
This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving hard engineering problems.
> Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance.
Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent over a barrel by the contractors.
TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to write software for them, what non-political signal do they have to separate the sheep from the goats?
Hire internal software folks who can judge the signals better?
This is what the USDS is slowly but surely accomplishing. It's just a hell of a beast to tackle.
This is an unexpectedly excellent article and incredibly well written.
It is crazy how much misinformation is being spread here.
1. Palantir does more than government work. They have 3 core products:
- Gotham fka PG, used by government agencies for Intel and Mission Planning. Used to extract information from unstructured data, geographical analysis and much more. Just look up Meta Constellation
- Foundry, their commercial big data product, kind of comparable to Databricks or MS Fabric, but much more capable. You can build no code applications on top of your semantic layer (ontology) and even write back to the source systems (ERP).
- Apollo, their deployment product. Haven't used it and I don't know if they are really selling it or just advertising. They are using it internally very heavily though.
2. Palantirs commercial products are not a secret. There are tons of videos out there, the docs are public, you can even sign up for Foundry and use it immediately.
3. Palantirs commercial side of business is bigger than its governmental today.
4. Foundry is NOT "basically Grafana". As I said before, just watch some videos
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and surveillance.
So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants.
I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
> You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs.
To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.
>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff.
When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems?
Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
I think based on your last sentence:
> Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
It's important to say which country you're residing in now.
You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushback
Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few options other than speculation if one is obligated to form a conclusion on the matter.
All deliberate actions to achieve certain outcomes are "force", it is a scale not a binary option.
I am skeptical, let's run an experiment and see what the response is:
Is feeding the homeless so they are not hungry "force"?
Is lending a compassionate ear to someone suffering so they may feel a bit better "force"?
Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"?
What's the opportunity cost on watching a movie with a sandwich over 'continuing research to help cure cancer?'
You're forcing people to endure cancer while enjoying a sandwich and a movie.
>Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"?
To the chicken, turkey, pig, or cow that died to make the meat in your sandwich, definitely yes.
the mental gymnastics it took to write this hot take must be "force" too
We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules.
The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a joke in poor taste.
You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning awful consequences for the whole world.
>You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy.
All complaints, no solutions. Typical.
So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
That's like telling a woman with a beating husband that it's better to stay with him because the other men are worse.
If you live in a world where it simply isn't possible for some reason for the woman to not have a husband at all, it makes perfect sense.
I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by the US.
Thats one example, there are many others.
In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something.
We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state.
> It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared.
You've misread the situation. I don't think it would be global peace and harmony if we stopped playing world police. I simply do not care. It's not our responsibility to take care of other countries while we have serious problems at home that are going ignored.
Kissinger set out for a policy that prioritized stability, communication, and mutual understanding of each others' desires to live their own lives.
If we do not "take care" of other countries (as in stop being world police, stop assisting in their problems like Clinton did with Ireland's Troubles, etc...) we would have their problems at our doorstep.
Also, there is definitely a subset of Americans that cannot stand by living well when others aren't, just because they other people were born elsewhere. This applies on all levels: Country, State, County, City, Neighborhood, block, house, etc.
What are you smoking? Have you not seen the list of all the governments that have been "removed" by the US? Most recently Pakistan which was a year ago
[1]:https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
> It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
What is the relevance of this to the content of the comment you are replying to?
Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME.
This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption and little chance to turn things around because of entrenched interests.
I can just picture the thought process going in your head(and many others) right now. If you hate it so much why dont you leave.
> Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME
America benefited greatly from this position though, it's just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
I think there's some clarification that needs to happen, though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable interpretation, the US remains an important trading, industrial, technological, and educational world power. Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical influence allows for many strategies.
Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed. Which means access to the foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since the political forces trying to bring that about are also not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and education".
The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
What do you mean by "post-WW2 world order", in this case? Without that, it's hard to even make claims about what happens when the US stops "enforcing it" with. Does the US simply stop pouring in development aid into countries? Does it stop attracting world-class talent into research institutions, and eventually industries? Does it stop having significant heft in trade negotiations because of that?
On one hand, there are specific things that the US _could_ stop doing: not selling arms left and right, and bombing third countries. Maybe you might not call that a meaningful change in the "post-WW2 world order" – but we'd argue that's the case, since it has been a consistent feature of the post-WW2 world order.
It's also a very big leap to assume that the middle class of any country would suffer after whatever is assumed here happens. Why would you assume that Russia and China not be interested in that? Moreover, why would you assume that Russia and China would _not_ want "trading, industry, technology and education" in the absence of great power competition?
>Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed.
The US isn't going anywhere. In fact China has serious structural problems that may make all this conversation pointless. But there needs to be some sort of pathway for the global south to move forward. If that involves having China rise up and then countries accepting that all they can do is play the US and China off of each other to get the best deals out of them then thats still a step forward. If climate change comes to pass it may not even matter. The US and the West is the cause for the majority of the historical pollution yet its the unprepared global south that will bear the worst brunt of climate change. So the best I am advocating for is that the global south take one step forward and hope they don't end up five steps backwards in the long run.
>The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
As to improving the middle class, we need to understand the structural reasons why they are sinking. Decades of erosion to US institutions has led to a situation that can only change if things get really bad and the citizens really demand change..or the US elite are challenged with some real competition. I dont see how it can happen naturally in the US anymore. Every time people get fed up, there is a "release valve" or a distraction in the form of crumbs offered to people so that enough settle down or fixate on something else. We saw it after the "Occupy Wall Street Protests" with the beginning of the culture wars as well as the passing of Obamacare which eliminated the most barbaric provisions of health care in the US. It is not meaningful change but it calmed people down. This method will lead to decades of the elite retaining their leverage. I dont want to see my life pass before my eyes and no real reform ends up happening.
In terms of the second method of having the elite being challenged, We saw in the cold war how the US system had to prove itself and that led to a strong taxation on the wealthy, good institutions, positive movement for the middle class, all to show the Russians that the US led system is the best. There currently is no forcing function to return to that situation at this time.
> We saw in the cold war how the US system had to prove itself and that led to a strong taxation on the wealthy, good institutions, positive movement for the middle class, all to show the Russians that the US led system is the best.
I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the message of Russian propaganda including its American extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
>I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the message of Russian propaganda including its American extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
Uh did I say anything of the sort?
When the Cold War was going on the communist system was initially out producing and out maneuvering the US but eventually the fallacy of a communist (and subsequently fascist takeover of the government) made it inevitable that it was going to fail.
However during this fight between the two powers, the US saw great advances in the prosperity and rights of its middle class. As the USSR started to fall, we saw the beginnings of corporate takeover of all layers of the US government and it really accelerated after the USSR fell. You are making this argument that the US had it so good while ignoring how it got so good and also failing to acknowledge why it has declined so much over the last few decades. If you don't buy my argument then I challenge you to provide an alternative explanation.
I am partial to that argument, at least in the interwar period the US masses and intelligentsia were enamored with the USSR for it was new and the atrocities were not widely known, so we got the New Deal. I don't think that applies to the post-WW2 period and the fact that the US was the only industrial nation left unscathed was the real prosperity driver.
But it is all moot in the world of today where the US competitors are not providing alternatives for people to strive for. Russian propaganda of "everything sucks" works wonders to keep Russians docile and it will work wonders to keep the US middle class down as well, ending Pax Americana will do nothing to change that.
>It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
This was explained in the other post which I will reproduce here:
"looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something.
We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state."
We saw the best of the US system during the cold war. The system had to prove itself. Im not advocating for communism nor Chinese style fascism just more competition.
The third world is already taking advantage of this situation. Nearly every country in the global south has been negatively damaged by the US or Europe at some point. They don't have many options other than to tough it out and hopes the West leaves them with whatever scraps they can get by. If they got too powerful, then the West topples them over. See Pakistan or Bolivia as a recent example. Now China has entered the scene and it has provided the ability for countries to start playing the US and China off of each other to see what they can get out of both countries. Djibouti and its military bases is a small example but we see it with countries like Brazil and Pakistan as well.
How would this help the middle class in the US? Well if the elite in the US start to think they will lose out they will start to enact change that will bring the middle class up to snuff in order to better compete...and lets be honest for a moment, whatever they say goes.
If you believe that the progress is achieved when the masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating condition of the American middle class will naturally help it. What's the point in this accelerationism with allies as casualties then?
>If you believe that the progress is achieved when the masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating condition of the American middle class will naturally help it.
Thats what we have seen historically. People always demand improvements. The leadership of this country hasn't actually done it until they really have a pissed off populace at their doorstep. I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the historical precedent.
>What's the point in this accelerationism with allies as casualties then?
Americans should be first in line when it comes to who the government serves but if you just look at the US government's actions vs other governments in the west, the US government clearly does not have their citizens interests first and foremost.
Think of all the rights and regulations the EU(or hell even many third world countries) have vs the US.
It manifests itself in so many ways:
Some easy examples demonstrating small issues as well as big ones:
1. EU countries mandate physical addresses for VOIP number registration. US spends years not implementing its half assed regulations Result: Americans are drowning in spam calls
2. EU negotiates drug prices as a government and refuses to pay more than a specific %. Companies would rather get something vs nothing from the EU market. US despite being the largest market, refuses to negotiate as a government even though they have a universal health program(for seniors only but thats a different issue). Result: American made drugs are sometimes up to 10x more expensive in the US than elsewhere. A vial of insulin in EU: ~9$ USA: ~99$
3. US sends its Navy to patrol world seas, ensuring flow of goods. Result: EU does not meet required 2% of NATO spending and instead funnels that money into social services like subsidized colleges. Result: US citizens either drown with a lifetimes worth of college debt or take a chance in the Military for subsidized college after giving up 4+ years of their young adult life serving their military contract while EU citizens graduate debt free and take a gap year traveling instead.
I can go on for literal dozens of examples. I specifically chose to go from small to big to show that the problem is systemic and permeates all aspects of American life. In many ways the American system is one giant scam and they only people benefiting are people who have managed to survive in the upper echelons of the income stratosphere or are foreigners.
If the US changed its focus to be more inward, it can focus on rebuilding manufacturing which would increase jobs availability and give more power to workers which would lead to other rights for the common man such as demanding more from the government to help US peoples among many other examples.
> the US government clearly does not have their citizens interests first and foremost
I disagree, Americans just vote for that. Yes, we can talk all day long about the two party system, winner takes all, the electoral college and unfairness of everything being decided on the margins, but when the rubber hits the road, talk is cheap, action is what matters and a solid half of Americans has been consistently voting for the US government to put the interests of rich people first. The US as a whole is a beneficiary of globalism and it's on the Americans to decide how to distribute the gains, allies are not at fault.
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems?
Reminds me of this scene in Wag the Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y
"The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be prepared."
I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming algorithm YouTube uses with its comments.
(Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)
"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle
What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?
I’m saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they are upfront about their association. In contrast you have what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are in fact gray areas.
You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service.
So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.
> Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas
I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.
Factually untrue.
I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough.
> The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well.
About "sin" industries:
> "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.
Julian,
I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument.
However—please—there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims.
You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.
Sounded fine to me.
I find the disdain for LLM's somewhat troubling when they they are easily in the top 1% of commenters on most subjects.
Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself.
I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.
This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here.
Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources."
I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice).
I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task."
The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.
I feel you.
The cost of defending a reasonable sentiment on the internet always outweighs the benefits...because whether there are "winners" in online arguments is questionable.
It takes a lot of forbearance to express an opinion, an observation, an anecdote or provide even objective information, and move on. Or, turn the 15–20 minutes into an entire weekend; researching, analyzing, drafting, revising and publishing a report to substantiate the claims for the next guy (and for the AI scraper bots who will use for work to support the argument of the next guy).
I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
I can't help but be a little skeptical because both my wife and I have worked in either the military itself or on military technology for most of our adult lives, and while we live comfortably and have no complaints, the pay is nowhere near what you'd get in finance or ad tech or most successful B2C web companies. Quite to the contrary, rather than being compensated for the stigma, there is no stigma. Outside of comments section bubbles, the US military is a widely respected institution and the people holding these kinds of jobs have great pride in their missions and willingly accept less money to work on something they care about and believe in.
I can't comment on porn and drugs, which seem quite different.
> I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you, then citing it as if it's the only authority out there and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But I commend his honesty in general.
ChatGPT is not a valid source to substantiate a claim.
It’s veiled spam and i don’t know why HN isn’t outright prohibiting it
What sources do suggest as superior?
Almost all tech acts as surveillance. Anything that records an IP address or GEO data is surveillance.
This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020: https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
The age old tale of “libertarians” getting filthy rich on taxpayer dollars.
That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't deny it.
If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.
It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the globe attract the 'right' candidates.
This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on government contracts to run surveillance for governments.
This is the first article on Palantir I've found that's refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a success.
Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.
As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well, but also interact and sell to customers.
I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle along with deep technical talent in the same individual.
So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to do this with their FDEs!
Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum. Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in kindergarten.
> These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun. This, it turned out, was an inheritance from the Paypal mafia.
Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.
100 mile bike rides are awesome. So is reading philosophy. Competition can be fun and motivating. Experimenting with weird diets can be fantastic exploration.
Fuck Palantir. Not because sometimes they act like human beings, but because sometimes they don't.
The worst attitude fta by far was the "Well at least we're at the table" justification. Weak rationalization presented as rationality; a thin veneer over "might makes right". "Gray areas" - yeah okay buddy.
I think you've hit the rationalist nail on the head. They look thoughtful and intellectually honest but in reality they're just kit bashing philosophy to paper over absolutely insane biases and political positions. You don't see any of them espousing leftist/egalitarian views, they're always sitting around thinking "this ethnic cleansing makes me feel good, how can I justify my participation?"
I have been directly involved in deals involving Palantir and I can say that their sales force, at least in Europe, is sociopathic. They play very dirty, both with their customers and amongst themselves. On top of that, I'm not particularly impressed with their software, which they charge way too much money for. It's data aggregation and visualization, gimme a break.
There is no grey area working for a company like Palantir. Palantir is as IBM was during the Holocaust.
Apartheid Israel has used the American military industrial complex and companies like Palantir to kill a majority of civilians in Apartheid Israel's genocide in Gaza. 65% killed have been women and children; 50 children a day killed since Oct 7th. 2% of the population have been culled. And all this to stay and make money in a lucrative market.
If you listen to Peter Thiel, he uses the same propaganda talking points that Apartheid Israel uses. There is zero morality supporting or working for companies like Palantir or people like Peter Thiel.
There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before he finally put together a sentence where he said something like "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back.
Twitter has since had the videos wiped, but I'm sure they're still out there somewhere. I've seen other people like Zuckerberg dodge questions, but I've never seen a man with such wealth and power suddenly become so completely terrified.
Link to the interview https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8
That's Peter Thiel's normal demeanor. He stutters and talks awkwardly about every topic
Thanks for the link. Peter Thiel did not seem terrified at all. Surprised by the question? Maybe. It took him some time to find his words but I think the final point he made is valid (and he also had a bit of humor. Kinda the opposite of terrified)
I have seen the same from Marc Andreessen. They do not know the Faustian bargain they have struck. It will consume their very souls.
What does it have to do with Faust? Israel is not a superhuman thing of any kind, and it doesn't possess superhuman knowledge.
Peter Thiel is enriching himself, fully aware that he's participating in ethnic cleansing, violence, and mass murder. If you see the video in the sibling comment, it's clear that he knows the evil he's working for, he is trading in the suffering of humanity for his own profit. And he knows we know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal_with_the_Devil
You, too, don't appear to understand what the Faustian is about specifically. Guys, you should read up on something other than Wikipedia, & not embarrass yourself with dimwit attempts at allegory.
Allow me to suggest Faust by Goethe!
It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support neither side.)
Having said that:
65% killed being women and children is because of the demographics of Gaza, not because of any specific behaviour by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours.
It's a talking point used by a people supporting one of the two sides, blithely ignoring the realities of a complex situation.
The reality is that 50% of Gaza's adult population if female, and nearly 50% of their population is below the age of 18! In other words, their population is 75% "women and children".
In any other war, that 65% statistic would be a sign of deliberate and malicious targetting of innocent non-combatants. In the Gaza war it is the sad but usual level of collateral damage that one might expect in urban fighting. Not to mention that this number would be even lower, but is as high as it is because of human-shield tactics used by HAMAS.
The people that use this 65% statistic often do so with the knowledge that people listening to it don't know the demographics of Gaza or the vile actions of HAMAS. They're trying to convince those listening through deception. Their cause may be just in their eyes, but does that justify this kind of false debate? It's in the same category as claiming 500 people died when "Isreal bombed a hospital" mere minutes after the incident, which turned out to be a failed HAMAS rocket that landed in the parking lot and killed maybe half a dozen people.
Yes, what Isreal is doing is bad, but not "murdering women and babies on purpose" bad!
You appear to be making the case that the 65% statistic of Gazans killed by Israel shouldn't be alarming since it merely is converging on the demographic makeup of the population.
I'd argue that it is very alarming when military casualties converge on the general populations demographics and not the demographics of actual combatants.
All I'm saying is that if any other country attacked Gaza using any normal means of war, they'd end up with the same statistic. Israel is not doing anything out of the ordinary for war. The statistics you quoted is a side-effect of Gaza's demographics.
Note that I don't condone Israel's actions in Gaza. I'm just saying that those actions are no worse than one would expect, but this statistic is purposefully deceptive and is being trumpeted across the Internet specifically to make Israel look worse than they are actually acting.
You support one of the two sides above the other. That's your right. But please don't support them through chosen talking points intended to deceive the audience.
PS: One of the two sides in this war targeted civilians on purpose and failed at doing so. The other site targeted combatants and failed at doing so. Which would you say is the more superior position?
Just based on your comment, I can promise you I have payed attention to the conflict less than you and have less of a 'dog in the fight' in terms of supporting a side. I just noticed your comment begging the question regarding mortalities that reflect makeup of a civilian population being the null case in urban warfare that needs no explanation.
It's a positive claim that requires empirical support, which you aren't providing.
A quick squiz would suggest this women+children death toll is the greatest in some time by some margin, despite some quite bloody and urbanised conflicts in recent years [1]. Perhaps you have justified knowledge that this case is different than any other or just better-documented, and the deaths are unavoidable insofar as urban warfare is to be conducted.
But even if it is the case that urban warfare should be expected to be conducted quite inefficiently (to the point that combatants are successfully targeted at a rate barely greater than random members of the population), you are also taking it as a given that conducting it at all is justified and shouldn't be alarming.
That doesn't appear to be a given by military standards of developed countries:
> Destroying an urban area to save it is not an option for commanders. The density of civilian populations in urban areas and the multidimensional nature of the environment make it more likely that even accurate attacks with precision weapons will injure noncombatants.…If collateral damage is likely to be of sufficient magnitude, it may justify avoiding urban operations, which though tactically successful, would run counter to national and strategic objectives.
United States Army and Marine Corps 2017 Manual on Urban Operations, quoted in [2]
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-and-child... [2] https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/04/27/urban-warfa...
Please re-read my statements, I’m choosing my words carefully.
Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.
In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.
Gaza has ridiculously skewed demographics with fully half of the population below the age of 18. (Don’t take my word for it, just Google it.)
Hence the civilian deaths in Gaza reflect this skewed demographics. Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!) but because fifty percent of the civilians are children!
I don’t disagree with the facts. It’s just that facts are being presented without the background detail to make Israel look insanely evil. Which they are not… they just a normal amount of evil.
> Urban conflict in general produces civilian casualties with women, men, and children dying in proportions matching the demographics.
You are begging the question still. Citation needed.
> In the Russia-vs-Ukraine war there are relatively few dead children because the demographics of both counties skews towards adults — not because of the military doctrine of either side. Children make up less than 20% of the population and hence less than 20% of the civilian deaths.
That dog won't hunt. ~58k Ukranian soldiers killed + 12k civilians = 70k total [1]. 633 Ukrainian children killed [2]. 20% of the population is children but they make up < 1% or those directly killed in the conflict. You will probably take issue with the degree of urbanisation etc., but it was your example.
> Fifty percent of civilian deaths are children not because Israel is targeting children (as if they were cartoon villains!)
I suggest you are strawmanning the argument here — I don't think Israel is actively targeting children is an accurate representation of the concerned 'side' overall (I'm sure you can find a tweet making it). But it is plain their actions are pretty indiscriminate wrt the combatant:civilian kill ratio.
> they just a normal amount of evil.
You haven't supported this claim, and its a considerable leap from 'Gaza has a pyramid-shaped age structure'. Yet, there is data available on recent urbanised conflicts and what the 'normal amount' is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
[2] https://www.savethechildren.org.au/media/media-releases/chil...
Let me simplify this for you: Do you believe that 50kg shells or 500kg bombs dropped on apartment blocks selectively kill women and children, or that they kill the people in the apartment block indiscriminately?
Because the arguments being made here are the former: that somehow the Israeli military is going out of its way to target not just civilians, but specifically an excess of women and children... or something to that effect.
Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.
Well, I think it is barbaric to drop bombs on areas where you hit such a high proportion of civilians that in the end your overall distribution of victims matches the distribution of the overall population.
So unless the distribution in age etc. of your combatants matches 100% of the distribution in the overall population, then the distribution of the victims should also not match the overall population. If it does, that is a very, very bad sign since it means that you basically mostly just kill the population so much that the killing of the combatants does not meaningfully influence the statistics. And this is a bad thing regardless which country does it.
Or let me simplify this: targeting your indiscriminate bombs indiscriminately is very bad.
Caveat: I did not check any numbers here and my comment is only based on the comments in exactly this thread. I just found your take on this very weird.
> arguments being made here
Being made where though? I google '65% of women children gaza' and among the front page of results, all but one reporting that figure do not indicate that women and children were selected for. Civilian infrastructure yes (e.g., "Israeli military has relentlessly targeted infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival." which is true, considering 14 hospitals were hit directly). The exception is the State of Palestine ("The Israeli aggression continues to target civilians in Gaza Strip" [1]), and I don't believe the wording is even incorrect — when you bomb a hospital knowing there are civilians inside (whether or not there were militants), you have targeted civilians.
> Certainly, the bare statement that 65% of the victims of the war are women and children is intended to make people think that.
Consider that is a subjective interpretation, others might find it indicates a strikingly indiscriminatory approach such that targeting is moot. That was my impression reading that figure. Let that be an answer to your initial question in the parent comment
I suspect that this is about to begin going in circles since no new arguments or evidence are being presented for your claims. So to conclude: I will reiterate that this is a matter that can be informed by empirical data, and the only data that has been provided in this thread with which we can interrogate the norms and outcomes of warfare (numbers from the example you invoked of Ukraine and other recent bloody and heavily urbanised conflicts in the Oxfam link) weighs heavily against assuming that mortalities should reflect the civilian population's demographics in a military action It strikes me as an undercooked, and insofar as it reflects reality, an appalling assumption.
Even assuming every adult male is a militant, they are killing two women/children per 1 militant. Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming: it does not matter if the goal of the dropped bombs is to preferentially kill women and children.
[1] https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4614#_edn1
> Killing that indiscriminately and ineffectively is, indeed, alarming
Oh, I agree! The problem Israel faces is that HAMAS fighters don't wear uniforms, are often under 18 years old, and uses civilian buildings for protection.
The dilemma I see as an outsider is that I honestly don't know what else could have happened after October 7th. A bunch of dominos were set up, someone knocked over one, and things unfolded along a nigh-inevitable path from there.[1]
IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault. It's like kicking a dog repeatedly. Eventually, it will bite you, but once a dog has its teeth sunk into your calf, you're not going to treat it nicely.
Let me ask you a simple question. Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done? What alternative choices do you think would have been available to you, that the people would accept? What decisions could you have made that would "stick", that wouldn't result in you being kicked out of your position of power on the 9th and replaced by someone else willing to do something horrible that is certain to result in civilian deaths? Keep in mind that to this day there are many abducted civilian Israelis being held in Gaza as hostages.
I've been thinking about this for months and I honestly can't come up with anything.
[1] Look at what the US did after 9/11! Same setup, same story, same depressing outcome.
> Pretend you're Netanyahu on October 8th. What would you have done?
Steering well clear of the greater picture and focusing just on the man himself there are a number of people, including a block of Israeli Jews, that would strongly suspect he quietly, behind closed doors, fist pumped in delight and had a moment with a few in his circle.
They'd charge he had knowingly and with forethought been inching up the pressure on Palestine for some time in order to provoke an extreme reaction that served to justify righteous overkill.
This goes to your:
> IMHO the fault is with allowing things to "get this bad" in the first place, which is mostly Israel's fault.
which I'd mostly agree with save I'd lay the blame as mostly the fault of a ruling extreme faction in Israel.
Palestine itself has also had to broadly deal with the consequences of the actions of smaller core extreme.
There’s no deception done imo.
Your argument is that it’s ok that Israel has killed this many women and kids because they’re over represented in the population.
Most people’s perspective is that you shouldn’t kill kids and women and target civilians, regardless of anything else.
And you’re ignoring the mountain of evidence of israel deliberately targeting civilians. Just the other day the times published a thorough report on israeli snipers deliberately targeting toddlers. That truth does not square with your “it’s just collateral damage” argument.
> report on israeli snipers deliberately targeting toddlers.
Link please.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-...
https://www.nytco.com/press/response-to-recent-criticisms-on...
For reference, I'm willing to accept every factual statement of the article: the doctor worked in Gaza, he saw many children with bullet wounds to the head or chest, many were single shots, etc...
A relative of mine is a nurse working in a hospital. I noticed a long time ago that her perspective on the statistics of illnesses is very skewed. She sees only very sick patients because -- duh -- she works in a hospital. Hence, she thinks every sniffle of her nephew is an emergency -- because she sees only emergency cases!
There are ~40K dead, ~100K wounded in Gaza by the war, of which half are children: about 70K child casualties of which 50K didn't die.
Parents and hospitals will prioritise children over adults. A child with multiple gunshot wounds will more than likely die on the spot and not be taken to hospital. A child with a single gunshot wound is more likely to cling to life long enough to make it into a hospital. In absolute terms, the few dozens cases mentioned in the article are just the inevitable statistics. I would be very surprised if doctors in Gaza had not treated many more such cases! I would expect a couple of hundred per hospital (there are only 32) at least.
To reiterate: None of this is in any way good, none of the children deserved any of this, and in no way is Israel innocent in the matter. It's just that it is the natural consequence of warfare in a high-density urban setting with that demo.
Mate, idk, now you’re arguing that it’s ok for toddlers to be sniped during war as long as your government claims they were “human shields”.
I literally don’t know what to say to that.
> Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024
> Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities,
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/10/un-commissio...
I can’t speak knowledgeably about the first point (I doubt many people can, fog of war and all that) but it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals to use them as human shields.
Are you telling me that Hamas deserves none of the blame?
> it is well known that Hamas set up command centres in or under hospitals
This is patently false. Israel single-handedly claimed this without any evidence other than CGI render. Think about it, ALL hospitals in Gaza has been bombed by this point, but have you ever see the actual footage of Hamas command centres?
Also pretty sure there was no Hamas involved in the case below:
> In one of the most egregious cases, the Commission investigated the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, along with her extended family, and the shelling of a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance and killing of two paramedics sent to rescue her. The Commission determined on reasonable grounds that the Israeli Army’s 162nd Division operated in the area and is responsible for killing the family of seven, shelling the ambulance and killing the two paramedics inside. This constitutes the war crimes of wilful killing and an attack against civilian objects.
Also for the first point, you can read more about it in NYT (if you have the subscription) here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/opinion/gaza-children-dea...
Some people accused it as fake, but NYT themselves had rigorously verified the evidences and found it to be true: https://www.nytco.com/press/response-to-recent-criticisms-on...
> Yes, what Isreal is doing is bad, but not "murdering women and babies on purpose" bad!
They are murdering children on purpose. Check the recent NY Times article by American doctors who worked in Gaza. Nearly all of them dealt with children shot in the head or in the chest on almost a daily basis. It is impossible to deny at this point that Israel is carrying out an extermination campaign there if not outright genocide.
I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying too. Recommended.
This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine, and I mean this in the best way possible.
But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?
Those new service sector jobs: get paid to respond to HN comments
Markets in everything.
Whats it with yellow fonts on a white background?
Thank God for reader mode.
Now that the surveillance state has won, people want to be on the winning side.
true, and disgusting.
Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know, even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you.
The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short. It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from what I heard it was hilarious.
I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive though?
In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man power and how much money? What is that compared to the resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge?
Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
It was nothing more than a handful of interns couldn't come up with in the same amount of time. Along the way they just asked obvious questions about how we used and wanted to see our data. There wasn't any magic, there was nothing new. We can make our own reports. We were told they were going to find new insights, there weren't any.
Ok. If that’s the case they failed.
Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
In other words, if you read the article I would add one more bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify palantir's work - genocide assistance.
from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-thiel-f...
""" Not only did it provide information to the US military during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10 months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on Gaza.
It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been involved in "crucial operations in Israel".
Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are “mission-tested capabilities, forged in the field” to deliver “a tactical edge - by land, air, sea and space”.
These capabilities include supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """
Not only did it provide information to the US military
Palantir can not provide information. They can give you insights into your data. They're like splunk..and equally expensive.
The war in Gaza is a moral gray area
To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument.
You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.
If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas and builds its underground infrastructure underneath civilian infrastructure, and that military enemy kills 1200 of your citizens in an attack, that creates a fair bit of moral ambiguity.
You would start by not sending them money. Unless of course you needed a justification for your political/expansionist goals.
https://archive.ph/2023.10.14-033824/https://www.haaretz.com...
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israels-own-creation/
Anyway, the idea of embedding military targets within civilian populations is also not exclusive to one side:
https://www.haaretz.com/2012-06-09/ty-article/.premium/does-...
Neither is the use of terror:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
https://web.archive.org/web/20121226235336/http://www.foreig...
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justifica...
https://www.thetorah.com/article/israels-incomplete-conquest...
sooo israel should use time travel? the situation right now is a fucked up war between two bloodthirsty groups. I dont think this is the right time to think of inventing time machines...
Evidence-free allegations of "human shields" is not an excuse to repeatedly commit mass murder.
Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The extra 99+ times represent unprovoked war crimes.
Evidence-free allegations of "human shields" is not an excuse to repeatedly commit mass murder.
Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The additional 99+ times represent indefensible war crimes.
I think by the time you’ve worked your way through more dead children than the entirety of your civilian casualties, I think you’ve lost all pretence at the moral high ground.
Do you know where the ministry of defense is located in Tel-Aviv? Right next to its biggest shopping mall, inside of which at any point you will find dozens of young soldiers wandering around in their military uniforms with automatic rifles hanging over the shoulders. I am saying this because I have been to this shopping mall many times. According to Israel's own doctrine that makes this shopping mall a legit military target, which, of course, is total bullshit. Just like the old and tired argument about "human shields" and "terrorists embedding themselves among civilians".
> If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself within civilian areas
And if you don't just claim that you do anyway and keep bombing hospitals.
Imagine the reaction to Palestinians blowing up a residential Israeli apartment building with hundreds of civilians inside and justifying it by saying they wanted to kill an IDF member inside.
If the IDF member is shooting at them from the apartment building, then it becomes a valid military target. This is very clearly spelled out in the Geneva conventions.
This is a tenuous hypothetical.
This, but the author betrays itself once it says he's fine with the clear pro-western stance. As a politically informed person coming from the global south, I cannot but denounce western colonialism that lives on up to today.
> Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
That there's a genocide in Gaza is objectively debatable. In the sense that people debate it.
That was covered in the article, a quote:
> I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative. I am sure the engineers at Palantir sleep well at night knowing they are helping achieve that goal, and I commend them for it.
Minimizing civilian casualties is a moral imperative. I am sure the engineers behind "Where's Daddy?" are losing sleep if they have any semblance of a moral conscience. Same goes for anyone who is aware of the true nature of Israel's conduct in Gaza yet still providing cover for it.
Defeating Israel is moral imperative. There was no Hamas on 1948 but they massacre people anyway. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
> The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children.[1] The attack was conducted primarily by the Irgun and Lehi, who were supported by the Haganah and Palmach.[3] The massacre was carried out despite the village having agreed to a non-aggression pact.
Another example for 20 years ago (way before October 7). Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
> An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
Netanyahu is a fascist inspired by Mussolini, all the Hamas talk is just an excuse to do ethnic cleansing and complete the settlement of Palestine. They will not stop at that, they will keep expanding into Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
People complain about cancel culture but this guy can go around saying genocide is good and absolutely nothing seems to happen to him as a consequence.
If you think the goal of defeating Hamas justifies this amount of civilian killing yiu have no moral basis to argue with.
What is the other solution?
create a separate state for palestine under the control of hamas would only legitimise them, allow them to easily get more weapons and go on another oct 7, which will again lead to the bombings currently happening.
Bombing them to death would lead to deaths of many, many women and children cuz gaza is 75% children.
You cannot have peace with hamas, only ceasefire, and even then they havnt stopped launching homemade missiles.
The most sane solution is defeating hamas, establishing a third party control over it to stabilise the region and then return it to democracy, but israel is too trigger happy to do any progress on this field and hamas wants all of israel.
You cannot have peace on the land without destroying hamas. Not even for moral reasons. Maybe there is another solution in ur mind?
My solution, if I was in charge of Israel, would simply be to NOT order the army to destroy most of Gaza and kill tens of thousands of people, and to instead just focus on preventing incursions into Israel. I would also focus on stopping Hamas missiles by using the hugely effective anti-missile system that, conveniently, already exists.
I realise that this is not a perfect solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. It has many flaws in the long term and ignores a bunch of pressing issues. But it does have the benefit of not killing tens of thousands of people, and in that way is a hell of a lot better than the bloodthirsty rampage currently happening.
sooo prolong the problem so that when you are dead, your descendants have to deal with it and you will be free of the responsibility? Do we forgive oct 7? what precedent would it set for other groups? that you can just go kill and rape people and there will be no response?
Self-defense is supposed to be proportional. If you're killing 30x as many people in "response", and most of them weren't in any way involved in the original attack, that's not justifiable.
> to instead just focus on preventing incursions into Israel.
So after Hamas invaded Israel, massacred over a thousand civilians (and they don't have the "collateral damage" excuse they just gruesomely raped and murdered people because they were apparently subhuman...) and kidnapped hundreds of others, Israel should have just said "aw-shucks.. well they won't get us next time". Really?
That would have actually been worse than the US government doing nothing after 9/11 besides introducing stricter TSA checks.
Now one might legitimately argue whether the reactions in either were necessarily that effective. But not doing anything would have been insanely absurd. You just can't except any non entirely dysfunctional government to behave that way.
It's a horrible situation.. but any suggestion or proposed alternative that wouldn't result in the destruction or significant weakening of Hamas is just not particularly useful (long-term at least).
> Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative.
In that case what do you call the Netanyahu governament strategy of propping up Hamas?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
A mistake? The Israelis didn't understand the extent to which Hamas views itself as engaged in a holy war. They (and many others, including me) thought that Hamas would prioritize building Gaza and providing services to its people over murder/kidnapping raids.
You're underestimating how valuable Hamas has been to the Israeli right. Smotrich called them an asset in 2015 for a reason, and Netanyahu said similar in 2012.
With Hamas in charge, Israel could avoid making new peace agreements or concessions by saying that there was "no partner for peace". The more violent Hamas got, the more cover Israel had for expanding settlements. And now Likud is already talking about what they'll do with all the Gaza land they're taking.
That's one theory. Another one is read the article.
The reason it matters is that under the second one Israel has no moral legitimacy, so saying things like moral imperative show how fucked up your morals are.
Them and every American taxpayer
Pretty obvious difference between choosing to work towards the goals of a genocide and being threatened to pay taxes or have your property and wages seized...
> Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. (Apparently there are cognitive benefits to this.)
Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?
Incredible cope.
> During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have about what Palantir is".
"Very intense people" -> Borderline evil sociopaths. "Things in category 3 needs to exist" mmmmh no, and reading from a "philosophy grad, rationalist heavy" that those are "morally thorny" questions tells me that he should have studied something else...
> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.
This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
> The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.
It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.
Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.
I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.
I agree with you if we're just talking about the people who work somewhere. I would say that the founders I'm referring to certainly at least partially delude themselves into believing that their intellectual prowess encompasses other realms of science, philosophy, engineering, etc. when all they did was create some software. I also do not believe for one second that these founders are actually as interesting as people have mythologized them to be.
In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.
When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”.
I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.
I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.
It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.
Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.
What was the book?
That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
Any idea what the book was?
I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors.
I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion to philanthropy. But I don't think it worked. Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos will need to wrestle with this, too, regardless of how much they "donate" to "charity". I don't envy them their positions in life.
The book was "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by McLuhan, Marshall. You can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150.
Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.
246 PE, with a $94B market cap.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/
Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.
Not every company trades on P/E. Some trade on EBITDA, others on Revenue. It's a spectrum. The more mature (code for more profitable, lower growth), the more likely it trades on P/E.
Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at here.
Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)
It's always amusing when armchair investors throw around financial metrics meant for entirely different types of companies, just to sound knowledgeable because they've heard others repeat the same lazy jargon.
Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your opinion and some links would be fine.
Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12 months).
Don't just take the average provided by something like Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write down all their estimates, take either the mean or average
Because few analysts provide quarterly estimates, you need to use annual estimates instead. But the next twelve months are going to be made of some part of 2024 plus some part of 2025. Palantir's fiscal year is 12/31/2024 so it's a bit less annoying to calculate.
Their most recently reported quarter was Q2 2024, so the next 12 months = Q3 2024 + Q4 2024 + Q1 2025 + Q2 2025[1].
Then you have to calculate enterprise value, which is easier said than done. In a nutshell, it's the total equity value + debt - cash, but there are always minor things to adjust. Equity value is the number of diluted shares outstanding[2] multiplied by today's share price. To calculate diluted shares, you will need to know the options that are outstanding on the company and use the Treasury Stock Method to assume all of the in-the-money options are exercised, with the proceeds from those options being used to buy back shares. Debt you can get from financial statements, unless the company has publicly traded debt in which case you might need to adjust for its current value rather than its book value. Cash you can simply get from financial statements, but there can be issues there too depending on how complex the company is. Add all of that together (subtract cash!) and you get Enterprise Value.
Divide Enterprise Value by NTM Revenue and you'll get a revenue multiple for this company today. But if you want to calculate what the company _should_ be worth relative to competitors, you can do the same thing for all of its competitors, then take the mean/average EV/Revenue of those comps and say "PLTR should be worth this much"
Also separately you can build a DCF if you have sufficient visibility into the future cashflows of the company.[3]
You can take some shortcuts or go even deeper in all of the above. It comes down to how much scrutiny you need for the investment you're making. Are you SAP trying to acquire Palantir? You're going to do all of the above with more detail than I explained. Are you deciding whether to rebalance a bit of your portfolio out of Palantir as an individual trader? Maybe Yahoo Finance Pro estimates are serviceable enough (I wouldn't know).
OR just find an analyst whose views on the company you happen to like and who you think is generally right and look at their multiples so you don't have to do all that legwork yourself. But you'll need to be a client at their bank to get access to their research...
----
[1] Some people like to do (days left in 2024 / 365) * FY 2024 estimates and take the remaining days to make up a year * FY 2025, but that's totally wrong for many reasons, the most obvious being that investors aren't updating their models (and thus the valuation multiples those models output) on a daily basis. There's no new news about the company every single day, so estimates should be stable over the course of the quarter.
[2] NOT from the earnings report, as that "diluted shares" for EPS means something else: to simplify, it means diluted over the course of the year rather than today, which is what we want.
[3] For fast growing companies, this is harder because you need to extrapolate all the way until you get to a year with relatively low growth cash flows in order to get to a "terminal year" for a DCF analysis, but if you're projecting 10-20 years into the future, chances are you're wrong!
Fantastic response, thank you for taking the time.
My pleasure! Wall Street likes to gatekeep this info (it's very simple math but banks charge millions for it) and there's a disheartening shortage of publicly available repositories with this knowledge (most of it can be automated, except for one-off adjustments you need to make for each company here and there for accounting reasons or out of the ordinary occurrences)
The bit I forgot to add is that you kinda have to do the reverse too, if you're valuing the company based on comparables: take their mean multiple, then apply that PLTR's forward revenue to get to some enterprise value, then subtract net debt (i.e. minus debt _plus_ cash now!) and get to equity value. Then divide by the diluted shares (you have to imply the Treasury Stock Method dilution in some somewhat circular Excel math) to get to a final dollar value per share
You can take this one step further and draw line charts over time with these multiples vs. comparables to see how the sentiment has changed for this stock (or for comparables) over time. And many other similar analyses...
Curious why this is downvoted. Crazy high PE / general valuation for a company that as far as I can tell mostly does IT consulting/contracting - sure they are in a growth sector - but still - plenty of other companies can do what they do.
As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap.
https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/
Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.
Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x, maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
> they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.
Are you saying Palantir's previous 10-Ks and 10-Qs have material misstatements of fact?
No, it's just the trading multiples derived from them that are totally wrong for the purposes of valuing the company today, because the Ks and Qs pertain to the past, which we cannot visit.
Kind of conveniently cut off the first part of the statement there. The basis of fundamental valuation, discounted cash flow analysis, looks at all cash flows, forever, into the far future until the company dies. For a sufficiently mature company, current earnings are reasonably considered a good approximation of future earnings. For a newer company that is growing rapidly and spending most of its cash on long term investments rather than current year operations, it is not. Otherwise, every new company that has no earnings yet would be worthless, or if you consider losing money to be negative earnings, you're saying they should be paying you to own them.
Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about extreme outliers.
It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are literally just noise. There are many companies with negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no sense.
To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built a very robust model based on your understanding of the company, the market in which it operates, corporate guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied forward P/E multiple is -100.0x.
The next day, you come to work and update your model based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now 100.0x.
Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.
> . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero earnings has no meaning.
Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists. Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead
This is factually incorrect. Plenty of negative P/E companies in the market with positive implied equity value.
The least objectionable defense of my argument is that many such companies are choosing to reinvest so much of their cash flows into more growth because that creates higher NPV than the alternative. If they wanted to, they could be profitable, but they choose not to be in order to be MORE profitable in the future.
Also note EPS is an accounting metric, so it's just "theoretical" stuff. It's not cash flow. These companies in general have positive operating cash flow... including PLTR
As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt about them.
But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate, monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-stench.
I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of what I had just read—a notable early one is where the author describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a series of examples that definitely read to me like performative, LARPing intellectualism… then sums that up by claiming you can’t copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism, which is what I though I was just reading a description of.
The selection of the list of people and the reason they were being mentioned, in the section you’re referring to, was another point where the piece threw me.
I wouldn’t say it changed my mind about the company, but it, uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.
> It's very powerful
If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
For all you backend engineers: It’s basically Grafana with a bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.
Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to incompetence, field conditions, or both).
The amount of manual labor doesn’t justify its market price, but because governments rarely change their vendors, there is significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their market cap.
> needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers
Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
Do they dig latrines too?
“Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
Touché
>inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning
Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?
But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
> they have 80% margin, according to the article
I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or Atlanta, now that's sexy. Even if you spend your entire work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the transaction orientation makes the division of labour a little more sensible.)
Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than Bain et al. Few in their generation dreamed of graduating college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a tech company, now that's sexy.
More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct costs" [2].)
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001321655/0...
Matt Levine had a funny similar take recently:
"You could have a model of Harvard Business School that is like:
Source: https://archive.is/8IUCA#selection-1795.0-1869.303I like this theory! And I don't think it's a cynical one either—this "laundering" could actually be really useful.
The worker gets the status and security of a tech/consulting job, while having more variety than actually working at the chemical plant, not being at the whims of their org chart, and also just the reframing probably makes it more enjoyable anyway. All the while, the important work is getting done.
I don't think it's cynical at all! I do think it's a decision-delaying choice, however, in that it treats one's work as a series of electives. The person working at the plant, gaining seniority and building deep connections is on their way to industry expertise. It's trading wealth and power for prestige. (It makes sense it's like catnip to our graduates from elite schools.)
I like the pet theory!
just quibbling on profitability. it's not ostensibly 80%, it's 80%. gross margin != "net profit" != cash flow positive, thanks to GAAP.
Compare the margins (gross, operating, net) here [0]. Observe the historical changes in cash on hand (i.e. cash flow) here [1].
They have been accruing cash-on-hand on a YoY basis since 2021Q4.
80% gross margins on 2.5B TTM revenue is really impressive.
For comparisons, Cloudflare sits around 77% (on 1.5B TTM Revenue), Salesforce around 75% (36.5B TTM revenue), Datadog around 80% (2.4B TTM revenue).
It does remain to be seen on whether they can translate that into meaningful operating margin over time. But they're well on their way [1]
[0]: https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PLTR/palantir-technolo...
[1]: https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PLTR/palantir-technolo...
I think the other side of the chemical plant job is that the salary is higher than a college grad would get from the plant itself out of college.
Nobody at the chemical would ever pay a college grad VP^h^h consultant salary to work there.
(I did stuff like this out of college - got paid hourly ~ 3x normal employee salary at non-sexy location)
Hilarious if true. Still hilarious if not.
I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been doing similar classified work.
Leaving this here for people interested in what the software actually is.
https://www.palantir.com/docs/
This is such a hilarious oversimplification.
Grafana is a better approximation. I used to say back in the day that Peter Thiel complains about no flying cars but is making a data ingesting platform with a Chart Js frontend.
So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_ work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality that seems to encompass this entire operation.
"A boring dystopia as a service."
Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to see if that helps. :|
I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was about it.
It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad™.
The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger. I'm sure the pay didn't hurt.
We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
In 2012 I was at a conference in Montreal for CS students that had Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard, bed bug registry) do the closing talk, and he was giving advice to students about what to work on. He said it out loud, "or if you want to work for evil go into the hallway and talk to the Palentir booth". It was a great moment of one man speaking truth to power in a packed room of their target audience.
> The article reveals depressing reasons why someone might choose to work for the lines of Palantir: lots of talented people working on hard problems. That's pretty much it. No problem with the business model, just intellectual hunger.
That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on?
[1] https://nabeelqu.substack.com/i/150188028/morality
> We need to teach our students...
Teach your values to your own kids, man
Pretty much every dysfunction of this society can be traced back to this attitude. Social responsibility to other people beyond your own kin is necessary to produce a society worth living in. This necessarily includes taking up the burden of teaching you the values your parents refused to teach you.
Most Computer Science and engineering curriculums include courses about professional ethics.
Students are adults. Teaching them that their choices have systemic consequences is not the same as forcing values on them. It might be factually incorrect, but it's not a value statement.
And I have no worries that the billionaires will make sure their views and values are aired and widely known, so students will be very much able to make up their own mind.
The perfect response to this kind of preaching.
I don't think it's preachy at all to say "Hey, the work you do has impacts on the wider world"
Sure! We just need more bureaucracy in universities to make sure it gets done. More useless classes to add to students’ debt loads! Jam it into tech and science classes in place of relevant teaching! And given that academia is 80%-90% left to extreme left, make sure it is way out of step with mainstream societal values!
Or we could just leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.
If you think ethics is “bureaucracy” and “useless classes”, you’re pretty loudly shouting that you needed that instruction.
The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.
You have just re-invented the priestly caste.
Do you think a civics class is a taught by a “priestly caste”? Or the ethics course in a medical or engineering program?
Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.
It's naive to think that a civics class or an ethics class is free of foundational prejudices. You suggest empowering a group of people to choose what to teach, and what not to teach, and thereby decide what constitutes "civics" or "ethics". And you advocate that this is outside of a parent's scope.
That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.
Surely you have the capability of making a distinction between doctrine established for hierarchical control and a teaching a basic system of deriving ethics or morality, with the exact intention of preventing such hierarchical control within an industry that has the power to make any extreme institutional system a reality. You've seen the effects of a generation of social media technologies and how it compared to the previous generation of internet communication such as BBS, forums, etc.
I assume you've lived long enough to witness an internet stewarded by those who place ethics or morality above purely capitalistic motivation, vs. an internet stewarded by a generation of new-age, fake-ethical "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" tech entrepreneurs.
The post I was replying to explicitly said we couldn't leave the teaching of things like ethics and morality up to parents. That's a priestly caste.
It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.
It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.
Have you taken a university level ethics course before?
They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.
This comment is a great example of a straw man argument.
> leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.
Should be, according to what doctrine? It certainly sounds like you're attempting to establish institutional moral instruction by imposing limits on when and where morality can be discussed.
Why are we allowed to teach students astronomy but not morality? Go back further and we couldn't even freely teach astronomy. Do you remember Galileo's trial for heresy? Or Socrates' condemnation to death for "corrupting the youth"? This war for teaching the ability to capably assess ethics and morality has been waging before you, I, Hacker News, universities, the internet, the printing press...
If you don't think it was right to kill Socrates for simply spreading the message of critical thinking, then you have to accept that adults can organize to teach whatever they wish at universities, assuming it doesn't run afoul of Constitutional protections.
This is a great example of the toxic individualism our society suffers from. There is no sense of community or doing what's right for the greater good because people think they always know better.
The sad thing is that there is some truth to the parent comment.
For the most part it's an accurate representation of how morals are appropriated into institutions like academia.
As important qualities like community and a shared notion of a common good in humanity are, the system as it stands will render them according to its own interests and students will exit none the wiser. Character becomes standardized into a set of "values" of an entirely different sort.
The problem is that Students inevitably become parents, and some inevitably branch out into "other institutions" professionally, espousing Moral Character® and we're left to figure out who contaminated what?
The baby or the bathwater?
who are we to hold others accountable for their actions when money is at stake?
Potentially the ones affected by the actions of those receiving the money?
If you live in the woods alone and don’t interact with society.
You should write a book about how a society composed entirely of pure-bred mercenaries outlasted all other competing civilizations on the planet. I'd be very interested in reading it.
Doesn’t the article say the OP wanted to work on meaningful problems in healthcare and bio? I don’t think what you describe sounds like that.
he wanted, but he didn't - his first deployment was for airbus. then it follows a weak ethical discussion on why working for imperialist powers "is good, actually".
> weak ethical discussion
followed by a one clause stone-throw. Irony?
So, the major democracies are imperialist powers? Do you live in a small dictatorship? If not, to be consistent with the rock you just threw, you don't pay your taxes? Do you just not take responsibility for anything? Because that's what he's arguing Palantir does.
Here's another take: since WW2 there's been a messy but semi-stable competition between the great powers expressed most visibly through a series of proxy wars near the perimeter of Russia and China. However, the competition is also expressed in the global economy, on the networks, in space, in the oceans. Turns out good people are often forced into ethically tenuous situations and in a world with 8 billion people, every one of whom has lots of opinions, there's a lot of possibility for entirely reasonable people to find themselves in life-and-death struggles.
Wolf packs defend their resources, mainly by marking their territorial boundaries but occasionally they fight. Are they unethical in doing so? Are we any different?
ah yes, invoking the age-old "wolf pack" analogy to explain the complexities of global politics—because who hasn't looked at international relations and thought, "If only we acted more like wolves marking territory"? If those are the premises (and THOSE are your premises), then no discussion about ethics is necessary indeed.
Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on higher quality ethical discussions on this topic? I've found it hard to find these, but I love reading these perspectives and dissections.
I sure don’t have any more glamorous reasons to work for the company I do.
They pay well, and that’s where the interest ends. There’s a lot of challenges in gluing CRUD together at a large enough scale, but it’s not exactly valuable to the greater world.
What a brilliant example of self-righteous post-rationalization. Maybe we all need to recalibrate our moral compasses. Yes, ethics is nuanced, but not in the case of Palantir, who directly enables the abuse of human rights on a massive scale. They are not in the grey, they are pitch black - arms dealers selling to the highest bidder[1][2]. Same as NSO but with better PR.
The minimal standard we should teach our students is to be part of the solution, not the problem, and that sitting on the fence counts as being on the side of the problem. Working for a "neutral" employer is just not good enough. There are plenty of worthwhile alternatives out there. We all should try to make the world a better place in some small way.
1. https://archive.ph/LwvMA 2. https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
This is a pretty wild claim, you're gonna need better evidence than strident rhetorical posturing to back that one up.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how your sources are relevant. [1] is written by a science fiction author, and while it outlines how palantir is trying to get into a contract with the NHS (apparently mostly by acquiring companies that already have such contracts), it doesn't say _anything_ about what palantir did (or has planned to do) that would be detrimental to the NHS. [2] merely speculated how palantir might help Ukraine defend itself from Russia. Which... Uhh... I don't see as a bad thing?
Certain situations that are likely to occur in professional settings would be suitable topics for university education. For example, doctors will encounter many challenging decisions where it's crucial to understand what past generations of medical professionals have learned from similar situations.
However, this differs from universities teaching students which business areas are more moral to work in than others. Who would have the authority to decide which businesses are more ethical? Some argue that working in the defense industry is the least ethical career choice, while others claim it would be immoral not to support a country's right to purchase weapons for self-defense. These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
> These judgments are often subjective and could be heavily influenced by individual teachers' biases.
When I taught design I ended one of my courses with a lecture and discussion on ethics, and I'd like to think I was pretty even-handed. One common issue that most young designers encounter is being asked to implement dark patterns that improve the company's profits at the expense of the end-user's well-being. The goal of that lecture was not to tell students what is right and what is wrong but to get them to think critically about the effects of their decisions on end-users, customers, society, and the planet. But those answers are different for everyone, for example in my case I was more ethically comfortable working on US military projects than projects involving advertising, social media, gambling, or other forms of psychological manipulation.
Ethics study is rarely about what decision to make, but mostly about how to make a decision. So, there's no problem with teaching ethics in the presence of defense industry.
Similarly, doctors learn medical ethics, and, of course, not every question has the "right" answer. Partially, medical (and research) ethics are about knowing what constitutes malpractice under current law, but it's also about some more general ideas (on which the law might be based) that are hard to quantify. Here's one example: during a drug research, if the interim results show that the newly suggested treatment is unambiguously better than the one given to the control group, the researcher is compelled to stop the research and just move everyone to the new drug. But, the reality is rarely so clear-cut. The researcher might not be confident in the accuracy of the intermediate results. While the average success from a particular treatment might improve, it might also worsen the situation for some outliers in the target group etc. All this would lead the researcher to the situation where they need to select between continuing and stopping the research with no clear best choice.
Maybe OP was aware of Palantir's impact on the world and was ethically OK with it. Ethics are nuanced, an by all means not universal.
Each individual has to balance between working for the corrupt system in order to extract benefits from it (otherwise the system simply kills you through starvation), and working in ways that benefit society even though the system punishes them for it. The best individual outcome results from working with the system at all times, so the problem will never be solved.
> We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.
The guy spends an entire section talking about this. Just because he has different moral opinions doesn't mean he doesn't care about morality. To quote the author:
Grey areas. By this I mean I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.
Every engineer faces a choice: you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things and basically fall into category 1. You can also go work on category 2 things like GiveDirectly or OpenPhilanthropy or whatever.
The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.
But it seems to me that ignoring category 3 entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category 3 need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?
I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus:
On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).
They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well.
I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.
This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere.
The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions. I’m betting the people who stopped the terror attacks feel good about theirs, too. Or the people who distributed medicines during the pandemic.
Even though the tide has shifted and working on these ‘thorny’ areas is now trendy, these remain relevant questions for technologists. AI is a good example – many people are uncomfortable with some of the consequences of deploying AI. Maybe AI gets used for hacking; maybe deepfakes make the world worse in all these ways; maybe it causes job losses. But there are also major benefits to AI (Dario Amodei articulates some of these well in a recent essay).
As with Palantir, working on AI probably isn’t 100% morally good, nor is it 100% evil. Not engaging with it – or calling for a pause/stop, which is a fantasy – is unlikely to be the best stance. Even if you don’t work at OpenAI or Anthropic, if you’re someone who could plausibly work in AI-related issues, you probably want to do so in some way. There are easy cases: build evals, work on alignment, work on societal resilience. But my claim here is that the grey area is worth engaging in too: work on government AI policy. Deploy AI into areas like healthcare. Sure, it’ll be difficult. Plunge in.8
When I think about the most influential people in AI today, they are almost all people in the room - whether at an AI lab, in government, or at an influential think tank. I’d rather be one of those than one of the pontificators. Sure, it’ll involve difficult decisions. But it’s better to be in the room when things happen, even if you later have to leave and sound the alarm.
I love this discussion, and I think it's critically important for people to engage with it.
However, I cannot more strongly disagree with your implicit assumption of innocence for "category 1." Facebook alone is unquestionably more harmful than Palatir, and any purely for profit entity is by necessity intentionally unanchored to any ethical foundation at all. Facebook is known for explicitly supporting genocidal regimes abroad, and for intentionally ignoring white supremacy, child abuse and domestic terrorism here in the US, all while being very explicit about not cooperating with the government agencies responsible for combatting these issues.
To that end, I would extend your thesis to the effect that people who eschew category 3 for category 1 aren't simply abdicating social responsibility, but are hypocritically engaged in substantially more socially harmful behaviors.
Sure, Palatir leads to people dying, and sometimes those people are innocent bystanders, but those actions are the result of any engagement with the public sector. Facebook is a direct progenitor of genocide abroad and fascism stateside, and is wholly untethered from either conscience or consequence. Category 1 is worse.
I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business. I'll give it a pass.
Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine: https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.
I'd be curious to understand what speciality they have that they can do drone path planning better...?
> you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news feed, all of which seem like marginally good things
lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into democratic institutions
he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net positive for society
It’s Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary “easy-to-build” application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously expensive consultants.
Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias people have against against application platforms requiring a consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are some areas where it's the right model to get things done efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to outmoded technology.
"I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of ice. "
" Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current geopolitical critiques of Palantir: https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755
Thiel knows how to get rich and I’ll give him that, however I would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or anything else outside of business strategy and even then I might limit it to stuff he’s working on in the past.
Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.
The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar international actions to claim that the global Jewish community was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust. The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden. His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of his denial of reality.
At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions", which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation, but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived "thought crimes".
So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a colonized people whose children, in the same year - months before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli occupation as they have done for decades: At least 507 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023, including at least 81 children, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians since the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording casualties in 2005. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-spik...]
Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose your land and property why would you care about the identity of your oppressor?
Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video shared across social media where he states: “We don’t hate Jews and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist him.”
Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes which the western world finds appealing.
>Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what absolute insanity.
That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a reason that book used to be handed out at US military academies. Extremely relevant essay:
https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...
Stryka’s concern for the genocide of the buggers, which might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the humanity of the “other,” is presented instead as an example of scapegoating the “other”—but in this case the other is redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about understanding the “other” are redirected from worrying about the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer, but the misunderstood victim of others’ fear and prejudice.
The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption. Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to the audience in order to justify the genocide.
Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they viewed the bombing as a model for their actions—and that is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after more than a year.
[1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go... - Israel 'undoubtedly committing genocide' says Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg
I loved the comment about Airbus
> “Asana, but for building planes”.
Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
Smartsheet.
Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is.
I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
the company was founded partly as a response to 9/11 and what Peter felt were the inevitable violations of civil liberties that would follow,
Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...