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.
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..."
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?
ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.
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.
The state needs powerful capabilities to provide credible defense. Unchecked, those capabilities can be used to reduce freedoms. The essential work is to build institutions and tools that can systematically navigate that nuance.
Personally, I think this all comes down to building high-quality democracy. The people constrain the leaders at the ballot box. The leaders constrain the institutions via policy. For a practical example, look at Sen Ron Wyden’s work.
If you care about this stuff, support things like FairVote.org
"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.
lol what? Doctorow created "enshitification" to describe rent seeking and its behaviors, and has been creating a technocratic journalist vocab since the BoingBoing days.
The point is that we tend to think of jargon creators as particularly insightful when their biases/viewpoints match our own, and annoying when they don't.
And don't forget the UK National Health Service
The first question makes no sense at all. The latter question, however, is an important one for democratic governments to tackle.
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.
Of course you can try with a local consultancy, but I wouldn’t know of any, and I assume the reason for choosing one over the other is mostly a matter of reputation.
Where it comes to organisational complexity and the barriers it creates, bear in mind that the British state is vastly more centralised than the USA. Fragmentation in the NHS was massively exacerbated by the Lansley Reforms which also forced trusts to outsource a lot of work.
"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."
No, they don't must do this. No, it's obviously not illegal to do things in-house. They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its security anything close to what Palantir has done.
(Disclaimer: I used to work there, so you can go ahead and dismiss my opinion outright, but I am responding directly to what you're saying)
While true, it also doesn’t answer legitimate concerns that the British public had that their medical data was being shared with a foreign entity that had actively participated in foreign government programmes of questionable morality.
The response to that was “all fundamental contractors have done dodgy things.”
To which you have my quoted reply. Which I’m not sure you understood at all, judging by your response.
The blog's moral stance is that GAFAMs are "neutral" or even "marginally good", because I suppose, they are, among other things, "pro-West".
I don't know which repressive country he "spent a few years in", but I am not sure why he seems more concerned by Russia and China (especially in a country under direct nuclear umbrella) than the risk of parts of the West turning repressive.
And that's not even counting the damage that they might cause outside, like Facebook's complicity in Myanmar's genocide.
Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?
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.
But what I would say is: countries have distinct cultures, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to preserve them, which implies controlling the rate of immigration from different cultures. The U.S. would be quite different if we replaced half the population with people from Iran, China, or even England. There is a happy medium.Pros and cons.
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.
low cost, low overhead, no risks due to INS rounding up your people, and no tariffs due to NAFTA.
the reason they want the in the US is to work in services to keep costs down, because overall wages have not gone up and the costs of everything domestically needs to trend down -- and that means cheap labor.
Ah that's the problem. But you're ok with the fact that your grandpa immigrated and changed the society as well?
Why?
I love the irony in this statement.
(Of which I suspect you're completely unaware)
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.
None of those dynamics contribute to higher incomes for anyone aside from bosses and investors.
But maybe exploitation of cheap labor for personal gains is what you were referring to?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
(And specifically the towns where most buildings have been destroyed and most people died or fled.)
There are situations where the situation is so manifestly bad, that a prima facie approach to granting refugee status to asylum seekers (aka "opening the floodgates") from a specific location is the kind thing to do.
We've for instance seen countries do this for Syrians in 2015, Rohingya in 2017, Ukrainians in 2022.
But of course this is only viable (among other reasons, politically) for specific groups at specific times, whereas for other groups or at other times the case-by-case treatment of asylum requests has to be done again.
BTW, looking this up I was surprised to learn that the right to asylum initially did NOT cover people fleeing war, and some countries still do not consider it a valid reason to get a refugee status, among them the USA.
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.
[1]: https://www.state.gov/assessing-the-results-of-venezuelas-pr...
There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member of the democratic party in office today in federal office supports some degree of border control, and frankly the degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most republicans want.
The GOP has successfully planted the idea that they are for a wall that lets no one through and the dems will let everyone in, but it's much more like two sides bickering over whether the wall should be 10m or 15m tall, whether or not there should be razors at the top, and exactly how many palantir/anduril terminators should be purchased for intercepting people, 1000 or 1200.
Edit: and you don't believe in global warming? Too rich!
Cooper also claims that the Holocaust happened by mistake, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to him.
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
Cooper's deliberate misreading of the Wannsee Conference is Nazi apologeticism.
"Well, they didn't really mean to commit genocide, they just whipped up public hatred, confiscated all their assets, and banned them from working! So of course they had to commit mass murder!"
Who are his sources, David fucking Irving?
And let's not get started on the pipelining of extremist views to people who would normally consider themselves moderate or centre-right and are now spouting insanity...
> 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...
your 401k is probably funding cocacola extract water from impoverished communities and then selling it back to them with sugar.
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?
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.
It was mostly ignored, worse, its impact was minimized by upper class journals, all the while hospitals were running out of space.
(So comparisons with Covid are hard to make, since the response was so different.)
The medical sector paid attention after the fact though, and supposedly the reaction to it basically created the (postmodern?) discipline of epidemiology !
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and those people have the habit of ignoring how bad things got at the start in a few countries (Italy and France come to mind, but there were others) where bodies were piling, there were military hospitals deployed in parking lots, hospitalised patients were being transported to other countries, people were dying, and there was a general lack of clarity and understanding of how to treat sick people, and importantly, lack of medical care capacity to treat them or any others (a friend had their uncle die because the ambulance took a few hours to arrive due to medical services being completely overwhelmed). Any country that looked into those countries and decided "nah, this doesn't concern us because we're better humans" was led by utterly incompetent idiots.
Did some countries overreact with their measures? Maybe, but based on the limited information available in 2020, overreaction was a better idea than doing nothing.
You could watch consent manufacturing in real time as former hardliner outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic started to insert timid opinion pieces that questioned school lockdowns and masking of children.
The Ukraine invasion may also have played an additional role in getting Western leaders focus on important things again.
If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like
It is tempting to conclude from this that you are saying immunization, through vaccines and post infection, played no role and that the situation before and after the lockdown was essentially the same in terms of risk of poor health outcomes if exposed to covid?
> Given the the world still exists,
Yes, the world where there were vaccines and lockdown. Not the alternative version where these things didn't happen.
> 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.
Two questions:
1) what precisely are you referring to when you say "comparable to what happened in the soviet union"?
2) In the face of an outbreak of a contagious disease, would you be comfortable with government not implementing any restrictions that might slow or stop the spread of disease?
Would your answer to question #2 change if the disease in question was Marburg or Ebola? If yes, why?
He also deserves to be locked up.
As for COVID policies, those were pretty universal among industrialized nations. and if you think those were Russian style I’d say you know very little about Russia (I’ve lived there so I know what I’m talking about). Our COVID policies were nothing like China — that was authoritarian.
> I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd
No need to fear missing out if you are on the gravy train.
please tell us something
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.
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.
Do you care if your code is used to kill literal children? Kidnap suspected terrorists (suspected based on detailed information such as their first name, their watch type, or them driving a car at the wrong time in the wrong place) and torture them to death? Where is your moral line?
Is everyone in Gaza a terrorist, in your opinion?
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.
- Israel Palestine. - India Pakistan. - Apartheid in South Africa. - .. anything else?
As for your line about people not knowing the history -- partially fair enough. Though that's also a propaganda line spread by Israel to keep people out of the metaphoric town hall. If you really believe that to join a movement you must first learn the entire history of all concerned parties first, shouldn't the same apply to any comments about Israel, or the US? I don't see pro-genocide commenters being told to shut up because they don't know the completely history of the Ottoman Empire.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
China might be eyeing Siberia for all its space and resources, but unlike in the modern era, the chance that they will declare war on Russia is basically nil.
It even predates nukes when you look how WW1 and WW2 had only losers (nothwithstanding those that didn't let war touch their territory, like USA). But I guess that we were too "dumb" to figure that out before nukes.
And still are, Russia is getting an example of it in Ukraine right now... speaking of, what "rules" ? Russia just went and completely ignored the Budapest memorandum (while Ukraine is regretting deeply they didn't keep at least some nukes).
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.
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.
[1]:https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
What is the relevance of this to the content of the comment you are replying to?
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"?
To the chicken, turkey, pig, or cow that died to make the meat in your sandwich, definitely yes.
I think it's kind of neat that we got from Palantir to sandwiches... I wonder if Palantir's software supports mapping metaphysical causality like this, because bizarre metaphysical causality is the root cause of war in the first place!
Do you think this is necessarily a bad thing?
You're forcing people to endure cancer while enjoying a sandwich and a movie.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
(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.)
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?
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.
So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.
I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.
“Where do you work?”
“Oh at $COMPANY.”
“I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah”
“Oh, well sorry you feel that way.”
“So how many innocent children you bombed this week?”
“Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.”
“Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…”
“Sounds about right…”
It doesn't matter what department you are in, or the neat little Ansible scripts you get to write.
The point is that we should constantly demand better of our governments and leaders, but that doesn’t require throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don’t think anyone should want to completely defund the people working on maintaining radios for EMS and 911 if they happen to work in a building next to people that spend 10% of their time making missile guidance systems
But in terms of aligning oneself with $COMPANY and its various endeavours (whatever one may make of them -- as an individual, one generally has vastly greater choice.
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 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.
Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But I commend his honesty in general.
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.
Then when the CEO hires Palantir suddenly everyone has to.
But who is going to do the heavy lift? who is going to get billed for that? who is paying for the cloud space, or licenses? absolute holy war.
no problems getting people into the data lakes, but if you want us to do anything useful with it you gotta pay / get people / get resources. but like, you want me to approve the read access or pull request? no problem, have at it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
To take a generous go at this - my guess is that they have multiple urgent issues they're dealing with at any one time, and so the cognitive bandwidth they're able to dedicate to 'random presentation number 3 for the day' is quite low
But I do agree that a lot of day-to-day work is play acting at being cooler than our actual work.
> execs is to approach them like young children.
lots of images. bright colors. no more than 3 bulletpoints per slide. no more than 4 minutes to get to the point, and be unambiguous about what and why.
I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was explained to me originally.
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.
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.
That's what companies should all be built and optimized to do. That's what it's about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already went way up.
Palantir... Not so much
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.
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.
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.
The introduction of "grey areas" as a distinct category seems to pre-emptively soften the possibility of negative judgments.
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.
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.
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...
Given the mileiu we find ourselves in on the web, this is probably hard to avoid. We're deluged with information nonstop, typically in fairly shallow small bites, often from sources with very limited and biased points of view. Doing a true deep dive to understand background and context before forming any sort of conclusion of your own is difficult, time-consuming, and contrary to human instinct, because we want to participate, and if we don't have an opinion, we feel like we can't, or at bare minimum, saying that surely won't put you at the top of an upvote-based sorting scheme.
Take this very thread. I'd heard of Palantir in the sense of hearing the name, knowing where that names comes from, and knowing it is associated with Peter Thiel. That's about all I knew of it before right now. After reading this blog and all the comments, what do I know now? A little bit more. My prior on them being part of an explicit and intentional conspiracy to abet genocide and prepare the population for an eventual authoritarian takeover in which regular people are getting jailed left and right for buying Plan B and what not is low, so I guess I tend to dismiss speculation like that. They seem to make a product for synthesizing data from sources that don't have compatible schemas and seemingly no APIs for common-format export. That was largely just manual work at first, maybe still is, but they've tried to make a product of it. Some commenters are saying it is snake oil. Some are saying it's amazing and useful. My takeaway from that is they are trying to solve a very hard problem and sometimes what they do works and sometimes it doesn't. They seemingly take on customers that are political hot potatoes and not popular with the stereotype demographic of a silicon valley workforce, more typical of the customers you'd usually see taken on by a Raytheon or Lockheed.
I guess I'm supposed to have an opinion beyond that. I don't know. My brother-in-law works for Anduril and has spent most of his time the past three years deployed to theaters of combat teaching soldiers to use drones. My wife works for Raytheon on a spy satellite orchestration that is literally named Cyberdyne and would almost certainly be considered dystopian by any average person on Hacker News that heard about it and didn't have the context of working on it for two decades. I don't believe they're evil. I was an Army officer commanding tank units in Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe I'm evil.
I'm not sure how people think we're supposed to approach subjects like this. We're going to have international conflicts and laws. They're both a part of civilization. Given that, it seems somewhat inevitable and reasonable that countries will also have military and law enforcement agencies. Balancing action with inaction, false positives with false negatives, is impossible to get right all of the time, but what is the takeaway? Should all humans everywhere refuse to work for any military or law enforcement agency? Should all businesses refuse to sell to them? Wouldn't that mean we effectively have no defense and no laws? Where is the line between acknowledging that sometimes even your own country is guilty of atrocities and overreach and simply throwing up your hands and saying we should build no weapons and have no sort of intelligence gathering activities of any kind?
I don't buy that the US or Israel is uniquely evil here and seemingly neither is Palantir simply for doing business with ICE and the IDF. I'm obviously motivated to believe that, but again, surely there is some spectrum, isn't there? If we look at say, the 20th century histories of France and Germany, there are no saints. France was an imperial power that did a lot of bad shit in Africa. They gassed protesters and have had some obvious law enforcement brutalities. But they didn't commit a holocaust and try to conquer all of Europe. I guess that's a low bar to clear, but still, should no one ever sell anything to the French military? The German military? Doesn't that again mean they wouldn't have militaries? If neither European powers nor the US had militaries, then seemingly all of Europe would currently be Soviet republics. That is surely not better than where we actually find ourselves, even if where we find ourselves isn't the best we can do.
Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services companies.
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/
Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves him.
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)
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!
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...
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
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.
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
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
Are you saying Palantir's previous 10-Ks and 10-Qs have material misstatements of fact?
Thank God for reader mode.
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".
Sounds like a fucking awful place to work.
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 the actual awful part of people like that are when they get in a position of power and preach their weirdness as The One True Way(tm). Which, unfortunately, a lot of them do. I think this stems from them having success in life without realizing it's selection bias. The result is that their own decisions are biased towards their quirks and they become pretty insufferable about it.
But, to your point and to completely contradict mine, I would bet those "One True Way" people probably are the norm at Palantir, judging by the onboarding book choices.
Is that really any different in 2024?
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. """
Palantir can not provide information. They can give you insights into your data. They're like splunk..and equally expensive.
That there's a genocide in Gaza is objectively debatable. In the sense that people debate it.
You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist values and so on.
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...
Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The extra 99+ times represent unprovoked war crimes.
Israel has already executed a proportional response to Oct 7, at least 100 times over. The additional 99+ times represent indefensible war crimes.
Nor does Israel build underground bunkers or areas to shoot rockets out of underneath civilian buildings.
And if you don't just claim that you do anyway and keep bombing hospitals.
> 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.
In that case what do you call the Netanyahu governament strategy of propping up Hamas?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
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.
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.
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?
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.
Proportionality has nothing to do with self defense.
Hamas the org was involved, and the other ones too, they are the target.
But I do agree that Israel's policies regarding air strikes are fucked up
The vast majority of the people who are killed in those strikes are not Hamas.
300 is clearly a bigger number than 40, so was the attack wrong? india used it as an excuse to kill more people than what should be considered a good proportional response!
Since that attack[and other operations], JeM and others became fairly inactive and terrorist attacks have gone down by an insane number, what used to be a daily occurrence and a reason to not attend local festival celebrations due to threat of bombs is now a rarity.
Proportionality has nothing to do with defence. Why on earth would u kill only a few terrorists as a response? Israels actions are fucked up but proportionality does not apply to defence. If a state is retaliating to a threat, why would it leave the threat alive, which would only cost lives of more of its people?
Israel's airstrike policy is bad and roof knocking is not enough, the way israel conducts war is wrong and there needs to be intervention that is able to chain israel while eliminating hamas, demilitarising palestinian jihadist groups and stabilising the region.
But proportionality has nothing to do with defence. you can be disproportional if that means the threat ceases to exist.
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).
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.
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 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.
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 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.
I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential (it’s a framework for analyzing media that makes some vague but bold claims about what constituted effective content on varying mediums for media at different points in time).
But he can be “famous” and the material can be relevant and the original point can still stand — they found something sufficiently relevant and mysterious and famous enough to point to as an external appeal to authority to justify the sale ads on the serving of visual opium to children. I don’t think that would have been McLuhan’s cup of tea, eh? But if you do it in his name, maybe it’s easier to swallow.
I’m frankly puzzled at your assertion that this is a rare, out-of-print book when it’s the top search result on Amazon for “Marshall McLuhan” and costs $31.22 in paperback: https://a.co/d/dhOl4EJ
Your claim that “you can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150” seems approximately true if you insist on only buying a first edition hardcover, which is fair enough. I don’t know what changed between the first edition and the 1994 edition currently available on Amazon. But if the Meta execs are sticklers for the first edition in particular, that’s an indication that they’re taking the ideas in the book more seriously rather than less.
> I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential
You also referred to it as “basically completely unfollow-able”. In other words, you weren’t really able to follow or grasp what McLuhan was writing. Maybe it’s not your fault and McLuhan was just writing incoherent nonsense—I can’t say either way since I haven’t read him—but this admission on your part undermines your attempts to assess the relevance of Understanding Media to Meta’s business model.
Ah, now believing to pseudoscience is a sign of great intelligence?
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.
Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. Nothing like Oracle or SAP consultants.
“Forward deployed” sounds like they’re in a FOB out in the sticks somewhere.
Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?
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...
"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.”
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.
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...
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)
https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
(And a very different kind of science fiction for a non-cop.)
"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. :|
From what I understand, their software is also responsible for deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through Russian terrain.
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.
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?
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.
That seems like a very uncharitable take. For instance, don't you think the section on morality[1] addresses this head on?
Teach your values to your own kids, man
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 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.
In terms of parents not being qualified, who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to say who is and is not qualified to instruct their own in morality? It is an entirely subjective topic and certainly should not be given over to corrupted institutions. Moreover, do you really believe folks like Elizabeth Holmes, Jeff Skilling, SBF (whose mother is a legal ethicist!!), and all the nameless, white-shoed McKinsey criminals haven't received "ethical" instruction in their coursework? And how has that panned out? SBF is a particularly great example as his mother, who you would no doubt have deemed "qualified", reared one of the worst criminals of this generation.
Let the universities focus on the efficient discovery and dissemination of truth, and discard the wasteful, useless mis-education. Fire 90% of the admins, and tie student lending to financial outcomes of students. All of the grievance studies degrees that purport to provide ethical and moral training would vaporize overnight!
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.
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.
Put another way, real engineers, doctors, scientists who work with human subjects, lawyers, finance people, etc. do not seem to have a conceptual hazard from professional ethics codes. Why would we expect software development to be so different?
It isn't. Recall the big push on DEI initiatives, quite similar to the push to remove blacklist/whitelist or master/slave in the software world. Or the guardrails put onto LLMs so they don't become antisemitic or whatever. Why was it a good thing to do? Because the priestly caste said it was, and tolerated no questions about it. You seem to be unaware of the concept of institutional capture.
And, yes, all teaching involves some sort of bias. We haven't yet created the human that is free from bias.
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.
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.
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.
In any event, the poster I replied to also included "morality" alongside "ethics", which is why I suggest it's not as cut and dried as you imply.
Parents can teach right and wrong, but they seldom teach about things like utilitarianism or hedonic treadmills.
That said, who did SBF largely derive his ethics from? His parents, at home, not at his mom's lectures. So all this does is illuminate why it's important for people to get exposed to a wider variety of opinions and ethical considerations.
> 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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
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.
I think this is important, especially in tech. Our contributions often change the world, even in little ways, but this compounds.
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.
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.
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
" Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
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.
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.
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
"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."
Here is the correct article: " 2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank" PUBLISHED: 18 Sep 2023 i.e. BEFORE OCT 7 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/2023-marks-deadliest-ye...
"18 Sept 2023 - At least 38 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far in 2023, making it the deadliest year since records began, said Save the Children."
So my argument is perfectly correct and if you had a shred of honesty you could have checked what happened before October 7 yourself to realize that my argument is perfectly correct, but you preferred to engage in your little zionist projection rant and pretend that history began on Oct 7 because that's the only way you can uphold your cognitive dissonance.
> “Asana, but for building planes”.
Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
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.
Had they truly believed they were not impotent, they wouldn't obsess over business-men.
Allow me to suggest Faust by Goethe!
The usage you are criticizing is the common understanding of the term “Faustian bargaining” but it seems that you have a better understanding and it would be nice to be better informed.
I don't know if Thiel or Andreessen ever made morally questionable decisions, and indeed I can only laugh at the notion that whatever decisions they have made would appear consequential in somebody's eyes. I find this obsession with famous men in commerce—pathetic, and ultimately indicative of a lesser mind. But to bring Goethe here—reduce great art to a tool of envy and true impotence—now, I find that deeply offensive. I say: Don't pollute the beautiful things with your petty personal politics and fixations. If the beautiful is not important to you—doesn't mean it's not important to others.
Otherwise, the Faustian in your mind might cheap-skate into uselessness when it comes to reading/understanding the truly exceptional acts.
Die Tat ist alles, nichts der Ruhm!
So because of the supernatural elements of acquiring the unattainable would you say that it is unusable as a real world metaphor or analogy?
Or is there a real life example that you believe would fall under the category of a Faustian Bargain?
I'm sure you've come across acts and thoughts like that.
If you eliminate the mundane like "power" and moneys, what remains? Well, plenty remains in fact. Imagine a scientist that would try and test dangerous experimental new drugs on themselves—to save their dying daughter—disregarding the established process, in spite of conventional wisdom. There have been cases like that, and sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they don't, but it's not the outcome that makes it interesting but the act itself; this theme is explored in the second act of Faust.
I'm personally fascinated by modern-day AI researchers who have clearly made the deal, and might as well succeed in it someday to build something truly godlike with no actual regard to the contemporary ontologies of human well-being. The poetic quality is beautiful in its simplicity: as long as the irreplaceable is bartered for the divine, the Faustian applies. The distribution of moneys as well as boring ideological presuppositions need not apply.
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!
I'd argue that it is very alarming when military casualties converge on the general populations demographics and not the demographics of actual combatants.
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?
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=4614#_edn1
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.
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.
Link please.
https://www.nytco.com/press/response-to-recent-criticisms-on...
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.
I literally don’t know what to say to that.
This -- this -- is precisely the emotion-laden but evidence-free language that I'm trying to warn people from avoiding. It doesn't help your cause (whatever it is) to misrepresent, assume, or just make things up. People will see through it and stop listening to you. I've largely stopped listening to propaganda coming from Russia and Gaza because they're both very transparently made up bullshit.
The sad thing is that at least in the case of Gaza the plain unvarnished facts are more than enough! Israel is bombing them, they are levelling large chunks of the city, they are killing tens of thousands of children, etc...
State the facts. Don't guess. Don't interpret. Don't weave a sob story based on hearsay from very highly biased people who themselves are necessarily ignorant of the facts on the ground. The doctor didn't witness the shooting, he just dealt with the aftermath.
The facts are bad enough:
Kids are being shot in huge numbers.
This just doesn't make any sense.
On one hand, it's trivially correct in that no forensic information can ever tell us anything about the intent of the person who fired the bullet.
But otherwise, what you're saying just doesn't hold up to basic common sense. First, "All bullets lodged in the body" definitely do not look "the same" -- some are fragmented or marked in ways that otherwise show signs of having passed through something besides human flesh (more suggestive of an indirect hit) while others are not (suggesting a direct hit).
The circumstances of the entrance would can also say something about the bullet's approximate velocity when it entered the body, and direction of fire. Finally, the location of the wound is itself very important - a disproportionate number of people with gunshot wounds to the head tends to suggest that, well, that's where whoever was firing at them was aiming at.
Such indications may not be sufficient to determine conclusively that someone was sniped. But they do shift the overall balance of evidence, and require us to weight our probabilties for any such interpretations of what happened accordingly (in the context of other available evidence, of course).
It isn't as if the condition of the bullet and the circumstances of the wound provide no signal at all in this regard, as you're suggesting.
You don't treat dead people in a hospital during a war. They don't get taken to hospital. You treat people "just hurt enough" to require surgery, but not so much that they definitely won't make it with or without surgery...
... such as single gunshot wounds to the head, which are surprisingly non-fatal. There's many(!) stories of people trying to kill themselves by shooting themselves in the head and failing.
The stories told by the people in the article are anecdotes by a select group with a strongly statistically biased view of the world on top of a personal bias against a literal enemy at war with them.
They're probably not wrong and they're probably not lying, they just can't see the whole picture and can't possibly know what an Israeli soldier is thinking our doing at the front line far from the hospital.
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...
Are you telling me that Hamas deserves none of the blame?
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...
The tunnels under the Al Haifa hospital were built by Israel and are widely acknowledged to exist.
Do the other hospitals have bunkers and tunnels? I doubt it. They would not be easy to add after initial construction.
> The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
> We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.
I'm not just saying this as an argument, this kind of bias in reporting from volunteers in war zones is common. There was some war in Africa where medics from Doctors Without Borders got in serious trouble because they spoke up about atrocities. If I remember correctly, some were abducted and/or killed. I do remember the head of MSF saying in an interview that they have a policy of keeping quiet because "that's what it takes to be allowed to provide services" under those conditions.
Also: "not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities".
Israel was saying that HAMAS had built tunnels under the hospitals, which doctors would not have been allowed into and would not have seen. They most probably told the truth, but that truth may just what they saw... they just didn't see the tunnels.
Last but not least: How would they know if activity was "militant"? HAMAS generally does not wear uniforms!
PS: I do think that at most one hospital might have been used as a HAMAS office... for something. Quite possibly a military medical office, coordinating care for the wounded or something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if Isreali drones saw 'x' HAMAS members walk into the hospital and hence they marked it as a "HAMAS office" based on that intelligence alone. (I always assume there's idiots on both sides of a war. It's an effective and accurate model of reality.)
If the tunnels are under the hospitals, why bomb the hospitals then? It won't destroy the tunnels. It will only destroy the hospitals.
IDK what else to say, for some reason you are eager on believing that the same Israel who invented 40 beheaded babies, and the US intelligence who lies about Iraq WMD, are somehow a beacon of truth, despite them never providing a shred of evidence.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-t-shirts-joke-about-kil...
> Israeli soldiers wore T-shirts with a pregnant woman in cross-hairs and the slogan "1 Shot 2 Kills," adding to a growing furor in the country over allegations of misconduct by troops during the Gaza war.
2009 btw
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 would expect that number to vary a lot day to day, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were at least a few days near the beginning where over 100 kids died in a 24 hour period.
"They're not killing them fast enough" does not make it not genocide.
I also think it's a bit odd to argue about the definition of the word. During this last escalation, Israel's government has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, including almost 17,000 children, and injured about 100'000 people in Gaza. Even if you come to the conclusion that this does not technically qualify as a genocide, that doesn't help any of the people living in Gaza. It doesn't help the Israelis, either, most of whom would probably prefer to live in peace.
It seems callous and pointless to look at what is currently happening and take that as an opportunity to start arguing about the definition of a word.
All of these conflicts saw large (upwards of 30% of the population) killed.
> Israeli slaughter of Arabic people living in Gaza.
Even if we trust the Palestinian government's own estimates, the death toll in Gaza has been under 2% of the population.
One of these is an order of magnitude less than the others. Furthermore, it's an incredibly inconsistent application of the term. Did we invoke the word "genocide" in the Iran-Iraq conflict? In the Syrian civil war? In the American Civil War? Was Germany a victim of "genocide" at the hands of the Allies in WWII? All of these involved proportional loss of life greater than the conflict in Gaza. I, and most people, do not regard these as genocide.
The term "genocide" apparently has a vastly different thresholds when it involves Israel.
In one year, and only counting direct deaths. By your logic, Hitler wasn't a monster in the first year or two since the beginning of the Holocaust, since not that many people had died yet, right? We should have kept selling arms to Germany, since it wasn't yet a genocide, only 2% of the population had been killed.
The government of Israel is telling everyone exactly what they are planning to do - rid Gaza of Hamas and anyone supporting them, including people "supporting Hamas" by, say, using and paying for hospitals sponsored by Hamas (as in, the government of Gaza). They are telling everyone that they believe Palestinians are collectively responsible for October 7th, not just those who did the killing, not just those who provided logistics, but all those who stood by and did nothing to stop it. They are leveling virtually every piece of infrastructure in Gaza: every single hospital in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed, every university, every high-school, most schools and kindergartens, vast swaths of apartment blocks. American doctors have spoken about how many toddlers they have seen shot in the head or chest by IDF soldiers.
Sure, it's taking a while to kill 1.5 million people. But all indications, of all kinds, from actions, to words, to assassinating peace negotiatiors, UN forces, Red Cross forces, journalists, aid workers of all kinds: Israel is making its intentions for Gaza extremely clear, and the genocide is mounting every single day.
You truly have to not want to see it to say all of these things.
And your other examples are misguided. Civil wars completely blur the line between combatants and non-combatants, so it gets much harder to distinguish bloody battles from one-sided slaughter that can amount to genocide. Even so, Syria's president has definitely been accused of war crimes, even though his actions were never so systematic to amount to genocide. In the Iran-Iraq conflict, we were on the side carrying out the aggression, and access to information about how the war was going was not that easy; even so, nothing like the systematic wide scale wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure happened, though there were clear war crimes committed during that conflict, and many who cried out against them. Germany was the aggressor in WWII; but the (mutual) carpet bombing that leveled large parts of cities and killed civilians intentionally and indiscriminately could be called genocide by today's standards, and many look back with a critical eye at Allied actions towards the end of the war (even more so in Japan, with the fire bombing of Tokyo often being called an atrocity).
And except for WWII, none of these resulted in this many casualties in so short a time frame, not even close. Especially when you consider how one-sided the slaughter in Gaza is, with Israel having almost no losses whatsoever since their invasion started, at least not from Gaza.
First of all, the war lasted for almost 8 years. In those 8 years, Iraq (the aggressor) killed approximately 200k-260k Iranians (including soldiers and civilians). In the 1980s, Iran's population was on average, say, 45 million (37 million in 1980, 52 million in 1988). So, in 8 years of war, Iraq killed 0.5% of Iran's population. Civilian casualties are estimated at 10-16k.
By the lowest estimate of deaths in Gaza, 45k, in 1 year of war, Israel has killed 2% of Gaza's population. And, according multiple sources including the UN sources cited in the Reuters article you yourself shared, likely more than a half of these are women and children, so confirmed civilians. And this is not even looking at the displacement of population, or the loss of civilian infrastructure (Iraq did not destroy every single hospital in Iran, I can tell you that much).
Your own criteria show just how much worse the genocide in Gaza is compared to those other conflicts. Please educate yourself more on the magnitude of the massacre being committed, and that we can still stop.
Now on to the case of France. In WWI, France lost ~1.4 million people directly, of which the vast majority were soldiers. The civilian population loss was less than the total killed in Gaza in this one year (40k civilians directly killed in the war). Given that many of those 1.4 million soldiers died abroad, in coordinated attacks and so on, it is very much clear that this is completely different from the genocide happening in Gaza. Plus, nothing even remotely similar to the destruction of civilian infrastructure and displacement of the civilian population happened in WWI - other things that clearly demarcate a war from a genocide.
> And what indications are this? Israel partially demobilized and scaled back military operations just a few months after the initial campaign. The majority of casualties in the last year happened the first couple months of Israel's response.
This is completely wrong, the death toll has been steadily rising every day since October 7th till today. Here is a graph lasting until August this year [0]. The slope decreases somewhat with time, but the majority of the 40k dead by August, the 20k died after December.
> The Gazan conflict is decelerating not escalating. Can you elaborate on what you see is an indication that Israel's goal is to kill 1.5 million Gazans?
Here is a Times of Israel article discussing Itamar Ben-Gvir (national security minister), Shlomo Karhi (communications minister), and Zvi Sukkot (member of the Knesset) talking about the "voluntary" resettlement of Gaza [0].
Here is a European Union condemnation of Bezalel Smotrich's (finance minister) declarations that it might be acceptable to let 2 million Palestinians starve to death if this brings back the Israeli hostages [2].
Here is a HuffPost article quoting a press conference with Isaac Herzog (president of Israel) assigning collective blame to the people of Gaza [3] for October 7th (this same declaration was also cited in the ICJ determination of the plausibility of genocide happening in Gaza).
Here is a Times of Israel article quoting Yoav Gallant (defense minister) calling the population of Gaza "human animals" [4].
Here is a tweet from Israel Katz (energy and infrastructure minister) announcing that the people of Gaza will be left without water and electricity until every single Hamas member is killed [5].
And these are all only top officials of Israel. If we looked at declarations from various members of the Knesset or from people in the more extreme parties, we'd see far worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Israel%E2%80...
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-calls-to-encourage-em...
[2] https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/israelgaza-statement-high-re...
[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65...
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...
This graph clearly shows a decelerating rate of death. This is exactly proving my point: most Gazans died in the conflict by the end of 2023, and the violence is decelerating not growing.
None of the other links you spammed give any indication that Israel aims to kill 1.5 million Gazans as per your previous comment.
And I showed you the explicit declared intentions and outlook on the population of Gaza of Israel's leadership. They want to kill, hurt, and displace the population, in retaliation for October 7th and other crimes.
Still, to a great extent, the biggest contributing factor to the current extremely low Jewish populations in the Middle East outside Israel has been migration or flight to Israel. For example, in Iran, even before the Islamic Revolution and the wave of antisemitic persecution that followed it, which could be described at least as ethnic cleansing if not outright genocide, there had been significant migration of Iranian Jews to Israel.
The establishment of Israel in 1948 and its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide, made Israel an appealing destination for many Jewish emigrants from Iran, that's why the overwhelming majority emigrated, but there were also substantial numbers who resettled in the United States, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York.
But when you directly tell the vast majority of the population of a region (>80%) to flee their homes and migrate south on foot or be killed in bombings, and then still kill more than 20 000 women and children, there is no equivocation. This is genocide.
If so, I certainly wouldn't want to meet the gods that approve of such a thing, if any existed.
And that is a perfectly reasonable argument to make. There are lots of valid arguments for why Israel isn't committing genocide on the Palestinians. Irrelevant population graphs that don't cover the timespan in question are absolutely not one of them.
But there are many, many more people buried in the rubble or otherwise missing, who are almost certainly dead, but are not included in this. And then there are indirect deaths, from starvation, injuries, lack of medicine: those already amount to some 100k+, almost 10% of Gaza's population.
Not to mention, virtually the entirety of the population of Norther Gaza has been displaced by now, which is another form of genocide, especially if they will not be permitted to return. This is already being planned by some in Israel, with some coveting parts of Gaza as prime real estate.
blatant lie, as has been pointed out to you multiple times now
What incentive would the Palestinian government have to deceive people into thinking there's fewer casualties than the real figure?
> IS THE GAZA DEATH TOLL COMPREHENSIVE?
> The numbers do not necessarily reflect all victims, as many are still under rubble, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. It estimates some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way.
> The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health has said that the true figures are likely higher than those published, without giving specifics.
> The U.N. human rights office also says the Palestinian authorities' figure is probably an undercount. In past Israel-Hamas conflicts, its own tally has sometimes exceeded theirs.
> It declined to share its toll for this war since it is incomplete but confirmed to Reuters that the deaths it has verified so far show that the majority are women and children.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impro:_Improvisation_and_the...
It's quite clever.
Literally demonstrably untrue. There are orgs in nearly any vertical you can name who are using Palantir.
> And, their software is not spy tech. They have some secret sauce behind the visualization of a customer's custom integrated data sources.
Mostly true :)
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.
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.
If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
Peter Thiel, supporter of Donald Trump....supporter of civil liberties, I'm sure...
