Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company.
Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company.
I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.
> “I’m curious why this had to be posted. Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frustrated employee. The message received more than 50 “+1” emojis.
> “Wether [sic] we acknowledge it or not, this impacts us all personally,” another worker wrote on Monday. “I’ve already had multiple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” This message received nearly two dozen “+1” emoji reactions.
> “Yeah it turns out that short-form summaries of the book’s long-form ideas are easy to misrepresent. It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs,” a third worker wrote. “I hope no one who decided to put this out is surprised that we are, in fact, getting kicked.”
entirely possible they're phrasing their concerns on the corporate slack to be 'pro-company' so they don't worry about getting fired for their views but it doesn't actually sound like they're wondering anything, they're just bothered that it's being brought to light.
I wouldn't say they necessarily aren't personally concerned as well. I think quite often if people disagree with their employer but don't want to lose their jobs, it's more amenable to phrase disagreement like they have there. Yes it would be braver to just come out and say "I really don't like this", but at least it's braver than saying nothing at all.
Sounds like they're having a 'NSA Moment'. After the leaks, there was a Bunch of high profile stories about employees leaving after their neighbors/friends/normies found out the sorts of stuff NSA was up to....
If you haven't listened/read it, I think the Ezra Klein interview with Alex Bores (who formerly worked at Palantir) and how he talks about how it was in 2014 vs now.
It's also insane that a PAC campaigning against Bores is funded by current Palantir employee Lonsdale. Their critical ads literally criticize him for working for Palantir.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Joe Lonsdale left Palantir in 2009 and moved on to Formation 8 and then 8vc. He was vocally pro-Palantir and used his co-founder status in the press a lot, but was off the board by 2010 and operationally had nothing to do with them since then.
Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positive company inside Facebook and she just had to navigate the politics to make it known despite all evidence to the contrary.
My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the amount of people who have unprompted (people are weird about it so I try to avoid talking about being vegan except for mentioning it quickly while declining food) said something along the lines of "factory farming is awful but I just love bacon" and laugh is legitimately terrifying. It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway.
It's made me rethink my life and how I do the same thing and was the impetus for me leaving tech.
They are letting perfect be the enemy of good. If they respond with "I love bacon" then tell them to eat plant-based + bacon. It's still a vast improvement environmentally than what they were doing previously.
Yeah there's some kind of absolutism aspect tied into identity.
Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from.
Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
Yeah but tons of things are awful. For me I couldn't keep doing things I knew caused immense suffering in other beings, be it humans or animals. (Sourcing things from ethical whatever and reducing consumption in general the last two decades, I'm sad my iPhone 6 isn't supported for banking so have to go android 10 etc).
Vegetarian options got cheap, and I still eat locally produced eggs and some milk products.
But like, awful can be coped with. Everyone thinks factory farming is awful. Few give a shit.
Basically this boils down to "I don't feel responsible for the meat I eat being factory farmed."
Not that I'm in any position to criticize; I'm in the cognitive dissonance camp.
Have you considered consuming "ethical" animal products (e.g. free range eggs or whatever?) That doesn't seem like martyrdom; compared to what you want (government mandated livestock welfare) it only costs you marginally more (due to missing economies of scale.)
>Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved)
My cynical inner pedant compels me to point out that societal collapse will also solve "factory farming is awful". And we're probably closer to that than effective government regulation of it.
Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny.
I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
We used to have more humane farming. We used to have laws against child labor. We now eat pigs, animals smarter than dogs, that lived tortured lives while wearing clothing made by children.
You can easily chose 'not factory farmed' and still eat meat. You just don't. I'm guessing unless you grew up rich or very recently, you consume more meat now than you were accustomed too growing up. In that case you choose to actively benefit from the factory farming.
To add a data point, I've reduced my meat consumption from "whenever I can" to "once a day" to "normally once a day, but some days none at all". It's really not that big a deal. I have no idea what this is doing to the environment, but I can confirm that I'm saving some scratch (bacon is expensive!), my hunger and tastebuds are just as sated, and my routine bloodwork has improved somewhat.
I personally think vegans should consider eating cows. If you care about sentient life and abuse, think about how much meat one cow produces. Killing a single cow can feed you for well over a year.
I can imagine this poster's chortle thinking to themself, 'they thought I meant the animals!'
aren't plants also sentient?
Isn't all life sentient?
If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?
I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?
> What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.
You are very wrong here by orders of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over.
This doesn't even begin to touch the amount of food you can make from the byproduct of tofu, soy pulp which is itself a food in some countries.
I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.
> mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth?
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
There's a case to be made for wild/hunted meat. But the majority of meat production worldwide relies on feeding those animals farmed plants, and that entails a lot more plowed fields than farming plants for direct human consumption does.
Should pacifists likewise murder one person?
I always think that this sort of culture and interaction was exactly was it was like to live during a time when slavery was legal and permitted. I hope in 100 year meat eating will be seen as similar.
to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completely massacred to harvest that oil (and even if you don't, the animals in those forests probably didn't enjoy their natural habitat being destroyed).
In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering.
Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?
Veganism is about being pragmatic. It's not a dogmatic mindset. The main goal is to not harm another sentient being. Both factory farmed or 'happy' farmed animals usually end up in the same slaughterhouse. Pigs are being gassed and have a terrible death. And in general, animals feel when they are about to die and then start to panic. In the words of Carl Sagan 'they are too much like us'.
Look up Mike Bisping, someone you would typically class as a tough man. Even he couldn't work in a slaughter house. So imagine what it does to your psyche day in and day out having to kill animals. Slaughterhouse workers suffer from PTSD. In one report one worker described how a pig came up to him and gently headbutted him (like a cat showing affection). He had to suppress his compassion to be able to kill it. How effed up is that?
We can vote with our wallet to reduce or stop all that.
In regards to eggs, I would say eating eggs from chickens you have in your garden is OK. There are folks who rescue chickens and let the roam in their garden and eat their eggs. There are certain vegans who complain about that. That is being dogmatic.
And what you suggested, eating meat from animals who died naturally and didn't have to be killed for you, I'd even class that as vegan, because no animal had to suffer. But it wouldn't be profitable as a business, so I don't see how it can work on a large scale or replace factory farming.
We need cultured meat or simply train ourselves to enjoy plant based foods. Dr Wareham said it will take a few weeks for your taste buds to 'like' other foods. And you get enough of nutrients and protein from those foods. Plenty of top athletes prove that point.
Or folks who eat road kill, I'd say that's also vegan. The animal died by accident. You didn't pay for it to be killed, i.e. you didn't contribute to the demand that keeps the meat & dairy industry running.
EDIT: typos & clarity.
I think we have almost "fully ethical meat" now - engineered from tofu and other plant material.
ps. Im by no means a saint in this regard, but I have moved to soy milk and eat much less red meat generally, both out of self-interest for the health aspects, but also partially as I think its better for the environment generally. I suppose I should give up chicken, but its a habit hard to break in my social circle. My point is a gradual move by degrees is still improvement, when integrated over the whole population.
You don't need to give up anything just reduce. I don't drink alcohol at home but I'll have a few drinks socially. If having a burger socially is what you want to do then do it.
I'm pretty sure a lot of commercial egg farming involves keeping the hens in bad conditions
You can't know out at a restaurant the what eggs they use, but at home you can buy eggs from sources you trust that don't keep hens in bad conditions.
> "fully ethical" meat
Clams. Clams and oysters and such. Sessile bivalves are the plants of the animal kingdom, the "genetically engineered brainless cow" of nature. They're also environmentally friendly even when farmed, and more healthy than any animal meat while addressing the same nutritional needs and more. They're almost comically ethical and healthy (and seafood dishes are great imo), they just don't produce bacon and burgers specifically.
Palm oil comes from palm fruit, by the way, not from "massacaring" the trees. Fruits are, from an evolutionary perspective, meant to be eaten, it is their purpose. If plants are conscious of fruit being harvested at all it probably feels good.
I think you're not reading the comment accurately, they're referring to the environmental harms of palm oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_environmental_impac...
This very closely resembles my philosophy. I too downplay vegan/veggie because I don't want to cause a stir.
It’s sort of interesting that “I love bacon” turns into “I must have bacon on a scale that can only really be satisfied inhumane farming practices.” I suspect we could raise meat humanely if we had it on a weekly or monthly basis.
>the impetus for me leaving tech.
What do you do now?
I started a master's in ecology with the hope of doinh a PhD after. Academia honestly sucks and has pretty bad culture issues (and like 10% of the pay) but I genuinely really like animals and it feels good to have my job be helping them.
Personally I don't think I would recommend it. Not that it's necessarily a bad choice but I think that the people for who this is the right choice will feel compelled to make a change regardless of what I say (I know I had people trying to convince me to stay in tech). Fully changing careers like this and living the poor and overworked grad student life in my 30s has taken more commitment and stubbornness than I had expected but some fights are worth doing.
man look at everyone getting weird as hell about it under here. Good gravy!
This comment section is actually pretty good and it's generally well intentioned so I'm not mad but it's the same stuff every time. It's like how a tall person I know hears the same "how's the weather up there" joke over and over and got tired of it.
The only thing people will say that annoys me is the "but animals eat other animals" argument from otherwise intelligent people (no worries if children say it). I've yet to meet someone who sincerely thinks that what happens in nature is ethically okay (as a simple point, many animals will eat their own family when stressed and sexually assault each other constantly, which are very natural but obviously unethical for humans to do. I've seen animals torture and eat each other alive) so the whole argument is a waste of time. It's weird that the "it's natural" argument is probably the most common when many people will walk it back even before I point out the flaws.
Eating meat is normal.
Yes, animals have feelings and are intelligent (to varying degrees, but generally a lot more then most think). Modern meat factories are absolute shit shows and it's outlandishly bad our societies treat the animals like that.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. And killing an animal for food which lived a nice life is perfectly fine. We're all part of the physical reality in which the survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Even if you want to put your head into the sand and deny this, animals eating each other is perfectly normal. And yes, humans are animals too.
I’m not a vegetarian and have no plans on becoming one but.. just because eating meat is normal doesn’t mean it needs to stay that way.
There’s an endless list of atrocities committed by our ancestors or our peers in the animal kingdom that we no longer tolerate. There’s no reason why eating another animal can’t someday become as abhorrent as cannibalism or slavery or whatever.
If eating plant-based didn't make me sick (and I could tolerate gluten and cereals and carb-heavy foods), I'd do it. Now, one might go on a tirade that I'm doing it wrong, but from my research, it's pretty clear the body and the brain evolved for a high-fatty diet; or at least that's how I feel the best.
So here's the conundrum: should I be sick and avoid the food that makes me feel really good, because of ethical concerns? Self-preservation, I believe, should be the top-most concern.
Whenever I hear vegans preaching, I think of the quote "for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" — if veganism works for you, I'm glad, but I wish most vegans would be a bit more empathetic and scientifically-minded rather than making people feel bad because, for many reasons, they live their life another way. A way, must I say, that is completely natural.
Honestly I'd rather have a discussion about nutrition with a vegetarian, than a preachy vegan that first insults me, shames me, before trying to hear my reasons.
And a corollary to that: when considering historical figures, before condemning them wholesale, consider how history would judge you if--for example--eating meat is considered in the future the way slavery is considered today
Nowhere did GP say animals eating animals is abnormal.
From what I've seen the focus on a few big companies can have a backwards effect on some people's sense of morals. I've heard a few people justify their work for unethical companies as "At least it's not as bad as what Facebook does".
It can also have the opposite of the intended effect when it encourages beliefs that bad behavior is normalized in the industry. I've heard an executive try to drum up support for a program to sell customer data by saying that everyone does it, from Facebook to Google. When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it. They had read so much about big companies collecting customer data to sell that they thought everyone did it and therefore it was okay.
"When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it"
I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do."
It's a distinction without much practical difference.
Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you.
Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.
A key way people rationalize bad behavior is saying "everyone does it" without distinguishing the intensity or frequency of bad behavior.
Like a guy who has taken home office supplies from work is not on the same level morally as someone doing home break ins.
New Startup idea: Mordor is a company dedicated to doing evil. We actually plan to lay waste to the world, enslave everyone in it, enshittify anything in sight, and maximize the use of AI for the worst possible thing. Just negative externalities, all the way down.
A (covert) investment in us today can make you seem like an angel tomorrow! Also, with this agenda we're probably going to make a fortune so you might as well get in on the ground floor. Why just fall into hell when you could take one of our luxurious express elevators and get there twice as fast?
Indeed. It would be difficult to make person understand something if their salary depends on not understanding it.
The very first chapter was actually excellent in setting my relationship to the book going forward, because stuff like this twanged against my brain and made me think, "Oh, she just really wanted to be powerful and influential and chased whatever she thought would give her that"
> [after surviving a shark attack] why did this happen to me? If I survived against the odds, surely there had to be a reason? [...] After becoming an attorney, I ended up in the foreign service because it seemed like a way to change the world, and I wanted an adventure. I ended up at the UN because I genuinely believed it was the seat of global power. The place you go when you want to change the world.
> It seemed obvious that politics was going to happen on Facebook, and when it did, when it migrated to this enormous new gathering place, Facebook and the people who ran it would be at the center of everything. They’d be setting the rules for this global conversation. I was in awe of its ineffable potential.
> The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power.
> After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I’d found the biggest one going. Like an evangelist, I saw Facebook’s power confirmed in every part of everyday life. Whatever Facebook decided to do—what it did with the voices that were gathering there—would change the course of human events. I was sure of it.
> This is a revolution.
> What do you do when you see a revolution is coming? I decide I will stop at nothing to be part of it. At the center of the action. Once you see it, you can’t sit on the sidelines. I’m desperate to be part of it. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.
She sounds horrifying.
This is a really important thing that people on the left in particular seem to consistently overlook: local incentives, emergent corporate behaviors, and the unconscious need to believe you’re “right” have way more explanatory power than “X is actually evil”.
The banality of evil is a well-known idea. That evil is often done by people who are just doing their jobs and see themselves as decent people.
Words are cheap, thoughts are cheap, and voting is cheap. A full-time job, on the other hand, is a substantial contribution towards something, and it comes with a huge opportunity cost. The job you have is a major factor in determining your moral character. Determining what kind of a person you actually are, as opposed to the kind of a person you believe to be, or wish you'd be.
The need for belonging is also really powerful, and companies actively try to fulfill that need. Not, generally speaking, for nefarious purposes, but because people do better work when they feel a sense of belonging.
If you decide that your work is against your values, you're also deciding to separate yourself from the group, even if you don't actually leave the company. That's painful. It's not an excuse, but it is a powerful motivator.
Yes, but once you're aware of these factors and leverage them for personal gain anyway, it's evil. It's not like it's impossible to make out the bigger picture on many issues, or to ask oneself if the upsides are really so great that it's worth being responsible for the downsides.
This is equally true for leftist projects. If one is dedicated to the cause of improving the general welfare and creating economic and social opportunities for as many as possible, that's laudable, but you can't use it as an excuse to just ignore the human rights whenever you run into a problem or a tricky ethical situation.
If your incentives and emerging behaviors land at an evil result, it is evil. I’d argue the problem is everyone who constantly generates these “well actually” reasons to excuse the consequences. Marx wrote about people being simultaneously perpetrators and victims of capitalism over 150 years ago, I assure you the left isn’t overlooking this very obvious mechanism.
It’s also a little funny to turn a thread about the blatant failures of a neoliberal “success” story into a weird criticism of the left.
Yeah but keep in mind what Zuck specifically has done. He copied Snapchat multiple times, Facebook overwrote people's public-facing emails, "dumb fucks" in IMs
Zuckerberg is awful person but he alone is not "Meta." It is a company made up of thousands of employees and each of those people play their role in enshittifying the internet. Some of do it gleefully and others do it because they think the battle is better fought in the company than out of it. The large salary also doesn't hurt.
I'm in the middle of this book right now, and I agree. It's a fantastic read to get inside the psychology of the folks that are making huge decisions about how society works.
How do you determine if they are mentally convincing themselves they are the good guy, when in fact it is you who is the good guy.
From either perspective, if the roles were reversed, wouldn't it look the same? Both parties thinking they are doing the right thing.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms out there, they seem to be vastly outnumbered by illegitimate criticisms, no matter what position you hold. It's easy to hold your opinion when you are inundated with a constant stream of invalid arguments that say little more than "I don't like the tribe you chose". Any valid argument is easily overlooked without a sense of guilt in that environment.
You’re probably right about the book either way, but I think the comparison has an obvious limitation. At best, Meta’s mission is “social connection.” Held up in an equally charitable light, a defense contractor is “protecting American interests.” The positive case is so much more stark that it’s probably easier to convince yourself of.
But I also think that’s partly because it’s actually true. (I concede I work in defense and am biased.)
There’s certainly a necessary debate to be had about whether these companies are doing the right things, whether they’re going about it the right way, and whether the United States’ actions are moral and legal.
But it’s very hard to argue that national security itself isn’t necessary. Whereas you can much more easily argue that a social-media-based ad company has no reason to exist in the first place.
I think Mitchell and Webb sketch is enough. It's not some slow descent to badness in case of Palantir, it's obvious from the PR materials alone
I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc.
The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"
The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.
I took one back in 2018 or so, and I assume it's still a degree requirement. If most are like the one I took, however, very few people seriously engaged with the class, and it's just viewed as a filler class.
It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.
Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
There is no “ethical” company. They will tend towards making money by means that can be interpreted as being legal. Sometimes they will do things not legal - but those are calculated decisions based on how much the profit from said actions is compared to how much they will pay out as fines.
Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.
this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave.
Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.
I’ve seen this time and again. The more money that a corporation or the leaders in there make, the less they’re worried about ethics.
It’s an irritating take. But personally I don’t move in the same circles as those making ethically dubious and partially legal decisions.
Do I want corporations to be ethical? Yes. Will I campaign for that and call my senator and congressman? Yes.
Are corporation lobbyists calling my congressman and senator with boatloads of money? You bet.
I don’t think everyone understands how disruptive privacy violations are. I think the best place to begin is start educating kids in high school about it, like they do for sex ed.
Am I willing to put money on the line and risk unemployment in the current market? Depends.
Thank you for putting into words what I dislike about that refrain so eloquently. It’s a cop out.
Being at a corporation normalizes sociopathy to some extent. The phrase: “It’s business, not personal”, outlines it well.
It is ok to harm another group of people financially and even personally because that’s what “business does”. Degradation being a ratchet that calcifies unethical behavior doesn’t help. Companies tend to get less ethical the older and larger they become.
> Being at a corporation normalizes sociopathy to some extent. The phrase: “It’s business, not personal”, outlines it well
The phrase essentially describes subsuming individuality in favour of group interests. You see similar refrains in militaries, monarchies, non-profits and HOAs.
As far as businesses go, I'd say Palantir finds itself somewhere between "extremely ethically dubious" and "overtly, transparently evil."
I mean, this kinda pushes them past the "in between" phase and squarely into "overtly evil" IMO:
sure.. but there is 'not ethical' and there is palantir...
I have an irrational hatred of someone who believes in "reality distortion fields". Over the last 10 years, I also have come away with an intense impression that Silicon Valley is full of the self-delusional type, as evidenced by Sara's book, Palantir's weird advertising and CEO, and the insane Nimbyism.
I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast. I and many others had enough of Silicon Valley.
Side note: I find it illuminating that one of the most popular social apps that birth social trends did not come from Silicon Valley, but China. I don't think Silicon Valley can drive social trends at all (anti-humanity types are too prevalent).
> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast.
Yes, because Wall Street is a paragon of ethical corporate behavior.
The fact that they're at least honest about what they care about (money) makes them far simpler to deal with than these entities (both private and public) that spin complex webs of half truths about how they're making the world better by implementing 1984.
That power, today, is expressed through technology, and these overlords hold their control via proprietary software and anticompetitive business practices.
To seize power back, you need to relinquish their shackles by using technology that is designed with user freedom in mind, not "lock-in", and support businesses constituted of that ethos.
We don't need to support business. We need to support political institutions that oppose proprietary software and support people's right to general purpose computing
It's exactly this over reliance on companies to shape society that got us in this mess
Free as in freedom!
Silicon Valley must be destroyed to save America. Gladly more are waking up to this. There’s been a surge on both the right and left in my state of people wanting to reject the place and it’s disgusting “culture”.
> I believe it is in the best interest of the United States if the center of power shifts back from West Coast "tech bros" to the East coast
I'm not an American, never set foot in the US for that matter, but I'd say I'm pretty sympathetic to the people actually living there. All this to say that I've recently had the same realisation as you when it comes to West Coast people vs East Coast people, by this point the SV automatons are way, way outside of "normal life", maybe that has always been the case but for sure back in those days SV didn't have the same power as it has now (I'm not talking money, even though that is important, I'm talking actual power to have control over people's lives), not by a long shot.
This quote immediately stood out:
> Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?
Their framing is wrong. The beliefs and internal politics of the people making the surveillance tools don't matter.
The fact is they're making tools to assist government overreach, and anyone with any political awareness (or maybe more importantly here, objectivity) could have seen that. They're just the enablers.
People do anything for money
They would read it and just say to themselves "Wow, how could anyone fall into that trap? Certainly I never would!"
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
This just another example of Sinclair's Law.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
To quote Upton Sinclair:
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
But there's something bigger that you allude to, which is that very few peoplel think of themselves as the bad guys. People separate themselves from the harm they contribute to or they dehumanize the targets of that harm and then argue they deserve it somehow or simply that this is necessary for some reason (eg lesser evil arguments).
I eschew the concept of "bad guys" in general because it's a non-argument. Philosophically and politically it's known as "idealism" [1][2]. It's saying "we are the good guys because we are the good guys" and everyone think they're the good guys.
The alternative to this is materialism [3] and historical materialism [4]. There is no metaphysical or inherent goodness (or badness). You are the sum of your actions and their impact on the world. Likewise you are a product of your material world.
So we don't really need to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out if, say, FB/Meta or Palantir is a "good" company or if the employees are or feel "good". We can simply look at the impact and whether that impact was intentional or otherwise foreseeable.
And that record for Meta really isn't good eg Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide [5] or FB's real world harm from spreading misinformation [6].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism_in_international_rela...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
[5]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[6]: https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devasta...
Everybody need to be a hero of their own story. Even concentration camp guards had this mental model, apart from outright sadists (I know I know, Godwin is cheap but it fits so well when talking about sociopathic traits and/or lack of morality when convenient).
I'm sure this is especially true of Palantir employees, but I feel like everyone in big tech is increasingly wrestling with this. (Don't ask me how I know.)
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As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified.
But I also think we need to get more smart people interested and working in national security. That’s the way you get the best balance between effective security and the minimum negative side effects to civil liberties or collateral damage, by having the smartest people inside these companies coming up with the best tech while also shaping the conversation from the inside.
It’s easier to just dunk on the big bad company (and maybe they are bad!) but I don’t think that solves anything. National security should be something more people participate in, not less.
We had a few smart people in national security, but they're getting fired. The Navy Secretary was just forced out. There's nothing that can help when the problem is upper management.
Yes, and the same can be said for the civilian workforce. The Pentagon’s labs and technical expertise are being hollowed out, and I worry we’re being left with an acquisition corps that’s incapable of holding its own in technical conversations with profit-maximizing contractors.
“Would you like the undercarriage coating for your new Abrams?”
But FYI, Phelan was just a private equity guy installed by Trump. The reason he was fired is because he wasn't building the "Trump class" battleships Trump wanted. Which were supposed to have WW1 era appearance because Trump is an "aesthetics guy" and doesn't like the look of modern stealth ships.
I kid you not.
> As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified.
I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis
I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.
The trendy SV defense companies (Palantir, Andruil) seem to be all "killing is fun and good, actually" with an underlying current of white nationalism. We might need defense technology, but not like this. Super fucked up.
can you be more specific about what you mean by "smart people"
like what are some examples of the kinds of people you mean -- what degrees are they getting, what causes are they applying their intellect to right now that are _not_ national security, etc.
> by having the smartest people inside these companies coming up with the best tech while also shaping the conversation from the inside.
The smartest people don't get that choice. Oppenheimer, Teller and Ulam were all ignored in matters of policy, the Manhattan Project was not designed to integrate their political feedback. Conversely, the scientists at Peenemünde never got to question the effectiveness of V-1 bombs with a CEP measured in miles. Their participation in policy was deliberately severed, ultimately to the detriment of the Wehrmacht.
When you start seeing technologies that affront humanity - warrantless surveillance, civilian terror weapons, chemical/biological agents - that's when normal people step out. No amount of sanewashing will fix the underlying administrative issue, it only exacerbates the underlying moral dilemma.
Fair point. I don’t think that simply working at a defense-tech would or should give someone sway over political decisions.
Which might be also good: von Neumann advocated for a U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
In the context of this thread my claim is simply that smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier. The choice to use those weapons still lies with our elected leaders.
I guess that's what I'm confused by, then. Americans don't have a duty to prevent their government from descending into crony capitalism. As long as the Fed undervalues intelligent labor, the smartest Americans are incentivized to go the private ownership route and extort the defense industry themselves. Protecting DARPA and preserving valuable Pentagon assets is the federal government's job - nobody else is paid to care about it, nobody else can fix it.
> smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier.
That's conjecture, as far as I'm aware. Again, the earliest researchers of spacecraft were being forced to design a pitiful terrorist weapon. Those same scientists wouldn't meaningfully progress peaceful space exploration until decades later. There is no balance inherent to having good ideas or executing them well, the procurement process can (and frequently does) excise intelligent thought when tensions run high.
FWIW, I bear little ill-will towards the defense industry or US service members. I just think that "shaping the conversation" is a fool's errand when "the conversation" is warrantless surveillance, and "shaping" simply means finding the best way to do it. An intelligent humanitarian would be fired long before they instill an ounce of ethical change.
> that's when normal people step out.
So Oppenheimer Teller and Ulam were not normal/sane people. In other words, they had the choice, and made a decision. Everything is political.
Are we the baddies?
Seems analogous to employees of a missile manufacturer being upset that their missiles were used for their intended purpose.
Except the missiles are being used in a civil war instead of against a foreign adversary.
The Confederacy was a foreign adversary the moment they seceeded.
'"That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.'
I watched the James Bond movie Spectre recently and came away feeling like the Spectre organization and Ernst Stavro Blofeld were modeled on Palatir.
Palantir is definitely “on our side”.
Hey, it could have been worse; at least they're not working in ad-tech.
Ads can generally be blocked, NSA agents on the other hand...
Or shipping locked blootloaders.
> ...about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb.
Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?
It was, which is why it makes such a perfect analogy.
Surveillance has lots of good and bad uses, and is morally neutral itself. Powerful but neutral. The problem comes when the users use it for bad purposes, and in fact it is so tempting that they can't help using it for more and more bad purposes. If every palantir (either one) user was a "good guy" who refused to use it for bad purposes, it would be a potent force for good, and that's why they were created in the first place.
I thoroughly disagree. Surveillance is an invasive tool of control, and as such intrinsically immoral. Just like a slew of other immoral actions, it may be a net positive when applied for a greater good, but if not used for anything, it's evil.
This is trivially true to most common moral understandings. If my neighbor installs a camera pointing through my window and into my shower, applying some fancy technique to see through clouded glass, most of us would justly think that was immoral of him, even in complete absence of any other immoral actions facilitated by that surveillance.
That depends on the definition of "surveillance". Should a foreman not pay close attention to his workers? Should a hospital not track its patients' locations and vital stats while within the hospital? Are cameras in a jewelry shop morally wrong?
Your neighbor's surveillance of you is bad because they're violating your privacy, and using the tool of surveillance to do it. If you lived in a foggy area and they were monitoring their front walkway with a camera that was good at seeing through fog, and they happened to get a corner of your property in the camera's field of view, then you might have something to complain about but I wouldn't call it morally wrong.
I agree that surveillance is a tool of control. So are fences. It's ok to control some things.
I also agree that surveillance gets into sticky territory very, very quickly. I definitely don't have a clean dividing line between what I'd like the police to be able to see and what they shouldn't. (Especially when the temptation to share that data is so strong and frequently succumbed to.) I would probably say in some useless abstract sense, mass surveillance is also morally neutral. But given that it's proven to be pretty much impossible to implement in a way that doesn't end up serving more evil than good, I wouldn't object to calling it immoral.
That is a "justifies extreme violence to prevent" type suggestion. Privacy is a basic human right. The problem is power. No one should be in a position to spy on everyone.
if its ok for the foreman to control the workers, you would then say its ok for the foreman to hold the workers at gun point while they work?
id say the control is immoral, in all forms. Voluntary agreement and consent are fine but then its not surveillance, its people saying where they are. the patient wants the doctor to know where they are and what they are doing, and not just letting the doctor decide on their own what to know.
the worker wants the foreman to know that they are present and working, in fulfilment of their contract together. its not surveillance either.
the jewelry store itself is immoral, but private property and control thereof is a tradeoff we've made
Again, there are plenty of instances where enough good comes from surveillance that it outweighs the intrinsic negative, but denying that it is, in of itself, intrinsically negative suggests that some creepy dude monitoring everyone's every move is just fine, as long as he's not doing anything else.
A more obvious parallel is violence. To trip over Godwin's law, shooting Hitler would have been a moral action, but not because "shooting people" is amoral. Shooting a random person is definitely immoral. We constantly do immoral things for the greater good, but it is a mistake to thusly assume those actions are amoral.
So should the US simply not pursue any tax evasion cases? Because catching tax evasion necessarily requires surveillance.
the palantir weren't created for spying, they were created so that the various kingdoms of middle earth could stay in contact with each other. The palantir are a party line. It just got real sketchy when Minas Ithil fell (and became Minas Morgul) and Sauron got possession of the orb. After which the kings of gondor stopped using them.
The palantiri were created by Fëanor. The kinslayer whose pride, rage, and desire for vengeance drove most of his people to their doom. The potential to corrupt was always present in them.
In the LotR, Aragorn bends a palantir to his will and uses it for good with great difficulty. He manages to do that, because he is (in addition to everything else) the trueborn king and the palantiri are his birthright. Denethor, on the other hand, succumbs to corruption. While he is a powerful lord with good intentions, he is only a steward, not a king. The right to use the palantiri is not inherent in his being, because he only wields power in someone else's name.
surveillance creates leverage over people. its not neutral if it creates a power imbalance, especially since its used by the wealthy on the poor.
you can't do surveillance and not learn the bad knowledge, and once youve created the bad knowledge its just a matter of time before it gets into nefarious hands.
a "bad guy" could still hack the "good guys" or palantir itself, and get access to all the bad data the "good guys" have created.
It’s not morally neutral, the very existence of surveillance has a chilling effect on dissenting opinions.
There are morally neutral technologies, but the unique quality of surveillance data containing PII (and tools to correlate across time and space) means that it's only morally neutral until it is used in any capacity. Which is to say, it is not morally neutral.
You've already made a pretty big leap from surveillance to storing surveillance data persistently, and another to the tools. I'm not going to argue that mass surveillance is morally neutral.[1]
Tolkien's Palantirs let you see and communicate and influence across vast distances. That's no more immoral than a videophone. Of course, that's also not surveillance; that'd be a telescope. But surely telescopes aren't immoral?
[1] I mean, I would, but (1) you can't create a mass surveillance system from a morally neutral or positive place, and (2) it seems nearly impossible to implement a mass surveillance system without creating more harm than benefit. So it becomes a boring semantics argument as to whether mass surveillance is fundamentally immoral or not.
If Palintir itself gets hacked, all the data and analysis will be stopped up by others.
> he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?
Interestingly enough, the stones could not lie. They only showed real things. Sauron's corruption was achieved through a lack of context. Just like Palantir (the company) can do with data. A dataset can be completely truthful, but lead to a false or manipulative conclusion.
But to the original point, yeah, the name Palantir is spot on for what the company intends to do, anyone who even has remote knowledge of Middle Earth wouldn't dare touch that company with a 10 foot pole.
Sauron is the reason the palantiri are dangerous, yes, because his influence causes them to mislead and delude the viewer. That happens even when Sauron is not directly influencing the visions. Essentially, when the forces of evil are present, the seeing stones may show the truth but in such a profoundly misleading way that even those with the best intentions will misinterpret their visions and fall prey to misunderstanding. This even happens to Sauron himself.
It's worth noting that by the War of the Ring (the Lord of the Rings story) Sauron had possessed a palantir for around 1000 years. Anyone who knew what a palantir was should have known that they were not to be trusted.
As for how that relates to Palantir the real-life corporation, I'll leave that up to your interpretation.
That was also my interpretation from reading LotR as well.
Nope. Sauron could just radicalize by making the palantir show what he wanted them to see, but it was always true.
55% Palantir revenue comes from government contracts and 50% from the US govenment.
With this "are we the bad guys" perspective, I wonder how much of the "evil" they are apparently doing is a result of the current view a majority of people globally have with the current administration?
Though we may find it difficult to separate the two, because it seems leadership and the founders of Palantir are supportive of, and in some ways responsible for, Trump getting elected, but with different leadership using the tools in different ways, would we still consider Palantir the bad guys?
personally yes, i've considered them the bad guys from day one. they have always publicly portrayed themselves as enabling mass surveillance so i'm not even sure why this sudden crisis of conscience, unless the trump administration has finally made it clear to even the thickest-headed of them that mass surveillance is not a good thing.
Only "starting" to wonder does not speak well of Palantir employees.
I think this is a weird side effect of how we portray evil corporations in fiction and in journalism. We imagine that everyone working there is a moustache-twirling villain. And then we get a job at Meta or Flock or Palantir, look around, and don't see any moustache-twirling villains. There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.
Even if some of the outcomes seem reprehensible, it's not really evil because we're good people. We do it in a responsible and caring way. We're truly sorry that your grandma is now hooked up on endless AI-generated slop, but shouldn't the media be talking about all the other grandmas whose lives are enriched by our AI? We have strict safety rules for the types of cryptocurrency ads that can target the elderly, too.
Let me tell you. I worked at a IRS equivalent service in another country, and a lot of what I did was not very different from spying in our own citizens.
And you know what? there's a pervasive ideology in the place that justifies it all.
One day you wake up, and you realize that you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer, even if the official documents say otherwise.
And we are talking about Tax Payers here. Now imagine an organization like Palantir that can de-humanize their targets marking them with the Terrorist label. It is easy to convince people that they are on the right side.
> you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer
Any force employing threat of violence for control does the same. Police presence, military occupation, hell you even see it in the eyes of loss prevention folks.
> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun"
Yes, there is.[1]
> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.
It can get pretty close at times. Witness Meta and Zuck being told, in clear terms, that there was clear material threats to Burmese dissidents with some of the asks of Facebook. "The features matter more."
Or like, anything peter thiel says ever.
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I look forward to all of these comments being Hoovered into their autonomous surveillance machine in short order.
Also, yes, they are.
The anti Palantir / anti AI / anti tech / anti billionaire sentiment is just way too strong. Far, far to many people post inflammatory things for the data collection to really matter.
Contrary to Karp’s fantasies, he will not have the capability to send fent-laced piss drones to every single person who’s ever criticized him.
In addition, the more data they have on us, the higher the odds they have something “bad”. So the irony of them increasing the volume of surveillance data is that it becomes pointless for people to “behave” in front of the camera once they’ve “crossed the line”.
Doesn't really matter if you talk shit online, it's just passive aggressive pressure relief. What matters is you not being able to effectively protest or do anything about it.
Well actually it does make a difference. Precrime only works if they can separate signal from noise. Much like how the more users there are on the Tor network, the easier it is to blend in, overriding the system with “threat signals” just adds noise to their predictive models.
And in addition to that, talking shit online lets others know they’re not alone. It increases the odds of coordinated action.
The best propaganda trick up the CIA etc.’s sleeve right now is the illusion of inevitability and learned helplessness. Online voicing of opinions is critical to fighting both of these tactics.
> Precrime only works if they can separate signal from noise.
IMO a lot of these debates depend on implicit assumptions about the threat and how it operates. For example:
1. Lawful Evil: They care about good data and going after the "worst" offenders, even if I might disagree about what is "bad".
2. Lazy risk-averse evil: The data needs to give them something to justify the existence of the program, they'll go after whomever is convenient.
3. Cover-your-ass evil: The data archive exists to let them make a plausible case for someone they've already decided to persecute for other reasons.
4. Fraudulent evil: The data archive is just to make it easier to fabricate a fake reason to go after someone.
5. Blatant evil: The data doesn't matter because they can just do stuff to you by fiat.
Some of those groups would be hampered by noise, some would benefit from noise, and the last just won't care.
No need to wonder
Palantir is not wrong that AI diminishes the power of Democrat and more-educater women voters. It will just diminish Republican and less-educated male voters too.
Unless it is being trained and applied to suppressing certain groups. Karp said a not-so-quiet goal out loud.
Yea, the same innovations that enable freedom can also be used for control. What else is new?
Palantir enables freedom in the same way salt water quenches your thirst.
It doesn’t.
Salt water totally quenches thirst if under 0.5%. Sea water doesn't.
Weird. I worked near a Palantir office in 2017 and I remember thinking it would be "morally challenging" to work there. 9 years later, it's just becoming apparent?
When I worked at a company that was using Palantir's software about 15 years ago the average age of a Palantir employee was in the early 20s in my experience.
It was almost certainly everyone's first job.
It's not too hard to think of ways you can get a bunch of young folks do your bidding without them questioning the motives or what kind of moral challenges the job has.
<nods> I had that reaction when they mailed me an offer to join a recruitment event sometime around 2013.
Not quite as creepy as recently when Anduril sent an email saying I was "on their radar".
Seeing that type of email coming from a company like Anduril would honestly freak me the frick out, no ifs and no buts about it. Which probably means I'd never be part of their target audience.
A recruiter tried to get me to interview there in 2018. I asked them about their reputation and they went cold after that.
Most high paying companies would do the same, irrespective of their reputation.
I was contacted by Palantir recruiters about 15 years ago. I found the name troubling along with the gov't contracts, as well as learning that spending one night a week at the office was encouraged.
I visited the office near University Avenue, once, many years ago. I found the freezer full of ice cream, the fragrant gaming room, and the heavily used bunk beds very disturbing. I'm not surprised they encouraged employees to spend one night a week there.
It's not like these guys have any media literacy or emotional intelligence to speak of. If they did, they wouldn't have gone to work for Thiel and Karp's perfectly named company.
I'm pretty sure this is the same population of people who lost (and may still be losing sleep) over Roko's Basilisk. They're clever but not smart.
While I believe it's good that we call it out, there will always be enough people willing to do evil for money. It'll have to be shut down from the outside and that's where our focus should be.
But not competent evil people. For example, most of the Nazis were completely inept, and a great aid to the allies.
Palantir delenda est
A lot of things delenda est. The ever-growing length of the delenda-est list and the nonexistent rate at which we're est'ing all those delendas is quite worrisome at this point.
“Starting”… hmmm
There's never been a single day in history without war. Indeed, there's never been a moment in all of biological life without violent conflict.
In high school, I had a visitor from West Point. My dad (Killing Fields survivor) was so excited. I (16 year old boy who only knew video games, porn and comics) later threw an impressive tantrum that defeated my father.
I threw away a golden ticket to see the world for what it is (instead of from within my cocoon in the suburbs of Los Angeles) and become a man at a more appropriate age.
Instead, I became an overpaid Peter Pan in San Francisco.
Theres some effect, I can't remember the name, where experts in one field (engineering) think they understand other fields (war) because they're so smart at their own field. I think this very much applies here.
If you're at Palantir and think you're the bad guy, first make the honest effort to convince yourself otherwise.
Failing that, leave and make room for patriots.
I don't like hurting others, but you really need to understand there are others that absolutely want to hurt you for basically no reason, and that hurting them first is highly effective, and as both firepower and intelligence (Palantir) improve, it becomes less fatal (clear historical trend).
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The title is likely a reference to a sketch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_We_the_Baddies%3F
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Although it could be unintentional - the phrase is mainstream now and not hard to produce independently either.
It's clearly intentional, and apt.
"a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb"
Desperate for some negative sentiment aren't we? The orbs were not "corrupting" in any way. Can we just have reporting anymore without everything being slanted?
The "manifesto" Palantir posted seemed pretty reasonable to me given their company mission and alignment. I don't get the backlash. It's much less worse than what they're already accused of, I think. It doesn't make me think worse of them at all.
Did they recently add skulls on their badges and branded swag?
Thought it was an onion article at first glance.
Starting?
Starting???
Taking a job at Spy Orbs For Evil Wizards Inc., reading the CEO's addled technofascist manifesto, and wondering if I'm the bad guy
Yeah, the mind boggles how anybody at Palantir can honestly be on the fence about them being the baddies.
Hearing my boss, Muad’Dib, say “There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.” and wondering what he means by all that
> I'm going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don't get distracted by that; I didn't know at the time. — Caleb Hearth
I remember seeing postings for "Forward Deployed Engineers" and thinking that this naming convention targets folks who don't like to work out but still have a military fetish and want to feel important.
It's self-aggrandizing egos all the way down/up (to Alex Karp).
I work at a non-defense tech company, and it's basically a running joke that no matter how bad the job market is, none of us are soulless enough to go looking for work at Palantir, even if the pay is good.
I would have trouble trusting the kind of person who would work at Palantir. It seems like it could be career-limiting in the long run.
Yes. The answer is yes.
For a company supposedly full of smart people they sure do work hard to turn their brains off
I've been working in the aerospace (now space) arena my entire career, and there's a lot of overlap there with the defense industry. What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used). I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.
> I think many (I won't say the majority but it wouldn't surprise me) in the defense and intelligence sector don't think, either willfully or because of lack of introspection in general, about these things.
I think it has more to do with the fact that many of the products built for defense are never actually used against adversaries in their useful life. Just look at our nuclear weapon stockpile.
Palantir on the other hand is an invisible weapon. They could be reading my comment right now and identifying me with sentiment "adversarial" for all I know. What implications that has on my daily life is innumerable...and I'm a US citizen!
> What I've seen is that it's very easy for people to look at their work as a narrow area and to forget about the consequences of it (how it's used, what it actually does when used).
Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers. Say you're working on nuclear weapons technology: is your job building weapons to enable the genocidal destruction of another country, or to prevent that kind of thing through a credible MAD deterrent? Both things are simultaneously true.
And then there's no way to predict the future: what's true today when you build it may not be true tomorrow when it's used, because there's a different leader or political system in place.
> Or it's a lot more complicated and doesn't lend itself to blank-and-white answers.
Did I say it wasn't complicated? I'll admit I didn't say it was complicated, but you can't infer a sentiment from a non-existent statement in either direction.
Yes, it's complicated. But I stand by my statement that many people just don't think about it. They want to solve interesting problems or to get paid well, or both, and so they take jobs at places like Palantir without thinking through the consequences.
Many others do think it through and either find a way to justify it, or do work they don't like and live with the emotional consequences of it.
I'm the sort who asks. Many who answered just didn't think it through, they didn't think about what the thing they were working on actually did within the larger system. I won't generalize this to the whole population (why I won't claim it's the majority of all people in the field) but the majority I did discuss this with had, at best, a hand-wavey "national defense" justification but did not think about what the thing they worked on did. Its effectiveness for its job, or its ultimate purpose.
Though a lot actually just wouldn't even discuss it in the first place. I think, though, that if you're going to work on a weapon or a component for a weapon you owe it to yourself to think deeply about the topic. I've known too many people who thought about it too late and realized that they couldn't live with it. Better to figure that out at the start and change career paths than at the end and either kill yourself or drink yourself to death.
Very well said. I will provide an analogy.
Imagine I came to know that ghosts exist with supernatural powers. My first reaction shouldn't be of fear. It should be of curiosity. What laws are prevailing in ghost realm which provides them with great powers over material world. Does one becoming a ghost suddenly know the truth of Rieman Hypothesis or P=NP?
The same could be asked of people who are supposed to know better by virtue of them close to knowledge and technology. Should they spend their improving lives of others or enslaving them for material gains?
Smart people are very prone to using their intellectual abilities for self deception and rationalisation.
Never underestimate the lengths and depths people will go in the name of a salary.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
Yes, the answer is yes they are.
Wired does sanewashing now?
It was always really obvious but that recent full-throated-fascist manifesto has left no doubt. One thing Palantir have going for them is this deranged movie-villain-style transparency about their intentions, they don't even care about hiding it.
Is the morality different from being a citizen or tax payer of USA?
It’s all moral relativism
I was once targeted for recruitment by Palantir. I looked into it, I decided not to apply. This was circa 2018. I think it'd be really difficult to justify to myself joining Palantir then, I can't even imagine doing it in 2026.
This is trying to manage their personal image; they know exactly what they are and what they do.
They are just annoyed Karp is breaking Kayfabe
The Department of Defense is now the Department of War. They've made their goals clear.
You are not in defense contracting. You are in the business of war contracting.
Take from that what you will.
I talked with a friend there around 2018 and he dissuaded me from applying, then quit a few months later. He already knew...
Starting?!
Mandatory public service is fascism? Deporting illegal immigrants is fascism?
There are ~68 countries with mandatory military service in the world [1]. To say nothing of countries with some other form of mandatory public service. How many of them are fascist?
The U.S., with the backing of widespread public support, passed bipartisan immigration enforcement laws in 1996 with an aim of rapid and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was not viewed as "fascism". Those laws remained on the books since that time and were only recently under enforced with dramatic consequences.
I honestly feel like we're increasingly living in separate realities driven by media bubbles and wanton historical illiteracy and dishonesty.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
To quote the Declaration of Independence "...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Starting to wonder?
Everyone know what Palantir was. The name is a dead-give-away.
I think it is really time that the superrich are downsized. Certain companies that are working against the people also need to be removed. Key considerations in any democracy need to be consistent. Palantir (and others) create inconsistencies. Granted, none of this will be fixed while the orange king is having his daily rage-fits, but sooner or later this is an inter-generational problem, no matter which puppet is taking over.
Probably thought "Total Surveillance" was too on-the-nose when starting up.
The palantir of the novel weren't surveillance tools. They were a party line, the Gondorians used them to talk to their various outposts throughout middle earth, the three we see in the movies (there may be more in the books, it's been a long time) were at Isenguard, Minis Tirith and the Palantir of Minis Ithil (now Minis Morgul) that Sauron took to Baradur.
When Sauron took Minas Ithil and captured the Palanir that was kept there the Kings of Gondor forbade the use of them. It is shown that Sauron can use them to corrupt and read the thoughts of the other users. We also see him use them for their intended purpose when he conspires with Saruman.
All to say Peter Thiel doesn't understand Lord of the Rings.
yes
The company is named after the evil telepathic orbs from lord of the rings. Wasn't that the first clue that everything might not be hunky dory?
They are, in fact, the bad guys.
Reminds me of the day I realized that, during my lifetime, my country, the US, caused the death of 1M Iraqis -- for no apparent reason.
Honestly doesn't even look like they pay that well compared to other major tech companies.
Like why justify it if it economically isn't even that advantageous? Ya'll are laughable.
Yes. Yes you all are.
Thats all.
Am I the only one that thinks that naming your company after a magical device that was corrupted by evil might be a bad look?
Little Eichmanns unable to feel good about themselves now that there's so much bad press? They should've known, in fact, most of them DID know about who they work for and what they do. They just can't handle the pressure. Name, shame and move on, fellas. No words worth listening to from Palantir employees.
'no shit sherlock' comes to mind.
When your product is used by a military occupation to target and kill civilians and their families [1][2], it's kind of shocking that there's any doubt. But as Upton Sinclair said:
> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I would go further and argue that Palantir employees are just as valid military targets as occupation soldiers are.
[1]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
Palantir must be working on something amazing if they are constantly assaulted by Iranian/Chinese bots,Left fascists,"but GenOcide in HAZA" and others. Curiously not Boieng, not drone companies, but Palantir.
Time to load up on Palantir stocks?
Truly. People are calling for Palantir employees to be targeted by foreign militaries right here in this comments section!
I'll ride this thread with you to the bottom of the page.
Relative to other government contractors, Palantir is pretty good. More so because the bar is typically so low, though.
But that's priced in.
Them featuring in conspiracy theories is just because there's a cultural treadmill for all these things, isn't there? You can't harp on about Raytheon forever. Those are the villans of the past. Back when Bush was the great evil, or something. To get engagement, you need to frame things in the current meta.
Another case where "starting" is the ha-ha-sob part. There's never been anything good about Palantir.
now? what took them so long??
stock price hit an ath and have been falling since
Every True Capitalist knows to use the golden rule as their moral compass.
Alex Karp is a fascist. The whole company should be ended.
That manifesto was antihuman.
I’m sure a copious amount of ketamine was involved in its production.
It read like a longtime adderall addict who switched to clean meth a while ago.
All three of these suggestions are likely true. I’ve never done Ketamine but I’ve heard it can seriously degrade the user’s “quality control” of their ideas, meaning that ideas that they have, or ideas they get from others, that are intellectually subpar appear to be quite brilliant. The dissociation is also helpful for overcoming moral qualms if they were ever present.
Combine that with speed and a insular SV culture steeped in the ideology of Ayn Rand and Nick Land (who likely suffered from amphetamine psychosis) and you get something like this Palantir manifesto.
I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t building skynet.
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A real "Are we the baddies?" moment for them
Sounds really late, honestly. It's been apparent from people outside the company for years, and employees realize it just now?
Now it's in the news where their normie friends and family see it
The truth about a particular company is always told in 10 years time.
Palantir now has too many eyes to the average person on the street and its reputation is negative.
We will have the same conversation about OpenAI, Anthropic, Mechanize, Inc. and the rest of all the other AI labs just like we are doing with big tech companies.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
...now it is complete
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As far as I can tell the main crime Palantir commits is actually delivering what it's asked for, instead of just stringing the government along like the other contractors do.
> We're not perfect. We've done bad. But, you won't find another nation on earth or in history who has contributed as much to global progress, stability and well-being.
Ooook... but
> Defending the United States of America is never the wrong move.
is not the correct logical conclusion from that. The correct conclusion would be that it is our ability to reflect on the bad things we've done that have allowed us to make forward progress.
Universally defending something without considering the circumstances and context is rarely ever the correct stance.
OK, well the "circumstances and context" here are that most people commenting on HN live in the United States, so obviously they will be better off if the United States does well. I don't think your "um actually, you can't ALWAYS support something in all cases, sweaty" critique really adds anything to the discussion here.
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I know exactly what you’re trying to say and you need to understand that it’s highly counterproductive.
The United States was built on genocide of the natives, slavery of captives from Africa, and multiple unecessary wars that have killed millions of innocent people. This is not a new thing.
It also isn't a unique thing. See (for example) the entire history of, well, pretty much any country. There is a reason Utopia literally means "no place".
* Genocide of the natives? Literally all countries in the Americas, for starters. * Slavery of captives from Africa? Pretty much everyone with colonies in and around the Caribbean was guilty of that too. * Multiple unnecessary wars that have killed millions of people? That encompasses more or less all of European history.
By all means, criticize Palantir. But don't pretend US history has anything in particular that would set up the prerequisites for it to exist.
I know it’s not unique. I just assumed the parent was a nick fuentes America First type who wants to transfer all of our guilt and sin onto Israel (and in the parent’s case a specific ethnicity). It’s more common in the US than you would think.
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literally none of this is true
Anti-tech sentiment is completely the tech industry's fault. Nobody likes tech because tech sucks to use. End of.
The company also chose to name itself after a fantasy scrying device corrupted by evil. There might be an ounce of self-fulfilling prophecy here.
Their stock is up something like 1500% since IPO. I can't imagine most employees there feeling like they're undervalued with that sort of equity valuation.
Nerds are ruining this great nation.
Nerds that did not get love in high school or college are ruining America.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company.
We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company.
The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.
On the changes to US military organization and thinking post-WW2 (and the name change):
> […] The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
The author is a retired professor from the US Naval War College:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nichols_(academic)
Ah yes, the administration’s love of Axis of Allies, or is it allies of axis? They don’t know, they got distracted by the mustaches and the desire to conquer the world.
The US did not retreat. We fought multiple wars to maintain our power and influence. We toppled multiple regimes to maintain puppet governments. Very much the same as the USSR and China have done.
Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, etc.
US conquest was quiet similar to British conquest. They didn't make their conquered people citizens (that'd make things tricky for exploitation) so instead they make sure the "democracies" they spread elected the right leaders who just so happen to align with US interests.
There's a reason the US has military bases across the globe. It's not because they've retreated from their subservient states.
US did not stopped Axis alone, Allies did. Even in Pacific Soviet participation was very important in defeating Japan.
And the US did not retreat, it kept its military all across Europe (and the world), brought its nuclear weapons to Europe (not for the Europe, but for the US to be used with Europe as a launching pad).
I think OP is talking about the current administration.
Most simplistic would be _Divide and Conquer_ (Axis) vs _United we stand, divided we fall_ (Allie). This administration is going down the divide and conquer path.
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater. [0] The current US administration has numerous similarities to 1930s Germany. The way they support banning books and the treatment of the LGBT+ community. Working to take over media organizations with proponent operatives, financial corruption, and _please the leader_ are also present in both. There are more ... read the book for them.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...
My point was that this administration seems to like the axis plan more than the original US/Allied plan. I'm fully aware of which side was which. Tell that to Hegseth and Miller.
They didn’t even retreat from places like Italy because... the communists might be successful. So the CIA backed fascists to sabotage them.
And the US ... retreated. harumph And interferred, and supported right-wing militias, and invaded countries by themselves, and supported coups, and so on.
> nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.
It's not hard:
* They're trying to build nuclear weapons, and they're one of the worlds leading sponsor of terrorism (if not the sole leader).
* The country ran out of water, people started to protest their government, and were killed by the thousands (some say tens of thousands potentially more).
Water is one of the most basic human needs, if they're willing to kill their own people protesting for the most basic human need, what would they do with Nuclear to the rest of the world? I feel like people don't understand the gravity of Iran with nuclear.
Iran having nuclear will not end well for its citizens or the world.
> The Department of Defense is the Department of War
No, it is not, at least not technically. That would require an act of Congress, which hasn't happened. Despite what the idiots "in charge" seem to believe.
But those idiots "in charge" are what matters, right? Since they set the tone for the department, and lately they sure are acting more like a DoW than a DoD.
Its quite laughable to pretend that DoD was never on the offense between 1948 and 2025.
It's effectively the same. The EO declares the Dept of War as a secondary title. Formally it still is the DoD.
Should also keep in mind the secretary of war publicly stated the department's aim is "maximum lethality, not tepid legality".
Politics aside, anyone in the supply chain shouldn't be surprised they have a role in illegal killings, because that's literally what they said they're doing.
Great point. Labeling it as 'defense' instead of 'war' might be one of the more brilliant marketing tricks in the last century.
No one likes war, everyone loves defense. Something something expanded surveillance under the guise of counter-terrorism post-9/11.
> No one likes war, everyone loves defense. Something something expanded surveillance under the guise of counter-terrorism post-9/11
It was renamed after WWII. In part because smart minds realised that war between industrialised civilisations had ceased to be an accretive endeavour since sometime between Napoleon and the Kaiser.
Everyone involved was smart enough to realize it shouldn’t go hot.
Are they war or defense products when they are used against your own citizens?
Neither... it is illegal when used against citizens
> What law are you thinking of?
Posse Comitatus [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
What if you're waging a war in the name of defense?
What if it's just a "military operation" or a "military excursion"?
It certainly has nothing to do with defending the country the department is located in.
Quite a few joined when it was a defense contractor, at least in name. They could at least imagine that their jobs were for defense purposes.
The name change is a harsh truth.
The U.S. has been taking military action against other countries since its inception, whether it was named DoD or DoW.
> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate,
As a third party watching I just assumed it was a “dead cat”[1] to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files.
Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys either but the timing of this war… it just looks very odd.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
Also trump seems to have this weird thing about Obama. He is obsessed with him. He tore up the Obama Iran deal, and is now seeking a better solution.
Trump is the sort of old school racist whose entire model of the world couldn't tolerate Obama as POTUS.
...and then of course, this didn't help:
https://youtu.be/HHckZCxdRkA?si=axixDO1Cm1i3Su0k
> Obviously the Iranian government are not good guys
I'll believe this when it comes from someone other than the Epstein people. As it stands, the worst people in the world do not like Iran, so they're definitely doing something right.
There's the "hilarity" of Operation Epic Fury. E.F. Epstein Files. It's either someone's private joke or the most clueless name you could imagine (not to mention sounding like it was taken straight from a COD Lobby).
It's not really a distraction, it's just it's own stupid, horrible thing.
The most sane reason for "why now" would be because Iran was in a relatively weak position (domestic unrest, severely weakened proxies due to Israel) and the hawks saw an opening
That and Trump was more easily moved now that he's developed a taste for military shows of force after the Maduro thing. He probably thought it would make great content.
The Iran hawks and Netanyahu probably didn't have to push him very hard
I was under the impression the name was not actually formally changed, just like how the “Department of government efficiency” was never actually a department but was just a rebranding of an existing department done totally by mouth (like a lot of nonsense this administration does)
The name isn't changed.
the current administration is using the war name, it doesn't matter what it technically is because they are using it to plainly state their ambitions for it
They are war criminals participating in a war crime enterprise.
Let's clarify further that they are working for the clown Gestapo known as ICE, and they are enabling them to violate judicial directives and Constitutional protections for an adminstration speed running American anarcho-fascism.
Palantir used to be an effective augmentation to counter-insurgency and international terrorism.
Karp has gleefully pivoted to enabling authoritarian pogroms in American cities, and if you keep working there you have blood on your hands.
I think the reason is quite easy to articulate - Israel.
> y changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries
the "department of defense" has been doing military actions against other countries forever.
War and defence are the same thing in the US, so the naming doesn't really matter. To go after enemies, real or otherwise, with overwhelming force (to also the scare the ones not bombed this time), is to "defend" the US. That is how they justify it to themselves.
Regardless of what the Trump administration will tell you, that's not it's name. The executive branch is not empowered to unilaterally change the name of a department.
It’s not empowered to unilaterally declare war without approval from congress, either. But here we are.
You're mixing up the propaganda phrases, that's Russia's stance in Ukraine. Trump's is this is "an excursion", totally different things.
If that’s true, that’s insane. Forgive me, I’m not a PolSci scholar. Nobody in the cabinet can speak up and overrule his whimsy? It always annoys me when the headlines are “Trump invaded this …” or “Trump slapped a tariff on…” while effectively it’s the US government that’s doing that, they are letting him to do as he pleases? Then the fault lies not with him. He’s not a king but surely seems to have absolute discretion if you believe the headlines.
Even by ignoring the name change, that is its function. Even if it was called department of defense, it's actually department of war.
Regardless of what the name legally is, they are in fact initiating war against other nations and Palantir is one of the main players in those wars.
If it's what they call themselves and what they're currently doing, how much does it matter what the official name is?
I'd agree in principle, but they're already killing people. The worst-case scenario has been happening for a while; treating this as a procedural stance rather than a description of reality is blinkered.
Trump publicly mulled about going to war with Iran for weeks before it started. Iran had been killing its own citizens by thousands, stopping the massacre was a leading factor.
I am aware of one obscure Democrat that spoke out against the action at the time. I believe that man is the only one that should be criticizing the decision, because he didn’t wait on the fence to see how things turned out.
If you know of more Democrats that spoke out—- especially big name ones—- please provide credible, contemporary sources. I’ll be glad to give approval to any that acted bravely at the time.
Right, but Trump has stated he can accept working with the regime without consequence, like in Venezuela, as long as they cooperate on key issues e.g. oil and Israeli security concerns. He couldn’t care less that the regime is killing its own people. Like he couldn’t care less about Israel’s illegal occupation and murder.
To think Trump did this war to save Iranian lives from its own government is hopelessly naive. It was not at all a leading factor.
'We' should stop using the word 'we'. :)
'We' talk is how the pseudo-educated talk down to those other people who are the problem.
The US has always used its military for global terrorism. Only just now, it is more in your face. There is no doubt: the US is responsible for some of the most sickening crimes against humanity the world has ever seen, including directly being the inspiration for the Holocaust, as well as US companies providing logistics for the Holocaust!
I hate the idea that it was ever the DoD. It was always a terroristic, offensive force.
"It was always a terroristic, offensive force." Even during WW2?
Well if Bibi says it then it must be true!
I don't care what Netanyahu says. Why do you?
It isn't really accurate to describe those bombings as terrorism when they happened during the largest war in human history.
Ok then, always in our lifetime, assuming you are < 81
The Iran war started to provide a distraction from the Epstein files. Let's not pretend we don't know why, or more absurdly, can't quite articulate. It's very simple.
Why is this getting downvoted? How is this any less ridiculous sounding than the multitude of other, ever-shifting reasons Trump gave for starting the war.
> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate
(1) Nuclear proliferation.
We once had a deal that looked as though it was holding. Trump's nixing of the deal and the happenings in Ukraine accelerated Iran's desire to have nukes.
(2) Taiwan invasion postponement / CRINK disruption
As I've been reading, this might be a second order play to stall China's invasion of Taiwan. If China has to dip into strategic oil reserves to smooth out impact to its economy, it may forgo its Taiwan invasion plans for a bit longer.
It's also throwing a wrench into the CRINK alliance.
There's a lot of retrofitting going on here.
Those are incredibly thin justifications that don't really hold up to scrutiny.
1) The deal was holding. And even if we take Trump's word for it that it wasn't, he told us that he destroyed their nuclear capability a year ago. So either he was lying about that, or there was no serious nuclear capability in the first place. Regardless of how that shakes out, there's no reason we should believe this justification today.
2) This is incredibly speculative, and no serious intelligence analyst or military strategist would suggest "war with Iran" as a solution there. And the joke is on us, anyway: China may be feeling an oil crunch, but we're depleting our stock of a bunch of materiel that we'll need if it comes time to defend Taiwan. On top of that, China's military leadership is seeing how incompetently the US is prosecuting this war, and is likely feeling a lot more confident about their ability to fend off a US defense of Taiwan.
Achieving the declared objective falls directly within the category of "prosecuting the war", and "the US" certainly includes the Commander in Chief.
What?
How many is the right number of personnel and materiel to lose for this war that isn't war and seems to have been either purchased for a few hundred million by political bribes or is just a distraction from the administrations involvement in a monstrous child sex ring? Also didn't we already win this war last year, last month, and last week? It is really easy to wave away our fellow dead citizens (and Iranians, including a school full of children!) from an internet comment form but damn, real people are dead here and it's an actual tragedy.
For me, zero deaths seems like the right answer for these objectives and anything else is egregious abuse of power.
I'd love it if everyone stopped being happy with people lying to them. When you catch people lying to you, be angry and stop trusting them!
Even if we destroyed it, RU would be happy to resupply. What has this war that nobody wanted cost just at the gas pumps all over the world and who stood to benefit? I really do think I’d be better off having had been born a century or two ago reading books under a candle and digging outhouses when needed.
The reasons are very clear: Bibi owns Trump, Israel will unlikely have a US president as supportive again, they want as many facts on the ground as they can get whilst they have him.
I don't know if Trump could walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, but he sure seems able to screw Ukraine and bomb Iran at the same time. He just finished sending Vance to Hungary to stump for Orban, too. The love affair between far-right authoritarian leaders is not a 2 person relationship.
Is he doing anything that is hindering Putin? That theory still very much holds. Both Putin and Netanyahu can realistically have kompromat on him, seeing how incredibly brazen and stupid he is.
As a right-winger, I miss the day when Jew haters were just on our side.
> for reasons that nobody can quite articulate
I'll say them. The reasons are Trump, Vance, and Republicans.
Might want to go back and check on the Dems. It bad > it's the ones I don't vote for is easy to say.
I mean. The side voting while knowing they can't stop it that way, the definition of optics, thought this was worth it to not cater to their anti-war voters, no?
Both side bad yeah, you seem to think the solution is still to cling to the lesser of two evils. Hell, dem presidential candidates were praising Trumps Iran policy up until the bombs started falling. There is no evidence they _actually_ care about a war with Iran outside of, just as you do, saying OH this is THEIR doing.
got two words for you - Netanyahoo :)
> for reasons that nobody can quite articulate
They were articulated many times, maybe you didn't want to hear.
The action itself was poorly planned and executed, it's a different question.
Many reason were articulated, including the threat on an immediate attack on the US. That reason ran counter to defense assessments. Also, the reasons and goals stated by Trump (“President of Peace” and inaugural awardee of the FIFA peace prize), Rubio, and Hegseth have not been consistent.
Was the reason to open the Strait that was already open, prevent an attack, to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon, or to change a regime?
I believe Rubio stated the reason at the very beginning of the war. The US learned that Israel was going to attack and jumped in. Everything after that is bullshit.
The reasons this administration gave to justify this war are mostly lies though
The reasons given were complete bullshit. So maybe it's not true that they weren't articulated, but the reasons that were articulated don't hold up to scrutiny.
And, yes, on top of that, the action itself was poorly planned and executed, which just adds insult to injury.
Yeah, we didn't want Iran to have nukes, so we rugpulled the JCPOA and murdered the guy who declared a fatwa against nukes.
We wanted to save the Iranian people from the regime that murdered 100,000 peaceful protestors (don't ask for evidence) so we butchered 170 school girls and didn't apologize.
We wanted to stabilize the region, so we greenlit Israel's rampage in Lebanon and directly induced Iran to close the Strait.
Yeah. Articulated.
Can we agree on "thousands"?
Israel are the terrorists who invaded Palestine and have committed crimes against humanity all across the Middle East. Your hypothetical situation is nothing at all like what's going on in reality. Iran is our ally against Zionist occupation of our own government.
> Send them fresh water and electricity? They tried it with Gaza, didn't help.
yes, one cannot imagine why keeping millions of people in an open air concentration camp doesn't work out well
They're defense contractors the same way IBM and Oracle are. Palantir has a huge USG business, but they're also widely used across the Fortune 500. From the coverage of Palantir online you'd think the company actually manufactured Palantirs, but they are in fact a database consultingware company; one person described them to me as "Oracle but with the benefit of the Web 2.0 technology stack".
People read things like this and a switch flips in their brain, that they're being told to be more charitable to Palantir, and that's not at all where I'm coming from. Rather: the attention paid to Palantir does a very effective job of running cover for Oracle, IBM, and Cisco.
Obviously, the ludicrous marketing/communications operation Palantir is running doesn't make any of this any simpler to reason about. Imagine getting a manifesto from AWS alongside your S3 bill urging you to reconsider Apostolic succession in the traditional Catholic church; that's the vibe they've managed to create.
> Obviously, the ludicrous marketing/communications operation Palantir is running doesn't make any of this any simpler to reason about. Imagine getting a manifesto from AWS alongside your S3 bill urging you to reconsider Apostolic succession in the traditional Catholic church; that's the vibe they've managed to create.
I do think that in the set of companies, Palantir is the one that's doing this kind of marketing and positioning differently, right? And so it does put them apart, even if materially what they do is the same?
"It's OK to have the boot to our face if the person seems personally troubled by it" isn't what I'm saying, so much as "Maybe the people who are grinning ear to ear about putting the boot to our face are the people to worry the most about"
Palantir feels like low hanging fruit on this topic, because you really don't have to look for the subtext.
Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.
We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with.
Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!
There's at least one company that straight-up reverses a pacifistic cultural reference: a Ukrainian autonomous weapons company called The Fourth Law, as in Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to prevent humans from coming to harm.
Apart from my own thoughts on the Ukraine war and autonomous weapons, that name makes me feel like the company's founders either haven't engaged with the moral questions of their technology, or want to mock them.
A reference to "The Fourth Law" in that context is quite ambiguous, because not only did Asimov introduce a "Zeroth Law" that is sometimes also called the Fourth, but also subsequent fanfic introduced "Fourth Laws" that had different texts and different objectives, so there is no singular or canon "Fourth Law of Robotics".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Laws_of_Robotics_in_...
(Interestingly, neither of these articles mention Ukraine)
> Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company
I can't imagine any of them are confused about this. I'd expect most are proud to support our military.
The line that's been crossed is the military being turned against Americans. Palantir helping ICE surveil and round up folks who turned out to be, in many cases, innocent American citizens, seems to be what's prompting–correctly, in my opinion–the crisis of faith.
It's a U.S. domestic surveillance operation, disguised as a defense contractor.
Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it.
It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.
The way I see it is that sousveillance is the correct response to surveillance.
If people feel threatened by this organization and the people who make it up they should start doing to them what they're doing to everyone else.
Who specifically works at Palantir? What do they look like? Where do they live? What kind of vehicle do they drive? How do they spend their free time? Who do they associate with?
These are all very interesting questions.
Questions that can be answered and answers that can be distributed online, forever.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
No secrets.
Wrong. It does surveillance for multiple countries militaries. And also for private companies.
Also wrong. Palantir itself does not do surveillance. It sells software to government agencies, who use that software to conduct surveillance.
If the IRS uses Excel, that doesn't mean Microsoft is actively catching tax evasion. Microsoft is selling spreadsheet software, and one of the users of that software is the IRS.
Yeah, for sure. Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. All else being equal, if we want to live in a safe and successful society we want good/talented people working in defense. The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
> Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time.
This is true sometimes. But many times the companies and the government get together to kill people for money (The dead people's money or the taxpayers money - they don't mind which, money is money)
> The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
Defense is good
Offense, killing is not good.
Current department understands that and hence renamed to department of war
I don't agree with this. Just because the DOD says it is ethical doesn't mean it is so contractors have a duty to maintain ethical standards in the face of changing DOD standards. To me this means a DOD contractor decides before they go in that they will have limits and sticks to them. I think anyone working for Palantir right now should be considering the limits they have and if the company is going beyond them or not. I know that I for one do not consider their work ethical and would not work for them even though the DOD says it is ok. Understand before you sign.
To a large degree you can't choose how the DoD or other letter agency uses what they buy from you. Obviously you can set some contractual guardrails but realistically if you build drones that can mount hellfire missiles you have to know that it can be misused by some 22 year old. Its tempting to believe that software is different, but once its on-prem its out of your hands.
The difference is scale and accountability. Surveillance tech is impacting everyone and is part of every kill chain but its not what people see so there is very little accountability for it. Building a drone that launches something has far less scale and far more accountability since its effects are visible. I personally think there is a big difference between being part of something with at least some accountability and limited scale compared to unlimited scale and no accountability. Of course many people would disagree and set their levels lower (mine are actually lower than this now) but I think that DOD contractors can think in at least this level of terms and decide to be apart of some things and not others in a meaningful way. No matter what though, a problem being hard isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and saying 'I'm good because the DOD says it is ok'
> U.S. defense company
Uh... don't you mean U.S. attack company?
In isolation your clarification is right, but considering that US department of War actually kills hundreds of thousands of people, there should be no question about negativity of that department
Still minimal compared to DOGE.
> they are doing business with U.S. defense company.
any time you're flying on a Boeing 737, 787, 777 etc you're doing the same. Just like every time you turn on a GE light bulb.
I'm unsure of how this information is being presented. But it's entirely possible for the majority of people on Earth to avoid all those things. And it's entirely possible for many people who are (perhaps unwittingly) funding U.S. defense companies to stop doing so.
To pick some nits, the GE who does US defense sold off all their consumer products decades ago.
This makes it sound as though doing business with Palantir is akin to doing business with Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman etc. This ignores important, qualitatively different ways that Palantir is worse: eg intentional white supremacist goals from Karp (Oswald Mosley fan) and Thiel (dismantling of multiculturalism), as well as Palantir's role in the surge of surveillance capitalism that treats US citizens as the opponent, rather than the more classic statist-aligned goals of US Govt/US Capital whose contempt for human life and human rights was pointed externally - so, while harmful, was still esstentially compatible with democratic principles.
> Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA
This was obvious from the start. Not sure why people "are starting to wonder", which I don't believe either.
Boeing is a US defense contractor. Yet there are plenty of Boeing employees who can have a high expectation of ethics in their jobs.
You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.
https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/
looks to be a computing tool used for purposes currently popular and not warcraft
If they can look at their leaderships statements as positive or neutral then they are part of the problem.
I have had an active hand in designing weapons at a defense contractor (I was at one time an expert in external ballistics simulation) and I'd feel uncomfortable with the morality of working at Palantir.
How do you reconcile having worked in this capacity mentally? Not being snarky or judgemental, genuinely curious as to the mindset of someone who has been in this position.
As an Army veteran, I try to be accountable for the role I played in an imperial occupying force and use that to inform my decisions in life.
People have a hard time admitting they’ve done bad things that caused pain. I’ve done bad things and I try to not do bad things now. Reconciled.
> How do you reconcile having worked in this capacity mentally? Not being snarky or judgemental, genuinely curious as to the mindset of someone who has been in this position.
I don't work at defense contractor, but it would probably help to imagine the situation Ukraine is in. If no one in the West was comfortable working in this capacity, it would all be Russian territory now (and more besides).
That reminds me of a sci-fi quote, where one of the main characters is discussing a murderous antagonist, putting their evil into a broader context:
> "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real."
-- Shards of Honor (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold
You may have gotten caught up in the hype. It's still intelligence, logistics, bullets, missiles, and airplanes (etc.)
The beginnings of "automated murder" were anti-aircraft weapons that implemented a kind of mechanical computer that beat humans in predicting where aircraft were going to be (you have to shoot at where the plane is going to be when your bullets get there). Look up Norbert Wiener.
For a century it's been automation assisted, none of this is new, it's just been improving consistently. They had UAVs in WWI for gods sake. (flying things without people in them, used in war)
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There's usually a bit more accountability in using a missile than using palantir systems. At least legally, a missile could only be used in defense or in a war authorized by the congress.
Until recently, most of the population believed that the vast majority of America's military actions were somewhat just and legal, for noble reasons.
Dark stuff like Palantir was never like that.
Please not that I qualified both statements.
"At least legally" It doesn't matter if this is true for this situation, as an employee you only need to have been convinced this is true.
"Most of the population believed" - Again, even if they were mistaken, if they believed it, and let me tell you, a lot of the people STILL believes it, that belief is enough to enure you'll have a good night of sleep after a shift in a Lockheed office or factory.
I have been in the same position. Maybe I was naive but I believed that weapons design wasn't the most moral thing in the world, but sadly necessary, and I actually trusted the military to .. I guess act in legitimate and legal ways. That if those weapons were used in a conflict, it would be defensive and defendable morally.
Of course that was before the inexplicable adventurism in the Middle East.
Pragmatism. We live in the real world, one where threat of violence and actual violence is indeed sometimes necessary. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was peaceful and we could all get along happy and free? Sure, but that's not the world we live in and sticking my head in the sand and leaving the necessary dirty work to other people would bring me no more peace than helping do the necessary things as well as possible.
The most weaponlike thing I worked on was a sniper rifle program, and to me precision weapons are one of those best you can do in an imperfect world kinds of things.
"If we do not design better weapons, those countries who do will subjugate us. I'd rather that not happen."
Edit: I honestly and directly answered the question and am getting downvoted for it? Lovely
Don't they work for the same government you did?
Under the name of the* same government. You can’t equate 1940s US govt with today’s government. Different people different priorities different actions. Not necessarily saying good or bad one way or the other. But ‘same’ is reductionist way of interpreting the situation. There’s plenty of nuance.
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at? (of course the literal answer is yes but that's obvious)
I believe they're called war companies now.
Until the next administration, at least