Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX
definition of treason.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-...
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
You got a name and a raw source?
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
The full essay https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” - not Peter Thiel
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
Maybe you can pull your head out of your ass and see sometime, but we'd prefer you didn't based on this comment!
How familiar are you with the writings of the founding fathers? The ones who very intentionally avoided creating a system based on direct democracy?
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies.
Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
Other countries got those without paying Palantir billions.
Immigration detention facilities are not concentration camps.
The freedom to own a slave. The freedom to treat women as property. The freedom to kill somebody who may have wronged you.
Just an array of freedoms.
Another tidbit: he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
The American military could not successfully build a stable Iraqi democracy or completely suppress sectarian violence.
They absolutely destroyed the Iraqi conventional military and occupied the country for 8 years though.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Doubt.
> an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers
Didn't a couple of them literally tuck tail and run from the Houthis? Besides, three of them are scheduled for maintenance between 2027 and 2030.
> the largest submarine fleet in the world
Those subs are at a severe disadvantage in the very shallow waters of the South China Sea, which are riddled with all manner of sensors.
> serious power-projection problem
Irrelevant. Wouldn't we be fighting them over there?
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
> https://edition.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-r...
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
You actually need a balance of power to prevent an armed political conflict, so the adults in the room will maintain one.
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
What's their promise?
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.
SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterprise data work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?
> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative
With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons. Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
mooreds•2h ago