Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Good luck with that
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?
Treason requires a war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Un...
Matches the last treason charges too. WWII was the last time anyone was charged (and convicted) of treason.
likely, we’ll never be at war again based on how we now do conflicts, waging language semantics and syntax
no war, no treason, no problem
we are evolved, there is no war in Ba Sing Se
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.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
Maybe you can pull your head out of your ass and see sometime, but we'd prefer you didn't based on this comment!
I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief.
As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Democracy%3A+The+God+That+Fa...
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.
The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!
> 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
What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
What's so great about voting? The things that people think they love about democracy are many, but voting isn't one of those. We love the idea that in principle, any child might grow up and become president. That (in principle, it's less and less so each day it seems) there is no ruling class and no political dynasties. That public discourse at least influences outcomes within government. Voting might have (at one time) helped to make those things a reality, but those things can all be had without voting.
Anyone who has heard of sortition and still wants voting to occur is a fool. Even the Greeks who invented democracy thought voting inferior to sortition.
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.
Glad that's not happening. Thanks for confirming they're not concentration camps.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic... - Gift link
https://archive.is/mPjPq - Archive link
So yes, he does say it's more likely to be Greta Thunberg than an "evil tech genius", but does not outright say she's the Antichrist.
I still find it strange that he's afraid of her creating a one world government.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
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.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
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.
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
> billionaire coup
Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.
the lies is what got us here
There have always been portions of the US electorate enamored with authoritarianism.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
* 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"?
> * 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.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
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.
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
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.
[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]
Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX
OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu
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.
Right. That's exactly why they get hate. So what's the problem with that?
Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.
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 enterpriseData 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.
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist. But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else. [but I would love so]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
mooreds•4h ago