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[HN Gopher] Reflections on Palantir
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Reflections on Palantir
Author : freditup
Score : 265 points
Date : 2024-10-16 02:18 UTC (1 days ago)
HTML web link (nabeelqu.substack.com)
TEXT w3m dump (nabeelqu.substack.com)
| newprint wrote:
| Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business model ?
| I haven't heard any large, meaningful project they been involved
| in, but I keep hearing the company name & how hot they are and
| their stocks are going to blow-up any day (some of my friends
| kept their stocks for the last 4-5 years with very little gain
| compared to other software companies). I know of the smaller
| software companies that are less than 100 people and have a very
| meaningful impact in DoD & Gov space.
| maeil wrote:
| They basically have two. Just like e.g. Amazon has both retail
| and cloud infra as separate, independent business models.
|
| One is described well in the article, originally aimed at
| commercial clients. The article isn't short but we're on HN,
| not Reddit, so we should read the articles. Parts 2 and 3
| describe it. The linked note at the end of 3 is very relevant.
|
| The other one is the gov one, which is also mentioned as
| "Palantir has prevented terrorist attacks".
|
| The article actually links to lots of product docs. It isn't
| secretive, plenty of videos on Youtube demoing the software.
| The docs are public, which is more open than can be said for
| 90% of software in their price range.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| When I interned at Palantir (summer 2014) their business was
| mostly in data ingestion, visualization, and correlation.
|
| A typical workflow for a Palantir customer was that Palantir
| would come in and dump a ton of data out of old crufty
| databases and into Palantir's datastore. Then, they'd establish
| connections between that data. This is all sounds kind of hand-
| wavy, but the gist of it is that a lot of government agencies
| have data that lives in separate databases and they can't
| easily correlate data between those two databases. Once the
| data was in Palantir's system, they could do queries against
| all their data, and make connections and correlations that they
| wouldn't otherwise be able to find when the data was previously
| siloed.
|
| One of the sample use cases was identifying people filling
| prescriptions for schedule II drugs multiple times on the same
| day, and correlating that with pharmacies run by people
| connected to known drug traffickers. Previously, this was hard
| to do because the database of prescription purchases was
| disconnected from the database of drug convictions.
| hammock wrote:
| So it's hygiene and structure
| Manuel_D wrote:
| That, and a really powerful visualization suite. In the
| example I gave above, you could plot the prescription
| purchases on a map and see that people were driving along
| the highway and hitting up pharmacies along the interstate.
| Better yet, you could drop into Google Street view in front
| of one of the pharmacies, and look at it from the street
| level and see that it doesn't even have signage indicating
| it's a pharmacy.
| swells34 wrote:
| I used it quite a bit early on during military
| operations. The ability to see the timing component was
| key; not only would you plot the purchase locations, but
| you could play the timeframe of records, work out the
| timing so you knew the order in which they visited the
| locations, where they must have stopped for gas along the
| route. In a classic workflow, you'd then investigate the
| gas stations, attach them to the event with confidence
| intervals, pull CCTV footage, see if you can get a
| payment receipt, and enter all of that data back into
| palantir. A few days of doing this, and you can build up
| all a map of every aspect of the drug run; the who what
| when where and why. It's a fantastic organization system.
| lapphi wrote:
| I appreciate the technical achievements here. However, I
| wonder how long before it's standard practice to track
| all peoples movement, not just those suspected of a
| crime. I know of at least one YouTube channel that is
| always recording all traffic camera streams in Washington
| so there must be some State entities doing the same. Back
| in 2020 there was a twitch channel that would play a 9x9
| grid of all the livestream footage from the George Floyd
| protests. I'm sure an archive of that exists somewhere on
| a LE server.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| nsa is storing _everything_
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Visualization is a fancy package. Nobody looks at
| visualizations, but that's what makes people buy.
| vundercind wrote:
| I've known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on
| fake, fancy "war rooms" they staff with people doing
| nothing useful, filled with "big board" style maps and
| shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren't used
| anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting
| CEO through, let them pretend what they're involved in is
| way cooler and more interesting and important than it
| really is, and I guess that assists sales so much that
| such endeavors make way more money than they cost.
|
| I connect this with comments I heard from several major
| management consulting firm folks stating bluntly that the
| best way to communicate effectively with execs is to
| approach them like young children.
|
| Life is super weird. Who knew imaginative play would be
| such a big thing for "serious" adults? I'd never have
| imagined, but it's kinda _everywhere_.
| danudey wrote:
| IIRC part of it is that the software itself can make
| connections between separate data sets. You're not just
| ingesting data about purchasing information and drug
| convictions and so on, you're getting automatic
| relationship detection. For example, figuring out that the
| cust_ss_num field in one dataset correlates to the
| conv_ssn_full field in another dataset, and knowing that
| those fields are the "SSN" field from a third dataset, and
| being able to automatically give you a view where those
| three datasets are correlated. This saves people having to
| go through every data set and manually map each field to
| each other equivalent field in each other related dataset.
|
| I could be mistaken, but I think this is how it was
| explained to me originally.
| hammock wrote:
| That makes sense and sounds really useful
| mperham wrote:
| Building a panopticon is always justified as a way to
| fight crime and then becomes a way to control the
| population. Tracking women getting Plan B, tracking
| people buying birth control, etc.
| browningstreet wrote:
| In many of the enterprise orgs I've worked in, the two tech
| teams that are chronically understaffed are 1) info sec, 2)
| DBA/ data architecture/ data science. I'm lumping those 3
| together on purpose, because they're always understaffed and
| typically not empowered to build anything.
| hitekker wrote:
| You're right to group Data teams together. They seem to
| share a common plight.
|
| In my experience, internal employees outside Data have a
| funny relationship with Data. They hate to manage it but
| they love to blame it, especially in analytical / decision-
| making scenarios. Teams that "own" the data usually get the
| blame, on top of having to deal with a mass of rotting
| pipes and noncompliant teams, while also losing out on
| credit when non-Data teams report big wins.
|
| Based on what the GP says, it sounds like Palantir knows
| how to exploit common internal politics around Data. They
| build up technical & social expertise in ETL'ing disparate
| data sources, _and_ they can avoid blame by being hired by
| executives as an external third party.
| vundercind wrote:
| This is exactly what I thought TFA was getting at when it
| brought up politics being a problem at companies and in
| sectors Palantir engages with, but instead it went a much
| more general direction.
| hitekker wrote:
| He talks about it a little:
|
| > Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in
| different formats that aren't easily analyzed by
| computers - PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many
| Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the
| way is organizational politics: a team, or group,
| controls a key data source, the reason for their
| existence is that they are the gatekeepers to that data
| source, and they typically justify their existence in a
| corporation by being the gatekeepers of that data source
| (and, often, providing analyses of that data). [3] This
| politics can be a formidable obstacle to overcome, and in
| some cases led to hilarious outcomes - you'd have a
| company buying an 8-12 week pilot, and we'd spend all
| 8-12 weeks just getting data access, and the final week
| scrambling to have something to demo.
|
| I think he's seen more companies without talented Data
| experts than companies with that talent.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| So if they are dumping data out of old crufty databases and
| into Palantir's datastore, which one is the active database
| going forward? In 2024.
| vundercind wrote:
| All of them, plus whatever next vendor they "migrate" to in
| three years (I'm being generous).
| sroerick wrote:
| People dismiss this type of work as no big deal, but in my
| experience this is the actual hard work of producing
| something useful for companies, and what 90% of SaaS
| resellers will never be able to deliver on.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, it is very hard. But does Palantir succeed? Or do they
| like some other companies just trick customers with big
| wallets to buy?
| trenchgun wrote:
| To me it seems they do https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-
| the-dragnet/
| osrec wrote:
| We used them at a bulge bracket investment bank and they
| failed miserably...
| vundercind wrote:
| The impression I get from their involvement at one
| company I know of is that it's very much the latter. I
| was pretty surprised to see them behaving and performing
| about the same as any parasitic enterprise software
| vendor with an integration services arm. One wonders how
| different they really are, and if maybe they just have
| very good PR and marketing.
|
| Chalk it up as yet another case of some famous one-would-
| suppose impressive entity, or strata of a company
| hierarchy, or whatever, turning out to be pretty average,
| or even below average. You'd think I'd stop being
| surprised by now.
|
| Then again, maybe I was just seeing their B-team.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| So basically data warehousing, and making it possible to do
| joins?
|
| Super boring, but super important stuff, which I've seen
| neglected at far too many places I've worked.
|
| Sounds like data engineering with a dash of ML.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This is a good post to explain the value proposition. It
| sounds like "Big Data" from the 1990s, but a very good
| salesperson was able to infiltrate some US gov orgs to sell
| the idea.
| stephencoyner wrote:
| They have a few brand new products that are quite compelling.
|
| Warp Speed: Aims to integrate ERP, MES, PLM, and factory floor
| systems into a single AI-driven platform. As opposed to legacy
| ERP systems, it focuses on production optimization rather than
| just financial tracking. Warp Speed has the potential to
| relegate legacy systems to backend data storage, shifting the
| entire intelligence layer (and value) to Palantir's system.
| Warp Speed targets both innovative new manufacturers (they note
| Tesla and Space X alums starting new companies) and traditional
| large-scale operations.
|
| Mission Manager: enables other defense contractors to build on
| Palantir's platform and benefit from their security
| infrastructure and position of trust within government. You can
| think of it as an AWS for defense companies; plug and play with
| the foundations handled for you. While the product just
| launched in Q4 2023, they just received a new $33 million CDAO
| Open DAGIR contract. While this is possibly just an advanced
| POC, it represents significant potential for future growth and
| wider adoption in the defense sector. Now is the perfect time.
| From 2021 to 2023, VC firms invested nearly $100 billion in
| defense tech startup companies, a 40% increase from the
| previous seven years combined. Time is the most important thing
| for these startups and Mission Manager shows the potential to
| save lots of it.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > Now is the perfect time
|
| The perfect time is yesterday. All defense companies already
| went way up.
|
| Palantir... Not so much
| stephencoyner wrote:
| The stock is up 152% YTD. I think they went up?
| melling wrote:
| The stock has blown up. It has more than doubled for me. Almost
| tripled.
|
| It's quite expensive now.
|
| I would encourage you to do your own research.
|
| For some reason, HN has very little depth in stock market
| understanding. HN passed on META at $100.
|
| I know there are some very knowledgeable people here. Wish
| there was a way to create a "subreddit " here without all the
| Reddit noise.
| sakopov wrote:
| If you were buying in the $6s, it nearly 7x'ed in like a year
| rabf wrote:
| One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to
| countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy
| buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of
| business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse.
| A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse.
| So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to
| attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that
| was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time.
| Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
| nodesocket wrote:
| HN has always lacked economic and stock market knowledge and
| instincts generally speaking. Most comments tend to say it's
| rigged, evil capitalist, etc. Guessing because hackers
| generally tend to swing far left and socialist though weird
| as a lot of founder and entrepreneurs are active on HN as
| well.
|
| There is a long tradition of show HN were the comments poo
| poo startups and ideas which end up being huge and the
| opposite is also true with praise and admiration of failures.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Common sense gets in the way of gamblers instinct.
| joewhale wrote:
| It all comes down to if you have the right sales people that
| can land large govt contracts. The rest is figuring it out as
| you go. This is an incredible moat for them. Whoever gets these
| large govt contracts first in their space wins.
| swordsmith wrote:
| I use Foundry for work. It makes data ingestion, cleaning,
| quality check and automation easy. After all the data is
| ingested, running analysis/RAG on them become extremely easy.
|
| Basically, it's end-to-end data engineering and analytics. And
| the more a company uses/invests into the platform, the more
| benefit and locked-in they are.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| RAG?
| mandevil wrote:
| Retrieval Augmented Generation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-
| augmented_generation
|
| Basically, using your actual data/documents to supplement a
| general purpose LLM and generate better answers for your
| specific use case.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| "End-to-end data engineering and analytics" is quite a bold
| claim from a single service provider.
|
| Here is the link for anyone interested:
| https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/ and a YouTube
| explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGGRCTTjLfQ
|
| Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me this
| seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable - I'm
| surprised there are not more competitors in the "vertically
| integrated data providers" space.
| maeil wrote:
| > Given you've used it, just how self-service is it? To me
| this seems like such a large claim that - if it's doable -
| I'm surprised there are not more competitors in the
| "vertically integrated data providers" space.
|
| It is both very self service and not very self service.
| That's why they employ the FDE model from the article, to
| actually ingrain it into the client company to the point
| that it becomes self service.
|
| It's extremely hard to build such a product from scratch
| and have it actually be _good_ , that's why there's no
| competitors. Especially providing the finely grained
| security controls that the article talks about, and have
| the platform be secure. There's a reason their security
| team wins the biggest CTFs half the time.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Can someone explain to me what is the Palantir's business
| model
|
| AFAICT, it is government & government-adjacent contracting
| using techniques borrowed from big tech and WITCH, since big
| tech won't directly court government sw contracts, and WITCH
| may fail at getting clearances for foreign-based personnel.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| WITCH?
| dullcrisp wrote:
| WITCH!!
| wpasc wrote:
| I was curious too; here's an HN link spelling it out and
| discussing in context of working there:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
| sangnoir wrote:
| Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. i.e. "large tech
| consulting companies" if you're feeling generous, "body
| shops" if you're not.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| your own private digital cia, for hire to the highest bidder.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse.
|
| At the risk of "getting political" which obviously the original
| post can't possibly be ever. It was seen as those things because
| it is those things.
|
| Palantir is to the palestinian genocide what IBM was to the
| holocaust. This guy is going to lie to his grandchildren about
| what he was doing during this time.
|
| No "reflection" on palantir without grappling with its role in
| oppression is worth writing.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 246 PE, with a $94B market cap.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/
|
| Alex Karp has something figured out. The investor class loves
| him.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| As best I can tell only ARM has a higher PE and Market Cap.
|
| https://www.marketbeat.com/market-data/high-pe-stocks/
| airstrike wrote:
| Those are trailing P/E numbers, so they are just plain wrong
| and should be disregarded.
|
| Also P/E doesn't matter for companies that have not been
| profitable for long. Any PE number above 100x is very likely
| just noise. I wouldn't look at anything too far above 30x,
| maybe 40x to account for the craze behind NVDA today
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Fine, but it is notable / extremely notable that there is
| only one large cap more expensive than Palantir on a PE
| basis. I'm not splitting hairs here, I'm talking about
| extreme outliers.
| airstrike wrote:
| It isn't really notable because those PE multiples are
| literally just noise. There are many companies with
| negative PE on that list too, even though that makes no
| sense.
|
| To take that even further, imagine ACME Corp.'s stock
| price is $1.00 today. You're a research analyst and built
| a very robust model based on your understanding of the
| company, the market in which it operates, corporate
| guidance, competitor performance, your experience, phone
| checks with the sales channel, etc. Your model currently
| says the company will have negative ($0.01) EPS over the
| next 12 months. Based on this information, its implied
| forward P/E multiple is -100.0x.
|
| The next day, you come to work and update your model
| based on some new information like the Fed cutting rates
| by 25 bps or revised labor market assumptions, what have
| you, such that your expected next twelve months EPS is
| now positive $0.01. The implied trading multiple is now
| 100.0x.
|
| Do you think a $0.02 change in the expected EPS should
| result in a 200.0x P/E difference? No, it shouldn't. The
| P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-zero
| earnings has no meaning.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > . The P/E ratio for a company with negative or near-
| zero earnings has no meaning.
|
| Only true in a ZIRP world, which no longer exists.
| Companies have bills to pay, and if you're constantly
| bouncing around 0 PE gambler's ruin is not far ahead
| airstrike wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. Plenty of negative P/E
| companies in the market with positive implied equity
| value.
|
| The least objectionable defense of my argument is that
| many such companies are choosing to reinvest so much of
| their cash flows into more growth because that creates
| higher NPV than the alternative. If they wanted to, they
| could be profitable, but they choose not to be in order
| to be MORE profitable in the future.
|
| Also note EPS is an accounting metric, so it's just
| "theoretical" stuff. It's not cash flow. These companies
| in general have positive operating cash flow... including
| PLTR
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > they are just plain wrong and should be disregarded.
|
| Are you saying Palantir's previous 10-Ks and 10-Qs have
| material misstatements of fact?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Kind of conveniently cut off the first part of the
| statement there. The basis of fundamental valuation,
| discounted cash flow analysis, looks at _all cash flows_
| , forever, into the far future until the company dies.
| For a sufficiently mature company, current earnings are
| reasonably considered a good approximation of future
| earnings. For a newer company that is growing rapidly and
| spending most of its cash on long term investments rather
| than current year operations, it is not. Otherwise, every
| new company that has no earnings yet would be worthless,
| or if you consider losing money to be negative earnings,
| you're saying they should be paying you to own them.
| airstrike wrote:
| No, it's just the trading multiples derived from them
| that are totally wrong for the purposes of valuing the
| company today, because the Ks and Qs pertain to the past,
| which we cannot visit.
| airstrike wrote:
| Not every company trades on P/E. Some trade on EBITDA, others
| on Revenue. It's a spectrum. The more mature (code for more
| profitable, lower growth), the more likely it trades on P/E.
|
| Palantir has $0.09 earnings per share. 2023 was the first year
| they were profitable. So P/E isn't the right metric to look at
| here.
|
| Also no investor ever trades on _trailing_ metrics. It's all
| about forward earnings, but 99.999999% of valuation multiples
| you see online are trailing metrics (or use questionable
| forward estimates pulled from some aggregate which is also just
| noise instead of actually diligencing estimates)
| specialsits wrote:
| It's always amusing when armchair investors throw around
| financial metrics meant for entirely different types of
| companies, just to sound knowledgeable because they've heard
| others repeat the same lazy jargon.
| cgh wrote:
| Honest question from someone who "armchair invests" in broad-
| market ETFs: what metrics would I look at for a company like
| Palantir? I'm not asking for investment lessons. Just your
| opinion and some links would be fine.
| airstrike wrote:
| Always forward multiples, never trailing ones. Palantir
| likely trades on Enterprise Value / NTM Revenue (next 12
| months).
|
| Don't just take the average provided by something like
| Yahoo Finance. You need to look at which analysts are
| providing estimates, decide which of those analysts are
| reliable (e.g. a Bank of America analyst can be trusted, a
| Morningstar bot that writes research reports cannot), write
| down all their estimates, take either the mean or average
|
| Because few analysts provide quarterly estimates, you need
| to use annual estimates instead. But the next twelve months
| are going to be made of some part of 2024 plus some part of
| 2025. Palantir's fiscal year is 12/31/2024 so it's a bit
| less annoying to calculate.
|
| Their most recently reported quarter was Q2 2024, so the
| next 12 months = Q3 2024 + Q4 2024 + Q1 2025 + Q2 2025[1].
|
| Then you have to calculate enterprise value, which is
| easier said than done. In a nutshell, it's the total equity
| value + debt - cash, but there are always minor things to
| adjust. Equity value is the number of diluted shares
| outstanding[2] multiplied by today's share price. To
| calculate diluted shares, you will need to know the options
| that are outstanding on the company and use the Treasury
| Stock Method to assume all of the in-the-money options are
| exercised, with the proceeds from those options being used
| to buy back shares. Debt you can get from financial
| statements, unless the company has publicly traded debt in
| which case you might need to adjust for its current value
| rather than its book value. Cash you can simply get from
| financial statements, but there can be issues there too
| depending on how complex the company is. Add all of that
| together (subtract cash!) and you get Enterprise Value.
|
| Divide Enterprise Value by NTM Revenue and you'll get a
| revenue multiple for this company today. But if you want to
| calculate what the company _should_ be worth relative to
| competitors, you can do the same thing for all of its
| competitors, then take the mean/average EV/Revenue of those
| comps and say "PLTR should be worth this much"
|
| Also separately you can build a DCF if you have sufficient
| visibility into the future cashflows of the company.[3]
|
| You can take some shortcuts or go even deeper in all of the
| above. It comes down to how much scrutiny you need for the
| investment you're making. Are you SAP trying to acquire
| Palantir? You're going to do all of the above with more
| detail than I explained. Are you deciding whether to
| rebalance a bit of your portfolio out of Palantir as an
| individual trader? Maybe Yahoo Finance Pro estimates are
| serviceable enough (I wouldn't know).
|
| OR just find an analyst whose views on the company you
| happen to like and who you think is generally right and
| look at their multiples so you don't have to do all that
| legwork yourself. But you'll need to be a client at their
| bank to get access to their research...
|
| ----
|
| [1] Some people like to do (days left in 2024 / 365) * FY
| 2024 estimates and take the remaining days to make up a
| year * FY 2025, but that's totally wrong for many reasons,
| the most obvious being that investors aren't updating their
| models (and thus the valuation multiples those models
| output) on a daily basis. There's no new news about the
| company every single day, so estimates should be stable
| over the course of the quarter.
|
| [2] NOT from the earnings report, as that "diluted shares"
| for EPS means something else: to simplify, it means diluted
| over the course of the year rather than today, which is
| what we want.
|
| [3] For fast growing companies, this is harder because you
| need to extrapolate all the way until you get to a year
| with relatively low growth cash flows in order to get to a
| "terminal year" for a DCF analysis, but if you're
| projecting 10-20 years into the future, chances are you're
| wrong!
| cgh wrote:
| Fantastic response, thank you for taking the time.
| airstrike wrote:
| My pleasure! Wall Street likes to gatekeep this info
| (it's very simple math but banks charge millions for it)
| and there's a disheartening shortage of publicly
| available repositories with this knowledge (most of it
| can be automated, except for one-off adjustments you need
| to make for each company here and there for accounting
| reasons or out of the ordinary occurrences)
|
| The bit I forgot to add is that you kinda have to do the
| reverse too, if you're valuing the company based on
| comparables: take their mean multiple, then apply that
| PLTR's forward revenue to get to some enterprise value,
| then subtract net debt (i.e. minus debt _plus_ cash now!)
| and get to equity value. Then divide by the diluted
| shares (you have to imply the Treasury Stock Method
| dilution in some somewhat circular Excel math) to get to
| a final dollar value per share
|
| You can take this one step further and draw line charts
| over time with these multiples vs. comparables to see how
| the sentiment has changed for this stock (or for
| comparables) over time. And many other similar
| analyses...
| nuz wrote:
| Since will come up, Thiels response to some of current
| geopolitical critiques of Palantir:
| https://youtu.be/bNewfkhhwMo?t=3755
| jedimind wrote:
| Thiel is such a propagandist, his speech reminds me of Nazi
| propaganda where the Nazis claimed that Jews had declared war
| on Germany. This narrative was part of a broader anti-Semitic
| campaign to justify the persecution of Jews. The Nazis cited
| several instances as evidence of this purported declaration of
| war by Jews, most notably a headline from the British newspaper
| The Daily Express on March 24, 1933, which read "Judea Declares
| War on Germany." This headline was in response to a worldwide
| boycott of German goods organized by Jewish groups to protest
| against the early actions of the Nazi government, such as the
| boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany.
|
| The Nazi regime used this headline and other similar
| international actions to claim that the global Jewish community
| was an enemy of Germany. This supposed declaration of war
| served as a convenient pretext for the Nazis to intensify their
| anti-Semitic policies, which eventually led to the Holocaust.
| The narrative fit into the broader Nazi ideology that portrayed
| Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and the
| Aryan race, and it was used to justify the systematic genocide
| that was to follow. This is akin to Thiel stating "well, if the
| jews had the power, they too would have committed a holocaust
| against the Germans", this is sheer insanity, he uses a similar
| argument to justify the Palestinian genocide. Stating "they
| didn't dresden Gaza", huh? What Israel did to Gaza is, by any
| measurable metric, much worse than what happened to Dresden.
| His defense of Israel's Genocide of Palestinians is not just
| factually wrong but filled with statements that are evidence of
| his denial of reality.
|
| At 1:03:05 Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where
| the crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what
| absolute insanity. Legally and pragmatically, that statement is
| absurd. One can not judge people based on their "intentions",
| which can't be separated from personal bias and interpretation,
| but only on their concrete actions and not their perceived
| "thought crimes".
|
| So Thiel dishonestly removes all context of a century of brutal
| colonialism and ethnic-cleansing to paint the crudest zionist
| propaganda of "they just want to kill all jews" instead of a
| colonized people whose children, in the same year - months
| before that event, were brutally murdered by the israeli
| occupation as they have done for decades: At least _507
| Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023_ , including
| _at least 81 children_ , _making it the deadliest year for
| Palestinians_ since the United Nations Office for the
| Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) began recording
| casualties in 2005.
| [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/shocking-
| spik...]
|
| Weaponizing antisemitism to disguise colonialism is extremely
| heinous and cheapens real antisemitism - would it make any
| difference if the occupiers were Scientologists? If you lose
| your land and property why would you care about the identity of
| your oppressor?
|
| Even Ahmed Yassin the founder of hamas has a famous video
| shared across social media where he states: "We don't hate Jews
| and fight them because they are Jews. Jews are people of a
| religion, and we are people of a religion. We love all people
| of religion. My brother even if he is my brother and he is a
| Muslim, If he steals my house and kicks me out, I will resist
| him."
|
| Although the zionist propagandists know very well that it is
| their oppressive occupation for which they are hated, they
| still prefer peddling a false narrative that their targets of
| colonization just "hate the jews", because it's a very potent
| narrative that plays into islamophobic and orientalist tropes
| which the western world finds appealing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Thiel states: "the intent to commit a crime is where the
| crime gets committed". LOL, and the audience clapped - what
| absolute insanity.
|
| That's the infamous Ender's Game school of warfare, there's a
| reason that book used to be handed out at US military
| academies. Extremely relevant essay:
|
| https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-
| website/creating...
|
| _Stryka's concern for the genocide of the buggers, which
| might be interpreted as arising out of a concern for the
| humanity of the "other," is presented instead as an example
| of scapegoating the "other"--but in this case the other is
| redefined as the exterminator, not the exterminated. This is
| a very clever stratagem: those of us concerned about
| understanding the "other" are redirected from worrying about
| the alien to worrying about the killer of the alien, and thus
| our condemnation of genocide reemerges as a sign of our
| prejudice and small-mindedness. Ender is not the victimizer,
| but the misunderstood victim of others' fear and prejudice._
| jedimind wrote:
| The problem is that Thiel himself clearly didn't understand
| the message of the novel. Quoting Ender's Game to justify
| genocide[1] fundamentally misinterprets the novel. Ender is
| horrified when he realizes he has been tricked into
| committing genocide and spends his life seeking redemption.
| Thiel on the other hand is bending over backwards to lie to
| the audience in order to justify the genocide.
|
| Even before the genocide began, it was clear from how
| israeli officials repeatedly referenced Dresden that they
| viewed the bombing as a model for their actions--and that
| is precisely what they did. Thus, it is even more absurd
| for Thiel to claim that they "didn't Dresden Gaza." They
| did, and it is much worse and it still hasn't stopped after
| more than a year.
|
| [1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-
| amos-go... - Israel 'undoubtedly committing genocide' says
| Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg
| EasyMark wrote:
| Thiel knows how to get rich and I'll give him that, however I
| would never trust his reptilian takes on geopolitics or
| anything else outside of business strategy and even then I
| might limit it to stuff he's working on in the past.
| tdeck wrote:
| > During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked
| at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA
| surveillance, or worse.
|
| Lots of people still see it in exactly this way. The fact that
| Palantir IPO'd and is a magnet for investors doesn't contradict
| this. Palantir always had a reputation for champagne and
| surveillance.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally
| neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably
| classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US
| government probably has access to all that data - with our
| without warrants.
|
| I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area
| working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a
| rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other
| nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from
| job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >You would rarely find any other nation that where defense
| tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda
| ridiculous.
|
| Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one
| hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense.
| On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending
| all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal
| problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to
| political stuff.
|
| When people post memes about "You are about to find out why
| US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming
| American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to
| see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are
| spending all this money on world police when we have a ton
| of internal problems?
|
| Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation
| of the post-WWII rules-based international order that
| underpins the entire global economy. The Department of
| Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is
| the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the
| world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is
| starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not
| screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
| mistermann wrote:
| Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain
| outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same
| general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort
| is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few
| options other than speculation if one is obligated to
| form a conclusion on the matter.
| scottyah wrote:
| All deliberate actions to achieve certain outcomes are
| "force", it is a scale not a binary option.
| mistermann wrote:
| I am skeptical, let's run an experiment and see what the
| response is:
|
| Is feeding the homeless so they are not hungry "force"?
|
| Is lending a compassionate ear to someone suffering so
| they may feel a bit better "force"?
|
| Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie
| because I find it pleasant "force"?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie
| because I find it pleasant "force"?
|
| To the chicken, turkey, pig, or cow that died to make the
| meat in your sandwich, definitely yes.
| ngcazz wrote:
| We should stop defending an imperialist establishment
| which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global
| south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-
| based order. More like America rules.
|
| The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by
| date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral
| high ground was shattered at the very latest with the
| Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a
| joke in poor taste.
|
| You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to
| drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you
| hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the
| human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons
| deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC
| veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce
| unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning
| awful consequences for the whole world.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to
| drive anyone decent crazy._
|
| All complaints, no solutions. Typical.
|
| So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe?
| It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all
| peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine
| much worse, just by reading a history book.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road
| if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by
| the US.
|
| Thats one example, there are many others.
|
| In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US,
| the only time the people at the top ever gave any
| semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew
| they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with
| whatever little they could give to calm the masses.
|
| Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again
| with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the
| bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-
| existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for
| the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was
| something.
|
| We just need something like that on a worldwide level.
| Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US
| given that the EU never amounted to much more than being
| a US vassal state.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be
| all peace and harmony if the US disappeared.
|
| You've misread the situation. I don't think it would be
| global peace and harmony if we stopped playing world
| police. I simply _do not care_. It 's not our
| responsibility to take care of other countries while we
| have serious problems at home that are going ignored.
| scottyah wrote:
| Kissinger set out for a policy that prioritized
| stability, communication, and mutual understanding of
| each others' desires to live their own lives.
|
| If we do not "take care" of other countries (as in stop
| being world police, stop assisting in their problems like
| Clinton did with Ireland's Troubles, etc...) we would
| have their problems at our doorstep.
|
| Also, there is definitely a subset of Americans that
| cannot stand by living well when others aren't, just
| because they other people were born elsewhere. This
| applies on all levels: Country, State, County, City,
| Neighborhood, block, house, etc.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| What are you smoking? Have you not seen the list of all
| the governments that have been "removed" by the US? Most
| recently Pakistan which was a year ago
|
| [1]:https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-
| pakistan-cyph...
|
| [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involveme
| nt_in_r...
| mistermann wrote:
| > It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be
| all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can
| imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
|
| What is the relevance of this to the content of the
| comment you are replying to?
| csomar wrote:
| That's like telling a woman with a beating husband that
| it's better to stay with him because the other men are
| worse.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| If you live in a world where it simply isn't possible for
| some reason for the woman to not have a husband at all,
| it makes perfect sense.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the
| decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and
| much of Asia and the ME.
|
| This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously
| bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption
| and little chance to turn things around because of
| entrenched interests.
|
| I can just picture the thought process going in your
| head(and many others) right now. _If you hate it so much
| why dont you leave_.
| yks wrote:
| > Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent
| lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of
| Asia and the ME
|
| America benefited greatly from this position though, it's
| just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one
| can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that
| outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of
| the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US
| gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms.
| FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not
| propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
| nxobject wrote:
| I think there's some clarification that needs to happen,
| though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the
| terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps
| back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable
| interpretation, the US remains an important trading,
| industrial, technological, and educational world power.
| Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide
| surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical
| influence allows for many strategies.
| yks wrote:
| Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means
| letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their
| satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the
| world, by force if needed. Which means access to the
| foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise
| "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that
| leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since
| the political forces trying to bring that about are also
| not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and
| education".
|
| The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign
| lifestyles because the middle class in the US is
| struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not
| make things better for the US middle class. Nor for
| middle class of any other country really, although the GP
| doesn't care about those.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means
| letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their
| satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the
| world, by force if needed.
|
| The US isn't going anywhere. In fact China has serious
| structural problems that may make all this conversation
| pointless. But there needs to be some sort of pathway for
| the global south to move forward. If that involves having
| China rise up and then countries accepting that all they
| can do is play the US and China off of each other to get
| the best deals out of them then thats still a step
| forward. If climate change comes to pass it may not even
| matter. The US and the West is the cause for the majority
| of the historical pollution yet its the unprepared global
| south that will bear the worst brunt of climate change.
| So the best I am advocating for is that the global south
| take one step forward and hope they don't end up five
| steps backwards in the long run.
|
| >The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign
| lifestyles because the middle class in the US is
| struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not
| make things better for the US middle class. Nor for
| middle class of any other country really, although the GP
| doesn't care about those.
|
| As to improving the middle class, we need to understand
| the structural reasons why they are sinking. Decades of
| erosion to US institutions has led to a situation that
| can only change if things get really bad and the citizens
| really demand change..or the US elite are challenged with
| some real competition. I dont see how it can happen
| naturally in the US anymore. Every time people get fed
| up, there is a "release valve" or a distraction in the
| form of crumbs offered to people so that enough settle
| down or fixate on something else. We saw it after the
| "Occupy Wall Street Protests" with the beginning of the
| culture wars as well as the passing of Obamacare which
| eliminated the most barbaric provisions of health care in
| the US. It is not meaningful change but it calmed people
| down. This method will lead to decades of the elite
| retaining their leverage. I dont want to see my life pass
| before my eyes and no real reform ends up happening.
|
| In terms of the second method of having the elite being
| challenged, We saw in the cold war how the US system had
| to prove itself and that led to a strong taxation on the
| wealthy, good institutions, positive movement for the
| middle class, all to show the Russians that the US led
| system is the best. There currently is no forcing
| function to return to that situation at this time.
| yks wrote:
| > We saw in the cold war how the US system had to prove
| itself and that led to a strong taxation on the wealthy,
| good institutions, positive movement for the middle
| class, all to show the Russians that the US led system is
| the best.
|
| I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or Chinese
| masses have it better in economic terms. In fact, the
| message of Russian propaganda including its American
| extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >I don't think anyone sane thinks that Russians or
| Chinese masses have it better in economic terms. In fact,
| the message of Russian propaganda including its American
| extension is that everything sucks everywhere.
|
| Uh did I say anything of the sort?
|
| When the Cold War was going on the communist system was
| initially out producing and out maneuvering the US but
| eventually the fallacy of a communist (and subsequently
| fascist takeover of the government) made it inevitable
| that it was going to fail.
|
| However during this fight between the two powers, the US
| saw great advances in the prosperity and rights of its
| middle class. As the USSR started to fall, we saw the
| beginnings of corporate takeover of all layers of the US
| government and it really accelerated after the USSR fell.
| You are making this argument that the US had it so good
| while ignoring how it got so good and also failing to
| acknowledge why it has declined so much over the last few
| decades. If you don't buy my argument then I challenge
| you to provide an alternative explanation.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle
| class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its
| leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1
| the US had even worse inequality while not propping up
| anyone's lifestyle abroad.
|
| This was explained in the other post which I will
| reproduce here:
|
| "looking at history of the US, the only time the people
| at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone
| else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and
| were forced to part with whatever little they could give
| to calm the masses.
|
| Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again
| with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the
| bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-
| existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for
| the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was
| something.
|
| We just need something like that on a worldwide level.
| Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US
| given that the EU never amounted to much more than being
| a US vassal state."
|
| We saw the best of the US system during the cold war. The
| system had to prove itself. Im not advocating for
| communism nor Chinese style fascism just more
| competition.
|
| The third world is already taking advantage of this
| situation. Nearly every country in the global south has
| been negatively damaged by the US or Europe at some
| point. They don't have many options other than to tough
| it out and hopes the West leaves them with whatever
| scraps they can get by. If they got too powerful, then
| the West topples them over. See Pakistan or Bolivia as a
| recent example. Now China has entered the scene and it
| has provided the ability for countries to start playing
| the US and China off of each other to see what they can
| get out of both countries. Djibouti and its military
| bases is a small example but we see it with countries
| like Brazil and Pakistan as well.
|
| How would this help the middle class in the US? Well if
| the elite in the US start to think they will lose out
| they will start to enact change that will bring the
| middle class up to snuff in order to better compete...and
| lets be honest for a moment, whatever they say goes.
| yks wrote:
| If you believe that the progress is achieved when the
| masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating
| condition of the American middle class will naturally
| help it. What's the point in this accelerationism with
| allies as casualties then?
| saturn8601 wrote:
| >If you believe that the progress is achieved when the
| masses have it the worst, then the deteriorating
| condition of the American middle class will naturally
| help it.
|
| Thats what we have seen historically. People always
| demand improvements. The leadership of this country
| hasn't actually done it until they really have a pissed
| off populace at their doorstep. I wouldn't believe it if
| it weren't for the historical precedent.
|
| >What's the point in this accelerationism with allies as
| casualties then?
|
| Americans should be first in line when it comes to who
| the government serves but if you just look at the US
| government's actions vs other governments in the west,
| the US government clearly does not have their citizens
| interests first and foremost.
|
| Think of all the rights and regulations the EU(or hell
| even many third world countries) have vs the US.
|
| It manifests itself in so many ways:
|
| Some easy examples demonstrating small issues as well as
| big ones:
|
| 1. EU countries mandate physical addresses for VOIP
| number registration. US spends years not implementing its
| half assed regulations Result: Americans are drowning in
| spam calls
|
| 2. EU negotiates drug prices as a government and refuses
| to pay more than a specific %. Companies would rather get
| something vs nothing from the EU market. US despite being
| the largest market, refuses to negotiate as a government
| even though they have a universal health program(for
| seniors only but thats a different issue). Result:
| American made drugs are sometimes up to 10x more
| expensive in the US than elsewhere. A vial of insulin in
| EU: ~9$ USA: ~99$
|
| 3. US sends its Navy to patrol world seas, ensuring flow
| of goods. Result: EU does not meet required 2% of NATO
| spending and instead funnels that money into social
| services like subsidized colleges. Result: US citizens
| either drown with a lifetimes worth of college debt or
| take a chance in the Military for subsidized college
| after giving up 4+ years of their young adult life
| serving their military contract while EU citizens
| graduate debt free and take a gap year traveling instead.
|
| I can go on for literal dozens of examples. I
| specifically chose to go from small to big to show that
| the problem is systemic and permeates all aspects of
| American life. In many ways the American system is one
| giant scam and they only people benefiting are people who
| have managed to survive in the upper echelons of the
| income stratosphere or are foreigners.
|
| If the US changed its focus to be more inward, it can
| focus on rebuilding manufacturing which would increase
| jobs availability and give more power to workers which
| would lead to other rights for the common man such as
| demanding more from the government to help US peoples
| among many other examples.
| walleeee wrote:
| You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may
| _have_ stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the
| chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have
| gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the
| relevant ears with no pushback
| mega_dean wrote:
| > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are
| spending all this money on world police when we have a ton
| of internal problems?
|
| Reminds me of this scene in Wag the Dog:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y
|
| "The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it
| will be against a small group of dissidents who,
| unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah
| blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be
| prepared."
| nxobject wrote:
| I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on
| improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that
| reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming
| algorithm YouTube uses with its comments.
|
| (Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense
| industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different
| from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden - i.e. its
| disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement
| with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc.
| Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire
| countries are painted black.)
| NegatioN wrote:
| "Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they
| used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the
| ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle
|
| What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion
| that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in
| the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their
| hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you
| seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all
| these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many
| people?
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I'm saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they
| are upfront about their association. In contrast you have
| what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are
| in fact gray areas.
| julianeon wrote:
| Factually untrue.
|
| I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links
| outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this
| summary is good enough.
|
| > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for
| working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S.,
| but internationally as well.
|
| About "sin" industries:
|
| > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography,
| miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers.
| As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate
| for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work
| in those sectors.
| tolerance wrote:
| Julian,
|
| I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a
| preemptive concern when structuring an argument.
|
| However-- _please_ --there is no need to resort to large
| language model applications in order to support your
| subjective claims.
|
| You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find
| it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What
| you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own
| words.
| julianeon wrote:
| Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself.
|
| I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken
| about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them.
| Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the
| first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I
| would need to scroll past all those, and read the
| abstract to find one that corroborated my argument.
|
| This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to
| say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which
| is what I did here.
|
| Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was,
| in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular
| choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise
| between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual
| sources."
|
| I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without
| sourcing (probably the best choice).
|
| I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly
| say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes
| too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise
| between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a
| thankless research task."
|
| The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend
| 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted,
| or simply say nothing.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds
| like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a
| bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you,
| then citing it as if it's the only authority out there
| and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of
| me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet
| actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest
| inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
|
| I can't help but be a little skeptical because both my
| wife and I have worked in either the military itself or
| on military technology for most of our adult lives, and
| while we live comfortably and have no complaints, the pay
| is nowhere near what you'd get in finance or ad tech or
| most successful B2C web companies. Quite to the contrary,
| rather than being compensated for the stigma, there is no
| stigma. Outside of comments section bubbles, the US
| military is a widely respected institution and the people
| holding these kinds of jobs have great pride in their
| missions and willingly accept less money to work on
| something they care about and believe in.
|
| I can't comment on porn and drugs, which seem quite
| different.
| tolerance wrote:
| > I want to be as charitable as possible, but it sounds
| like you're saying here your alternative was to skim a
| bunch of sources until finding one that agrees with you,
| then citing it as if it's the only authority out there
| and the matter is settled. While the more cynical part of
| me doesn't doubt that's what everyone on the Internet
| actually does, it's not exactly in the spirit of honest
| inquiry and I rarely see people flat out admit to it.
|
| Outside of the spirit of honest inquiry, perhaps no. But
| I commend his honesty in general.
| tolerance wrote:
| I feel you.
|
| The cost of defending a reasonable sentiment on the
| internet always outweighs the benefits...because whether
| there are "winners" in online arguments is questionable.
|
| It takes a lot of forbearance to express an opinion, an
| observation, an anecdote or provide even objective
| information, and move on. Or, turn the 15-20 minutes into
| an entire weekend; researching, analyzing, drafting,
| revising and publishing a report to substantiate the
| claims for the next guy (and for the AI scraper bots who
| will use for work to support the argument of the next
| guy).
| rabf wrote:
| I find the disdain for LLM's somewhat troubling when they
| they are easily in the top 1% of commenters on most
| subjects.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| ChatGPT is not a valid source to substantiate a claim.
| xk_id wrote:
| It's veiled spam and i don't know why HN isn't outright
| prohibiting it
| rabf wrote:
| What sources do suggest as superior?
| Shog9 wrote:
| You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies"
| here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady
| behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in
| addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for
| the spooks, they _also_ provide phone service.
|
| So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a
| lineman or something.
| moolcool wrote:
| > Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but
| in reality gray areas
|
| I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections
| to Meta specifically.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Almost all tech acts as surveillance. Anything that records an
| IP address or GEO data is surveillance.
| akira2501 wrote:
| So this entire article seems to actually describe a _single_
| work/consultation product, then spends the rest of the time
| describing and backwardly lauding the absurd cult of personality
| that seems to encompass this entire operation.
|
| "A boring dystopia as a service."
|
| Or maybe I'm just not cognitively ready to read this yet this
| morning. I guess I'll set my A/C to 60 and chew on some ice to
| see if that helps. :|
| partomniscient wrote:
| I agree. I still didn't fully understand what value Palantir
| adds, and it partly felt like they were justifying the 8 years
| spent working for them to themselves. It sounds kind of
| interesting from a corporate culture point of view but that was
| about it.
| tolerance wrote:
| It's public relations. Palantir is Not Bad(tm).
| eezing wrote:
| It's Salesforce v2. A ridiculously expensive proprietary "easy-
| to-build" application platform with an ecosystem of ridiculously
| expensive consultants.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Salesforce v2 is a pretty bull case for Palantir! This bias
| people have against against application platforms requiring a
| consultant ecosystem and per-customer installations is just not
| accurate - in software, as in the rest of the world, there are
| some areas where it's the right model to get things done
| efficiently. Walmart can't use an off-the-shelf CRM platform
| any more than US Steel could use an off-the-shelf furnace.
| wbl wrote:
| US steel very infamously did not do any R&D and stuck to
| outmoded technology.
| fnwbr wrote:
| > you can work on things like Google search or the Facebook news
| feed, all of which seem like marginally good things
|
| lol, where has the author been in the past decade? both of those
| are bad, especially the feed algorithms are scientifically proven
| to have a strong influence on the decline of trust into
| democratic institutions
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| he worked at palantir for 8 years dude, do you think he has the
| capacity to discern if the Facebook news feed was a net
| positive for society
| Finnucane wrote:
| "I remember my first time I talked to Stephen Cohen he had the
| A/C in his office set at 60, several weird-looking devices for
| minimizing CO2 content in the room, and had a giant pile of ice
| in a cup. Throughout the conversation, he kept chewing pieces of
| ice. "
|
| " Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled
| water or rainwater? And only pure grain alcohol?"
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Huh. I finally have a name for what my own job really is.
|
| I should probably look into this Palantir operation.
| master_crab wrote:
| For all you backend engineers: It's basically Grafana with a
| bunch of support engineers in the backend cleaning up the data
| source (like a splunk index) that feeds it.
|
| Palantir does UI and visualization well but needs an inordinate
| amount of field support engineers to groom the dirty disparate
| data that governments do a poor job cleaning (either due to
| incompetence, field conditions, or both).
|
| The amount of manual labor doesn't justify its market price, but
| because governments rarely change their vendors, there is
| significant lock in that probably supports some amount of their
| market cap.
| nxobject wrote:
| I imagine back in the LBJ and Nixon days IBM would've been
| doing similar classified work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _needs an inordinate amount of field support engineers_
|
| Hey now, they're forward-deployed engineers. _Nothing_ like
| Oracle or SAP consultants.
| master_crab wrote:
| Touche
| throwup238 wrote:
| Do they dig latrines too?
|
| "Forward deployed" sounds like they're in a FOB out in the
| sticks somewhere.
| okino wrote:
| Leaving this here for people interested in what the software
| actually is.
|
| https://www.palantir.com/docs/
| Taikonerd wrote:
| But they have 80% margin, according to the article... so those
| engineers are generating a lot of revenue per capita.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they have 80% margin, according to the article_
|
| I have a pet theory about private equity: they're in the
| business of laundering boring jobs for college graduates. Few
| kids dream of graduating college to work at a chemicals plant
| in Baton Rouge. But working for Accenture in New York or
| Atlanta, now _that 's_ sexy. Even if you spend your entire
| work week *checks notes* working at a chemicals plant in
| Baton Rouge. (Investment banking is similar, though the
| transaction orientation makes the division of labour a
| _little_ more sensible.)
|
| Palantir pays less for its consultants (sorry, FDEs) than
| Bain _et al_. Few in _their_ generation dreamed of graduating
| college to work at a soulless corporate consultancy. But a
| tech company, now _that 's_ sexy.
|
| More pointedly: It's remarkable how an ostensibly 80% GM
| business only barely became profitable last year. Palantir's
| Q2 '24 cash flows from operations at 40% of revenues looks
| closer to the mark [1]. (Palantir's cost of revenue
| "primarily includes salaries, stock-based compensation
| expense, and benefits for personnel involved in performing
| [operations & maintenance] and professional services, as well
| as field service representatives, third-party cloud hosting
| services, travel costs, allocated overhead, and other direct
| costs" [2].)
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/000132165
| 5/0...
|
| [2] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/000132165
| 5/0...
| OisinMoran wrote:
| I like this theory! And I don't think it's a cynical one
| either--this "laundering" could actually be really useful.
|
| The worker gets the status and security of a
| tech/consulting job, while having more variety than
| actually working at the chemical plant, not being at the
| whims of their org chart, and also just the reframing
| probably makes it more enjoyable anyway. All the while, the
| important work is getting done.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I don't think it's cynical at all! I _do_ think it 's a
| decision-delaying choice, however, in that it treats
| one's work as a series of electives. The person working
| at the plant, gaining seniority and building deep
| connections is on their way to industry expertise. It's
| trading wealth and power for prestige. (It makes sense
| it's like catnip to our graduates from elite schools.)
| wg0 wrote:
| Hilarious if true. Still hilarious if not.
| m463 wrote:
| I think the other side of the chemical plant job is that
| the salary is higher than a college grad would get from the
| plant itself out of college.
|
| Nobody at the chemical would ever pay a college grad VP^h^h
| consultant salary to work there.
|
| (I did stuff like this out of college - got paid hourly ~
| 3x normal employee salary at non-sexy location)
| g_sch wrote:
| Matt Levine had a funny similar take recently:
|
| "You could have a model of Harvard Business School that is
| like: 1. Harvard Business School teaches
| you skills that would make you good at running a company.
| 2. There are lots of companies that could use those skills.
| 3. But you don't want to run those companies, because they
| make, like, ball bearings. 4. You want to run a
| fancy company; you want to run a hedge fund or a tech
| startup or something. 5. Meanwhile, the people
| currently running the ball bearings company would not be
| all that excited about you, a fresh-faced business school
| graduate who has never run anything, coming in to run their
| company, even if you did learn a lot of useful skills at
| Harvard. 6. Therefore various industries exist
| whose principal business is laundering ball bearings
| companies into opportunities that appeal to Harvard
| Business School graduates. You wrap the ball bearings
| company in a name like "private equity" and suddenly it is
| legible to the Harvard students, so they flock to it.
| 7. Those industries are also in the business of getting the
| ball bearings companies to accept the Harvard Business
| School graduates, which in practice means not so much "make
| the ball bearings company excited about its new Harvard
| CEO" but rather "buy the ball bearings company and install
| new management."
|
| Source: https://archive.is/8IUCA#selection-1795.0-1869.303
| gen220 wrote:
| I like the pet theory!
|
| just quibbling on profitability. it's not ostensibly 80%,
| it's 80%. gross margin != "net profit" != cash flow
| positive, thanks to GAAP.
|
| Compare the margins (gross, operating, net) here [0].
| Observe the historical changes in cash on hand (i.e. cash
| flow) here [1].
|
| They have been accruing cash-on-hand on a YoY basis since
| 2021Q4.
|
| 80% gross margins on 2.5B TTM revenue is really impressive.
|
| For comparisons, Cloudflare sits around 77% (on 1.5B TTM
| Revenue), Salesforce around 75% (36.5B TTM revenue),
| Datadog around 80% (2.4B TTM revenue).
|
| It does remain to be seen on whether they can translate
| that into meaningful operating margin over time. But
| they're well on their way [1]
|
| [0]: https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PLTR/palantir-
| technolo...
|
| [1]: https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PLTR/palantir-
| technolo...
| kidros wrote:
| This is such a hilarious oversimplification.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _inordinate amount of field support engineers to groom the
| dirty disparate data that governments do a poor job cleaning_
|
| Getting clean data seems like a universal need, but the job is
| still difficult, under-appreciated and underpaid. How come?
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Palantir is neck-deep in Ukraine:
| https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine/
|
| From what I understand, their software is also responsible for
| deep-strike drone path planning, avoiding air defenses through
| Russian terrain.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| I'd be curious to understand what speciality they have that
| they can do drone path planning better...?
| thimkerbell wrote:
| I very much liked this essay, and the HN comments are clarifying
| too. Recommended.
| aduffy wrote:
| This is the most Tyler Cowen-coded response I could imagine,
| and I mean this in the best way possible.
| sien wrote:
| But what is the Straussian interpretation of your comment?
| aduffy wrote:
| Those new service sector jobs: get paid to respond to HN
| comments
| sien wrote:
| Markets in everything.
| km144 wrote:
| > The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense
| competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It's still hard to find
| today, in fact - many people have copied the 'hardcore' working
| culture and the 'this is the Marines' vibe, but few have the
| intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich
| set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early
| employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.
|
| This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are
| successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is
| so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in
| by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also
| insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and
| then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
| mydriasis wrote:
| Nothing worse than sniffing each-other's farts when we're
| already working hard. Eek. I'd prefer levity any day.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones
| that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually
| engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for
| having the opinions they already had.
| bschne wrote:
| I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down
| to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of
| nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging
| out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the
| descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it
| seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal
| consulting engagement -- we're not really talking developing
| foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the
| kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places
| like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can
| veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a
| certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about
| e.g. places like Jane Street.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who
| merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.
|
| It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with
| (texts of) ancient philosophers.
|
| Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and
| money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly
| had much to say about that.
| gen220 wrote:
| When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make
| vague references to this rare out of print book on media
| studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot
| about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem.
| They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions
| or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book "if you could
| find a copy".
|
| I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It
| was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best
| tangentially related to anything they were doing.
|
| I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to
| justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving
| behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school
| in Silicon Valley.
|
| It's a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant
| illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that's wrist
| deep into your coin purse.
|
| Not to say there aren't interesting or valuable intellectual
| ideas in these books -- in Girard, or what have you. But
| ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of
| behaviors they exhibit, not on the "illusions" of the
| intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those
| behaviors.
| wg0 wrote:
| TLDR - Basically deployed developers in the field who scoured
| various archaic data sources into mostly read only dashboards in
| a hacky way and the other half kept generalizing it into a
| product.
|
| Now they have a platform that's hard to replace because the
| businesses that rely on them are extremely slow to adapt
| themselves that's the very reason Plantir was able to get into
| the space.
| nickff wrote:
| Seems like an application of "do things that don't scale".
|
| https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| maeil wrote:
| It's funny to read this. The reality is the opposite - Palantir
| pushes the custoner all day to go with actual operational
| usecases (i.e. CRUD, not R) and oftentimes some highlevel exec
| says no, I just want my reports.
|
| Most companies like the mentioned Airbus though do nowadays get
| convinced to do more impactful things, and they do reap the
| rewards.
|
| It doesn't help that the product has evolved ridiculously over
| the years. Just in these comments there's people who e.g.
| worked there in 2016. Productwise they might have well have
| been at an entirely different company, unless they were on the
| gov side of things.
| csomar wrote:
| Essentially their competitive advantage is having access to
| these companies. You can't just show up at Airbus and propose
| to build them a system for their data flows. Palantir does that
| and charges multiples of the market rate.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| If you want to pick winners, look for companies that hire
| connected companies.
|
| In hindsight, the fact that Palatir went to Airbus meant that
| the fix was in and it was already decided that Boeing was
| going down. Or for the less cynical, it was Palantir's magic
| that made Airbus successful and if Boeing were competent they
| would have hired Palantir.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| I loved the comment about Airbus
|
| > "Asana, but for building planes".
|
| Would you use Asana for even building a project plan?
| workflowing wrote:
| Smartsheet.
| huqedato wrote:
| I read the article. It sounds like a Laudatio to amorality for a
| S&P500 behemoth whose goal is to enable other companies to purge
| human from their workflow, pardon... to digitalize the business.
| I'll give it a pass.
| ak_111 wrote:
| Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable as
| made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in the
| genocide in Gaza.
|
| In other words, if you read the article I would add one more
| bucket to the three categories the author provided to classify
| palantir's work - genocide assistance.
|
| from https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-jd-vance-peter-
| thiel-f...
|
| """ Not only did it provide information to the US military during
| the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but over the past 10
| months in particular, Palantir has provided AI-powered military
| and surveillance technology support to the Israelis in its war on
| Gaza.
|
| It has, in the words of Palantir's co-founder Alex Karp, been
| involved in "crucial operations in Israel".
|
| Palantir says it offers defence technologies that are "mission-
| tested capabilities, forged in the field" to deliver "a tactical
| edge - by land, air, sea and space".
|
| These capabilities include supplying Israel's military and
| intelligence agencies with the data to fire missiles at specific
| targets in Gaza - be it inside homes or in moving vehicles. """
| mulcahey wrote:
| The war in Gaza _is_ a moral gray area
| pphysch wrote:
| To what extent is repeated mass-murder of civilians, total
| destruction of healthcare and education systems, etc. part of
| the "moral gray area"? That's just not a serious argument.
|
| You can be pro-Israel without pretending to hold humanist
| values and so on.
| dralley wrote:
| If you have a military enemy that blatantly hides itself
| within civilian areas and builds its underground
| infrastructure underneath civilian infrastructure, and that
| military enemy kills 1200 of your citizens in an attack,
| that creates a fair bit of moral ambiguity.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Imagine the reaction to Palestinians blowing up a
| residential Israeli apartment building with hundreds of
| civilians inside and justifying it by saying they wanted
| to kill an IDF member inside.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| If the IDF member is shooting at them from the apartment
| building, then it becomes a valid military target. This
| is very clearly spelled out in the Geneva conventions.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| You would start by not sending them money. Unless of
| course you needed a justification for your
| political/expansionist goals.
|
| https://archive.ph/2023.10.14-033824/https://www.haaretz.
| com...
|
| https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israels-own-
| creation/
|
| Anyway, the idea of embedding military targets within
| civilian populations is also not exclusive to one side:
|
| https://www.haaretz.com/2012-06-09/ty-
| article/.premium/does-...
|
| Neither is the use of terror:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121226235336/http://www.for
| eig...
|
| https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-
| justifica...
|
| https://www.thetorah.com/article/israels-incomplete-
| conquest...
| ArtixFox wrote:
| sooo israel should use time travel? the situation right
| now is a fucked up war between two bloodthirsty groups. I
| dont think this is the right time to think of inventing
| time machines...
| samatman wrote:
| That was covered in the article, a quote:
|
| > _I can't speak to specific details here, but Palantir
| software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror
| attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance._
|
| Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative. I am sure the engineers
| at Palantir sleep well at night knowing they are helping
| achieve that goal, and I commend them for it.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > Defeating Hamas is a moral imperative.
|
| In that case what do you call the Netanyahu governament
| strategy of propping up Hamas?
|
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-
| up...
| slibhb wrote:
| A mistake? The Israelis didn't understand the extent to
| which Hamas views itself as engaged in a holy war. They
| (and many others, including me) thought that Hamas would
| prioritize building Gaza and providing services to its
| people over murder/kidnapping raids.
| monkaiju wrote:
| If you think the goal of defeating Hamas justifies this
| amount of civilian killing yiu have no moral basis to argue
| with.
| ArtixFox wrote:
| What is the other solution?
|
| create a separate state for palestine under the control of
| hamas would only legitimise them, allow them to easily get
| more weapons and go on another oct 7, which will again lead
| to the bombings currently happening.
|
| Bombing them to death would lead to deaths of many, many
| women and children cuz gaza is 75% children.
|
| You cannot have peace with hamas, only ceasefire, and even
| then they havnt stopped launching homemade missiles.
|
| The most sane solution is defeating hamas, establishing a
| third party control over it to stabilise the region and
| then return it to democracy, but israel is too trigger
| happy to do any progress on this field and hamas wants all
| of israel.
|
| You cannot have peace on the land without destroying hamas.
| Not even for moral reasons. Maybe there is another solution
| in ur mind?
| arczyx wrote:
| Defeating Israel is moral imperative. There was no Hamas on
| 1948 but they massacre people anyway. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
|
| > The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when
| Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin
| near Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107
| Palestinian villagers, including women and children.[1] The
| attack was conducted primarily by the Irgun and Lehi, who
| were supported by the Haganah and Palmach.[3] The massacre
| was carried out despite the village having agreed to a non-
| aggression pact.
|
| Another example for 20 years ago (way before October 7).
| Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
|
| > An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of
| his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and
| then said he would have done the same even if she had been
| three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military
| court yesterday.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Them and every American taxpayer
| monkaiju wrote:
| Pretty obvious difference between choosing to work towards
| the goals of a genocide and being threatened to pay taxes or
| have your property and wages seized...
| slibhb wrote:
| > Note that Palantir's moral stature isn't as grey or debatable
| as made in the article, it is basically clearly complicit in
| the genocide in Gaza.
|
| That there's a genocide in Gaza is objectively debatable. In
| the sense that people debate it.
| xrd wrote:
| As someone who has always dismissed Palantir, I really loved
| this. It's very powerful and makes me reconsider what I felt
| about them.
|
| But, I'm really stuck on the point about Trump being a capable
| meme generator. I mean, this feels like someone saying that a
| monkey produces lots of BS. It is close to technically accurate,
| monkeys do produce feces, and the cosine distance between that
| and true bullshit is small. But, it misses the larger vibe-
| stench.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > It's very powerful
|
| If you bought that garbage I have some ice to sell you.
| vundercind wrote:
| I found TFA to frequently juke in weird directions, and for the
| text to at times be at-odds with what I believed the subtext of
| what I had just read--a notable early one is where the author
| describes the intellectual atmosphere at the company in a
| series of examples that definitely read to me like
| performative, LARPing intellectualism... then sums that up by
| claiming you can't copy their vibe by LARPing intellectualism,
| which is what I though I was just reading a description of.
|
| The selection of the list of people and the reason they were
| being mentioned, in the section you're referring to, was
| another point where the piece threw me.
|
| I wouldn't say it changed my mind about the company, but it,
| uh, gave some new shading to my existing impression.
| Cloud98 wrote:
| This was a refreshing read! I like to think Software is eating
| the world, but it's unable to digest the data and use it
| effectively. Perhaps the shift from services to a product
| business adds a layer of RWE (real-world evidence) to solving
| hard engineering problems.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Palantir was working on my companies data for months getting
| ready to show us what AI could do for us. Internally I was asking
| "what could they possibly show us that we don't already know,
| even theoretically?" No one really had any idea either, but we
| were skeptically optimistic. Palantir said just wait, this AI
| shit is amazing and we'll have so many new insights for you.
|
| The day finally came and the execs were all in the office for the
| big presentation. I wasn't there, but from what I heard, it was
| basically a handful of unfinished, incomplete Power BI type
| reports outlining information that we already had/knew. They were
| literally laughed out of the room and the meeting was cut short.
| It was a huge waste of time. I wish I could have been there, from
| what I heard it was hilarious.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I agree, the business use case was zero. Was it impressive
| though?
|
| In the sense that Palantir found out information that you guys
| already knew... but how much time did it take? How much man
| power and how much money? What is that compared to the
| resources your company spent to build that internal knowledge?
|
| Also what company was it if you feel comfortable revealing?
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| I worked there in the weird era. A couple things.
|
| 1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not
| even close to being the most dubious things.
|
| 2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different
| from typical sv talent.
|
| 3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it
| as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after
| they ipo'd
|
| 4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out
| who you actually needed to talk to.
| avmich wrote:
| It would also be interesting to hear thoughts on the company of
| somebody like Cory Doctorow.
|
| Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-
| will-steal-the-nhs-...
|
| "Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global
| stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as
| a service. The customers for this turnkey service include
| America's most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir's
| products to monitor protest movements.
|
| Palantir's clients also include the Immigration and Customs
| Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir's products
| for their ethnic cleansing..."
| lmz wrote:
| I wonder why Americans are so against cracking down on
| illegal immigration. Is it all that repressed guilt from
| invading Indian lands or something?
| carom wrote:
| It is because corporations benefit from exploitable labor
| and competition among workers. For this reason they promote
| a narrative that opposing illegal immigration is racist.
| The counter narrative would be that preventing it gives
| power to American workers (of all races) but no one seems
| to discuss that.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Basically because everyone here is an immigrant of some
| sort just maybe not first generation. Also because the vast
| majority of people who show up at the Mexican border are
| fleeing horrific violence and when you are fleeing horrific
| violence it is difficult to always do things by the book.
| And also it is a reaction to just how poorly these people
| that otherwise would be classified as refugees get treated.
| Under Trump in particular family separation became the norm
| and courts who oversaw immigration cases had kids as young
| as 4 brought before a judge without family or legal
| representation.
| mc32 wrote:
| The majority are in no way fleeing "horrific violence."
| That's made up. The great majority come for jobs. Lots of
| job figures by the Fed are inflated by jobs going to
| illegals. They're not coming from violent war zones --but
| even in war zones people go on living their lives, though
| interrupted by war. By and large it's not the janjaweed
| or isil as Obama calls the other baddies.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| [citation needed]
| worstspotgain wrote:
| They're fleeing Putin's strategically-created crises in
| Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere. He gives you the flu,
| blames the aspirin, and sells you the Ivermectin.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maduro shat the bed himself with perhaps the aid of his
| indoctrinated chavistas. They used to get help from Cuba.
| In any case, it's their problem. Even Columbia, their
| neighbors and co-Bolivarians don't like them going into
| their country illegally. They also want them out.
|
| Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow
| the repressive government and create a new beautiful
| shining beacon in the southern cone.
|
| An implication of your statement is that Putin does this
| to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that
| these people weaken rather than strengthen us.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Maduro is a 100% Russian product and service.
| mc32 wrote:
| Then kick him out of office. Do a Panama and turn it
| around.
| MrLeap wrote:
| A week ago Alejandro Arcos was decapitated right after he
| took office as mayor of the city of Chilpancingo, a city
| of around 280,000 people.
|
| Some approximate stats:
|
| Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has
| about 25k a year.
|
| The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the
| US is 350m.
|
| One can't derive the distribution of motivations that
| bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd
| call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's
| safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of
| Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by
| those statistics/events.
|
| Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations.
| More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?
| mc32 wrote:
| People get murdered in the US too. We had a presidential
| candidate who had two attempts on his life this election
| cycle. Dems glaze over that.
|
| Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires
| because Chicago is so violent? That's our problem to
| solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of
| course electing a socialist probably won't help. They
| need their own Milei.
|
| Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed
| it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They're
| not incapable.
| MrLeap wrote:
| > People get murdered in the US too. We had a
| presidential candidate who had two attempts on his life
| this election cycle. Dems glaze over that
|
| I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence
| of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump
| decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't
| believe dems would gloss over that.
|
| > Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos
| Aires because Chicago is so violent?
|
| I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate
| allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago
| violence.
|
| > Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We
| fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too.
| They're not incapable.
|
| Everyone is doing the best they can for those within
| their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Everything you wrote is correct. However, Mexico is
| actually an immigration success story. The net migration
| flow is around zero [1].
|
| The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's
| supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala,
| Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country
| has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to
| violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that
| order, and often it's all three.
|
| "Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US
| immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a
| judge for a year or two. During this period they have to
| be paroled in and granted work authorization.
|
| Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was
| not the case in prior decades because there was no
| backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much
| more practical and appealing destination than it used to
| be.
|
| The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional
| paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists
| blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support
| for reform. They did so because every compromise also
| included a guest-worker program and other immigration
| benefits.
|
| More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP
| and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would
| have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump
| campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]
|
| A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due
| to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.
|
| For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus
| in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you
| the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin
| (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to
| handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump,
| Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2021/07/09/before-co...
|
| [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-
| republicans...
| avmich wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus
|
| The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and
| AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that
| high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian
| problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.
| mc32 wrote:
| Not really, Bill Clinton was famously against it and so was
| Bernie Sanders, and, arguably so was Obama. It's the
| progressives who took over the vanguard of the Dem party
| that espouse the position of open/porous borders. Not even
| a majority of regular democrats want illegal aliens coming
| in unfiltered.
|
| Of course some would like to forget that prior to the
| progressives taking over policy, Bill, Bernie and Barrack
| were all against illegal immigration. We have the
| interviews, the statements, speeches, etc.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > It's the progressives who took over the vanguard of the
| Dem party that espouse the position of open borders
|
| There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the
| position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member
| of the democratic party in office today in federal office
| supports some degree of border control, and frankly the
| degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most
| republicans want.
|
| The GOP has successfully planted the idea that they are
| for a wall that lets no one through and the dems will let
| everyone in, but it's much more like two sides bickering
| over whether the wall should be 10m or 15m tall, whether
| or not there should be razors at the top, and exactly how
| many palantir/anduril terminators should be purchased for
| intercepting people, 1000 or 1200.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| The distinction you're drawing is called being
| intellectually honest about the subject. For people
| predisposed to the fox news cinematic universe, this is
| not something they will want to substantively engage
| with.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| "Cracking down" isn't what's needed, it's reform of the
| immigration system in the first place.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Man his speaking and writing _style_ get so annoying after a
| while and I speak as someone who has seen him talk at DEFCON
| and HOPE multiple times. He has got this god like reputation
| among the hacker community. Might there be someone who isn 't
| as attention seeking and who isn't just trying to make catchy
| speeches talking about the same ideas?
| BryantD wrote:
| I tend to agree with you on this, but it's kind of an
| amusing comment given the linked article's comment on
| memes:
|
| "the most talented people tend to develop their own
| vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to
| a whole intellectual world constructed by that person."
|
| Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm
| not sure that any of this negates the point.
| hitekker wrote:
| Reminds of this quote from
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm:
|
| _Above all things we should avoid often talking of
| ourselves and giving ourselves as an example; nothing is
| more tiresome than a man who quotes himself for
| everything._
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| as I said, ICE is not even close to the spiciest thing it
| worked on
| monkaiju wrote:
| Are you ashamed of that or proud?
| serguzest wrote:
| I think things are getting worse, JD Vance is Peter Thiel's
| high-rank implant to possible upcoming Trump administration.
|
| Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Let's hypothesize that a would-be administration in a Western
| country would like to accomplish full Russian-style autocracy
| relatively quickly. Let's say they have stated publicly that
| their plan is to go after immigrants first, opposition leaders
| second. Numerically, these are two small categories, relatively
| speaking.
|
| The first question is, what about the third and fourth
| categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific
| kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process)
| and which?
|
| The second question is, how would they go about identifying
| them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have
| been designed for this goal?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| This: > I did purchase fomo insurance after
| they ipo'd
|
| Sorry, my English is a bit weak. What is the meaning here? Did
| you buy shares post-IPO?
| trenchgun wrote:
| This wad also a great read on Palantir, from 2020:
| https://logicmag.io/commons/enter-the-dragnet/
| ks2048 wrote:
| The age old tale of "libertarians" getting filthy rich on
| taxpayer dollars.
| jongjong wrote:
| That's the story of the entire big tech sector and they can't
| deny it.
|
| If tech leaders actually believed that they were adding value
| and receiving fair proceeds, they wouldn't spend so much energy
| trying to control the media. They wouldn't be increasingly
| distrusted. Society wouldn't be so divided. They wouldn't need
| a monetary system based on unlimited money creation.
|
| It's interesting that morality is often mentioned when
| discussing such companies. It must be a significant challenge
| for them to find people who are both intelligent enough and
| immoral (or amoral) enough to do the kind of work which still
| yields profits in a system such as ours. They now have to
| signal their moral status far and wide to every corner of the
| globe attract the 'right' candidates.
| EFreethought wrote:
| This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on
| government contracts to run surveillance for governments.
| whaaaaat wrote:
| > During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked
| at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA
| surveillance, or worse.
|
| I mean, it is those things. I think just because it's listed on a
| market doesn't change those things. People are just like, "I
| value the money it makes me more than the ethical qualms I have
| about what Palantir is".
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Every time you see the government give another $110 million
| contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn't work, or
| a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to
| implement a payroll system that - again - doesn't work, you are
| seeing politics beat substance.
|
| Dismissing it as politics beating substance is not useful, since
| there is so little substance present. Figuring out which of the
| bidders is incompetent is non-trivial when what they do is far
| from your expertise, and if it's close to your expertise, you
| wouldn't be hiring outsiders to do it. I have heard similar
| things coming from DOTs where, when the infrastructure is
| something that hasn't been done this generation, they get bent
| over a barrel by the contractors.
|
| TL; DR: when people who can't write software hire other people to
| write software for them, what non-political signal do they have
| to separate the sheep from the goats?
| fnikacevic wrote:
| Hire internal software folks who can judge the signals better?
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| This is what the USDS is slowly but surely accomplishing.
| It's just a hell of a beast to tackle.
| botanical wrote:
| There is no grey area working for a company like Palantir.
| Palantir is as IBM was during the Holocaust.
|
| Apartheid Israel has used the American military industrial
| complex and companies like Palantir to kill a majority of
| civilians in Apartheid Israel's genocide in Gaza. 65% killed have
| been women and children; 50 children a day killed since Oct 7th.
| 2% of the population have been culled. And all this to stay and
| make money in a lucrative market.
|
| If you listen to Peter Thiel, he uses the same propaganda talking
| points that Apartheid Israel uses. There is zero morality
| supporting or working for companies like Palantir or people like
| Peter Thiel.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| There was an interview somewhat recently where someone asked
| his connection to Israel's military, and he squirmed and
| rapidly stuttered in sheer terror for about 15 seconds before
| he finally put together a sentence where he said something like
| "I'm not allowed to criticize Israel." It was weird seeing one
| of the richest men on earth suddenly have absolute fear in his
| eyes and talking like he had a gun to his back.
|
| Twitter has since had the videos wiped, but I'm sure they're
| still out there somewhere. I've seen other people like
| Zuckerberg dodge questions, but I've never seen a man with such
| wealth and power suddenly become so completely terrified.
| samrus wrote:
| Link to the interview https://youtu.be/q1asavnl_o8
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's interesting to watch these "talking points" bouncing
| around when there's a politically charged topic like the war in
| Gaza. (For reference: I have no skin in the game and support
| neither side.)
|
| Having said that:
|
| 65% killed being women and children is _because of the
| demographics of Gaza_ , not because of any specific behaviour
| by Israel other than just "being at war" with their neighbours.
|
| It's a _talking point_ used by a people supporting one of the
| two sides, blithely ignoring the realities of a complex
| situation.
|
| The reality is that 50% of Gaza's adult population if female,
| and nearly 50% of their population is below the age of 18! In
| other words, their population is 75% "women and children".
|
| In any other war, that 65% statistic would be a sign of
| deliberate and malicious targetting of innocent non-combatants.
| In the Gaza war it is the sad but usual level of collateral
| damage that one might expect in urban fighting. Not to mention
| that this number would be even lower, but is as high as it is
| because of human-shield tactics used by HAMAS.
|
| The people that use this 65% statistic often do so with the
| knowledge that people listening to it don't know the
| demographics of Gaza or the vile actions of HAMAS. They're
| trying to convince those listening through deception. Their
| cause may be just in their eyes, but does that justify this
| kind of false debate? It's in the same category as claiming 500
| people died when "Isreal bombed a hospital" mere _minutes_
| after the incident, which turned out to be a failed HAMAS
| rocket that landed in the parking lot and killed maybe half a
| dozen people.
|
| Yes, what Isreal is doing is bad, but not "murdering women and
| babies on purpose" bad!
| kuhewa wrote:
| You appear to be making the case that the 65% statistic of
| Gazans killed by Israel shouldn't be alarming since it merely
| is converging on the demographic makeup of the population.
|
| I'd argue that it is very alarming when military casualties
| converge on the general populations demographics and not the
| demographics of actual combatants.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| All I'm saying is that if _any other country_ attacked Gaza
| using any normal means of war, they 'd end up with the same
| statistic. Israel is not doing anything out of the ordinary
| for war. The statistics you quoted is a side-effect of
| Gaza's demographics.
|
| Note that I don't condone Israel's actions in Gaza. I'm
| just saying that those actions are _no worse_ than one
| would expect, but this statistic is _purposefully
| deceptive_ and is being trumpeted across the Internet
| specifically to make Israel look worse than they are
| actually acting.
|
| You support one of the two sides above the other. That's
| your right. But please don't support them through chosen
| talking points intended to deceive the audience.
|
| PS: One of the two sides in this war targeted civilians on
| purpose and failed at doing so. The other site targeted
| combatants and failed at doing so. Which would you say is
| the more superior position?
| amrocha wrote:
| There's no deception done imo.
|
| Your argument is that it's ok that Israel has killed this
| many women and kids because they're over represented in
| the population.
|
| Most people's perspective is that you shouldn't kill kids
| and women and target civilians, regardless of anything
| else.
|
| And you're ignoring the mountain of evidence of israel
| deliberately targeting civilians. Just the other day the
| times published a thorough report on israeli snipers
| deliberately targeting toddlers. That truth does not
| square with your "it's just collateral damage" argument.
| kuhewa wrote:
| Just based on your comment, I can promise you I have
| payed attention to the conflict less than you and have
| less of a 'dog in the fight' in terms of supporting a
| side. I just noticed your comment begging the question
| regarding mortalities that reflect makeup of a civilian
| population being the null case in urban warfare that
| needs no explanation.
|
| It's a positive claim that requires empirical support,
| which you aren't providing.
|
| A quick squiz would suggest this women+children death
| toll is the greatest in some time by some margin, despite
| some quite bloody and urbanised conflicts in recent years
| [1]. Perhaps you have justified knowledge that this case
| is different than any other or just better-documented,
| and the deaths are unavoidable insofar as urban warfare
| is to be conducted.
|
| But even if it is the case that urban warfare should be
| expected to be conducted quite inefficiently (to the
| point that combatants are successfully targeted at a rate
| barely greater than random members of the population),
| you are also taking it as a given that conducting it at
| all is justified and shouldn't be alarming.
|
| That doesn't appear to be a given by military standards
| of developed countries:
|
| > Destroying an urban area to save it is not an option
| for commanders. The density of civilian populations in
| urban areas and the multidimensional nature of the
| environment make it more likely that even accurate
| attacks with precision weapons will injure
| noncombatants....If collateral damage is likely to be of
| sufficient magnitude, it may justify avoiding urban
| operations, which though tactically successful, would run
| counter to national and strategic objectives.
|
| United States Army and Marine Corps 2017 Manual on Urban
| Operations, quoted in [2]
|
| [1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/more-women-
| and-child... [2] https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-
| policy/2021/04/27/urban-warfa...
| arczyx wrote:
| > Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency,
| intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children
| who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a
| daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting
| of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course
| of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest
| Israeli civilian and military authorities.
|
| https://www.gazahealthcareletters.org/usa-letter-oct-2-2024
|
| > Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's
| healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza,
| committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of
| extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on
| medical personnel and facilities,
|
| https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/10/un-
| commissio...
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Now that the surveillance state has won, people want to be on the
| winning side.
| anshulbhide wrote:
| This is the first article on Palantir I've found that's
| refreshing in its candour and actually exposes why its a such a
| success.
|
| Also, great learnings for everyone building AI driven services
| companies.
| smolder wrote:
| Peter Theil is scum. People who work for him are also scum.
| Evil has the ropes of society because evil worked harder at
| getting them and didn't learn the lesson about sharing in
| kindergarten.
| anshulbhide wrote:
| As someone who runs an IT services company, I can tell you how
| uncommon it is to find engineers who can both code really well,
| but also interact and sell to customers.
|
| I always wondered why you needed BD / "business folk", but its
| rare to find the ability to schmooze with customers and hustle
| along with deep technical talent in the same individual.
|
| So really surprising (and cool) to see how Palantir was able to
| do this with their FDEs!
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