I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.
I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
I think Palintr ought to be nationalized and placed under the jurisdiction of several competing watchdog agencies - it can generate automatically our annual, quarterly and etc datasets for specific, selected things.
Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it
The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
> Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.
It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.
The kind of vice-signaling Palantir employees do on this board is more pathetic than the guy who peaked in high school bragging about the time he woke up hungover in a pool of his own vomit.
"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"
I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.
I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.
One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.
If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.
I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy
There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.
> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.
I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous
Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?
From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.
They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.
"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
This is just an inversion of culpability. We know that theres virtually no relationship in our Republic with popularity of an initiative and it's passing into law.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.
I've worked at a company using it. Wrote this below.
> Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace, big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
What other Databricks providers are designing “daddy’s home” style apartment complex bombing target solutions, in order to have AI provide 100x more targets per day than human processes were able to achieve? I understand such tech is not magical to achieve but I don’t believe that’s the accusation
I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast.
Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.
Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.
Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
the thing about supervillains is that you expect technical seriousness but thats just Hollywood not showing that psychopaths and narcissists are lazy and sell BS
a person cannot "be illegal". they can perform acts which are illegal, sure, but to call them "illegals" is just dehumanizing rhetoric that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Does US have such a lack of space to fail to absorb 2-5% increase over years?
What's so hard about naturalizing or legalizing them, so that they can more easily interact with current power structures on the territory?
Capital city in the country where I live got a 25% population bump over a few months a few years back, of people who didn't even speak the language. Barely anything appretiably negative overall happened.
In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
Why have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Etcetera, etcetera.
You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.
Unfortunately while proselytizing about nuance, the side with the power and the guns is working overtime to make it so there is only one valid set of beliefs, and those beliefs are “American”. This is no longer a symmetric conflict of ideologies, I’m not sure what it’s going to take for people to realize this. A tidal wave of blue in the midterms I think is the only hope a lot of us have left. Maybe if that doesn’t come to fruition, either legitimately or illegitimately, despondent Russian literature will start to resonate much more strongly for us.
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
Yes, that it is a set of things that it is possible one could believe.
That is not an argument for it being a set of things that one ought to believe, as opposed to that ICE has a legal mandate that it isn't actually pursuing, and the mandate which it is pursuing is both intentionally murky, unethical to the extent that evidence suggests what it is, and also pursued by methods that are illegal and inhumane even irrespective of the bad ends that they are directed at.
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Again, that it is certainly a set of things it is possible to believe, but it seems pretty silly to believe. A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.
> Nuance is possible.
“X is possible” is not an argument is that X is, factually or morally as appropriate to the shape of the proposition at issue, justified. And an extended argument that sets of beliefs are possible is something people only engage in when they recognize that they are unable to make the case that they are justified, but nevertheless want to suggest that people are bad for failing to adopt them.
A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.
> believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Honestly, There is no queue for poor people, this is their only way, most of these people aren't even eligible for farm worker temp visa. US has created bureaucracy over the years in such a way that these people can never become legal. They are not skipping the line and taking some tech worker's spot or anything.
They're still illegal. You can and should defend yourself from poor strangers who view their circumstances as justification to infringe upon you. You can and should enforce your border.
Could it just be that people with views at each end of spectrum see posts this like as part of a battleground, and everyone else stays clear of battlegrounds?
Another nuance I would like to add, being an immigrant myself, not in the US. There should be more discussion about fixing the source of the migrants, the countries people are running away from. What is it that makes people leave their families behind and how can it be fixed. I know it isn't up to the US to fix other countries but it should be a point of nuanced discussion. We cannot all end up in the US.
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.
The existence of that app is an abomination; the fact tax payer money is being allocated to it is tragicomic. Not spending it and just giving it as tax returns to the population would be so much better than kidnapping people over being born in the wrong place.
> ... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.
I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
Because the use of ICE and its actions has become so extreme that it can’t be simply “moderated”. The Trump Admin is pushing it to extreme action. So unless that is removed the only possible response is a strong reaction. ICE gutted its own nuance.
I feel that the mob doesn't understand nuance and right now that mob is fighting for control for definitions of words and what is moral and ethical without giving you the freedom to choose for yourself and accepting it without malice. It's vicious and tiring and definitly not productive.
I'm neutral here, but I think the person you're replying to already covered your points when they wrote
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
I blame infiltration by bots slowly shifting the Overton window. Did this site not get "weird" in the last few years?
Not to think to highly of ourselves, I for one am a genuine idiot, but the crowed here likely has more influence than a lot of other online forums. Making it a worthwhile target, especially on the AI front. Plus the site is an easy to integrate into a bots with the minimal website and all.
It's because there is extremism both on the left and right: the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back, and the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants.
Both of them are right: unless there's a civil war or moderate president (which probably needs ranked choice voting) the most probable scenario is that one of the 2 extremes succeeds.
I also miss the old HN btw and wish that there wouldn't be any right/left politics, just the old classic libertarian property/privacy/opennes right debates, but it looks like those days are gone.
Only an idiot will think all of this is about "illegals"; this is a whole infrastructure of mass surveillance and "rogue" police. They might be after specific targets now, but once it's fully normalized, you are next. From data collection and aggregation, the invasive surveillance like Flock and Ring, the use of AI and apps, it's being carefully planned and rolled out for such a mission. There should be a platform to track the people who worked on building these technologies and apps. I would never trust or hire someone who has no morals and worked and spent hours making ELITE app or Flock Android systems or similar; these people are the enablers for such surveillance and should be held accountable.
If the government can track illegals who haven't interacted with government for 40 years and track them down to their house, you can imagine how fast they can track a tax paying citizen.
To tech leaders and hiring managers at other companies: If you're reading this, please consider publicly stating that your company will interview Palantir engineers who want to exit on moral grounds. Create an explicit off-ramp. Lower the barrier to leaving. Make it a tech industry norm that we offer refuge to engineers trying to do the right thing.
The options are a) they have to decide between starving their family or continuing compromise their morals and increasing the capabilities of immoral company X, or b) a more ethically aligned company removes them from the resource pool of immoral company X. Which world do you prefer?
You could focus on having positive projects for the society, and a good reputation. That works.
I don’t think I ever seen a CV from an ex Pal*ntir employee though. Perhaps they are automatically filtered or working for good morals doesn’t attract them.
I think they might be a little desperate for new employees since I haven’t worked in about ten years and both Palantir and Anduril contacted me with cold calls in past year.
Palantir had a shit reputation 12 years ago when I graduated from college. I'm not sure folks who couldn't figure that out until now are very principled.
Can people bring higher effort posts to this discussion so that this thread doesn't get pulled like the others?
Is there a specific product line that this app is using? What FOIA laws are applicable to its use? What kind of data does this provide? something else?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a whole team dedicated to running an online bot army to counter dissent. It wouldn’t surprise me if they plan on selling that service to their customers.
Ironically the best solution for this is for websites to start de-anonymizing users to the extent necessary to block fake accounts from polluting the airwaves.
Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace on big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
When I was 19, an ex-student of my Alma Mater came to give a talk about TDD. While I found the lecture interesting, I vividly remember that a portion of our community rallied against him, attempting to boycott his presence because he worked for Palantir.
At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me.
While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest.
A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be.
These raids are the indiscriminate door to door raids right? There are lots of disturbing reports from these. For example ICE agents showing up at a white family’s door to ask which houses have Asian people living in them. The raids are blatantly unconstitutional (fourth amendment) but also, regardless of laws, they are well beyond the pale in terms of morality. It’s crazy that tech companies are willfully participating in this. Palantir must be treated as a criminal enterprise by the next non-GOP administration, and there should be consequences for everyone there. As someone else said, you don’t get to just say "I was only in charge of transport".
This, along with the AI slop and agentic nonsense gutting real work, is exactly why I pivoted my career. The industry feels like it's being driven by chest-thumping, siege-heiling authoritarian inbreds at the top, propped up by tepid company-man shills who clap along and call it innovation while the place rots from the inside. my feed on LinkedIn gives me hives. I've since cancelled my account as well. good riddance. tech is dead and I hope the public doesn't have to yet again bailout some late-stage capitalist bullshit when yet another bubble bursts. /rant
Doesn't your indiscriminate label preclude the involvement of tools like Palantir? Unless you want us to believe that the tooling is worthless. But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
Palantir is directing them to neighborhoods. The doors are being chosen indiscriminately and people are being stopped or detained on the street indiscriminately. So I don’t think those are in conflict.
> But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.
I told somebody that Palantir is building the maid services and rat poison for a post-lower/middle class society. They didn’t believe me. Seeing this is vindicating.
You just collapsed your own wave-function right in front of us all. I pray it goes back into superposition for you and gives you a chance to try again.
Let's say a third party was elected and started implementing certain policies. What would they have to do for you to call them fascist? Fascism is an actual thing, after all, so there must be some line that would separate fascism from not-fascism.
It's only fascism when it comes for them personally. Mask wearing when sick ? "How dare you, that's fascist" . Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended"
Internal bleeding? Where do you get this nonsense? I keep seeing completely imaginary "facts" parroted about this case and I really want to know where they come from.
That's not what's happening. There wouldn't be the backlash if they were primarily deporting "the worst of the worst", as they promised, using due process. Instead they're targeting everyone, including people here legally and in many cases U.S. citizens, without due process, in the cruelest and most over-the-top way possible.
Ignore the worst of the worst framing. Even a person who is unobjectionable but who is in the country without legal authorization is fine to be deported. I'm not going to pearl clutch over it. Estimates say that up 3-5% of the entire american population has no legal right to be in this country. I'm not a perfectionist. A few 100,000 would be totally reasonable to say 'good enough' at. But multiple millions? Not really sure where this line of argumentation goes really. The US government has made it very clear for a year now that people without authorization to be here should leave. They've even offered monetary incentives to go. At this point, people flaunting the law are doing so openly. Most of these people are not even refugees from war-torn regions. They're from our neighboring country of Mexico which has no war going on.
Sure, that's extremism. That has nothing to do with ICE using software to identify illegal migrants. The argument in the article was not that the software often gets it wrong, but that -- even if it were right -- something would be wrong with it.
Even trying to follow the existing law is punishable by exile without trial. You can go to all your legally appointed court dates, follow every rule in the book, and get snatched and deported from the courtroom the next minute.
If you are in this country illegally to begin with, then yes, going to court and following procedure will still result in deportation and a permanent ban on entry. While following the post-crime procedure is indeed laudable, the prescribed punishment for flaunting the immigration laws of the US is being barred from entry.
(2) -- why can't you raid a church? A church is not a special place. America is not a theocracy which gives sacrosanct respect to some portions of land.
(3) The US has every right to revoke legal status with no other reason than it doesn't make sense for the United States. We can talk about how it's done, but that's rarely the issue at hand in these debates.
(4) Not sure what this means
(6) Politicians say incorrect things all the time to appeal to their base.
I think a more comprehensive and simpler explanation is that the people protesting just hate this administration. They don't go about making lists like this and then think they need to go protest. They just see a guy they despise and start protesting. Hate is really powerful.
People who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law and make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump. I predicted exactly this outcome with the election of Obama and his policies. How can the supposedly educated be so bad at applying history.
People have been deported for decades but the manner in which deportations occur is important. There’s a world of difference between law enforcement and these brownshirts.
1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.
Would you support deporting people who are criminals? Or have no intention of ever working and just want to live off various welfare programs? Trying to find some common ground here.
> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
1. Entering a country without proper documentation is a crime. Therefore all "undocumented immigration" is by definition criminal.
2. Removing criminals is paramount to a safe society and a justice system that is respected.
3. "Documenting them and letting them live" undermines legal immigrants who likely worked very hard to integrate culturally, establish themselves, and do the proper LEGAL paperwork. These legal immigrants have stringent reporting requirements, need to be careful about even minor crimes (excessive speeding tickets even!) etc. How is your proposal remotely fair to them?
I don't understand why this is a controversial opinion at all. I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out. A country without border control is NOT a country.
You're assuming deportations work, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. Huge numbers of deportations have happened, with some people deported multiple times. Do you feel the problem is solved?
Ultimately, you have to fix the incentives. Fine the people hiring them, making it uneconomical, and you will remove the main incentive for people to enter the US illegally.
Our politicians have simply seemed fairly uninterested in holding business owners accountable.
Since you're only getting blowback, I think taking tough action on immigration was a long time coming. I don't agree with the violent tactics, but exactly those people who couldn't settle on some sensible solution are the ones that fostered the current situation where the (anti-)immigration pendulum swings back hard.
That's where I'm stuck on this. When you have certain cities (or even entire states) saying "we will resist _any_ deportation effort", what choice does a deportation officer have than what they're doing right now?
* They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries
* They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted
* They didn't explicitly target people here legally
* They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants
* They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal
* They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy
* They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed
* They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people
* They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems
* They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent
* They didn't try to end birthright citizenship
I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.
Number of immigrants has been slowly increasing or steady for decades. It's a fantasy that it's a crisis or that there is a risk of tens of millions flooding our shores. We mostly drastically benefit from products downstream from cheap labor while tacitly allowing those who don't get in trouble so we can continue to benefit from this.
We could have "solved" immigration decades ago with enough punative treatment of employers but didn't want to.
If you want to actually stop it you could just ramp up punative treatment of employers over the next 5 years while keeping other policies at Obama or Bush era.
Half the undocumented without us family members would self deport gradually whilst jobs dried up. Offer amnesty to productive people with family roots and no criminal record and you end up with a microscopic undocumented pop.
Meanwhile DSHS is tweeting a pic of an island paradise with the caption America after 100M deportations. There are around 12M undocumented but about 100M non-whites if you have trouble interpreting their meaning or intention.
1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.
2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
> 1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.
How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all.
> 2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?
How about we treat people humanely?
How about we focus on the criminals and dangerous people first instead of getting people that have pending citizenship appointments. How about we don't grab people from hospitals, schools, and places of worship?
How about we try to get citizenship easier access for these folks who are clearly living and contributing successfully to our society?
How about we don't have masked thugs grabbing anyone of color off the street?
Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.
> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
They put together a dashboard that presents probabilistic information. We already know from several facial recognition cases that some police have a hard time differentiating known facts from probabilistic guesses. We also know that many agents of the agency using this dashboard have relatively little training, and have demonstrated very loose understanding for of fundamental rights (47 days for new recruits currently).
I would be willing to lay a bet worth a significant portion of my net worth that this dashboard will end up being involved in multiple wrongful arrests of innocent people.
Anyone working on these products should ask themselves if they believe in what they build or if they are “just doing what they are told”. If the latter, consider the cohort of people who have previously used that justification.
Palantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
It appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity).
I don’t think this is true. Palantir are fundamentally a consultancy with a graph database and a map. They sell expensive “forward deployed engineer” consulting services to integrate things with their graph database and map. As far as I know they still don’t broker or share data - the customer provides the data and they provide the database and visualization. Has that changed?
The problem is there is a certain segment of the population suffer from (or have been fed) false dichotomy that either we have open borders and are overrun with criminal immigrants taking all our jobs, or we need a surveillance state that hires masked “Brownshirt” thugs to brutalize its civilian population and who can operate with impunity and immunity. Since people are afraid of the former they try to justify the latter.
At this point where the brownshirts are openly attacking civil society - driving their vehicles into protestors, crashing into other motorists, abducting citizens and lawfully present immigrants, murdering uppity women in the street, and even escalating their violent attacks after citizens speak out against them - it's patently obvious that "illegal immigration" is nothing more than a rallying cry for overt fascism, red in tooth and claw.
I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.
I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
I think Palintr ought to be nationalized and placed under the jurisdiction of several competing watchdog agencies - it can generate automatically our annual, quarterly and etc datasets for specific, selected things.
Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it
> expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants)
Well, at least they're paying those consultants a lot of money, since they're charging a lot for them... right? Right?
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they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
The line blurs when you consider Thiel's personal motivations (e.g. Project 2025) and investments/involvement in the current administration.
Referring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.
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The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
> Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.
It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.
The kind of vice-signaling Palantir employees do on this board is more pathetic than the guy who peaked in high school bragging about the time he woke up hungover in a pool of his own vomit.
"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"
I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.
I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.
One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.
If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.
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You mean virtue signaling with the sign flipped?
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I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.
Totally. Responsability is not, in general, mutually exclusive. When it happens to be, that's an organisational convenience, not a moral law.
Governments using Palantir services as a loophole to enable mass surveillance by linking data is the evil part.
How is Palantir a loophole?
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
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They also used Google, Facebook, etc... as a loophole for suppressing freedom of speech in the past (and could still be for all I know).
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy
> It's one hell of a sales strategy
What happens when there's a bug in the software? Would that mean God is fallible after all? Could this be the plot line of Dogma++?
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What exactly is the incredible sales strategy here, overhyping to the point of blatant dishonesty? That's hardly unique...
There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.
> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.
I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous
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Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?
the commercial company I worked at had a contract with Palantir - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220817005178/en/Bet... .
From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.
They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.
"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
Palantir also supports folks like CDC's DCIPHER
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdc-and-palantir-pa...
When it's a government system, your issue is not really with the vendor, your issue is with the policymakers.
This is just an inversion of culpability. We know that theres virtually no relationship in our Republic with popularity of an initiative and it's passing into law.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.
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I’ve used their products extensively, and this is pretty much what you get along with a bunch of “forward deployed engineers” doing ETL all day.
> every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes.
Isn't this the banality of evil in action?
I've worked at a company using it. Wrote this below. > Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace, big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
What other Databricks providers are designing “daddy’s home” style apartment complex bombing target solutions, in order to have AI provide 100x more targets per day than human processes were able to achieve? I understand such tech is not magical to achieve but I don’t believe that’s the accusation
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I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast. Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
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You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.
Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.
Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
the thing about supervillains is that you expect technical seriousness but thats just Hollywood not showing that psychopaths and narcissists are lazy and sell BS
Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.
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> I'll also remind everyone that it's estimated that under Obama 3.1 million illegals were deported.
And with no gestapo needed! That's the difference.
a person cannot "be illegal". they can perform acts which are illegal, sure, but to call them "illegals" is just dehumanizing rhetoric that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
If you ever drove over the speed limit can you be called "an illegal?"
Does US have such a lack of space to fail to absorb 2-5% increase over years?
What's so hard about naturalizing or legalizing them, so that they can more easily interact with current power structures on the territory?
Capital city in the country where I live got a 25% population bump over a few months a few years back, of people who didn't even speak the language. Barely anything appretiably negative overall happened.
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In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
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Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
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You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
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Why have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Etcetera, etcetera.
You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.
Unfortunately while proselytizing about nuance, the side with the power and the guns is working overtime to make it so there is only one valid set of beliefs, and those beliefs are “American”. This is no longer a symmetric conflict of ideologies, I’m not sure what it’s going to take for people to realize this. A tidal wave of blue in the midterms I think is the only hope a lot of us have left. Maybe if that doesn’t come to fruition, either legitimately or illegitimately, despondent Russian literature will start to resonate much more strongly for us.
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> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
Yes, that it is a set of things that it is possible one could believe.
That is not an argument for it being a set of things that one ought to believe, as opposed to that ICE has a legal mandate that it isn't actually pursuing, and the mandate which it is pursuing is both intentionally murky, unethical to the extent that evidence suggests what it is, and also pursued by methods that are illegal and inhumane even irrespective of the bad ends that they are directed at.
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Again, that it is certainly a set of things it is possible to believe, but it seems pretty silly to believe. A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.
> Nuance is possible.
“X is possible” is not an argument is that X is, factually or morally as appropriate to the shape of the proposition at issue, justified. And an extended argument that sets of beliefs are possible is something people only engage in when they recognize that they are unable to make the case that they are justified, but nevertheless want to suggest that people are bad for failing to adopt them.
A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
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> believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Honestly, There is no queue for poor people, this is their only way, most of these people aren't even eligible for farm worker temp visa. US has created bureaucracy over the years in such a way that these people can never become legal. They are not skipping the line and taking some tech worker's spot or anything.
They're still illegal. You can and should defend yourself from poor strangers who view their circumstances as justification to infringe upon you. You can and should enforce your border.
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The core issue is not that people cannot think with nuance, but that nuance is costly and poorly rewarded.
I fear you may be right…
Could it just be that people with views at each end of spectrum see posts this like as part of a battleground, and everyone else stays clear of battlegrounds?
Another nuance I would like to add, being an immigrant myself, not in the US. There should be more discussion about fixing the source of the migrants, the countries people are running away from. What is it that makes people leave their families behind and how can it be fixed. I know it isn't up to the US to fix other countries but it should be a point of nuanced discussion. We cannot all end up in the US.
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.
The existence of that app is an abomination; the fact tax payer money is being allocated to it is tragicomic. Not spending it and just giving it as tax returns to the population would be so much better than kidnapping people over being born in the wrong place.
> ... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.
I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
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> particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people.
Even smart people are capable of hate.
Because people get blinded by dogmatic ideologies that chastise them for going against and/or questioning any position held by given side.
It's all or nothing.
Because the use of ICE and its actions has become so extreme that it can’t be simply “moderated”. The Trump Admin is pushing it to extreme action. So unless that is removed the only possible response is a strong reaction. ICE gutted its own nuance.
I feel that the mob doesn't understand nuance and right now that mob is fighting for control for definitions of words and what is moral and ethical without giving you the freedom to choose for yourself and accepting it without malice. It's vicious and tiring and definitly not productive.
Yes yes, shoot mothers in the face in her car.
Grab human beings from their homes and detain them thousands of miles away with no due process.
Send human beings to detention camps in another country NOT the one they are from
Please, people, have some decency and maintain the nuance. We're not barbarians here! Sheesh.
I'm neutral here, but I think the person you're replying to already covered your points when they wrote
> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
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I blame infiltration by bots slowly shifting the Overton window. Did this site not get "weird" in the last few years?
Not to think to highly of ourselves, I for one am a genuine idiot, but the crowed here likely has more influence than a lot of other online forums. Making it a worthwhile target, especially on the AI front. Plus the site is an easy to integrate into a bots with the minimal website and all.
HN got a lot of refugees from Twitter and Reddit the past few years as well.
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ICE Was created by an illegitimate president who murdered a million people in Iraq under false pretenses. It has no ethical mandate.
Illegitimate, you're hilarious
nuance exists plenty it just doesnt float to the top.
by definition, groupthink will get more upvotes than mishmashthink.
Companies have advertising to sell. Nuance doesn’t sell very well.
That's enough concern trolling out of you.
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It's because there is extremism both on the left and right: the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back, and the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants.
Both of them are right: unless there's a civil war or moderate president (which probably needs ranked choice voting) the most probable scenario is that one of the 2 extremes succeeds.
I also miss the old HN btw and wish that there wouldn't be any right/left politics, just the old classic libertarian property/privacy/opennes right debates, but it looks like those days are gone.
This is peak “both sides”. Just today Trump said he thinks there shouldn’t be any midterms. No Democrat is saying anything remotely like that.
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> the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back
It would probably help if Trump didn't fantasize about this publicly all the time
> the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants
The left will "take it" by being elected, if they are in fact elected. That's the extremist threat the right is worried about?
What does "keep it using immigrants" mean?
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Yeah, remember when Biden deployed a personal army on red states and threatened to cancel the election?
What world do you live in where you would expect equally extreme behavior from a democrat president?
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Sophisticated and nuanced opinions are an embellishment . A badge worn at cocktail parties .
Cleaning up a mess is 1000x messier than making it .
No one will ever care or remember your sophisticated opinion.
That’s why it may be possible to have nuance but it’s just a peacocks feather
Only an idiot will think all of this is about "illegals"; this is a whole infrastructure of mass surveillance and "rogue" police. They might be after specific targets now, but once it's fully normalized, you are next. From data collection and aggregation, the invasive surveillance like Flock and Ring, the use of AI and apps, it's being carefully planned and rolled out for such a mission. There should be a platform to track the people who worked on building these technologies and apps. I would never trust or hire someone who has no morals and worked and spent hours making ELITE app or Flock Android systems or similar; these people are the enablers for such surveillance and should be held accountable.
If the government can track illegals who haven't interacted with government for 40 years and track them down to their house, you can imagine how fast they can track a tax paying citizen.
if you go by “morals” every FAANG employee (current and previous) would need to go plumbing school
Fair enough, they had (specially their executives and the engineers working on ad tech) a negative impact in the world as well.
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Some demons are worse than others. Take your defeatist attitude, and shove it up your ass.
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Since it's inception, Palantir has extracted roughly 10 billion usd taxpayer money from the US government. God bless America.
It is a de-facto corporate state right now. Everyone in the current government tries to see how much money they can steal.
Has been for over a century.
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Surprised it is so little!
Lou Reed lyrics?
To tech leaders and hiring managers at other companies: If you're reading this, please consider publicly stating that your company will interview Palantir engineers who want to exit on moral grounds. Create an explicit off-ramp. Lower the barrier to leaving. Make it a tech industry norm that we offer refuge to engineers trying to do the right thing.
Why shouldn't I do quite the opposite? I don't want people with a questionable morale who knowingly built those systems work in my company
The options are a) they have to decide between starving their family or continuing compromise their morals and increasing the capabilities of immoral company X, or b) a more ethically aligned company removes them from the resource pool of immoral company X. Which world do you prefer?
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You could focus on having positive projects for the society, and a good reputation. That works.
I don’t think I ever seen a CV from an ex Pal*ntir employee though. Perhaps they are automatically filtered or working for good morals doesn’t attract them.
I think they might be a little desperate for new employees since I haven’t worked in about ten years and both Palantir and Anduril contacted me with cold calls in past year.
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Palantir had a shit reputation 12 years ago when I graduated from college. I'm not sure folks who couldn't figure that out until now are very principled.
So did HFT's, weapons makers, and Hedge Funds
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Can people bring higher effort posts to this discussion so that this thread doesn't get pulled like the others?
Is there a specific product line that this app is using? What FOIA laws are applicable to its use? What kind of data does this provide? something else?
Palantir damage control got to this thread faster than the last one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a whole team dedicated to running an online bot army to counter dissent. It wouldn’t surprise me if they plan on selling that service to their customers.
Ironically the best solution for this is for websites to start de-anonymizing users to the extent necessary to block fake accounts from polluting the airwaves.
Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace on big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
When I was 19, an ex-student of my Alma Mater came to give a talk about TDD. While I found the lecture interesting, I vividly remember that a portion of our community rallied against him, attempting to boycott his presence because he worked for Palantir.
At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me.
While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest.
A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be.
We must fight this filth.
Welcome to the downvote club. Anyone who criticizes tech oligarchs on here gets downvoted by bots.
Palantir is a mediocre company staffed by mediocre people making mediocre products, owned by a mediocre person.
These raids are the indiscriminate door to door raids right? There are lots of disturbing reports from these. For example ICE agents showing up at a white family’s door to ask which houses have Asian people living in them. The raids are blatantly unconstitutional (fourth amendment) but also, regardless of laws, they are well beyond the pale in terms of morality. It’s crazy that tech companies are willfully participating in this. Palantir must be treated as a criminal enterprise by the next non-GOP administration, and there should be consequences for everyone there. As someone else said, you don’t get to just say "I was only in charge of transport".
This, along with the AI slop and agentic nonsense gutting real work, is exactly why I pivoted my career. The industry feels like it's being driven by chest-thumping, siege-heiling authoritarian inbreds at the top, propped up by tepid company-man shills who clap along and call it innovation while the place rots from the inside. my feed on LinkedIn gives me hives. I've since cancelled my account as well. good riddance. tech is dead and I hope the public doesn't have to yet again bailout some late-stage capitalist bullshit when yet another bubble bursts. /rant
Doesn't your indiscriminate label preclude the involvement of tools like Palantir? Unless you want us to believe that the tooling is worthless. But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
Indiscriminate can be defined as "done at random or without careful judgment" - I think the latter part of that definition perfectly describes ELITE.
I find it nonsensical to dismiss an anti-ICE argument because of one word.
Palantir is directing them to neighborhoods. The doors are being chosen indiscriminately and people are being stopped or detained on the street indiscriminately. So I don’t think those are in conflict.
> But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.
Ah yes, beta-tested on Palestinians, how generous of them to ship the polished version to everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
Welcome to the downvote club folks. It’s an honor to serve here with you.
Much better link with some excellent (and some not so great) discussion already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378
Original 404media article:
https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
https://archive.ph/wa32f
The name is giving "bad Malthusian"
I told somebody that Palantir is building the maid services and rat poison for a post-lower/middle class society. They didn’t believe me. Seeing this is vindicating.
To be clear: I’m not enthusiastic about this.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378
"I was only in charge of transport" was not an excuse.
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Don't they get a trial though? Do you send them to "rape prisons"?
You can pretend that's all that is happening.
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Stop trying to gaslight us, that's not what people are protesting about.
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So you don’t care how cruel, humiliating, or terrorizing the process is because “it’s the law”?
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Of course it's Palantir.
“Tracking Apps for Thee, but Not for Me”
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Do you think fascism appears instantly, fully formed? Or could it grow through legal political action until such time that it can do away with them?
You just collapsed your own wave-function right in front of us all. I pray it goes back into superposition for you and gives you a chance to try again.
Let's say a third party was elected and started implementing certain policies. What would they have to do for you to call them fascist? Fascism is an actual thing, after all, so there must be some line that would separate fascism from not-fascism.
It's only fascism when it comes for them personally. Mask wearing when sick ? "How dare you, that's fascist" . Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended"
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Do their boots taste good?
Just because you are nice to the oppressors, doesn't mean they won't come for you too.
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We've all seen the video.
You are working so hard to build and manufacture the narrative that fits in your mind, to the point where it can justify the actions of the officer.
There is no justification for shooting a woman point blank in the face, and you know it.
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Internal bleeding? Where do you get this nonsense? I keep seeing completely imaginary "facts" parroted about this case and I really want to know where they come from.
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Is your username C. Simpleton?
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That's not what's happening. There wouldn't be the backlash if they were primarily deporting "the worst of the worst", as they promised, using due process. Instead they're targeting everyone, including people here legally and in many cases U.S. citizens, without due process, in the cruelest and most over-the-top way possible.
Ignore the worst of the worst framing. Even a person who is unobjectionable but who is in the country without legal authorization is fine to be deported. I'm not going to pearl clutch over it. Estimates say that up 3-5% of the entire american population has no legal right to be in this country. I'm not a perfectionist. A few 100,000 would be totally reasonable to say 'good enough' at. But multiple millions? Not really sure where this line of argumentation goes really. The US government has made it very clear for a year now that people without authorization to be here should leave. They've even offered monetary incentives to go. At this point, people flaunting the law are doing so openly. Most of these people are not even refugees from war-torn regions. They're from our neighboring country of Mexico which has no war going on.
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I have a friend whose parents were just (incorrectly) detained by ICE, and had to pay a $3000 administrative fee to be released.
That _is_ the extremism. It's here.
Sure, that's extremism. That has nothing to do with ICE using software to identify illegal migrants. The argument in the article was not that the software often gets it wrong, but that -- even if it were right -- something would be wrong with it.
Even trying to follow the existing law is punishable by exile without trial. You can go to all your legally appointed court dates, follow every rule in the book, and get snatched and deported from the courtroom the next minute.
If you are in this country illegally to begin with, then yes, going to court and following procedure will still result in deportation and a permanent ban on entry. While following the post-crime procedure is indeed laudable, the prescribed punishment for flaunting the immigration laws of the US is being barred from entry.
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> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi
It's not just that idea though. Plenty of presidents have done that without pushback. It's that idea combined with:
* Rhetoric dehumanizing the immigrants
* Raiding churches, courts, jobs, etc
* Revoking legal status of immigrants
* Reducing training time for new hires
* Detaining U.S. citizens and threatening them
* Saying it'll help the U.S. citizens, when data shows it doesn't
I can agree with (1) and (5).
(2) -- why can't you raid a church? A church is not a special place. America is not a theocracy which gives sacrosanct respect to some portions of land.
(3) The US has every right to revoke legal status with no other reason than it doesn't make sense for the United States. We can talk about how it's done, but that's rarely the issue at hand in these debates.
(4) Not sure what this means
(6) Politicians say incorrect things all the time to appeal to their base.
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I think a more comprehensive and simpler explanation is that the people protesting just hate this administration. They don't go about making lists like this and then think they need to go protest. They just see a guy they despise and start protesting. Hate is really powerful.
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> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi
Because that idea consists of harming someone over their birth circumstances, rather than any objective harm they may have done.
People who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law and make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump. I predicted exactly this outcome with the election of Obama and his policies. How can the supposedly educated be so bad at applying history.
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People have been deported for decades but the manner in which deportations occur is important. There’s a world of difference between law enforcement and these brownshirts.
My great-grand parents woke one day with status of illegals. Shortly after that they have been included in mass deportations to Poland.
Some people have asked how something like that could happened. Thanks for your comment. Now I can sand them this link as an answer.
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1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.
Would you support deporting people who are criminals? Or have no intention of ever working and just want to live off various welfare programs? Trying to find some common ground here.
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> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
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Cute.
1. Entering a country without proper documentation is a crime. Therefore all "undocumented immigration" is by definition criminal.
2. Removing criminals is paramount to a safe society and a justice system that is respected.
3. "Documenting them and letting them live" undermines legal immigrants who likely worked very hard to integrate culturally, establish themselves, and do the proper LEGAL paperwork. These legal immigrants have stringent reporting requirements, need to be careful about even minor crimes (excessive speeding tickets even!) etc. How is your proposal remotely fair to them?
I don't understand why this is a controversial opinion at all. I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out. A country without border control is NOT a country.
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You're assuming deportations work, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. Huge numbers of deportations have happened, with some people deported multiple times. Do you feel the problem is solved?
Ultimately, you have to fix the incentives. Fine the people hiring them, making it uneconomical, and you will remove the main incentive for people to enter the US illegally.
Our politicians have simply seemed fairly uninterested in holding business owners accountable.
Since you're only getting blowback, I think taking tough action on immigration was a long time coming. I don't agree with the violent tactics, but exactly those people who couldn't settle on some sensible solution are the ones that fostered the current situation where the (anti-)immigration pendulum swings back hard.
That's where I'm stuck on this. When you have certain cities (or even entire states) saying "we will resist _any_ deportation effort", what choice does a deportation officer have than what they're doing right now?
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>How do you deport with millions of illegal immigrants?
Make E-verify the federal minimum standard for ALL employers nationwide.
Fine the shit out of all businesses that don't comply. Fine the shit out of employers that hire illegal labor. We know who they are.
You don't deport them, you give them no reason to stay here because there'd be no work for them.
They didn't attract the same publicity because
* They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries
* They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted
* They didn't explicitly target people here legally
* They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants
* They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal
* They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy
* They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed
* They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people
* They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems
* They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent
* They didn't try to end birthright citizenship
I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.
Number of immigrants has been slowly increasing or steady for decades. It's a fantasy that it's a crisis or that there is a risk of tens of millions flooding our shores. We mostly drastically benefit from products downstream from cheap labor while tacitly allowing those who don't get in trouble so we can continue to benefit from this.
We could have "solved" immigration decades ago with enough punative treatment of employers but didn't want to.
If you want to actually stop it you could just ramp up punative treatment of employers over the next 5 years while keeping other policies at Obama or Bush era.
Half the undocumented without us family members would self deport gradually whilst jobs dried up. Offer amnesty to productive people with family roots and no criminal record and you end up with a microscopic undocumented pop.
Meanwhile DSHS is tweeting a pic of an island paradise with the caption America after 100M deportations. There are around 12M undocumented but about 100M non-whites if you have trouble interpreting their meaning or intention.
Ah yes, the "fantasy" of housing price inflation and wage depression.
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1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.
2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
> 1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.
How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all.
> 2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?
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How about we treat people humanely? How about we focus on the criminals and dangerous people first instead of getting people that have pending citizenship appointments. How about we don't grab people from hospitals, schools, and places of worship? How about we try to get citizenship easier access for these folks who are clearly living and contributing successfully to our society? How about we don't have masked thugs grabbing anyone of color off the street?
Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.
> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
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They can self deport and get paid doing so, it doesn't get any more humane than that really.
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Biden did not do it successfully, or most of anything really
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They put together a dashboard that presents probabilistic information. We already know from several facial recognition cases that some police have a hard time differentiating known facts from probabilistic guesses. We also know that many agents of the agency using this dashboard have relatively little training, and have demonstrated very loose understanding for of fundamental rights (47 days for new recruits currently).
I would be willing to lay a bet worth a significant portion of my net worth that this dashboard will end up being involved in multiple wrongful arrests of innocent people.
Anyone working on these products should ask themselves if they believe in what they build or if they are “just doing what they are told”. If the latter, consider the cohort of people who have previously used that justification.
Palantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
Sure, they build innocent dashboards in the same way that your name is an innocent Dutch word. Obvious bad faith arguments coming from a troll.
It appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity).
Didn't know so caching this here for others.
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Lots of things aren't fearsome until they're pointed at you.
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I don’t think this is true. Palantir are fundamentally a consultancy with a graph database and a map. They sell expensive “forward deployed engineer” consulting services to integrate things with their graph database and map. As far as I know they still don’t broker or share data - the customer provides the data and they provide the database and visualization. Has that changed?
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Fascistic is the word you are looking for
I tell my family to go out and be productive citizens. Let’s see where they all are in a bunch of years.
Sign up for ice and kill some libs?
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The problem is there is a certain segment of the population suffer from (or have been fed) false dichotomy that either we have open borders and are overrun with criminal immigrants taking all our jobs, or we need a surveillance state that hires masked “Brownshirt” thugs to brutalize its civilian population and who can operate with impunity and immunity. Since people are afraid of the former they try to justify the latter.
At this point where the brownshirts are openly attacking civil society - driving their vehicles into protestors, crashing into other motorists, abducting citizens and lawfully present immigrants, murdering uppity women in the street, and even escalating their violent attacks after citizens speak out against them - it's patently obvious that "illegal immigration" is nothing more than a rallying cry for overt fascism, red in tooth and claw.