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
no i think you and the people you are replying to are getting it completely backwards
people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.
people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha
In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
> I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer
See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.
On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.
I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.
> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
Right, and what I’m saying is that to the best of my knowledge, Palantir don’t sell data at all, which is the fundamental misunderstanding people seem to have about them.
There are two really two major concerning issues with Palantir:
1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.
2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
We agree, I think these are the more valid concerns than the "they are operating a data warehouse with all of the data in the entire universe" conspiracy theory that seems popular.
I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.
But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.
Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.
They sell data derived from the data. But it's not, like, a hash function - you can absolutely deduce the source data from it. In fact, that's the entire purpose. You use the aggregation and whatnot bullshit to find individuals, track them, gain insight into their living situation and patterns, and acquire evidence of crimes. Typically that requires a search warrant.
If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.
I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.
One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
>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
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.
Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.
It depends on your moral framework. For example if you believe killing is always wrong, then guns are not neutral - they're a tool designed for evil uses.
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
And yet even Feanor was a “good guy” at one point in time. It wasn’t until many years after the invention of the palantiri that he went off the rails, and that was only after talking to Sauron for a while.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
And more particularly, any remaining telescope after an apocalypse which caused all of them to be controlled and by a mind-destroying superhuman force of literal evil incarnate.
It’s not the palantir’s fault that Sauron exists. You might notice that there are several other psychic tools lying around that nobody is using because Sauron will enslave anyone who does. The Throne of Amon Hen, certain magic rings, etc, etc. The danger is Sauron, not the tools themselves.
So what? This was never about the moral culpability of the inanimate object itself. (Charitably ignoring, for the moment, that the One Ring was instead a part of Sauron, infused with his own life force. )
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
> that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
No, that’s normal. See also newspapers, radio news, television news, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, The Algorithm, etc, etc. It’s not like Tolkien invented a new thing here; the wicked Vizier who tells the King selective truths is a trope practically as old as time.
Even if they’re the most evil corpo ever, the buyer is still the government. If a democratically elected government buys this products, I would assume, in large scale of things, the general population wants the most evil corpo.
This works is if-and-only-if you assume everyone involved is a good actor. In fact, many if not most in politics are bad actors, and voters largely believe said bad actors.
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.
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.
If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.
I started a company in that market 10 years ago. We compete with palantir. It’s a competitive market with lots of actors.
On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.
palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.
What I meant is that they espoused that attitude in the Silicon Valley world, which traditionally has not really invested in Defense. I imagine that's also why they're able to raise lots of money and build hype trains, they have one foot still in SV and SV VC.
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.
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
Are they designing it, or is the DOD - sorry, the Department of War that you're likely paying your taxes towards - designing it on their platform? As mentioned, who is providing the data necessary for such applications? For ICE, which this thread is about, it's clearly the likes of news.ycombinator.com's Flock (S17). Whether they put it in a simple Postgres instance or on Databricks or on Palantir's platform or on Microsoft Fabric, I think that's much less core than whose gathering and providing the data.
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.
"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.
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.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
There are people who would not sleep at night knowing that the tool they created was enabling such things. I believe some are looking to make "semi-open" source licenses that add more restrictions.
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?
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
No, but it's also the engineer at Palantir who is enabling it with their efforts. If every engineer there immediately resigned and no other agreed to work there, the situation would end. One can try to hide behind the idea that they are only 1/n_employees responsible (typical corollary: therefore not responsible at all), but this doesn't change the fact that they are participants in what is happening.
I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene.
On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it.
In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
IBM wasn't only providing commodity infrastructure. They designed schema for labeling Jews and other categories of people for targeted internment and extermination
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.
Heh, the “illegitimately” was in reference to it “[not coming] to fruition”, precisely in the immediately preceding clause of that sentence.
In other words, I was saying that the reason for it not coming to fruition could be either legitimate or illegitimate. You assigned your own presumptions to what I said.
Ironically the Democrats deserve much more benefit of the doubt when it comes to election fraud and interference given the glut of evidence of such on the other side of the aisle.
To others who read the comment above, we know that this administration has done many illegal actions. Lying about elections and causing an attack on the capitol, then further pardoning the attack is a blatant example of this.
The comment above is frankly disingenuous and disguises blatant strawman fallacy with an air of moral superiority
> 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.
"The queue is a thing that tends to happen when you're trying to design policy with the aim of limiting/regulating immigration to amounts that wouldn't be problematic or unmanageable in some way, but the queue itself shouldn't be a goal"
> 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.
Borders are an imaginary concept made-up by nation-states, which only serves the people in power.
Or how are people fleeing from prosecution, looking for a better life, or just feeling like living somewhere else exactly hurting you? It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required.
If you're thinking about jobs, skilled workers immigrating will compete with you much more than less-privileged people. And "we cannot pay for them" is BS made up the system as well. It is possible to pay for social security for everyone, but not if all profits go to shareholders of course.
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.
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?
> 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.
> that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports
Clearly is it not a belief that no one in the USA supports, as seem in the discourse against ICE and immigration contrl.
> The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
Not necessarily, no. "The debate" is too vague to elaborate in favor or against what you're saying.
But yes, there are people against immigration control period, and period in favor of reforms to make immigration easier for workers, not harder. But propaganda will keep putting workers against each other, instead of companies lobbying against workers.
All of this misses the point of the moment, which is that the federal government is completely lawless and is incapable of responding to democratic or popular will. There is no debate happening. It does not matter which ordinary people "support" which position. Any political project (other than the current regime) in the USA in 2026 must contend with the fact that just establishing a democracy must be our first step. This is as true for Socialists as it is for non-regime-approved stripes of Fascist. It's the same for Chamber of Commerce Republicans and ex-hippie boomer liberals. Any talk of what we will do with a democracy once we have it is premature, because at the moment it simply does not matter what the opinions of the citizenry are.
Why is this being downvoted? The primary reason Trump was able to win is because Biden waited until it was far too late to address the surge of illegal immigration at the southern border. We don't have to wonder or argue about whether Americans support open borders, we already had something mildly in that direction (that still didn't remotely approach the idea of "no immigration control, period"), and in response Americans voted into office Donald Trump.
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'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.
That isn't written in good faith, though. It's a "both sides" argument that's clearly written from a particular side.
> ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
It doesn't, given the current administration. It's somewhat questionable in general, given that being in the country illegally isn't a felony (or criminal) in itself. We have local law enforcement that can handle cases of illegal actions, regardless of immigration status, and actual crimes can and do lead to deportation.
The vast majority of people being targeted, via mandate, are not criminals. The mandate of the current administration also includes protestors, regardless of citizenship status.
So, no, that person didn't cover the points, and your neutrality here is also written in a way that backs up that person, so that's also somewhat questionable.
The point here is that the people currently in charge hold 100% of the power, and they're misusing it. You don't have any power, nor do I, nor do the poor American citizens who may or may not be executed.
They, the people in power, do not require your good will or help. They're already maxed out. They are already 100% legitimate and in control. While it might be nuanced to argue ICE as an institution is one which should exist, it's also just doing more harm.
For someone that complains a lot about people lacking 'nuance', your post history is guilty of the exact same crime you complain about. So it's doubly clear that you're not actually arguing with good intention.
Then stop hiding behind "nuance" and be more explicit about how you support what's going on. Everyone who disagrees with the ongoing blatant fascist police state activity do not lack nuance, they lack your ability to suppress empathy.
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.
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.
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.
It's quite simple, some states want to allow voting without identity cards that prove that they are citizens of the country.
I don't know of any other country that would allow it, but I know other countries where people in power used other ,,tricks'' to increase the chance of being reelected
You changed what I wrote: it's not about non-citizens voting or not, it's about requiring identification by law at polling, which is required in every other democratic country.
As an example in in late 2024 in California Governor Newsom signed SB 1174, which explicitly prohibits local governments (like cities or counties) from passing their own laws to require voter ID.
OP has the delusion that being rich means you are resistant to corruption by being less likely to pursue riches. That being rich causes one to stop pursuing it.
Form what I've seen in life it's the exact opposite - the most greedy are the richest. The only people who have the seemingly unreasonable desire for infinite wealth are the already wealthy. For most everyday people, there is a cutoff amount.
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.
Given the choice, end users choose free or cheap and ad supported over full price in huge majorities. You have to weigh "I don't like ads" against 200 million (!) people on Netflix's ad supported plan and how much enjoyment they get that they might not otherwise. Not to mention things like Google that are ad supported and genuinely useful. In the real world things have pros and cons.
I used to buy this thinking, but no longer. People are incredibly resourceful, and instead of innovating towards exploiting and manipulating people, we could choose to innovate towards conserveration of important things, just like we have done in the past.
We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies.
Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.
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're missing my point. If all 'ethical' companies treat all ex-employees of 'unethical companies' as unemployable, they are effectively only going to work at 'unethical companies' regardless of whatever mindset has shifted over time.
I agree they shouldn't become outcasts, but it feels disingenuous to say that the reason for wanting to work for palantir is anything but "they wanted A LOT of money".
It's kind of beside the point. You could argue the change of mind/heart is unlikely, but if indeed they had changed, it would be better to encourage that. Perhaps they were lured by the money, or perhaps some jingoistic impulse, but then the reality of what the company was doing became clearer? Or their world view evolved?
That said, if some ex-Palantir worker was somehow working for UNICEF – to take an extreme example – it would be a little awkward unless they had denounced their old company in a fairly public manner.
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.
In a country with many huge companies selling oil, cigarettes, weapons, etc. there is no shortage of people willing to deal in morally questionable trades for money. I might even boldly suggest that Palantir is arguably far from the worst.
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?
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.
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.
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 for one would find it far more acceptable if the people carrying out the deportations would be a little less "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" about it.
“Not listening” is really an incredible framing for trying to flee being detained for obstruction, and in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in your SUV.
Where did I say that? It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether lethal force was justified. Obstruct and provoke law enforcement at your own peril.
It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether she was trying to flee being detained for obstruction and was in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in her SUV.
The person you are referring to rammed an ICE agent with their vehicle and the agent suffered internal bleeding as a result.
Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
The "interal bleeding" thing is so unbelievably ludicrous. He got a bruise because he was lurching for the car while juggling his phone in one hand and a gun in the other. She was clearly neither trying to, nor succeeding in "ramming" him.
So the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope.
Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense.
Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
This is such a bizarre argument because the entire reason the two women were there in the first place is because they thought they were following ICE agents. Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group. They had been following the agents around throughout the day, attempting to disrupt them, which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
> Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group
Based.
> which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
That giant ass street that could fit three of her car across its entire width? The one where she was signaling them to go around her? It doesn't sound like she was very effective at disrupting ICE.
But even if she was the most effective giant-road-blocking ICE inconveniencer Minneapolis has ever seen, she still should not have been murdered by ICE. It's morally indefensible, there's no world wherein she deserved to be shot unless she had a gun and was shooting first.
While I agree she knew who they were and disagree with the other person’s implication that she could have not known, in the US we are entirely within our rights to monitor law enforcement, despite attempts to end it (see what recently happened in Louisiana with bans on filming police within 25ft). So what you see as a provocation or “looking for trouble,” I see as exercising her rights and doing her civic duty. I imagine your opinion would change if you agreed with what she was doing a la “ one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
The sad reality is these people need to be monitored. If they think nobody is watching then they will behave worse than they already are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Cave
Regardless of the exact circumstances of that scenario, there has been no efforts towards even the most token forms of accountability, and your echoing of state propaganda only furthers their success. You are on the wrong side of history with this one. An armed state police force that exists above accountability (except to the executive) is by definition a Geheimestaatspolizei.
> Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
Describing what she did as "ramming" an ICE agent is extremely disingenuous. She tapped him, probably on accident[†]. He got a bruise, and she got shot in the face.
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"
> Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended"
Or my personal favorite, "a mandate."
Interestingly I don't recall any other US President in recent memory (last 30 years) referring to their policies, or more accurately the fact that they won an election, as "a mandate given by the American people."
But you only need to go back a few more decades to find similar phrases used by a certain country's infamous authoritarian regime. Are the frogs boiling yet? It's starting to get really uncomfortable really fast.
If you believe said women is attempting to attack you with a deadly weapon (an accelerating vehicle that you were struck by in this case) that would fall pretty clearly under justified use of force.
What makes you believe that she had any intent to attempt an attack?
Intent is where this falls apart, as she had no intent to harm with her vehicle. The interaction up until escalation by the agents was peaceful.
Even if the agent was in harms way, "totality of the circumstances" need to be reviewed before it can be said that deadly force was justified (see Barnes v. Felix ruling below)
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.
So you think there no other way in the world that ice agent would have a bruise? Is there any proof the bruise was from this incident? Did he have any bruises before from any other ice activity?
They are grabbing people day in and day out.
Again, think.
This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:
“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
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.
It's both the fact that they're going after people here legally and even U.S. citizens, and the brutality and unconstitutional nature of their tactics. They are literally going house to house kicking in doors without a warrant. They're racial profiling. The ICE agents are completely out of control as their recruitment standards are nonexistent and higher-ups are signaling that they can do literally whatever they want, including killing people, and they'll face no consequences. I don't understand how any sane person can support it, much less the "don't tread on me" crowd.
Detaining and/or deporting people here illegally to their home countries with due process: OK
Detaining, deporting, and/or killing people here illegally, legally, and U.S. citizens, without due process, to private detention camps or third countries: NOT OK
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.
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.
The outcome of an immigration hearing is supposed to be up to the judge, not some masked goons skulking in the hallway outside the courtroom.
You are carrying water for genuinely-terrible people. Why are you doing that?
(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.
Hate is powerful, and I think that's part of what drives protests into riot. And some people to protests honestly. But I think the root of it is anger at the situation, not just the leader. And it doesn't negate the reasonableness of the concerns and worries people have.
I know one of the lead protest organizers where I live. They have a long list of things. Things they feel are bad and want reversed. And having known them for a long time, I can say they are internally consistent, and would be out there protesting if it was a Democratic president doing this, or more likeable person doing this. It's less about the hate, and more about concern for the direction things are going, and blatant disregard for the law.
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 who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law
No, they do not. Quite the opposite, they want to live their lives quietly and normally like everyone else.
The only law they "undermine" is the one forbidding them to living in a place due to a birth right. Civil disobedience to unjust laws like that is correct and moral.
> make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump
Disagree. IMO the biggest reasons for Trump's election were inflation and raising living costs. Under those conditions, picking a group of people to elect as the "enemy" is a tact to win elections, but has nothing to do with the underlying cause for the bad conditions in the first place.
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.
Nope. Access to food, water, shelter, and freedom of movement are fundamental human rights. I'm not a proponent of executing useless eaters. If you commit a crime with a prison sentence then you serve that sentence where you committed the crime.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position.
So if China or some other country decided to send 10 million people here for whatever reason, you think our official policy should be to welcome then in and provide them food, shelter, etc...?
What about 100 million people?
Should they also be given citizenship and right to vote in addition to food/shelter?
The only issue would be logistics. Getting supporting infrastructure and housing set up. But yeah, ultimately. More hands, more consumers. Why wouldn't we want as many citizens as possible, we certainly have the land for it.
I wonder in such a case if more populous countries like India or China could in theory send over 100 million+ people to our country over the course of a decade, and then once those people are citizens, legally vote for the US to be annexed by China, etc..
You could conquer a country without a single shot fired.
"These people are akin the mold growing upon a rotting city-state economy. They have to be removed." --our poster
"humanity suffers today under Jewish parasitism" --Adolf Hitler
It is this fake injury or mis-assignment of blame for real harm that serves as justification for actual crimes against humanity be they at CEDOT or Dachau
This is disgusting hyperbole. Nazis killed millions of innocent people; a nation enforcing border laws by asking illegals to leave or removing them when they don't is not that.
We sent people who committed no crimes to a foreign concentration camp in a country that they aren't from and have killed several including citizens.
Our present admin holds that it can detain anyone it merely asserts is illegal without trial or any due process and ship them to such camps or hold them domestically indefinitely in fetid slums that if we fill with the millions they want picked up will become death camps due to illness, climate, privation, lack of medical care.
They have variously called for imprisoning and even executing law makers who speak up, shooting protesters, killing them and shutting down journalists who run negative press.
They did commit a crime by crossing the border illegally. Illegals are free to leave the country on their own and not deal with any of this, in fact they are paid to do so. The idea that removing people who entered America illegally and sending them back is the same as systematically exterminating an entire race of humans is so dangerous and makes any discussion with people who think like you such a waste of time. It's rhetoric like yours that encourage people like the Tyler Robinsons or that sniper who attacked the ice facility.
A crime against the citizens like robbery not a civil wrong like overstaying their visa. We have a different interest in enforcing one vs the other which I think you know.
You are suggesting we can't call out what is actually happening in case the proud boys running around kidnapping and murdering people get hurt as if people will be inspired to hurt them because of online rhetoric and not because of the kidnapping and murder.
Want to keep ICE from getting hurt? Roll back enforcement to 2010 norms and start rolling in greater penalties from hurtful to ruinous for employee illegals with 5 years in jail for all management/HR/accounting who lie about it.
Start at 10% of payroll paid to illegal labor increasing to 1000% over whatever timeline would allow companies to transition from illegal labor.
Making it economical to hire illegal labor with a slap on the wrist or no penalty then punishing laborers for adapting over decades to this situation is insane.
What was the reasoning Hitler used to deport Jews and other "undesirables" to Polish concentration camps? Was it legal?
If so, maybe we shouldn't try to equate "What is legal/possible" with "what is moral/good". It can be legal and possible, and still very inhumane and evil. The Nazis prove that, don't they?
> and sending them back
We didn't "send them back". We sent them to a third place. A very bad place. Why are you ignoring that when the person you are replying to was specifically mentioning it?
> It's rhetoric like yours that encourage people like the Tyler Robinsons or that sniper who attacked the ice facility.
There is absolutely zero evidence of this. Tyler could have a very specific grievance with Charlie Kirk's rhetoric without being motivated by other people calling Trump and MAGA Nazis or Facists.
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.
> "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.
It's a shame those people had to work so hard to be treated like their neighbors. That's not a reason to deny others that treatment though.
> I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out.
Yeah they tend to skew pretty reactionary. That tends to sort itself out after a generation or two.
> A country without border control is NOT a country.
I didn't say we shouldn't have border security. In what universe is a goon squad going door to door checking for undesirables "border control"?
> 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.
> Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.
What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you? People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.
Now, that doesn't mean deportation should be the only or even the main method of immigration enforcement (personally, I like the idea of putting more burden on employers).
> And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
Oh of course, it's always too different if you want it to be. That way, you can continue to feel righteous.
> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.
Enjoy this little cognitive dissonance:
You could also change the law make them legals eg. after X years of work, no criminal record and citizenship tests.
This would completely disable the current ICE gestapo and would have prevent soo much suffering. But i can imagine what you must be thinking now: But they came here illegally, this is harm to our society enough.
> What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you?
I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems. Unfortunately neither party in my country is keen on that idea.
> People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
People thought that once they were told to think that. It's an easy sell to blame everything wrong on the scary dirty foreigners. When people are dissatisfied populism wins, regardless of whether the talking points are rooted in reality. The responsible thing to do is try to get people on board with populist ideas that help rather than hurt.
> I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems.
It's a seductive idea, but it's the attitude of an authoritarian technocrat. However, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, which requires being sensitive to the problems voters have, as voters see them. And that's probably a big part of Trump's actual appeal. My understanding is at his rallies and in his rhetoric, he gave the appearance of being responsive to many concerns that had been willfully ignored or denied for a long time (for instance: free trade dogma, which destroyed a lot of things and insisted people be satisfied with the easily-quantified cheap junk they were being given).
> People thought that once they were told to think that.
Don't pretend your thoughts are any more independent than those of the people you're othering.
> There is broad support for Dreamers. It's not as simple as deport everyone here illegally and the public seems to understand that.
What the GGP was advocating was much broader than that. What's sympathetic about the Dreamers is the non-consensual nature of their position (their parents took them here) and many of them have little to no connection to the country they'd be deported to.
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.
If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
See, this is exactly why I don't believe the things I read - his only actual conviction was for falsifying business records. (He is a convicted felon, though, that's indisputable).
Let’s say you’re a person of questionable immigration status who has lived in the US for a couple of decades, achieved some modest success - your own home, mostly paid for, a car or two, maybe even a small business.
Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.
Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.
Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.
If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.
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).
a lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
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?
Okay so they have a “graph database” that transforms client data into actionable insights. I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
I'm not trying to make an ethical judgement here; personally, I think there is certainly a reckoning to be had given the role ICE have taken on, and I don't think that "we just make the platform" excuses culpability.
However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve.
> I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.
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 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.
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?
Yes. If you worked at pltr as a FDE you are now wealthy.
no i think you and the people you are replying to are getting it completely backwards
people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.
people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha
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.
In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
Then you're not familiar with software consultancy because that's exactly what they do.
Ah ok then let’s just call them contractors because that’s what exactly what they do.
Ok they are "consultants" with a federally guaranteed moat.
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.
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.
[dead]
You mean virtue signaling with the sign flipped?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vice_signalling
> 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.
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.
> How is Palantir a loophole?
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
> I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer
See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.
Which has what, exactly, to do with Palantir?
On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.
I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.
> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
Pretty sure GP is saying that the data Palantir sells are commercial because they're being sold by Palantir.
Right, and what I’m saying is that to the best of my knowledge, Palantir don’t sell data at all, which is the fundamental misunderstanding people seem to have about them.
There are two really two major concerning issues with Palantir:
1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.
2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
We agree, I think these are the more valid concerns than the "they are operating a data warehouse with all of the data in the entire universe" conspiracy theory that seems popular.
I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.
But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.
Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.
They sell data derived from the data. But it's not, like, a hash function - you can absolutely deduce the source data from it. In fact, that's the entire purpose. You use the aggregation and whatnot bullshit to find individuals, track them, gain insight into their living situation and patterns, and acquire evidence of crimes. Typically that requires a search warrant.
If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.
> They sell data derived from the data.
Do they? I don't think they even do this, either.
I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.
One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
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++?
"we have 2394328423 devs on standby able to fix it if/when it happens. five 9s for all apps"
of course when shit actually hits the fan you'll still wait 4 days for a response
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
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.
Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.
Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
> Torment Nexus
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus.
> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7DjEsFTlic it's also settler logic
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
The tool is a lump of metal apart from ethics, but making the cliterectomy-knife was a choice someone made. We can judge that decision.
Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.
It depends on your moral framework. For example if you believe killing is always wrong, then guns are not neutral - they're a tool designed for evil uses.
> prince Fëanor
> one of the good guys
Uhhhh...
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
Such actions does not a good guy make.
And yet even Feanor was a “good guy” at one point in time. It wasn’t until many years after the invention of the palantiri that he went off the rails, and that was only after talking to Sauron for a while.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
So it's literally the Elvish word for "television"...
Telescope, not television.
And more particularly, any remaining telescope after an apocalypse which caused all of them to be controlled and by a mind-destroying superhuman force of literal evil incarnate.
One can't just ignore that kind of subtext...
It’s not the palantir’s fault that Sauron exists. You might notice that there are several other psychic tools lying around that nobody is using because Sauron will enslave anyone who does. The Throne of Amon Hen, certain magic rings, etc, etc. The danger is Sauron, not the tools themselves.
So what? This was never about the moral culpability of the inanimate object itself. (Charitably ignoring, for the moment, that the One Ring was instead a part of Sauron, infused with his own life force. )
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
palantíri * (sorry, couldn't resist)
that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
> that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.
> they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus…
Worse, that spy apparatus inherently corrupts its users.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
> If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
I mean, that's worse.
No, that’s normal. See also newspapers, radio news, television news, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, The Algorithm, etc, etc. It’s not like Tolkien invented a new thing here; the wicked Vizier who tells the King selective truths is a trope practically as old as time.
Even if they’re the most evil corpo ever, the buyer is still the government. If a democratically elected government buys this products, I would assume, in large scale of things, the general population wants the most evil corpo.
It’s not like they are overthrowing South American countries for favorable terms in pineapple and banana trade *cough*Dole*cough*Chiquita*cough*
Yet.
This works is if-and-only-if you assume everyone involved is a good actor. In fact, many if not most in politics are bad actors, and voters largely believe said bad actors.
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.
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.
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.
If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.
I started a company in that market 10 years ago. We compete with palantir. It’s a competitive market with lots of actors.
On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.
palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.
What I meant is that they espoused that attitude in the Silicon Valley world, which traditionally has not really invested in Defense. I imagine that's also why they're able to raise lots of money and build hype trains, they have one foot still in SV and SV VC.
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.
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.
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
Are they designing it, or is the DOD - sorry, the Department of War that you're likely paying your taxes towards - designing it on their platform? As mentioned, who is providing the data necessary for such applications? For ICE, which this thread is about, it's clearly the likes of news.ycombinator.com's Flock (S17). Whether they put it in a simple Postgres instance or on Databricks or on Palantir's platform or on Microsoft Fabric, I think that's much less core than whose gathering and providing the data.
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.
At least the underwater city would be useful.
Karp put out a whole book about how "Silicon Valley needs to be more willing to work with the government" too, post launch of Palantir.
Idk...any and every of these companies fielding government contracts with a name from LOTR seem off to me. Palantir, Anduril, Erebor....
I mean people have complained about the 4th amendment loophole for a long time now
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.
"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.
> 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?
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.
That fails to meet the need of having a bogeyman to get people to cheer you on as you recruit your brownshirts and start looting the coffers.
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.
There wasn’t anything built there until well after the tracks were laid, if I understand the logistics of that area correctly.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
There are people who would not sleep at night knowing that the tool they created was enabling such things. I believe some are looking to make "semi-open" source licenses that add more restrictions.
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?
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
I consciously used the word ”produce” rather than ”develop” or ”invent” to try to be clear that I meant ”[produce] from a factory”.
Fair enough. In that case I agree.
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
No, but it's also the engineer at Palantir who is enabling it with their efforts. If every engineer there immediately resigned and no other agreed to work there, the situation would end. One can try to hide behind the idea that they are only 1/n_employees responsible (typical corollary: therefore not responsible at all), but this doesn't change the fact that they are participants in what is happening.
I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene. On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it. In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
IBM designed and serviced such a system when it was known to be used by a genocidal government as the customer
Meh American oil companies were literally selling the oil that German tanks ran on until Roosevelt finally got them to stop.
And I am not going to single out the Americans here lots of people in my country made money on the Atlantik wall.
IBM wasn't only providing commodity infrastructure. They designed schema for labeling Jews and other categories of people for targeted internment and extermination
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".
If you're working at Palantir, you know what you're working on.
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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Heh, the “illegitimately” was in reference to it “[not coming] to fruition”, precisely in the immediately preceding clause of that sentence.
In other words, I was saying that the reason for it not coming to fruition could be either legitimate or illegitimate. You assigned your own presumptions to what I said.
Ironically the Democrats deserve much more benefit of the doubt when it comes to election fraud and interference given the glut of evidence of such on the other side of the aisle.
Whoosh.
To others who read the comment above, we know that this administration has done many illegal actions. Lying about elections and causing an attack on the capitol, then further pardoning the attack is a blatant example of this.
The comment above is frankly disingenuous and disguises blatant strawman fallacy with an air of moral superiority
How do you sleep at night being such a disingenuous person? Do you look in the mirror and see a liar? How does that make you feel?
> 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.
"The queue is a thing that tends to happen when you're trying to design policy with the aim of limiting/regulating immigration to amounts that wouldn't be problematic or unmanageable in some way, but the queue itself shouldn't be a goal"
> 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.
You are benefitting more from illegals than they are "infringing" on you.
Borders are an imaginary concept made-up by nation-states, which only serves the people in power.
Or how are people fleeing from prosecution, looking for a better life, or just feeling like living somewhere else exactly hurting you? It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required.
If you're thinking about jobs, skilled workers immigrating will compete with you much more than less-privileged people. And "we cannot pay for them" is BS made up the system as well. It is possible to pay for social security for everyone, but not if all profits go to shareholders of course.
>Imaginary
People forgot this once Maduro was noped
>It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required
Bhutan, Barcelona
How are they infringing on you specifically?
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…
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.
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?
> 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.
> that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports
Clearly is it not a belief that no one in the USA supports, as seem in the discourse against ICE and immigration contrl.
> The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
Not necessarily, no. "The debate" is too vague to elaborate in favor or against what you're saying.
But yes, there are people against immigration control period, and period in favor of reforms to make immigration easier for workers, not harder. But propaganda will keep putting workers against each other, instead of companies lobbying against workers.
All of this misses the point of the moment, which is that the federal government is completely lawless and is incapable of responding to democratic or popular will. There is no debate happening. It does not matter which ordinary people "support" which position. Any political project (other than the current regime) in the USA in 2026 must contend with the fact that just establishing a democracy must be our first step. This is as true for Socialists as it is for non-regime-approved stripes of Fascist. It's the same for Chamber of Commerce Republicans and ex-hippie boomer liberals. Any talk of what we will do with a democracy once we have it is premature, because at the moment it simply does not matter what the opinions of the citizenry are.
> which is that the federal government is completely lawless and is incapable of responding to democratic or popular will.
Trump won the election mostly on a strong anti-immigration policy this is the popular will of the people.
Why is this being downvoted? The primary reason Trump was able to win is because Biden waited until it was far too late to address the surge of illegal immigration at the southern border. We don't have to wonder or argue about whether Americans support open borders, we already had something mildly in that direction (that still didn't remotely approach the idea of "no immigration control, period"), and in response Americans voted into office Donald Trump.
Not everyone believes this is about "the border" but rather a Christian conservative takeover of society.
The immigrants are just an excuse for the fascist goons in the street.
There are borders are imaginary and everyone should be able to move anywhere they want people on this post.
> 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.
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.
That isn't written in good faith, though. It's a "both sides" argument that's clearly written from a particular side.
> ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
It doesn't, given the current administration. It's somewhat questionable in general, given that being in the country illegally isn't a felony (or criminal) in itself. We have local law enforcement that can handle cases of illegal actions, regardless of immigration status, and actual crimes can and do lead to deportation.
The vast majority of people being targeted, via mandate, are not criminals. The mandate of the current administration also includes protestors, regardless of citizenship status.
So, no, that person didn't cover the points, and your neutrality here is also written in a way that backs up that person, so that's also somewhat questionable.
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It's a slippery slope.
ICE at one time was legitimate - their previous purpose had legitimacy... past tense.
ICE will not exist at some point in the hopefully sooner future than later.
No amount of nuance will change fundamental failure to success.
What nuance is missing? The above comment is a list of facts.
Lists of facts don’t inherently constitute a nuanced take.
Yes, but they do constitute an accurate one.
The point here is that the people currently in charge hold 100% of the power, and they're misusing it. You don't have any power, nor do I, nor do the poor American citizens who may or may not be executed.
They, the people in power, do not require your good will or help. They're already maxed out. They are already 100% legitimate and in control. While it might be nuanced to argue ICE as an institution is one which should exist, it's also just doing more harm.
For someone that complains a lot about people lacking 'nuance', your post history is guilty of the exact same crime you complain about. So it's doubly clear that you're not actually arguing with good intention.
Is there anything inaccurate in the above comment?
Then stop hiding behind "nuance" and be more explicit about how you support what's going on. Everyone who disagrees with the ongoing blatant fascist police state activity do not lack nuance, they lack your ability to suppress empathy.
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.
If there is a hell on this planet it is Reddit. I don't blame them
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.
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
That's enough concern trolling out of you.
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.
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...your argument is that H-tler wasn't actually that bad, he had a clear and ethical mandate but went about fulfilling it in the wrong ways? SMH.
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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
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.
> 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?
It's quite simple, some states want to allow voting without identity cards that prove that they are citizens of the country.
I don't know of any other country that would allow it, but I know other countries where people in power used other ,,tricks'' to increase the chance of being reelected
There's no evidence of noncitizens voting in meaningful numbers, but I'm aware that's a popular right-wing talking point.
You changed what I wrote: it's not about non-citizens voting or not, it's about requiring identification by law at polling, which is required in every other democratic country.
As an example in in late 2024 in California Governor Newsom signed SB 1174, which explicitly prohibits local governments (like cities or counties) from passing their own laws to require voter ID.
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?
He didn't have to if he could just get Trump be thrown out of social media.
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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This is one of the most insane things I've ever read. You have to be so disconnected from reality to believe this.
> Trump has been the only one that the corporations couldn't buy
Hasn't he accepted donations from many mega corporations? My assumption is that a corporation wont donate money, without the expectation of ROI.
OP has the delusion that being rich means you are resistant to corruption by being less likely to pursue riches. That being rich causes one to stop pursuing it.
Form what I've seen in life it's the exact opposite - the most greedy are the richest. The only people who have the seemingly unreasonable desire for infinite wealth are the already wealthy. For most everyday people, there is a cutoff amount.
Surprised it is so little!
Lou Reed lyrics?
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.
Given the choice, end users choose free or cheap and ad supported over full price in huge majorities. You have to weigh "I don't like ads" against 200 million (!) people on Netflix's ad supported plan and how much enjoyment they get that they might not otherwise. Not to mention things like Google that are ad supported and genuinely useful. In the real world things have pros and cons.
I used to buy this thinking, but no longer. People are incredibly resourceful, and instead of innovating towards exploiting and manipulating people, we could choose to innovate towards conserveration of important things, just like we have done in the past.
We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies.
Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.
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?
If they're good enough to be hired to palantir as an engineer, I very much doubt at any point they were desperate.
You're missing my point. If all 'ethical' companies treat all ex-employees of 'unethical companies' as unemployable, they are effectively only going to work at 'unethical companies' regardless of whatever mindset has shifted over time.
I agree they shouldn't become outcasts, but it feels disingenuous to say that the reason for wanting to work for palantir is anything but "they wanted A LOT of money".
It's kind of beside the point. You could argue the change of mind/heart is unlikely, but if indeed they had changed, it would be better to encourage that. Perhaps they were lured by the money, or perhaps some jingoistic impulse, but then the reality of what the company was doing became clearer? Or their world view evolved?
That said, if some ex-Palantir worker was somehow working for UNICEF – to take an extreme example – it would be a little awkward unless they had denounced their old company in a fairly public manner.
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.
In a country with many huge companies selling oil, cigarettes, weapons, etc. there is no shortage of people willing to deal in morally questionable trades for money. I might even boldly suggest that Palantir is arguably far from the worst.
I can't speak to Palantir, but Anduril is growing rapidly. Headcount has been ~doubling every 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The name is giving "bad Malthusian"
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
[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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How about ICE canceling naturalization ceremonies literally minutes before they become citizens: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/12/08/unspeakabl...
These are LEGAL immigrants who have done it the right way being denied. That is worthy of protest.
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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I for one would find it far more acceptable if the people carrying out the deportations would be a little less "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" about it.
“Not listening” is really an incredible framing for trying to flee being detained for obstruction, and in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in your SUV.
I forget that the punishment for obstruction is on-the-spot public execution by a trained officer.
Where did I say that? It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether lethal force was justified. Obstruct and provoke law enforcement at your own peril.
It’s ultimately up to a jury to decide whether she was trying to flee being detained for obstruction and was in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in her SUV.
Not that it will do her any good.
Agreed. I'm continually shocked at the level of gaslighting still occurring around this event when we have clear footage from multiple angles.
Disagreement =/= gaslighting
The person you are referring to rammed an ICE agent with their vehicle and the agent suffered internal bleeding as a result.
Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
The "interal bleeding" thing is so unbelievably ludicrous. He got a bruise because he was lurching for the car while juggling his phone in one hand and a gun in the other. She was clearly neither trying to, nor succeeding in "ramming" him.
So the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope.
Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense.
Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
This is such a bizarre argument because the entire reason the two women were there in the first place is because they thought they were following ICE agents. Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group. They had been following the agents around throughout the day, attempting to disrupt them, which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
> Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group
Based.
> which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
That giant ass street that could fit three of her car across its entire width? The one where she was signaling them to go around her? It doesn't sound like she was very effective at disrupting ICE.
But even if she was the most effective giant-road-blocking ICE inconveniencer Minneapolis has ever seen, she still should not have been murdered by ICE. It's morally indefensible, there's no world wherein she deserved to be shot unless she had a gun and was shooting first.
While I agree she knew who they were and disagree with the other person’s implication that she could have not known, in the US we are entirely within our rights to monitor law enforcement, despite attempts to end it (see what recently happened in Louisiana with bans on filming police within 25ft). So what you see as a provocation or “looking for trouble,” I see as exercising her rights and doing her civic duty. I imagine your opinion would change if you agreed with what she was doing a la “ one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
The sad reality is these people need to be monitored. If they think nobody is watching then they will behave worse than they already are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Cave
Regardless of the exact circumstances of that scenario, there has been no efforts towards even the most token forms of accountability, and your echoing of state propaganda only furthers their success. You are on the wrong side of history with this one. An armed state police force that exists above accountability (except to the executive) is by definition a Geheimestaatspolizei.
> Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
Describing what she did as "ramming" an ICE agent is extremely disingenuous. She tapped him, probably on accident[†]. He got a bruise, and she got shot in the face.
[†] We'll never know because she's dead.
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"
> Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended"
Or my personal favorite, "a mandate."
Interestingly I don't recall any other US President in recent memory (last 30 years) referring to their policies, or more accurately the fact that they won an election, as "a mandate given by the American people."
But you only need to go back a few more decades to find similar phrases used by a certain country's infamous authoritarian regime. Are the frogs boiling yet? It's starting to get really uncomfortable really fast.
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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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You can when they are wearing a mask and a gun and are trying to pull you out of your car. It’s called self defense.
By this logic anybody could legally kill a police officer trying to arrest them.
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Nothing you've said justifies her murder. Absolutely nothing.
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.
If you believe said women is attempting to attack you with a deadly weapon (an accelerating vehicle that you were struck by in this case) that would fall pretty clearly under justified use of force.
"If you believe"...
What makes you believe that she had any intent to attempt an attack?
Intent is where this falls apart, as she had no intent to harm with her vehicle. The interaction up until escalation by the agents was peaceful.
Even if the agent was in harms way, "totality of the circumstances" need to be reviewed before it can be said that deadly force was justified (see Barnes v. Felix ruling below)
https://www.shawbransford.com/supreme-court-unanimously-reje...
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1239_onjq.pdf
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.
Happy to share: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-officer-who-shot-renee-good...
It’s kinda funny that conservatives don’t have the ability to think for themselves and rather just repeat what others tell them.
Internal bleeding = a bruise
So you agree he was struck by the vehicle?
So you think there no other way in the world that ice agent would have a bruise? Is there any proof the bruise was from this incident? Did he have any bruises before from any other ice activity?
They are grabbing people day in and day out.
Again, think.
This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:
“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
Think for yourself.
Has this been independently confirmed? I trust nothing these people say. Especially when the video shows nothing happening.
'officials say' anything now-a-days... What a trustworthy time to be alive. /s
No. Wheels were turned away from the gestapo, gestapo was not hurt, gestapo is lying about injuries.
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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.
It's both the fact that they're going after people here legally and even U.S. citizens, and the brutality and unconstitutional nature of their tactics. They are literally going house to house kicking in doors without a warrant. They're racial profiling. The ICE agents are completely out of control as their recruitment standards are nonexistent and higher-ups are signaling that they can do literally whatever they want, including killing people, and they'll face no consequences. I don't understand how any sane person can support it, much less the "don't tread on me" crowd.
Detaining and/or deporting people here illegally to their home countries with due process: OK
Detaining, deporting, and/or killing people here illegally, legally, and U.S. citizens, without due process, to private detention camps or third countries: NOT OK
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.
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.
The outcome of an immigration hearing is supposed to be up to the judge, not some masked goons skulking in the hallway outside the courtroom.
You are carrying water for genuinely-terrible people. Why are you doing that?
> 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.
Kidnapping people literally going to immigration hearings.
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.
Hate is powerful, and I think that's part of what drives protests into riot. And some people to protests honestly. But I think the root of it is anger at the situation, not just the leader. And it doesn't negate the reasonableness of the concerns and worries people have.
I know one of the lead protest organizers where I live. They have a long list of things. Things they feel are bad and want reversed. And having known them for a long time, I can say they are internally consistent, and would be out there protesting if it was a Democratic president doing this, or more likeable person doing this. It's less about the hate, and more about concern for the direction things are going, and blatant disregard for the law.
> 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.
> People who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law
No, they do not. Quite the opposite, they want to live their lives quietly and normally like everyone else.
The only law they "undermine" is the one forbidding them to living in a place due to a birth right. Civil disobedience to unjust laws like that is correct and moral.
> make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump
Disagree. IMO the biggest reasons for Trump's election were inflation and raising living costs. Under those conditions, picking a group of people to elect as the "enemy" is a tact to win elections, but has nothing to do with the underlying cause for the bad conditions in the first place.
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.
Nope. Access to food, water, shelter, and freedom of movement are fundamental human rights. I'm not a proponent of executing useless eaters. If you commit a crime with a prison sentence then you serve that sentence where you committed the crime.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position.
So if China or some other country decided to send 10 million people here for whatever reason, you think our official policy should be to welcome then in and provide them food, shelter, etc...?
What about 100 million people?
Should they also be given citizenship and right to vote in addition to food/shelter?
The only issue would be logistics. Getting supporting infrastructure and housing set up. But yeah, ultimately. More hands, more consumers. Why wouldn't we want as many citizens as possible, we certainly have the land for it.
I wonder in such a case if more populous countries like India or China could in theory send over 100 million+ people to our country over the course of a decade, and then once those people are citizens, legally vote for the US to be annexed by China, etc..
You could conquer a country without a single shot fired.
Yeah, sure, if Chinese people were ants in a hivemind that strategy might work.
Putting aside the blatant unconstitutionality of the question, how often does "should the US be legally annexed by China" come up on the ballot?
Another hypothetical is what if those 100 million turn out to be right wing radicals.
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Godwin's Law invoked in record time. Such hyperbole is not conductive to real discussion.
Literal Nazi stuff
"These people are akin the mold growing upon a rotting city-state economy. They have to be removed." --our poster
"humanity suffers today under Jewish parasitism" --Adolf Hitler
It is this fake injury or mis-assignment of blame for real harm that serves as justification for actual crimes against humanity be they at CEDOT or Dachau
Immigrants aren't hurting us by existing.
This is disgusting hyperbole. Nazis killed millions of innocent people; a nation enforcing border laws by asking illegals to leave or removing them when they don't is not that.
We sent people who committed no crimes to a foreign concentration camp in a country that they aren't from and have killed several including citizens.
Our present admin holds that it can detain anyone it merely asserts is illegal without trial or any due process and ship them to such camps or hold them domestically indefinitely in fetid slums that if we fill with the millions they want picked up will become death camps due to illness, climate, privation, lack of medical care.
They have variously called for imprisoning and even executing law makers who speak up, shooting protesters, killing them and shutting down journalists who run negative press.
They did commit a crime by crossing the border illegally. Illegals are free to leave the country on their own and not deal with any of this, in fact they are paid to do so. The idea that removing people who entered America illegally and sending them back is the same as systematically exterminating an entire race of humans is so dangerous and makes any discussion with people who think like you such a waste of time. It's rhetoric like yours that encourage people like the Tyler Robinsons or that sniper who attacked the ice facility.
A crime against the citizens like robbery not a civil wrong like overstaying their visa. We have a different interest in enforcing one vs the other which I think you know.
You are suggesting we can't call out what is actually happening in case the proud boys running around kidnapping and murdering people get hurt as if people will be inspired to hurt them because of online rhetoric and not because of the kidnapping and murder.
Want to keep ICE from getting hurt? Roll back enforcement to 2010 norms and start rolling in greater penalties from hurtful to ruinous for employee illegals with 5 years in jail for all management/HR/accounting who lie about it.
Start at 10% of payroll paid to illegal labor increasing to 1000% over whatever timeline would allow companies to transition from illegal labor.
Making it economical to hire illegal labor with a slap on the wrist or no penalty then punishing laborers for adapting over decades to this situation is insane.
> They did commit a crime
What was the reasoning Hitler used to deport Jews and other "undesirables" to Polish concentration camps? Was it legal?
If so, maybe we shouldn't try to equate "What is legal/possible" with "what is moral/good". It can be legal and possible, and still very inhumane and evil. The Nazis prove that, don't they?
> and sending them back
We didn't "send them back". We sent them to a third place. A very bad place. Why are you ignoring that when the person you are replying to was specifically mentioning it?
> It's rhetoric like yours that encourage people like the Tyler Robinsons or that sniper who attacked the ice facility.
There is absolutely zero evidence of this. Tyler could have a very specific grievance with Charlie Kirk's rhetoric without being motivated by other people calling Trump and MAGA Nazis or Facists.
I bet houses in your suburb are a million a pop
City and yes they are expensive because houses in a city are
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.
> "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.
It's a shame those people had to work so hard to be treated like their neighbors. That's not a reason to deny others that treatment though.
> I have yet to meet a legal immigrant that isn't okay with booting anyone that isn't legal out.
Yeah they tend to skew pretty reactionary. That tends to sort itself out after a generation or two.
> A country without border control is NOT a country.
I didn't say we shouldn't have border security. In what universe is a goon squad going door to door checking for undesirables "border control"?
> 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.
> Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.
And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
> Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.
What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you? People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.
Now, that doesn't mean deportation should be the only or even the main method of immigration enforcement (personally, I like the idea of putting more burden on employers).
> And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.
Oh of course, it's always too different if you want it to be. That way, you can continue to feel righteous.
> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.
Enjoy this little cognitive dissonance:
You could also change the law make them legals eg. after X years of work, no criminal record and citizenship tests.
This would completely disable the current ICE gestapo and would have prevent soo much suffering. But i can imagine what you must be thinking now: But they came here illegally, this is harm to our society enough.
> What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you?
I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems. Unfortunately neither party in my country is keen on that idea.
> People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.
People thought that once they were told to think that. It's an easy sell to blame everything wrong on the scary dirty foreigners. When people are dissatisfied populism wins, regardless of whether the talking points are rooted in reality. The responsible thing to do is try to get people on board with populist ideas that help rather than hurt.
> I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems.
It's a seductive idea, but it's the attitude of an authoritarian technocrat. However, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, which requires being sensitive to the problems voters have, as voters see them. And that's probably a big part of Trump's actual appeal. My understanding is at his rallies and in his rhetoric, he gave the appearance of being responsive to many concerns that had been willfully ignored or denied for a long time (for instance: free trade dogma, which destroyed a lot of things and insisted people be satisfied with the easily-quantified cheap junk they were being given).
> People thought that once they were told to think that.
Don't pretend your thoughts are any more independent than those of the people you're othering.
There is broad support for Dreamers. It's not as simple as deport everyone here illegally and the public seems to understand that.
> There is broad support for Dreamers. It's not as simple as deport everyone here illegally and the public seems to understand that.
What the GGP was advocating was much broader than that. What's sympathetic about the Dreamers is the non-consensual nature of their position (their parents took them here) and many of them have little to no connection to the country they'd be deported to.
That logic doesn't apply to, say, the 3.5 million illegal immigrants that arrived between 2021 and 2023 (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...), but those are people the GGP would "document not deport."
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?
>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.
The fantasy is that's it's caused by migrants and going to be fixed by deporting them.
'cause feelings
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?
Example: Kavanaugh stops. Racial profiling is now legal thanks to our Supreme Court.
Trump referred to Somalis as "garbage". If that's not publicly antagonistic or racist then what is?
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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.
If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
How does one become to be a professional agitator? Indeed.com comes up with no results. I have a friend who's bored with their job.
> Every time I read about them arresting somebody...
You're clearly not reading enough and are a part of the problem if you believe what you're saying to be true.
I'm not 100% sure what to believe, but I have been around long enough to take everything I read with a grain of salt.
Gonna need more than a grain these days.
> That's what they say they are doing?
Hardly with president convicted of sexual assault (among other things).
See, this is exactly why I don't believe the things I read - his only actual conviction was for falsifying business records. (He is a convicted felon, though, that's indisputable).
Must be why he is doing everything to not release the Epstein files. We have a critical thinker here.
And he may well be tried and convicted for something that comes out of those, but he hasn't been yet.
They can self deport and get paid doing so, it doesn't get any more humane than that really.
Let’s say you’re a person of questionable immigration status who has lived in the US for a couple of decades, achieved some modest success - your own home, mostly paid for, a car or two, maybe even a small business.
Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.
Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.
Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.
If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.
Cost-free travel back home, a $1,000 exit bonus, and forgiveness of any "failure to depart" fines. Quite generous.
Over the Holidays they even increased the exit bonus to $3000: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/12/22/increased-incentives-dhs...
Yet another reason why I find the haphazard comparisons to Nazi Germany/Gestapo so farcical.
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.
a lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity
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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?
Okay so they have a “graph database” that transforms client data into actionable insights. I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
I'm not trying to make an ethical judgement here; personally, I think there is certainly a reckoning to be had given the role ICE have taken on, and I don't think that "we just make the platform" excuses culpability.
However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve.
> I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.
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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?
Move out of mommas basement you dolt
That's just the previous step.
So now you’re two steps behind
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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.
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.