Another case where "starting" is the ha-ha-sob part. There's never been anything good about Palantir.
Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
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Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#152Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company. I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.
Boeing is a US defense contractor. Yet there are plenty of Boeing employees who can have a high expectation of ethics in their jobs.
You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, for sure. Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. All else being equal, if we want to live in a safe and successful society we want good/talented people working in defense. The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
I don't agree with this. Just because the DOD says it is ethical doesn't mean it is so contractors have a duty to maintain ethical standards in the face of changing DOD standards. To me this means a DOD contractor decides before they go in that they will have limits and sticks to them. I think anyone working for Palantir right now should be considering the limits they have and if the company is going beyond them or n…
To a large degree you can't choose how the DoD or other letter agency uses what they buy from you. Obviously you can set some contractual guardrails but realistically if you build drones that can mount hellfire missiles you have to know that it can be misused by some 22 year old. Its tempting to believe that software is different, but once its on-prem its out of your hands.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#154Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company. I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.
It's a U.S. domestic surveillance operation, disguised as a defense contractor. Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it. It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.
Wrong. It does surveillance for multiple countries militaries. And also for private companies.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of what the Trump administration will tell you, that's not it's name. The executive branch is not empowered to unilaterally change the name of a department.
If it's what they call themselves and what they're currently doing, how much does it matter what the official name is?
Because soft power is a real phenomenon and by going along with the illegal name change, we are giving legitimacy to an illegitimate act. Its anticipatory obedience.
Do not obey in advance. It signals to the regime how much power they actually have.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, for sure. Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. All else being equal, if we want to live in a safe and successful society we want good/talented people working in defense. The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
> Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. This is true sometimes. But many times the companies and the government get together to kill people for money (The dead people's money or the taxpayers money - they don't mind which, money is money)
> The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" t…
> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate (1) Nuclear proliferation. We once had a deal that looked as though it was holding. Trump's nixing of the deal and the happenings in Ukraine accelerated Iran's desire to have nukes. (2) Taiwan invasion postponement / CRINK disruption As I've been reading, this might be a second order play to stall China's invasion of Taiwan. If China has to dip int…
Those are incredibly thin justifications that don't really hold up to scrutiny.
1) The deal was holding. And even if we take Trump's word for it that it wasn't, he told us that he destroyed their nuclear capability a year ago. So either he was lying about that, or there was no serious nuclear capability in the first place. Regardless of how that shakes out, there's no reason we should believe this justification today.
2) This is incredibly speculative, and no serious intelligence analyst or military strategist would suggest "war with Iran" as a solution there. And the joke is on us, anyway: China may be feeling an oil crunch, but we're depleting our stock of a bunch of materiel that we'll need if it comes time to defend Taiwan. On top of that, China's military leadership is seeing how incompetently the US is prosecuting this war, and is likely feeling a lot more confident about their ability to fend off a US defense of Taiwan.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#158Everyone in this industry should be required to read Careless People by Sara Wynn-Williams about her tenure at Facebook. Not because the book is about how evil Meta/Facebook is as a company but because you get to see the lengths people go to mentally convince themselves they are the good guy. Repeatedly in the book she tries to assure herself she's making the world better and that there's actually an ethical, positiv…
Everybody need to be a hero of their own story. Even concentration camp guards had this mental model, apart from outright sadists (I know I know, Godwin is cheap but it fits so well when talking about sociopathic traits and/or lack of morality when convenient).
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" t…
> for reasons that nobody can quite articulate They were articulated many times, maybe you didn't want to hear. The action itself was poorly planned and executed, it's a different question.
The reasons given were complete bullshit. So maybe it's not true that they weren't articulated, but the reasons that were articulated don't hold up to scrutiny.
And, yes, on top of that, the action itself was poorly planned and executed, which just adds insult to injury.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" t…
> We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate (1) Nuclear proliferation. We once had a deal that looked as though it was holding. Trump's nixing of the deal and the happenings in Ukraine accelerated Iran's desire to have nukes. (2) Taiwan invasion postponement / CRINK disruption As I've been reading, this might be a second order play to stall China's invasion of Taiwan. If China has to dip int…
There's a lot of retrofitting going on here.