Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients

I find that not entirely contradictory, both are tools of societal control. From a perspective of power, whether you legalize marijuana or not is not a question of personal liberty but what is of greater utility to your immediate political goals. I think it is an open secret that the 1960-70s criminalisation of drugs was not really because of concern for the health of the users, but because it was an effective way to suppress and ultimately eliminate the threat of the emerging counter culture.

Maybe in light of growing inequality and youth unemployment marijuana is seen as one of the diversion tools to prevent the poor from taking political action. Especially because it has roughly the intended effects, when used regularly. Note that it is not entirely out of the question that people in power think that way, for example the 60-70's were perceived as a "Crisis of Democracy" in parts of the establishment.

I consider them closer to SAP than the usual DC area style contracting company. What does distinguish them from most of the companies in the area though is that their product tends to work and scale somewhat which I can't say for the vast majority of government contractor produced software for the government at their (very, very schizophrenic and oftentimes misleading) direction. Actually hiring engineers that can codifies instead of asking for a clearance first makes a monumental difference in how you structure your company and lines of business. It lets you at least create a working project first because you can actually reject most of your candidates instead of being pressured to due to being jerked around by the terms of the contract requiring certain levels of clearance first. The government isn't run by completely retarded people and they're seeing now how it's probably easier to have actual software companies produce software and then go through the integration and compliance paperwork later - it's how GovCloud fundamentally became an option in Intelligence Community projects. You thought the Terremark cloud was one nobody used that's terribly overpriced? Wait until you see the "clouds" the big defense contractors came up with at orders of magnitude more dollars (most of it probably going to compensate those poor people filing documents and paperwork meant to protect the government but now entrapping it to work primarily with parasitic companies).

Look online for people with DCGS on their profiles, you'll be able to trace it all back to trying to reproduce Palantir down to the web GUI. Some decent journalist should be able to piece a lot together if they just trolled LinkedIn. A lot of it is unclassified but technically FOUO so not quite cleared for public consumption. The reason I figure it hasn't been researched thoroughly is because it's extremely boring DC area "tech" news that is more about topics that are of little interest to the tech community and is boring even by DC tech standards. Almost every company here is some Big Data bullshit company that's writing something about 8 - 14 years behind private industry timelines from an engineering standpoint and held back by politics, funding, and sheer disorganization endemic to enterprises but especially bad in the bloated Pentagon budget.

Honestly, it sounds like traditional enterprise software and should be valued similarly. Software like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Electronic Health Record (EHR) always require very expensive integration/training/support. The contracts take forever to negotiate but are very lucrative with a huge lock in and expensive support contracts.

> Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors.

That was my reading as well - Techcrunch essentially reprinted marketing materials as incontrovertible fact for this story (continuing a long tradition of similar journalistic excellence). One particularly troublesome sentence:

"...[Palantir] is capable of building comprehensive models of activity to detect suspicious anomalies and is even able to provide immunity to fraud thanks to strategies the founders learned while still at PayPal."

Well there's an objective, accurate statement. Even Paypal itself is far from "immune to fraud". Palantir appears to be doing some interesting things, but this article is ridiculous.

I just lost all my respect for Peter Thiel.