131–140 of 187 posts
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Question: do you agree police must be defunded?
I agree that in both cases there is an issue that needs to be solved (see NYPD budget as example) so don’t take “defund” at face value but more like “radical changes are needed”
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> we would end up with something much worse. Whenever I see this, I recognize it as obvious scaremongering.
When I saw "defund the policy" I recognised it as virtue signalling.
Whether abolishing the police, or defunding the police (to deescalate the militarization), both are proposals formulated by serious academics and politicians, whether you agree or not. It's not virtue signalling. If anything, "defund the police" is still very badly regarded outside very small circles and there's no credit to be gained by holding such positions.
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I agree that in both cases there is an issue that needs to be solved (see NYPD budget as example) so don’t take “defund” at face value but more like “radical changes are needed”
The scoffing of "defund the policy" was specifically at the face value interpretation.
The UK has decided to terminate Palantir contracts when they become due for renewal. Not before time.
Not before handing over an enormous cache of NHS patient data to them during the pandemic. If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
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"We've" wdym? You don't get to decide the rules. Your adversary is not signing a legally binding contract.
"We" as a species with common interests like "not eradicating ourselves through violence."
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Surprised by this take. Building a startup is already insanely hard. So I wouldn’t like to add more challenge by spending time integrating with non-US services if they are not top just because of my political views. I feel a better answer is for Europe to build real, competitive alternatives to US services.
I love seeing companies set meritocracy aside for partisan political posturing. All people who run companies should relish their competition behaving sub-optimally.
Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?
Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.
There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.
When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?
Sure, Europe should absolutely be saying no to Palantir. However > A powerful company enables genocide in Gaza, helps ICE separate families, and fuels Trump’s war with Iran So does Google, so does Meta, so does Oracle. What do you think all that Palantir software runs on in the clouds? On Palantir's own huge datacenters? They don'thave those. The huge bulk of it runs on it on clouds provided my Microsoft, Amazon, Goo…
Indeed. It is very disappointing that they chose that as the opening paragraph of their "Why" section, without even making the attempt to relate those points as to why Palantir in Europe would be bad for European citizens. As someone who strongly supports European digital sovereignty and eliminating dependency on the US, I'm frankly very tired of so damn much of the activist discourse around these issues revolving ar…
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Indeed. It is very disappointing that they chose that as the opening paragraph of their "Why" section, without even making the attempt to relate those points as to why Palantir in Europe would be bad for European citizens. As someone who strongly supports European digital sovereignty and eliminating dependency on the US, I'm frankly very tired of so damn much of the activist discourse around these issues revolving ar…
I suspect that if Palantir had the same exact business model but the CEO had supported Kamala Harris, this campaign would not exist. Or if Palantir had said it supported targeting "fascists" the same people denouncing it would be supporters. So if you're actually serious about sovereignty it probably needs a whole campaign around that cause.