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Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

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241–250 of 375 posts

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#241
post #63

Yuck. It's like the perfect marriage of taking any remaining humanity out of law enforcement and add tons of bottomless greed to it. It's so very Peter Thiel-ish. I'd love to say I wish them well, but I hope this company goes out of business due to a public outrage. But they'll always find someone to sell to, like authoritarian governments, and make money hand-over-fist.

I hope everyone involved with this company dies painfully

You can't post like this here regardless of how strongly you disagree with someone or dislike them. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and using HN as intended? They include Be kind. That includes being kind even when others are not being kind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#242
post #2

Did we create a super-villain by ostracizing him for supporting Trump?

Maybe this is too off topic for HN, but I'm genuinely curious what is the best argument for why it is bad/racist to enforce immigration laws? I've heard people argue that a wall won't be effective. But some people seem to have the view that immigration laws shouldn't be enforced at all and we should allow people to use whatever loopholes (refugee status, traveling w/ children) there are to get in and then not show up…

Your question is quite loaded and rests upon false premises - for example, your assertion that people don't show up for court hearings rehashes an anti-immigrant trope that has little basis in fact. Attendance rates are actually quite high, close to 100% for those who have attorneys and still high even for those who don't: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/

It's a deep complex subject that can't be summed up in a short (or even a long) comment. If your understanding of it is based on misleading tropes that you've heard from pundits or political figures, it might be worth taking up the issue as a research project or taking some classes so that you are not taken in by slanderous misinformation.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need to protect our borders? Why not just let people live wherever they can afford?

People illegally present in the US cannot work legally. That means they work under the table and are subject to all sorts of abuse, and their presence promotes gray market/black market economies. While I think it is unfair to deport people who have been here for decades and giving them amnesty (again, like we did in the 1980s) is a reasonable solution especially for those who were kids when they came here, I don’t ha…

So let people have work permits as long as they don't commit serious crimes and the illegal work problem goes away. There is no necessity for the control freakery that has driven much immigration policy in recent years.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#244
post #208

Awesome! Anduril is one of the few startups today I believe is solving a core problem in the United States' institutions - Defense industry dysfunction. It costs American taxpayers billions of dollars on weapons that under-perform at best and endanger American lives at worst. Palmer correctly identifies some of the incentive issues with current defense contracts. Rather than working on contracts pre-defined by the Do…

Anduril has a nice model. It's not unique to Anduril, but it is nice. Most R&D places with eventual infusion / sale to acquisition partners start with IRaD funding and move on to small scale demos and sales.

I can't comment on the major acquisitions like fighter jets and aircraft carriers, but this feels natural and familiar when it comes to these advanced, small-scale, systems-level engineering projects.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need to protect our borders? Why not just let people live wherever they can afford?

Because they impose externalities on the people around them.

And yet immigrants have lower levels of criminality than native-born Americans, so you're actually better off with more of them.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#246
post #4

“I felt like there were not nearly enough high-tech companies working on defense problems in a way that was more similar to the Silicon Valley model of innovation rather than a traditional defense contract.” (Luckey) Is this true (not enough companies applying "SV innovation model" to "defense problems")?

In my experience in a corner of this field, I can say that's less true than you think (there are many more partners), but competition is still not quite strong enough.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#247
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "birth lottery" is a metaphysical construct. There is no such lottery, in which souls are assigned at random to bodies. Each human being is a rooted thing with a multigenerational history which is (in the typical case) deliberately created. Some stochastic variability is at work in this process, but it is by no means random. Every nation must have the right to choose the people it wishes to assimilate and those i…

Try to think in terms of individuals, not nations. As for your sovereignty - it ends outside of your condo - you can't restrict someone from Oklahoma to move to SF.

>>> As for your sovereignty - it ends outside of your condo

Why do you have sovereignty over your condo? Why can't I express my right to sleep on your couch, regardless of your consent? If you can express access control rights over a particular piece of territory or property that you consider your own, then why can't a collective group of people also express access control rights over their common, government-managed and administered property/territory?

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#248
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So - while I would prefer a "monitored solution" to border control over physical imposing measures, my real preference would be for us to all work toward eliminating these national-level borders completely. You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." Lots of Americans (and people in other countries) don't have this flexibility. They are di…

> Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico "Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better technique…

> Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know the specific means by which fentanyl is getting into the US?

> The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.

I'm also curious about this, how you know the actual motivations behind people's concerns about the border?

Fully agree with your final point though, fixing the problem at the source should at least be seriously attempted, and I don't see any sign of that happening.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's hard to take this kind of opinion seriously The economic argument for free migration is identical to the one for free trade[1]. Do you find it hard to take free trade advocates seriously? [1] https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/

He didn’t make an economic argument, he made a social and political one about changes to culture. I support open borders for the same reason I support free trade but the idea that it would be anything but massively disruptive to most existing political settlements is a joke. The US fifty years after open borders would have a lot in common with before but the Roman Empire had a lot in common with the Republic too. No…

Borders are an authoritarian tool of control, so allusions to empire and talking about a democratic society with a safety net being unable to handle open borders is bizarre to say the least.

The entire point of the argument is that in aggregate the benefits outweigh the costs, not that it's costless.

Re: Anduril, a startup from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, now valued at $1B

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is wrong with securing your nation's border.

Big fan of the iron curtain, then? The way borders between North Korea and China/SK are secured too? Protesters being shot to death at the Gaza Strip borders? That's fine? There have to be reasonable limits to how you secure your border and whether you violate international and local laws to do it. The US border is currently being "secured" by ignoring lots of laws and treaties we agreed to re: asylum seekers and peo…

The United States allows all asylum seeker's safe entrance at ports of entry, so... Dunno what you're arguing here
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