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‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

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Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#61

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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.

[flagged]

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#62

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. T…

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.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#63
post #20

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. T…

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…

Referring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#64
post #60

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. T…

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 as…

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.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#65

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. T…

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?

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#66

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. T…

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 ot…

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.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#67

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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.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#69

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 participat…

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.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#70
post #60

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. T…

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 as…

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".

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