Oh please. Were they really so willfully ignorant not to know who they are working for and on what?
Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
631–640 of 756 posts
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, they just heavily implied it with > It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway.
I do not see that implication in those words. I take it much more literally. People overlook things that are simultaneously bad and normal.
I cannot agree with that interpretation considering the rest of the comment
But let's agree to disagree there
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the extent that I can, I do try to pick ethical products (like the aforementioned free-range eggs). It's not an all-or-nothing thing indeed; there's a huge spectrum between veganism and not at all thinking (or caring) about where the animal products come from. But yes, I, as a consumer, am not responsible for what is already heavily regulated in favor of factory farmers. Heard of the ag gag laws? You can't vegan t…
All markets have rules, the "free" in "free market" is just marketing. (Not disagreeing with you, just mentioning it because your statement inside made me think of it)
Well of course. Free market (even as a theoretical concept) is only possible with regulation that prevents monopolies and ensures some sort of fairness.
The agricultural market is perhaps the furthest thing from it, given the importance of, well, having food. Farmers get subsidies. Nation-states get involved in the circulation of food around the planet. Geopolitics comes into play.
In some markets, individual choices of consumers matter a lot in shaping them.
Agricultural products are as far from that as it's possible.
I am not convinced that not buying unethical meat does any more than not buying unethical weapons of mass destruction, or not using Palantir's products.
Few of us are hoarding stashes of chemical weapons or signing contracts with Palantir, and yet Palantir still thrives.
Perhaps simply not buying it isn't always the most effective way to end something.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Aren't vegetables cheaper than meat? Do you even do any grocery shopping where you live? Not long ago, I could get chicken for $0.99/pound, same as the cheapest tomatoes, whereas quality tomatoes sold for $2.99/pound. Now the prices for meat are up, but chicken still costs $1.99/pound[1], while decent tomatoes are $3.99/pound[2]. Even if you are thrifty and find cheaper tomatoes, they are incomparable to chicken in…
The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman. First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy - which are what the 0.99/p chicken eat [edit: and it's closer in term of nutrients]. Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale. The grains price should be the one paid by the fermer, adjusted for smaller packaging. Your comparais…
>The comparaison of chicken and tomatoes is a strawman.
It's a direct answer to the question asked by the parent.
The answer is: no, vegetables are not cheaper than meat in the US.
It is perverse. Which is my point: what enables the low, low price of chicken isn't merely the laws of supply and demand.
>First off: people don’t swap them in their diet, a better exemple would be wheat or soy
Those are not vegetables. Those are grains and legumes, respectively.
>Second: the shelf price you mention includes gouvernement subsidies and economy of scale.
No shit.
Which is my point exactly: the problem is addressed by government regulation, and exists because of government regulation, including, but not limited to, subsidies to particular forms of farming, and ag gag laws.
>Your comparaison may stands where you live
Well of course I can speak about where I live.
And yeah, we're talking in English on a US-based website (specifically, a Silicon Valley one). I am talking about the US, a country of about 350M people.
It's not like I'm talking about a small state few people have heard of with no impact on anything. The situation in the US matters because it influences a lot.
Canada isn't that different from the US food-wise, for that matter.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#635 >Join as skynet developer for EvilOrb corporation run by an actual cartoon villain
>Skynet trained by MoralArmy(tm) in Gaza
>Blows up an elementary school in opening strikes of war
>SurprisedPickachuFace.webpRe: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#636I work at a non-defense tech company, and it's basically a running joke that no matter how bad the job market is, none of us are soulless enough to go looking for work at Palantir, even if the pay is good. I would have trouble trusting the kind of person who would work at Palantir. It seems like it could be career-limiting in the long run.
That is strange. I work at Cisco and nobody has mentioned the slightest political aside about anything, ever. No one would ever say something like that about Palantir or its opposite. I would have trouble working at the kind of place with those running jokes in the office.
I suspect the difference is working in continental Europe...?
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#637This is exactly the kind of ethical tension big‑tech workers need to talk about more: you can build “cool” systems, but if the use case is harm, is it still worth it? Wonder how other engineers in the room would act in the same position.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
Billions of pigs cows and chickens will stop being massacred in grizzly ways? Yours is an extremely common and unfortunately ill-informed argument that I see a lot. If I was given the choice between end all suffering by killing all factory farmed animals right now vs perpetuate it, im choosing kill all animals right now
It sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?
Somewhat. I think we are still quite a long way from ethical practices even in the "good" cases.
I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me.
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah yes, the administration’s love of Axis of Allies, or is it allies of axis? They don’t know, they got distracted by the mustaches and the desire to conquer the world.
You do realize that the Axis (Nazi Germany, Japan) were attacking everyone with the explicitly stated goal of conquering the world (and subjecting it to the holocaust, we might add), and US stopped them, conquered Europe, North Africa, half the Pacific, and nothing has been able to stop the US military since. And the US ... retreated. We might add, the Soviets, the other axis, did not retreat. China did not retreat.…
Japan did not take part in the Holocaust. Not the goal of Germany nor Italy was the holocaust. Their objective was not to conquer the world. They were empire builders, plain and simple, and they were trying to expand their trade networks, like Britain had done and monopolized. They took over each European state and replaced its leadership with one that benefitted themselves. Their objective was policy frameworks for the purpose of trading. The holocaust was a later addon (1940).
Re: Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys
#640One aspect of my job is that I have a lot of autonomy and the work I do is such that I could push something out to the production environment and cause massive problems. We have processes in place to make sure that doesn't happen, but they're not robust processes, if you really wanted to you could get something out there that is harmful to the company. Now, there are two ways of looking at that - one is that it's really important to have robust processes to make sure that doesn't happen. But the other is you need people who understand that responsibility and take it seriously and whose personal values are such that they aren't just going to carelessly do stuff. At the end of the day the processes are only good if they're followed.
So one of the things I strongly look for when hiring is for people who have a high sense of personal responsibility. They're not going to just throw shit out there because it's easy or quick. They know they are responsible for what goes out and they really are going to own that responsbility.
In the same way, take a look at anything senior management says about their ICE or military contracts. It's not that I think they're doing something bad or that the military shouldn't have access to good technology. It's that at best they seem entirely disinterested in that what they're doing could be harmful or that they have any responsibility if it is.
It's not that I think Palantir is helping the US government bomb Iranian school chilren. It's that I don't think it would bother them if they were.