We received a presentation/demo of their products when I worked in the gov (not the US gov. though) a couple of years ago.
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
Ex FDE here. Part of Palantir's pitch for Foundry back in the day is connecting disparate databases from agencies that don't collaborate well. They're also really good at getting demos up and running in a few days. The tech was good back when I was employed.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
That's a great summary, especially the part about Palantir's strategic customer approach being the middle squeeze (high + low buy-in being used to override middle manager blockers).
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
You are aware the product names are cognitive obfuscation that the underlying implementation is just vanilla open source data modeling services right?
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
I’d like to hear from others, but my assumption has been that they’re the ones that 1) have staff with the required clearance to work on DoD projects and 2) the required security and compliance certifications in their product. On the latter, it’s not easy to provide a product that is DoD IL5 certified, so that is a differentiator for them.
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
> Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
They're blowing up because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts, which is par for the course for big government contracting. Elections are to a certain extent a contest between different camps to swing at the Piñata of Federal funding, with the winner taking the current batch of candy.
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
> because they've got allies in government right now steering them contracts
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
I will comment only on the Foundry stack that we work extensively with, at my company.
Given the complete havoc that the other IT ecoaystems has become, we are constantly struggling with proper data access data exchange data transformation and data alignment. To a point where a political layer has appeared on top of that, which looks like the middle age baronies.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company.
The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
> are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data ?
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist.
But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else.
[but I would love to]
Truth to be told: data barons rarely consume their own data, and are not at all focused of the data customers needs.
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons.
Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.
Its really easy to read this and be scared without being given any context, not everyone in the room knows who you are referring to and if your reading of their remarks are accurate.
You can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Or watch Peter Thiel's interview on the anti-chris and if he thinks humanity should survive (uhhh, well, ughh, ummm, you see). Wild scary stuff. Go watch the whole interview but a taste:
Here’s a more contextual excerpt of the transcript which features the 5 questions prior to this and his answer. When I listened to it, to me it seemed like he was thinking about how to weave answers to those into his response, which he does after the exerpt. It’s an entertaining memed clip but we owe it to intellectualism to understand the full context and not simply consume YouTube shorts as the be-all, end-all.
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
I think he was saying the antichrist would be more likely to be a person like Greta, not Greta herself, but the clip cuts off the context at the beginning so it is hard to say.
Why is our media literacy so in the gutter? A few second clip of an easily accessible and free interview from a NYT podcast would not be accepted as gospel fact in the hn of the past.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
Sure. There's a big difference between believing a 20 year old climate activist is a clown versus a harbinger of the apocalypse as foretold in an ancient text 2000 years ago.
Peter Thiel. He says "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
I have knowingly voted for less freedoms for myself multiple times and I know it, for example I have voted:
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
I understood your comment as restricting my own freedoms was a fully bad thing, and I therefore tried to provide examples of positive freedoms being afforded to you by restricting my own negative freedoms.
The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
That's still not more or less. That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies.
> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!
> But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies
What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
>That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
What's so great about voting? The things that people think they love about democracy are many, but voting isn't one of those. We love the idea that in principle, any child might grow up and become president. That (in principle, it's less and less so each day it seems) there is no ruling class and no political dynasties. That public discourse at least influences outcomes within government. Voting might have (at one time) helped to make those things a reality, but those things can all be had without voting.
Anyone who has heard of sortition and still wants voting to occur is a fool. Even the Greeks who invented democracy thought voting inferior to sortition.
What's great about voting is that it gives the government a mandate from and therefore legitimacy to the electorate. It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
Even theoretically that's not true. But if we stoop to the pragmatic, sometimes they win without even a majority of those still not disillusioned enough to stop voting.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
>You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
These sound like the exact reasons we don't have a direct democracy.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”
- not Peter Thiel
It's a nice soundbite, but in reality people (maybe not Peter Thiel though) understand the value of the common goods quite well. (If you happen to be an uneducated American, who doesn't, you can come here to Europe and see.)
I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief.
As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
Hoppe is far too extreme for my tastes and did not seem too interested in rigorously supporting his (distasteful to put it mildly) preconceived notions, but yes direct democracy is undesirable for a number of reasons IMO.
That's exactly how it works already, albeit through the middlemen representatives figuring out what block of voters is cheapest to buy. The only meaningful difference in a representative democracy is that the representatives can choose not to deliver on their promises (in other words: lie), thereby consolidating real power in a smaller group of people.
Except somehow it's the opposite? The Big Beautiful Bill is one of the most regressive bills in decades - the vast majority of the benefits went to the richest while the biggest cuts went to the poorest. The MAGA base is definitely not on the richer end of that spectrum. I.e. they didn't really even get anything for their undying loyalty besides "owning the libs" I guess.
The market already exponentially concentrates wealth, just piggy back on that. There will always be a market for promoting the self-serving politics of the rich.
The idea is that smaller group of people actually have some integrity and sense of duty to the people they represent and the country at large, rather than just pulling the lever for the thing that benefits them the most in the immediate term.
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
The argument that somebody else has better integrity and sense of duty representing my needs or wants is dead on arrival. Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person has a representative.
The founding fathers and many others would disagree. Based on human history, your assessment of the average human's level of integrity and reasoning is irrationally optimistic.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Haha I like that quote, but to her unintentional credit Ayn Rand did force me to think about why she was wrong, whereas if my main exposure to capitalist propaganda were the plausibly apolitical econ classes offered in school I might never have even realized that they were propaganda.
I mean, he’s not wrong. Libertarianism is freedom - for the rich. And concentrated wealth is antithetical to democracy because it’s concentrated power. He’s just taking libertarianism to its logical extreme by repudiating democracy.
Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
This is part of the fundamental contradiction of libertarianism. Why would those with the power and the purse strings curtail the government (including spending) when it doesn’t suit them? Instead it’s things like environmental regulations and social programs that get cut, tipping society’s imbalances further.
I don't disagree with any of your conclusions, but he is not even a libertarian ideologically. Somebody who is a boss (owner or manager) in a private company can't be considered to put freedom of his subordinates above all else; it's an authoritarian arrangement. If he was truly a libertarian, he would be either a lone contractor or consider his coworkers to be his peers (e.g. would start a cooperative instead of private company, or he would find a similar position as Linus Torvalds).
Exactly, you can paint "it's a concentration camp" on the immigration detention facility and it is miraculously still the same thing. Glad you agree, it's not a concentration camp.
OK, but if I am part of a large flow of people fleeing country X for country Y, more often than not, I cannot move around country Y as I please: I am restricted to a refugee camp. Also more often than not, I am not entitled to a hearing in front of a magistrate to dispute that restriction.
Most refugees don’t live in camps. Some camps don’t restrict movement, and those that do restrict it to widely varying degrees. Some do have features of concentration camps. Typically, even in closed camps, there’s no claim that refugees have violated the law as justification for detentions. Refugees are typically fleeing to escape dangerous situations.
As of the end of 2021 there were around 6.7 million registered refugees from
Syria globally. This figure is reported by the UNHCR (United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees) in their Global Trends report for 2021. These
refugees were primarily hosted in neighboring countries such as Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan -- and most of those are restricted to refugee camps -- and the ones who enjoy the freedom to move around the country probably achieved that through bribery, which of course is not the same thing as having due-process rights.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
According to UNHCR, 22% of the world’s refugees are in refugee camps. Camps vary in their quality. And some are more or less closed than others.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are? Can you (without cheating)? You've heard the term before (in school most likely), and if you were in the 10% of the students who weren't borderline flunking, you might even be able to name which amendment enumerates due process rights, but in my experience that's about the most any non-lawyer can even manage.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
>I've asked this before, but how many Americans could even state a simple definition of what due process rights are?
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
>I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
> The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Which does not preclude him from having due process rights, as SCOTUS ruled 9-0 (and has been reaffirmed unequivocally by about 180 years of case law).
His due process rights were "if he protests that he is a citizen, then they must make effort to determine if that is the case with haste, and release him if it checks out".
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
At Alligator Alcatraz and CECOT, people are held without charges, denied timely access to legal counsel, and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention. At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so. The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials. Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
You do not have to be criminally charged to be deported under civil immigration statues. The years of leftists smugly proclaiming "it's a civil violation, not a crime" ended up being a self own.
>denied timely access to legal counsel
Again, civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
>and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention
They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge. The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
>At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
Not in the US. Deportations to CECOT follow the same practices and statutes as deportations to other countries.
>The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so.
I'll give you this, detention/prisons/etc. centers in the US are universally bad.
>The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials.
It's not punishment, it a temporary holding before deportation.
> Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
Illegal immigrants do not have a constitutional right to stay in the US.
CECOT is part of US mass deportation operations. Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country. In fact the US plans to expand the number of domestic and foreign concentration camps.
> civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
You’re appealing to the law. But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it. It is a human right not a legal right. The history of concentration camps is full of legal supports placed there by authoritarian governments. But legal justifications don’t exonerate governments mass incarcerating people without due process.
> They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge.
Sure there is. Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging.
> The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
Average detention times are around 50 days. Some people crossing at borders for example can be turned back fairly quickly. Others are held indefinitely.
> It’s not punishment
Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
>Sending someone to a concentration camp doesn’t become justified when the destination is a foreign country.
If illegal immigrants were to voluntarily deport before becoming detained, could they avoid incarceration at CECOT? If the answer is "yes", then it seems their own actions/decisions cause this. Why then should I have sympathy for them?
>But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it.
What is the exact nature of their due process rights in that situation?
What process is due, exactly, someone who is detained because they have no right to be in this country?
>Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging
The only people who have a say in the matter on whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed to stay or forcibly deported is a citizen. If you'd like to make the case that they should be allowed to stay (as a citizen), then I am willing to hear your argument.
I'm not willing to hear theirs, and as much as I can influence my government, I will demand that it be unwilling to hear their (non-citizens') arguments as well. In court, or otherwise.
>Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If you remove a trespasser from your property, it is not punishment... it is remedy. If the remedy (for some reason) deters future trespassing, that still doesn't make it punishment.
hmm. i read the whole thing and i'm not sure the point you're making. in the first paper, Wilson points out:
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
The Great MAGA Cultural Revolution has shifted the overton window enough among right wing elite that anti democracy propaganda is now strong and spreading. But it's still our foundation, "we the people" and all that. If the right keeps pushing dictators I see a civil war in our future.
The MAGA cultural revolution fundamentally is an opposition to Wilsonianism and liberal universalism. That's why MAGA's authoritarian impulses are directed to the organs of Wilsonianism--such as executive agencies permanently captured by one party--rather than the public at large.
The deeply unpopular destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives is not democracy. It is a billionaire coup, they're blowing up all the safeguards that generations of Americans put in place to protect us from them.
> destruction of government institutions in 6 months that were built over decades by hundreds of laws passed by thousands of elected representatives
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
Not only is it true, it's not even debatable. 84% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Kamala Harris: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... If you exclude DOD, it's like 90%. In State and Commerce, it was like 95%.
I'd point out that, at the time American went to war against the Nazis, it was in the 3rd decade of an immigration policy so restrictive that the foreign-born population dropped from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. Even though Europe was utterly devastated from war in the post-war period, there was no mass immigration of europeans to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration laws.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
>Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”
I don't believe this is true. The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe. It's frequently expressed online, but a lot of that is not from human Americans.
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
I'm not saying that people don't think that the US should be a democracy. I'm saying that people don't think the US is a democracy. When the president of the country is a criminal and blatantly ignores the constitution and the courts, what does democracy even mean?
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
> The idea that the US should be non-democratic is very fringe
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
Sorry, this is Orwellian doublespeak. I don't know exactly what "democratic institutions" you're referring to, but you seem to be referring to administrative agencies and adjuncts that are the exact opposite of "democratic institutions." They're anti-democratic checks that are permanently in the control of one party, regardless of who wins elections.
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
> You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
> Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
> So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does
Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you figure that?
Also its named after a technology that most often causes its user to die or lose a war by exposing them to disinformation. That's an odd bit of messaging for a surveillance company.
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
To give my own view of Foundry and the products - pipeline buider, Ontology Manager, and workshop.
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
Do you even know what Palantir actually do? Because I see so many people talking about Palantir, but it seems apparent they've no idea what the business does, or sells, or how it even makes money except "through the government".
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
Their stock has tripled since november, they are way to overvalued. Either way I would not put my money on their stock, I do not want to support such company.
Vote with your wallet.
Speak for yourself....Writing was on the wall the minute I saw where the funding for Palantir was coming from. Been in since $12 a share, holding tight until they take over.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Oh, you think the price of equities will mean anything when Skynet takes over.
I'll be seen as a friend of the bots. A Godfather who funded their existence in the first place. The Digital Gods will favor me and my 100 shares as one of their own creators
/s (hope that was obvious. In reality, I'm pretty sure Theil's influence on the current admin will only increase Palantir's influence in the gov, but I don't think we're here for my speculative DD)
I wonder if the VCs have given up on growth. AI isn’t really profitable. Unless you can get government to pay for it (“socialism for me, capitalism for thee”). That means military contracts. So we have a top heavy system with a perverse incentive to justify itself with war. Unsurprisingly, I guess, the US is gearing up to do just that in 2027 with China.
I don't buy it. The money for government contracts is so much lower than the money from regular economic activity. It seems like every other business should be conspiring to avoid war, even if a small group wants it.
That's the meme. It's not going to happen IRL because it doesn't look like China is rising to the bait, because Russia is still advancing in Ukraine, because American industrial production capacity is by every estimation not equal to the task, and because the Middle East is as bad a mess as it has ever been and is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
I seem to remember a few months ago reading about wargames and/or scenario planning for a hypothetical US/China war, and the conclusion was, the US Navy gets thoroughly and quickly rekt.
It's important to take these wargames with a grain of salt. The US knows a direct naval conflict with China won't be pretty, there's almost certainly no intention of fighting them if China decides to press their advantage. But we don't have to "beat" China, we simply have to deter or outlast their desire to capture Taiwan.
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
Even if we grant that China is anything like Iraq (it sure ain't!), that was more than 20 years ago.
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
What conventional military capabilities? The Houthi's aren't sinking military ships, they're sinking unarmed, unarmored freighters in a stretch of water so narrow you could use a towed artillery gun to bullseye a freighter moving through it.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
So either the war goes immediately nuclear, in which case no one wins but the US has a significant missile advantage, or it doesn't in which case China will be facing down an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers and their support flotillas, as well as deep magazines of long range antishipping missiles and the largest submarine fleet in the world and the largest airforce in the world.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Just how long do you think the US would be able to deploy the full force you describe here in a world where all commerce with China ceases abruptly and Pacific ocean trade is severely disrupted?
They can blow up some dams and cause enormous civilian suffering. After having lost in Ukraine I expect certain states to be on the look-out for actions that will cause massive destruction that they can consider quick wins.
A lot of VCs are Zionists and personally dedicated to making war and violently attacking Muslims. If you doubt, go read the twitter feeds from Sequoia MDs like Shaun Maguire. They're very open about their goals and very pro-Palantir, which has also been very open with their Islamophobia and explicit desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine.
We must see the privatisation of government not as a new Palantir project but as a long ongoing effort by most major tech companies and a growing number of politicians, republicans and billionaires. I suggest researching Dark Enlightenment and Neo-feudalism
Most countries use Palantir or similar data-analysis systems today. This fear-mongering spiel is aimed squarely at most uninformed peasants, but I guess they do it because it works.
What is the solution? Is it more corporate controlled, incompetence in government? Or is it less government that is focused on core issues and building competency and trust?
Rule of thumb: If a corporation mostly sells to consumers or other corporations, the government can save a lot of money and get a great result by buying from it at consumer prices. If a corporation mostly sells to the government, the government can steal every last taxpayer penny while delivering shit by buying from the corporation at government prices.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX
Also there is the result that from IP to service and support the Gov will get washed.Leading to a lack of expertise and ownership. It essentially becomes little more than a rental - not owned, serviced or extended unless at the whims of the lowest bidder .Who inevitable qccrues cost overruns.In the space examplein the 70-80s a gov department was arguable more competent/effecient and on spec within its given budget.Not so much now.
> Following massive contract terminations for consulting giants and government contractors like Accenture, Booz Allen, and Deloitte, Palantir has emerged ahead.
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
BAH was the “bad guy” in the sense that they were grifters competent at only winning contracts and then extending them indefinitely through incompetent delivery to suck as much money out of the government as possible at the expense of having good systems and taxpayer money.
Just kind of summarizing from the comments in this topic (I also couldn’t be bothered to Google Palantir’s thesis): sticky/useful tools to combine and enrich data sources with a focus on a sector where there is a lot of compliance-driven security, data sources that aren’t easily queryable outside of their direct users, and high barriers to entry.
From the parts I've seen (Foundry et al), the promise is ability to sense of data and controlling its stocks and flows. There is a bit of Pachyderm-like versioned pipelines, notebooks, lots of access controls and audit logging. This is a place that was bought into Oracle "data democracy", reluctantly used Foundry and then was won over by the product.
They seemed, okay? I mean nothing seemed mind-blowing. I worked on surveillance in a specific sector, where interagency collaboration is important. Hence why Palantir pitched their tools.
I'm not sure how they've managed to blow up like that. Do they have some extensive network with gov. officials, in the same way top management consulting firms operate?
EDIT: Basically their pitch was that if agency A and B (and C, D, etc.) connected their data sources to the tool (I think it was Gotham), then identifying and catching threat actors would be much easier, and that their software would streamline this.
They get hate because support war efforts / police / intelligence.
They do 5 year contracts with the govt then bump the prices once they're sticky, like a J curve, hence the valuation.
Enabling a parallel construction in a surveillance state should draw hate, as it weakens the fourth amendment.
Right. That's exactly why they get hate. So what's the problem with that?
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integr...
The problem as enunciated also 100% tracks with my time as a consultant -- delivering solutions was 40% people-fixing and 60% code-fixing.
Linux. Windows. Both are "operating systems"?
What actual novel data collating and anomaly detection algorithms does Palantir implement that no one else does? Oh that's right these services are all just different corporate branding atop the same old open source stacks and libraries everyone uses.
[not entirely true note: PalantirFoundry is a lowCode/noCode stack on top of a Spark cluster]
Pipeline Builder : https://youtu.be/WIQA7u1tbsY?si=iG-N9xHpUPPVAqDX
OntologyManager: https://youtu.be/SOW0IA_I0bk?si=u5eha0o-yrn4pHvu
Workshop: https://youtu.be/Uh0zpMUR6wY?si=BClTTbch70ZolRCb
It's a little bit of being good at sales but it's also very much that the integrations with their tools and platforms are synergistic to a large degree.
Don't known about any other government officials, but Austrians ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has strong ties with his Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup Dream[0].
[0]: https://www.politico.eu/article/austria-former-chancellor-se...
I kinda think Palantir is GenZ TRW, or at least the data analytics sections of TRW that did things like the first US social credit... I mean... credit score systems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.
SAP is also a good comparison, so maybe GenZ SAP.
There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues. I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
Not saying they're doing great stuff, but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives. People voted for this.
Is that because palantir takes them out for golf outings and steaks? Or is it because palantir promises certain results and outcomes to them once the product is in place?
> There's a ton of conspiracy theories about them because their founders are tech-right ideologues.
Yea, it's just the ideology of their founders, it has _nothing_ to do with their actions and partnerships.
> I'd pretty much guarantee that if we'd elected the most mega-woke president in US history instead of Trump and they wanted to commission a huge government data project to analyze the entire American workforce to look for racial, ethic, and sexual orientation biases, Palantir would bid on that contract.
"They're evil and they don't care who's buying."
> but the bad stuff they're doing is the fault of your elected representatives.
That's not how morality, ethics, or the law works.
> People voted for this.
Literally _no one_ voted for this. The people who wanted DOGE to clean up government spending did not in any way think that all federal data, including their own private medical data, would be, or even need to be, fed into a private company to be used in service of the problem.
This is ridiculous apologia for evil. What is wrong with this site? If there's even a single dollar of profit on the table then civil rights are the first thing the "hacker news types" sacrifice. It makes you all seem gross and unapproachable.
Foundry has been in the company for the last ten years, and I will be frank: this is the only source of truth that I believe in the company. The integration of data, its lineage, its semantics, its consumption stack, the community who makes the enterpriseData work for real, all of that is simply much more efficient and sane than going for yet another war with data barons and IT (so-called) enterprise architects.
And now my personal comment on this: Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative. And it is [stupidly expensive but] simply SOOOOO good !
Do data barons attempt to replicate silo control within Palantir?
> Foundry is definitely the vision I was expecting from the Linked Data initiative
With this profitable existence proof in the market, are there competing products based on the original open standards for Linked Data?
I am pretty sure PoolParty and some other integration stacks exist. But they lack the insane scalability and the proper stacking of layers that Palantir is implementing.
For the moment, the killing stack that Palantir proposes is:
- Spark
- PipelineBuilder
- OntologyManager
- Workshop
And I see nothing like that anywhere else. [but I would love to]
So data customers have simply taken over the Palantir platform and manage the data import, data pipelines and data exposure (both general purpose exposure, and custom project-specific exposures) without caring very much about the data barons. Those ones simply deny the need for such a data integration platform.
So we really are in a situation where users have embraced the platform and live in it on a daily basis, and the barons spend their days pretending that it is a minor useCase.
You got a name and a raw source?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0NkYxjE23JA
———-
Douthat: … It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?
Thiel: Um, yeah.
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.
Douthat: Should the human race survive?
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: OK.
Another tidbit: he believes Greta Thunberg is very possibly the actual antichrist.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ao_umPlSV6o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic... - Gift link
https://archive.is/mPjPq - Archive link
So yes, he does say it's more likely to be Greta Thunberg than an "evil tech genius", but does not outright say she's the Antichrist.
I still find it strange that he's afraid of her creating a one world government.
You may very well and with good reason disagree with Thiel on the downstream effects of climate regulating agreements/regimes on global productivity and liberty, but regurgitating “Greta is the Antichrist” just replaces discussions of interesting issues to yelling at shadow puppets in Plato’s cave.
The beginning of the essay
> I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.
The full essay https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
- to have less freedom to pollute the environment.
- to have less freedom where I am able to defraud my customers.
- to have less freedom to have less ability to lie about medical "benefits" of fake cures.
I am also a big proponent of freedom-limiting legislation like GDPR which prevents myself and my employer from secretly collecting and processing your personal information.
And I am currently part of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative which will hopefully restrict the freedom of games companies to sunset and withdraw purchases without a clear roadmap or similar remedy.
Explain why that is a straw-man.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies.
The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!
> But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies
What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
What's so great about voting? The things that people think they love about democracy are many, but voting isn't one of those. We love the idea that in principle, any child might grow up and become president. That (in principle, it's less and less so each day it seems) there is no ruling class and no political dynasties. That public discourse at least influences outcomes within government. Voting might have (at one time) helped to make those things a reality, but those things can all be had without voting.
Anyone who has heard of sortition and still wants voting to occur is a fool. Even the Greeks who invented democracy thought voting inferior to sortition.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
And what’s the scope of the majority? A simple majority on each individual decision?
How familiar are you with the writings of the founding fathers? The ones who very intentionally avoided creating a system based on direct democracy?
The freedom to own a slave. The freedom to treat women as property. The freedom to kill somebody who may have wronged you.
Just an array of freedoms.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” - not Peter Thiel
I find it illustrative that so many here defend Democracy as an ends to be achieved or an unqualified good unto itself, rather than a process or a means to an end. It illustrates the arguments made elsewhere about how democratic processes and institutions have been succeeded by Democracy, the belief.
As an unqualified good, one can simply claim that the majority has voted or that the Democratic process has been performed, and therefore the outcome is just. There's an apt George Carlin quote...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Democracy%3A+The+God+That+Fa...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qByWF30jKiw
See Squid Game as a more recent commentary.
That idea has always been tested, with the current times being the largest test in several decades at least.
Also, I assume you meant to say "Direct democracy is a representative democracy where each person *is* a representative."
Is it any wonder that he has helped fund our decline into authoritarianism? We now have concentration camps, abrogation of the constitution, judicial capture, and the military turned increasingly against American citizens.
Other countries got those without paying Palantir billions.
Immigration detention facilities are not concentration camps.
Refugees admitted into Europe are not restricted to camps and do have some due-process rights, but they have at most times been a distinct minority of the refugees in the world.
Some refugees do live in inhuman conditions. Even if these conditions affected a majority of refugees, that doesn’t justify treating human beings this way.
All people have a right to due process. It’s a human right. Whether this or that government honors this right is a separate question.
We should be trying to emulate governments that honor human rights, not take our example from those that don’t.
I have a fuzzy notion of what they encompass, admittedly, but nothing about the detention centers or the deportations stands out as a violation of those rights.
It's because most people don't have a good grasp of how diverse and often flimsy administrative and civil process (in cases where one party is the .gov is in reality. Typically the answer is "whatever the enforcing agencies come up with", which isn't very reassuring.
Like for a traffic ticket they at least haul you before a judge in a public court anyone can attend to give some pretext of the accused having serious rights that protect them. It makes sense. Traffic tickets are a "mass market" product so to speak and so the .gov has to put on a good show even if at the end of the day someone facing a $200 civil traffic fine doesn't actually have the same rights as the guy facing a $200 criminal public urination fine.
When it comes to stuff like code enforcement, arcane industry enforcement, fish and game, ICE and everything else federal the process is far less "due", so to speak and is far more likely to not have separation of powers on the government side (i.e. administrative ppl in the enforcement agencies will be making decisions that would be made by a judge in other contexts)
I don't know what "due process" consists of for immigration violations but I would bet my last dollar that it is an absolute joke compared to the high end of civil (traffic ticket and the like), which itself is a joke compared to criminal matters.
I would really like to see all this shit thrown out by the supreme court. If the .gov, be it fed, state or local, is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals bet it a fine or jail then they ought to meet the same bar. Allowing people to be jailed (in the case of ICE) or fined large sums (in the case of many other types of administrative matters) because it's not nominally a criminal matter is 100% an end run around the constitution.
Then let's explore that. There are some rights which aren't fundamental human rights... that is, you don't get them just by virtue of existing. Voting comes to mind, that's a citizen's right only.
The right to be present within the borders of the United States is another such right. If you aren't a citizen, you do not have this right. We might extend the temporary privilege to non-citizens, but it is absolutely at the prerogative of the United States... subject to revocation at any time. The idea that it can't just be subject to revocation (arbitrary or otherwise) is the dimwitted notion that there is a sort of second-class citizenship... that some not-really-citizens can be here permanently and we can't decide that we want them to return home.
So, if they can be deported (for reason, or none at all), the only recourse such people have is "I can prove I'm a citizen". If ICE isn't letting them do so, if they protest that they are a citizen and the ICE agent sticks his fingers in his ears and chants "I can't hear you" repeatedly, then that would be a violation of due process. The process which is due (among whatever other redundant triplechecks they should be doing) is to hear all such protests in good faith and evaluate whatever evidence such a person provides. I haven't heard of any refusing to do such a thing (but if they have, it should be grounds for termination).
I reject the idea that it is necessary or desirable to drag each of these foreigners before a judge to perform this function.
> is going to punish people the same way they punish criminals
I don't want these people punished at all. Punishment would be putting them in prison (where they would stay in the United States). If someone is trespassing on your property and you call the police, the police would punish them by prosecuting, convicting, and incarcerating. When they drag them from your property and tell them to get lost, that's not punishment. It's just removal from where they aren't permitted to be. It's still not punishment even if they cry that they don't want to go home.
A DOJ lawyer literally said they haven't been doing this sufficiently and then he got sacked by Pam Bondi. SCOTUS then reaffirmed 9 to 0 that the original lawyer who admitted this failure in court was actually correct, that DOJ wasn't giving people their due process rights.
I find it extremely hard to believe you have not heard about the Kilmar Abrego case?
Yes. And to the best of my knowledge he is not a citizen.
He did not assert citizenship, they did not violate due process rights. No other process is due him. Anyone claiming that it's a violation of due process rights doesn't know what they mean, though for a moment I had hope for you... you sort of described them, or at least hinted at them, but you're unable to apply what you described to this situation. Due process rights can't and won't keep non-citizens in this country if they are trying to avoid deportation, and shouldn't ever. Non-citizens only have the revocable-for-any-reason-or-none privilege of visiting, and that only if they get the visa.
What do you know that they don’t?
Glad that's not happening. Thanks for confirming they're not concentration camps.
The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so. The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials. Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
CECOT is not in the US.
>people are held without charges
You do not have to be criminally charged to be deported under civil immigration statues. The years of leftists smugly proclaiming "it's a civil violation, not a crime" ended up being a self own.
>denied timely access to legal counsel
Again, civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
>and prevented from having a fair hearing to challenge their detention
They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge. The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
>At CECOT, transfers from the US occur without notice to attorneys or families, in a foreign justice system that has suspended many basic rights.
Not in the US. Deportations to CECOT follow the same practices and statutes as deportations to other countries.
>The conditions at these facilities are inhumane and deliberately so.
I'll give you this, detention/prisons/etc. centers in the US are universally bad.
>The purpose is to punish people, not detain people awaiting fair trials.
It's not punishment, it a temporary holding before deportation.
> Besides the other issues, being punished without trial is a clear violation of constitutional rights.
Illegal immigrants do not have a constitutional right to stay in the US.
> civil proceedings in the US do not ensure a right to legal counsel.
You’re appealing to the law. But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it. It is a human right not a legal right. The history of concentration camps is full of legal supports placed there by authoritarian governments. But legal justifications don’t exonerate governments mass incarcerating people without due process.
> They're being temporarily detained for deportation, there's nothing to challenge.
Sure there is. Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging.
> The average detention time is short before they're deported to their home country.
Average detention times are around 50 days. Some people crossing at borders for example can be turned back fairly quickly. Others are held indefinitely.
> It’s not punishment
Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If illegal immigrants were to voluntarily deport before becoming detained, could they avoid incarceration at CECOT? If the answer is "yes", then it seems their own actions/decisions cause this. Why then should I have sympathy for them?
>But due process is violated even if there is a legal framework to justify it.
What is the exact nature of their due process rights in that situation?
What process is due, exactly, someone who is detained because they have no right to be in this country?
>Whether a person should be deported or not is absolutely worth challenging
The only people who have a say in the matter on whether or not a non-citizen should be allowed to stay or forcibly deported is a citizen. If you'd like to make the case that they should be allowed to stay (as a citizen), then I am willing to hear your argument.
I'm not willing to hear theirs, and as much as I can influence my government, I will demand that it be unwilling to hear their (non-citizens') arguments as well. In court, or otherwise.
>Besides the inhuman conditions that exceed most US prisons, multiple officials have stated that the intent behind Alligator Alcatraz is deterrence.
If you remove a trespasser from your property, it is not punishment... it is remedy. If the remedy (for some reason) deters future trespassing, that still doesn't make it punishment.
* it is better for government to own its own infrastructure than to depend on private business -- and if the government must depend on business, he stresses the government should be in a position to exert control over the business.
* it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
and the rest mostly pontificates and the distinction between a bureaucrat and a legislator. care to connect the dots between this and a "hostility to democracy"?
> * it is easier for a monarchy to initiate administrative efficiencies than a democracy, therefore great care must be taken to design administrative policies without inadvertently introducing popular sovereignty.
Wilson believed in "scientific governance" over popular sovereignty. He was unpersuaded that America's diverse electorate could efficiently govern itself, so sought to institute an administrative state to manage the electorate. These paragraphs in Part I are revealing:
"Even if we had clear insight into all the political past, and could form out of perfectly instructed heads a few steady, infallible, placidly wise maxims of government into which all sound political doctrine would be ultimately resolvable, would the country act on them? That is the question. The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes. A truth must become not only plain but also commonplace before it will be seen by the people who go to their work very early in the morning; and not to act upon it must involve great and pinching inconveniences before these same people will make up their minds to act upon it.
And where is this unphilosophical bulk of mankind more multifarious in its composition than in the United States? To know the public mind of this country, one must know the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes. In order to get a footing for new doctrine, one must influence minds cast in every mold of race, minds inheriting every bias of environment, warped by the histories of a score of different nations, warmed or chilled, closed or expanded by almost every climate of the globe."
Wilson's ideology was an outgrowth of the political situation in which he found himself. He was a WASP in a political party dependent on massive numbers of Catholic immigrants for political viability. The administrative state was a way to maintain WASP control of the government while leveraging the votes of non-WASPs. That's something that has persisted to this day. Federal government agencies, particularly the intelligence agencies and foreign service, are the last bastion of WASP America.
Republicans made the case to their voters that these institutions were permanently controlled by Democrats, and expressly promised to dismantle them. And Republicans won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. There's no principle of "democracy" that says changes to longstanding institutions must proceed slowly.
In fact, the only thing that's preventing Trump from living up to even more of his campaign promises is the anti-democratic check of the filibuster.
> billionaire coup
Every objective analysis shows that the majority of billionaires supported Kamala Harris. She raised $1.65 billion against Trump's $1.05 billion: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har.... She went into the home stretch with a huge cash advantage over Trump: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/politics/campaign-fundraising.... This was the second time Trump won despite being outspent and swimming against the opposition of Wall Street.
the lies is what got us here
To put that into context, replacing the federal workforce with random voters from AOC's district in New York City would double the percentage of Republicans! (https://nypost.com/2024/11/09/us-news/aocs-district-saw-mass...)
There have always been portions of the US electorate enamored with authoritarianism.
So yes, there were Nazis in the U.S. But modern liberals also would've called Eisenhower or FDR a Nazi.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt#
If you know of a high quality poll showing a majority of people support turning the US into a non-Democratic form of government I'd be very interested to see it and I would be legitimately surprised.
The polls I see have at least 70-80% endorsement of the importance of democracy across the political spectrum.
Edit: I'm not here to debate this or to defend that view, it's simply my observation of what people think these days, from my perspective here in Thailand.
The theoretical idea, maybe.
In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal, accepted practices that a lot of Americans (especially on one side of the two party system) accept and actively cheer on, because it's their side that is "winning".
You mention "checks and balances" but which ones are you referring to? All three branches of government are controlled by the same party. Perhaps you can clarify if I'm mistaken, but you seem to be referring to anti-democratic putative "checks" within the executive branch. Those are nowhere in the constitution.
What's the big news right now? Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist." Sorry, that's democracy in action!
> In practice, one party dismantling democratic institutions and checks and balances, or stacking the courts, or accepting bribes in public, or drawing districts in a way to benefit them are normal,
California's "independent redistricting commission" drew a map where republicans have 17% of the seats despite getting 40% of the vote. That's worse than Maryland's quite deliberately gerrymandered map, where republicans got 16% of seats despite getting 35% of the vote. "Independent" redistricting commissions get taken over by democrats in practice, like every other putatively non-partisan political body.
Didn't the Supreme Court, stacked by Republicans, decide that Presidents on official business are immune to prosecution, on a case against a Republican president? That's one massive check eviscerated for political reasons.
> Republicans defunding NPR, which spent the last five years calling republicans and white people "racist.
What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
The constitutional “checks and balances” are between the three branches. The prospect of the President being prosecuted by his own executive branch is not a “check” contemplated by the constitution. The constitution does not incorporate this modern idea of a “neutral justice system” that can be trusted to enforce the law regardless of politics. (If such neutral bodies existed, the whole tripartite system of government would be pointless.)
The DOJ, like virtually every group of lawyers, is 80-90% Democrats. If you posit an “independent DOJ” that can prosecute the former president, and leading candidate for reelection, then you’re envisioning a government where unelected Democrats hold permanent power over elections.
> What the fuck are you on. Please provide sources, let's at least once a month, of NPR calling "republicans and white people" racist. I'd be shocked if you can find one single instance of that (other than, of course, legitimate cases such as JD Vance saying that Haitian migrants are eating pets, which was something he himself admitted to inventing, and clearly racist).
So we’re going to judge what’s “legitimately” racist through what Democrats think is racist? It’s like you’re trying to prove my point! Expanding the concept of “racism” to encompass unrelated beliefs and preferences is a liberal idea, and baked into almost everything NPR does.
Are you claiming that lying about Haitians eating pets to get people to vote for your anti-immigration platform isn't racist? How do you figure that?
When you look at the totality of the things that people who profess to "believe in democracy believe", advocate for and spend real resources advancing it's pretty clear that they a) don't believe in democracy b) believe in democracy in the the most technical "gotcha" sense because they don't believe in structuring it in a way that results in any serious amount of the implied freedom or autonomy for the individual.
I hate the guy and what he stands for. But at least he's self aware and honest so that puts him ahead of way more people than it should.
definition of treason.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-...
it would not be treason for drone armies of automated bots deployed in the field because they aren’t human?
if there were the same number of people standing on street corners collecting the same data as ring doorbells and waymos in san francisco, to sell for political and military applications, where does the treason begin?
how many humans need to conspire to erode democracy for it to count to your standards?
Treason requires a war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Un...
Matches the last treason charges too. WWII was the last time anyone was charged (and convicted) of treason.
likely, we’ll never be at war again based on how we now do conflicts, waging language semantics and syntax
no war, no treason, no problem
we are evolved, there is no war in Ba Sing Se
Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.
I think that pipeline builder is a good tool for building pipelines - however maybe its just my company but there is a sea of very similar tables that have been generated and pipeline builder makes things a lot messier. Personally I would prefer to use data bricks or even M$ Fabric to do pipeline processing - its like a lego version of those tools.
At my company I don't think that the ontological layer is really any more useful than a strict RDBMS warehouse system. It feels like marketing speak when I hear engineers/product managers talk about it. I certainly don't think that it has added any more insights/interlinking. I would like to see clear examples of benefits to this data structure over traditional warehousing approaches rather than hype.
I'm not blown away by Workshop - for reporting/visualization I would use PowerBI/Tableau (far superior). For app development (i.e. some kind of intelligent spreadsheet to allow opps people to use it) its ok - but quite clunky. Its a lego like system - and I'm not convinced as an app its better than excel on sharepoint (broadly speaking its worse). Again I think its all marketing.
Like...they're a software firm. They specialize in government contracting. They sell software to the government, to fulfill tenders and requests asked for by the government (which is its own subset because government contracting generally sucks and is it's own skillset).
https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Basically they're selling BI-solutions for tyranny, usually by convincing government officials that it's a good idea to aggregate data sets that are separate for good reasons and then they'll achieve greater power over their subjects. That's the idea in the NHS project, that's what they're doing in the US and so on.
Praying the Pala-net will look favorably on share holders in a psuedo Roko's basilisk sort of situation.
Good luck with that
I'll be seen as a friend of the bots. A Godfather who funded their existence in the first place. The Digital Gods will favor me and my 100 shares as one of their own creators
/s (hope that was obvious. In reality, I'm pretty sure Theil's influence on the current admin will only increase Palantir's influence in the gov, but I don't think we're here for my speculative DD)
When your Navy literally can't defeat the Houthis, you know for an ironclad 100% certainty that there's zero chance they're capable of beating China -- right off the coast of China!
You actually need a balance of power to prevent an armed political conflict, so the adults in the room will maintain one.
There are innumerable possibilities if the US assists Taiwan, especially through the lens of hybrid warfare and not pitched battles. We have no motivation from a strategic standpoint to give China the naval war they want, so why would we?
The American military could not successfully build a stable Iraqi democracy or completely suppress sectarian violence.
They absolutely destroyed the Iraqi conventional military and occupied the country for 8 years though.
Last year, and not for want of trying, the US Navy sure didn't do anything to destroy the Houthi's conventional military capabilities. They're still sinking ships left and right! So much for freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas.
> https://edition.cnn.com/world/middleeast/eternity-c-houthi-r...
Now imagine the USN actually has to fight a war in shallow waters against a foe that's literally 10,000x better armed and equipped than the Houthis, and with a capacity for industrial production that dwarfs its own.
War is a measuring rod. Before it begins, each side guesses at its own strength and the other's will. Often it guesses wrong. (In Ukraine, NATO overrated its weapons and tactics, Russia both overrated its own capabilities, and underrated Ukraine's resolve.) But if both sides know the truth beforehand, they don't fight to begin with. Thus there's literally zero chance that there's a war between the US and China in 2027, because the outcome is not really in doubt.
The problem they're facing is they can't reduce that capability to zero without starting a half-dozen other wars to deal with a logistical supply chain.
China has a lot of resources, but they have not turned those into the type of resources which can fight and defeat the US military conventionally and have a serious power-projection problem compared to the logistical mobility the US military enjoys mastery of.
Which again highlights the absurdity of saying "couldn't defeat the Houthis, can't defeat China" as though you're comparing apples to apples.
The other absurdity is of course the supposition that anyone wants a war to be good for business: checkout how that's going for Russia's defence contractors. No: the fear of a war is good for business. An arms build up or modernization program is good for business. An actual war is ubiquitously terrible for business.
Doubt.
> an adversary with a 11 aircraft carriers
Didn't a couple of them literally tuck tail and run from the Houthis? Besides, three of them are scheduled for maintenance between 2027 and 2030.
> the largest submarine fleet in the world
Those subs are at a severe disadvantage in the very shallow waters of the South China Sea, which are riddled with all manner of sensors.
> serious power-projection problem
Irrelevant. Wouldn't we be fighting them over there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism
What is the solution? Is it more corporate controlled, incompetence in government? Or is it less government that is focused on core issues and building competency and trust?
Government isn't the problem here, it's the victim.
See for example (and yes I’d get cancelled for pointing this out) govt purchasing from ULA vs govt purchasing from SpaceX
Just swapping different big consulting firms around.
I remember when Booz Allen was the bad guy. I just checked and apparently this is what they call themselves these days "an American company specializing in digital transformation and artificial intelligence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booz_Allen_Hamilton
Palantir is good at delivering what they promise.
What's their promise?