Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-...

"Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.

Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."

The immigration has always existed, laws of it shifted, and AFAIK the current level of illegal immigration is not that high. So it's not really a large economical or humanitarian problem, and looks like it's much bigger political one.

It’s in our face. And it’s changing our society.

Yup, same in Europe. There's constant fear mongering with racist undertones in the media about illegal immigrants and refugees, it's driving people crazy and violent against each other. All the while they're conveniently distracted from the root of their social ills.

But what I would say is: countries have distinct cultures, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to preserve them, which implies controlling the rate of immigration from different cultures. The U.S. would be quite different if we replaced half the population with people from Iran, China, or even England. There is a happy medium.Pros and cons.

I love the irony in this statement.

(Of which I suspect you're completely unaware)

Ah that's the problem. But you're ok with the fact that your grandpa immigrated and changed the society as well?

Why?

low cost, low overhead, no risks due to INS rounding up your people, and no tariffs due to NAFTA.

the reason they want the in the US is to work in services to keep costs down, because overall wages have not gone up and the costs of everything domestically needs to trend down -- and that means cheap labor.

Asylum applications are often contingent upon finding and keeping employment. ICE immigration prisons sell prison labor sold to state governments and corporations.

The public debate between "Immigration is a human right" and "Immigrants are criminals" is out of touch with the actual considerations motivating the laws and policies by US institutions.

None of those dynamics contribute to higher incomes for anyone aside from bosses and investors.

But maybe exploitation of cheap labor for personal gains is what you were referring to?

This is just such an absurd take. How much reality do you have to suspend to believe that corporations around the globe have all zoned in on a policy of somehow propagating a narrative through public life about immigration so that they can exploit illegal immigration.

I know we're in the anti-capitalism, anti-big-corp zeitgeist, but come on.

Some approximate stats:

Mexico has 45,000~ murders a year. The United States has about 25k a year.

The population of Mexico is 130m. The population of the US is 350m.

One can't derive the distribution of motivations that bring immigrants from these statistics. That said, I'd call that an alarming about of horrific violence. It's safe to say it's not evenly distributed over the whole of Mexico. It's easy to imagine being motivated to move by those statistics/events.

Like everything, it's probably a spectrum of motivations. More opportunities, better schools, fewer decapitations?

Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent? That’s our problem to solve. Mexicans have their own problems to solve. Of course electing a socialist probably won’t help. They need their own Milei.

Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.

I included stats in my post acknowledging the existence of murder in the United States. To your point, if Trump decided to flee to Mexico to escape the violence, I don't believe dems would gloss over that.

> Should kids in Chicago get a pass to move to buenos Aires because Chicago is so violent?

I would applaud Buenos Aires if they made a compassionate allowance for hypothetical people fleeing Chicago violence.

> Early in our history we had a violent Wild West. We fixed it ourselves. They can fix their own things too. They’re not incapable.

Everyone is doing the best they can for those within their radius of compassion. It is the way it is.

The big picture comes down to supply and demand. Today's supply is from specific countries: Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, a few others. Each country has a different rationale, but generally it boils down to violence, poverty, and Putin. Not necessarily in that order, and often it's all three.

"Demand" is due to the congestion backlog in the US immigration courts. A prospective refugee might not see a judge for a year or two. During this period they have to be paroled in and granted work authorization.

Most applicants today aren't genuine refugees. This was not the case in prior decades because there was no backlog. Awareness of this loophole makes the US a much more practical and appealing destination than it used to be.

The backlog, in turn, stems from the congressional paralysis on immigration. For 20 years the nativists blocked bill after bill, despite large bipartisan support for reform. They did so because every compromise also included a guest-worker program and other immigration benefits.

More recently, there was a deal on the table with no GWP and no immigration benefits. In previous years, it would have been a nativist's dream. It was blocked by the Trump campaign in order to "run on the issue." [2]

A large fraction of the 2024 immigration numbers is due to Trump, maybe as much as 50% or 80%.

For the bigger picture, consider the fact that the exodus in Venezuela and Syria was started by Putin. He gives you the flu (waves of fleeing migrants,) blames the aspirin (the "globalist" Western governments who are forced to handle them,) then sells you the Ivermectin (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, AfD, etc.)

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/09/before-co...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...

One of the best things the US can do for its economy IMO is get back to being better at brain drain, and helping naturalize the people ready to work hard in general. They make jobs and help drive the American spirit because they basically have to. That's a tough message for people in struggling industries & towns, but it's hard to make a competitive & growing American economy when the job makers and doers are instead growing the economies of competing countries.

As a job maker, successful scientist, OSS supporter, & thankful refugee granted citizenship, immigration has become simultaneously one of the most American things to me... and one of the most bizarre.

(And specifically the towns where most buildings have been destroyed and most people died or fled.)

There are situations where the situation is so manifestly bad, that a prima facie approach to granting refugee status to asylum seekers (aka "opening the floodgates") from a specific location is the kind thing to do.

We've for instance seen countries do this for Syrians in 2015, Rohingya in 2017, Ukrainians in 2022.

But of course this is only viable (among other reasons, politically) for specific groups at specific times, whereas for other groups or at other times the case-by-case treatment of asylum requests has to be done again.

BTW, looking this up I was surprised to learn that the right to asylum initially did NOT cover people fleeing war, and some countries still do not consider it a valid reason to get a refugee status, among them the USA.

Man up and do what we did. Armed resistance and overthrow the repressive government and create a new beautiful shining beacon in the southern cone.

An implication of your statement is that Putin does this to undermine the US thus bolstering the position that these people weaken rather than strengthen us.

[1]: https://www.state.gov/assessing-the-results-of-venezuelas-pr...

Of course some would like to forget that prior to the progressives taking over policy, Bill, Bernie and Barrack were all against illegal immigration. We have the interviews, the statements, speeches, etc.

There are no federally elected democrats who espouse the position of open borders. None. Zero. Every single member of the democratic party in office today in federal office supports some degree of border control, and frankly the degree that they want is not worlds apart from what most republicans want.

The GOP has successfully planted the idea that they are for a wall that lets no one through and the dems will let everyone in, but it's much more like two sides bickering over whether the wall should be 10m or 15m tall, whether or not there should be razors at the top, and exactly how many palantir/anduril terminators should be purchased for intercepting people, 1000 or 1200.

Edit: and you don't believe in global warming? Too rich!

Cooper also claims that the Holocaust happened by mistake, so I wouldn't pay too much attention to him.

I heard no such claims, but also he hasn't finished his WWII series yet, so a little premature to dismiss him

Edit: When I said conservatives, I meant conservative values

Cooper's deliberate misreading of the Wannsee Conference is Nazi apologeticism.

"Well, they didn't really mean to commit genocide, they just whipped up public hatred, confiscated all their assets, and banned them from working! So of course they had to commit mass murder!"

Who are his sources, David fucking Irving?

And let's not get started on the pipelining of extremist views to people who would normally consider themselves moderate or centre-right and are now spouting insanity...

That controls the general immigration policy debate, too. American employers in key industries like construction depend on immigrants for cheap labor, and the unwillingness to provide a legal path for those workers guarantees that people will keep taking huge risks to come here illegally because the conditions in their home countries are even worse. I would highly recommend reading this article: note both the former cop accurately stating that you can’t arrest your way out of a market imbalance and the lack of reception for the proposals from the construction company owner trying to have a legal path for workers. These people aren’t dangerous, they’re working hard and supporting families, but they’re brown and speak Spanish so we don’t respect them and businesses love to have workers who can’t complain about mistreatment.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...

The problem is that the asylum seekers are committing fraud if they are immigrating for economic reasons, and that fraud is being encouraged by the government and NGOs. JD vance, Elon, and Trump have talked about this several times but the media usually interrupts then or make a straw man argument about racism instead of covering the real issue, which is that these immigrants are being brought in as low wage, temporary laborers to undercut American workers.

If you have a reliable source for the claim that large numbers of people are lying on asylum applications and that this is being encouraged by the government, you should edit your comment to cite that so there’s something to be objectively discussed.

Like go to any construction site, any restaurant -- you're gonna see a bunch of Mexicans, Salvadorians, etc.

As wages haven't gone up, Americans need cheaper and cheaper labor on the low end to be able to, like, eat, and lots of big business knows this. The GOP owned Congress under GW Bush could have locked this issue down, and if they felt so compelled they probably could have swung that during the Obama era if they were willing to push. Instead it's a boogyman they can use to rile up voters while keeping costs low.

I don't think you have to look that far back to find fairly convincing arguments that the US is the architect of much of its own immigration "problems." Most illegal immigrants come to the US from Latin American countries that the US spent a lot of time interfering with in very recent history.

Consider Guatemala. Democratically elected president overthrown with CIA support in 1954 so that US fruit companies could keep up their profits by exploiting people. The 1950s weren't that long ago.

Consider El Salvador. During their recent (ended: 1992) civil war the US funded the right-wing government that according to the UN committed 85% of atrocities during the war. The US government then refused to grant asylum and legal protections to refugees, which contributed heavily to MS13 forming in LA. The US then deported many of these gang members back to El Salvador, which did a huge amount of damage to their development after the war.

Wrt Mexico's gangs, most of the demand for their products come from US customers.

Wrt Venezuela, whether the sanctions are right or wrong there's no doubt that they're hurting people there economically.

Given what the US has done to these countries (and others) in living memory, I don't think we have much of a moral right to turn these people away. I've also never had a single negative experience (and many positive ones) with immigrants from these countries (I live in an area with many of them), nor am I convinced that they're even an economic drag on the country.

> if they are making our lives worse

They (legal and illegal immigrants, for this discussion specifically from Latin America but I suspect more broadly) certainly are making my life better and I'm not convinced that they're making the life of the average American worse.

I've seen a lot of convincing arguments for why immigration helps us, and they seem to mesh with my understanding of immigration to the US being historically a good thing. I can't say the same for arguments from the other side. Often the claims are totally baseless, such as claims that illegal immigrants are as a whole dangerous, despite having a lower incarceration rate than US-born citizens. Other times they're just myopic (most of the claims related to jobs imo). Sometimes they're just blatant racism (white-replacement theories).

"the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person."

Doctorow is not one of the examples he provides, but I'm not sure that any of this negates the point.

lol what? Doctorow created "enshitification" to describe rent seeking and its behaviors, and has been creating a technocratic journalist vocab since the BoingBoing days.

The point is that we tend to think of jargon creators as particularly insightful when their biases/viewpoints match our own, and annoying when they don't.

Will evil techno-cons replace neocons?

And don't forget the UK National Health Service

The first question makes no sense at all. The latter question, however, is an important one for democratic governments to tackle.

Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know.

The blog's moral stance is that GAFAMs are "neutral" or even "marginally good", because I suppose, they are, among other things, "pro-West".

I don't know which repressive country he "spent a few years in", but I am not sure why he seems more concerned by Russia and China (especially in a country under direct nuclear umbrella) than the risk of parts of the West turning repressive.

And that's not even counting the damage that they might cause outside, like Facebook's complicity in Myanmar's genocide.

"Your (and the sibling) responses also beg the question: must governments contract to big foreign consultancies? It's not illegal to do things in-house if they so choose, you know."

No, they don't must do this. No, it's obviously not illegal to do things in-house. They choose not to because it's obscenely hard to build what Palantir has already built and to battle test its security anything close to what Palantir has done.

(Disclaimer: I used to work there, so you can go ahead and dismiss my opinion outright, but I am responding directly to what you're saying)

While true, it also doesn’t answer legitimate concerns that the British public had that their medical data was being shared with a foreign entity that had actively participated in foreign government programmes of questionable morality.

The response to that was “all fundamental contractors have done dodgy things.”

To which you have my quoted reply. Which I’m not sure you understood at all, judging by your response.

Of course you can try with a local consultancy, but I wouldn’t know of any, and I assume the reason for choosing one over the other is mostly a matter of reputation.

Where it comes to organisational complexity and the barriers it creates, bear in mind that the British state is vastly more centralised than the USA. Fragmentation in the NHS was massively exacerbated by the Lansley Reforms which also forced trusts to outsource a lot of work.

ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim.

Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.

How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this? If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?

ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.

https://theconversation.com/postwar-forced-resettlement-of-g...

Also, Hitler's first planned "initial solution" was, as incredible as it might sound, relocating Jews to Madagascar (which of course would still have caused plenty of misery, since the core issue was that Nazis barely considered them as human beings).

EDIT : Yeah, so after following the rabbit hole for a bit, this seems to be about "Trump's mass deportations". Which I remember him claiming himself (maybe in other words), but one should check how massive exactly they ended to be.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr...

But one of the main gists of that article is about how Palantir is helping law enforcement with data integration. Which, as this blogpost points out, shouldn't be underestimated.

And thankfully at least some of the lawmakers didn't underestimate it : there's a reason why it's illegal to build some national databases, and combine some other less sensitive national databases.

Liberal democracy requires a balance of power, and giving too much power to the policeS (or the state in general) results in a police state (dystopia). (Including through the loophole of private companies like GAFAMs.)

You can also see it as a reminder that tools aren't neutral and scale matters.

The state needs powerful capabilities to provide credible defense. Unchecked, those capabilities can be used to reduce freedoms. The essential work is to build institutions and tools that can systematically navigate that nuance.

Personally, I think this all comes down to building high-quality democracy. The people constrain the leaders at the ballot box. The leaders constrain the institutions via policy. For a practical example, look at Sen Ron Wyden’s work.

If you care about this stuff, support things like FairVote.org

The first question is, what about the third and fourth categories? Would they be dissenters in general, or specific kinds (judged to be riskier for the autocratization process) and which?

The second question is, how would they go about identifying them? Are there products and services at Palantir that may have been designed for this goal?

The Biden administration on the other hand said nothing and then spent the next four years to actually lock Trump up.

The Biden administration had authoritarian, Russian style COVID policies.

Watch what they do and not what they say.

During the pandemic I read various descriptions of what disease outbreaks were like during various times. Including descriptions of the plague of 1665. What is interesting is that the approach to managing outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases hasn't really changed that much. Because we discovered relatively early on what helps. (Though we no longer nail houses shut with infected people inside them and post armed guards outside).

What policies would you suggest to manage outbreaks of infectious diseases? How many deaths do you think is acceptable? Can you pick a number?

It will be interesting to see what happens during the next pandemic. Because there will be pandemics in the future. Do you think that a population disinclined to act cautiously in a situation where correct information will be scarce for months, possibly years, is a good thing or do you think it might represent a problem.

The most sinister thing a government could possibly do would be to do as little as possible and just accept loss of human life.

Given the the world still exists, I think the pre-2022 policies were a gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in the Soviet Union.

It's also possible that both instituting a lockdown and subsequently removing that lockdown were both essentially correct. While I believe the government waited far too long to remove lockdown restrictions I don't think instituting them in the first place was the wrong decision.

There's a tendency amongst folks who have strong opinions on covid measures to create false dichotomies and ignore how context changed over time. Lockdowns appear to have been a good idea during some of the disease (i.e. before we knew how to treat it, and before vaccines became readily available), and became less important as the context changed.

You could watch consent manufacturing in real time as former hardliner outlets like the NYT and the Atlantic started to insert timid opinion pieces that questioned school lockdowns and masking of children.

The Ukraine invasion may also have played an additional role in getting Western leaders focus on important things again.

If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like

Yeah, and those people have the habit of ignoring how bad things got at the start in a few countries (Italy and France come to mind, but there were others) where bodies were piling, there were military hospitals deployed in parking lots, hospitalised patients were being transported to other countries, people were dying, and there was a general lack of clarity and understanding of how to treat sick people, and importantly, lack of medical care capacity to treat them or any others (a friend had their uncle die because the ambulance took a few hours to arrive due to medical services being completely overwhelmed). Any country that looked into those countries and decided "nah, this doesn't concern us because we're better humans" was led by utterly incompetent idiots.

Did some countries overreact with their measures? Maybe, but based on the limited information available in 2020, overreaction was a better idea than doing nothing.

It is tempting to conclude from this that you are saying immunization, through vaccines and post infection, played no role and that the situation before and after the lockdown was essentially the same in terms of risk of poor health outcomes if exposed to covid?

> Given the the world still exists,

Yes, the world where there were vaccines and lockdown. Not the alternative version where these things didn't happen.

> I think the pre-2022 policies were a > gross overreach and the cancellations of the likes of Malone are an > eternal shame for the U.S. that is comparable to what happened in > the Soviet Union.

Two questions:

1) what precisely are you referring to when you say "comparable to what happened in the soviet union"?

2) In the face of an outbreak of a contagious disease, would you be comfortable with government not implementing any restrictions that might slow or stop the spread of disease?

Would your answer to question #2 change if the disease in question was Marburg or Ebola? If yes, why?

It was mostly ignored, worse, its impact was minimized by upper class journals, all the while hospitals were running out of space.

(So comparisons with Covid are hard to make, since the response was so different.)

The medical sector paid attention after the fact though, and supposedly the reaction to it basically created the (postmodern?) discipline of epidemiology !

He also deserves to be locked up.

As for COVID policies, those were pretty universal among industrialized nations. and if you think those were Russian style I’d say you know very little about Russia (I’ve lived there so I know what I’m talking about). Our COVID policies were nothing like China — that was authoritarian.

    > I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd

No need to fear missing out if you are on the gravy train.

please tell us something

> Palantir is hot now. The company recently joined the S&P 500. The stock is on a tear, and the company is nearing a $100bn market cap. VCs chase ex-Palantir founders asking to invest.

[...] During the 2016-2020 era especially, telling people you worked at Palantir was unpopular. The company was seen as spy tech, NSA surveillance, or worse. There were regular protests outside the office.

I don't really see the contradiction here? The most morally repugnant companies are often the most profitable, and the stock market sometimes (not always) follows suit. And if the protests outside their offices have decreased, that's probably just a sign that there are other things to protest against now...

your 401k is probably funding cocacola extract water from impoverished communities and then selling it back to them with sugar.