
Palantir CEO rips Silicon Valley in letter to investors - elsewhen
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/25/palantir-ceo-rips-silicon-valley-in-letter-to-investors.html
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uniqueid
It's no consolation to me that a company is giving transcripts of my personal
conversations and medical records to the American government instead of the
Chinese. I don't want you to collect my damned data. Period.

~~~
manfredo
Palantir doesn't collect any data. Palantir builds software tools to browse
and analyze data. The government already has that data, and that data stays
with the government not Palantir.

~~~
uniqueid
Close enough. I have ample pique to spread among multiple parties who have a
hand in this.

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chrstphrknwtn
Exactly. Microsoft have a lot to answer for with their ‘tools’ for data
analysis. Every single hedge fund was using Excel leading up to the 2008
financial crisis. It’s sickening. /s

~~~
uniqueid
Has MS worked with government to make it easier to call up records of my
hemorrhoids or eczema?

If so, I'll reserve some hate for MS, too.

With billions of people on this planet, some terrorist kingpin and I might
have the same birthmark on our ankle. Thanks to the work Palantir does, that
could result in law enforcement swatting me, or worse. That _is_ sickening.

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thu2111
_“We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We
stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.”_

I think we will start to see this as a perspective and stated position more
and more. Companies are waking up to left wing employee-driven cancel culture
being generally poisonous, as it constantly defines arbitrary new thought
crimes that are seemingly unpredictable and which almost any company or group
could be "guilty" of.

This makes partnering with explicitly SJ-focused organisations highly risky.
Can any firm say _for sure_ that they will still be welcome on Google Cloud
next year (to pick a random example)? Yes? What if they're doing business with
the US ICE? What if their service gets widely used by Trump fans? What if the
CEO tweets unacceptable things? Some of these organisations are so in-hock to
increasingly extreme minorities of employees that it's hard to say that a
partnership is really safe, especially if you're only a small customer.

By explicitly stating that Palantir will service customers whether
(politically) convenient or not, they are not only re-assuring their existing
customer base but in addition, putting a stake in the ground that partnerships
with Palantir are robust and Twitter-proof. Importantly they recognise that
this means "picking sides": that you cannot reach agreement or compromise with
the sort of people who now dominate firms like Google, Twitter etc. No matter
how much ground is given up they will always want more, because their demands
don't seem to be rooted in any coherent political theory (critical theory not
being such a thing).

The other day unwoke.hr started going around. Its slogan is "Hire thinkers.
Not activists". You're going to see more and more of that. Strong
SJ/woke/BLM/etc type views are going to start shutting people out of career
opportunities, as they will be associated with customer-confidence-killing
demands and morale sapping internal conflicts.

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peter303
Karp and Thiel are a pair.

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everdumb
The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building
software,” Karp wrote. “But they do not know more about how society should be
organized or what justice requires.

The utter lack of self awareness is beyond shameful. As far as I can see
Palantir wants to do with tech what Blackwater did with the armed forces and
Peter Thiel is just a smarter version of Erik Prince.

