Not a lot of content in the comments yet, so I thought I'd just copy-paste the Wikipedia note regarding this controversy:
> Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir has responded that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times, the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. However, documents obtained by The Intercept show that this is not the case. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice, National Immigration Project, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Tech Workers Coalition and Mijente. In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of illegal migrant children.
- It is an international human right to be allowed to seek asylum from danger and poverty
- ICE is treating immigrants in ways that flagrantly violate international human rights law, such as separating families, witholding adequate nourishment and healthcare, recent reports of forced sterilizations, sexual assaults, and many more that are just a google search away.
- For any reading who aren't familiar with this line of argument: "they're just enforcing immigration law" is a common victim-blaming strategy that blames immigrants seeking asylum for their own abuse at the hands of our immigration agents. It implies that anyone who violates a country's laws, no matter how unfair or in violation of international human rights, deserves any punishment that comes their way.
Not everyone might agree but, taking a global view, I would interpret Article 25 of the UDHR [0] - right to standard of living - combined with Article 2 - right to nondiscrimination - as supporting the right to flee poverty in general. Going further, the relative wealth of countries like the U.S. is tied with exploitation and imperialistic meddling in the places where people are fleeing from, so it takes on that extra layer of responsibility. I argue that poverty is a form of persecution (exploitation) of the poor by the rich, which meets the letter of Article 14.
> your third bullet also implies that all illegal immigrants are refugees seeking asylum.
How much would the human population need to contract in order to provide everyone with the same wasteful quality-of-life that the average citizen from a western industrialized nation has?
Yikes, I appreciate the insight into your perspective but this terrifies me that otherwise intelligent people hold the disgusting ideas so confidently that you do.
I don't think it's that, it's actually pretty radical a position in the US to say we shouldn't enforce immigration law or we should effectively have open borders. The controversy comes in the harsh manner in which DHS has been enforcing those laws in the last few years. It seems like we're not even treating immigrants like human beings, so any company that enables this by partnering with DHS, even if not directly working on targeting migrants, rightly comes under scrutiny and ire.
For anyone unsure of what you meant by "The controversy comes in the harsh manner in which DHS has been enforcing those laws in the last few years. It seems like we're not even treating immigrants like human beings" see
https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/new-mcallen-fa...
When the Intercept published those reports, there was a stir among employees, because the internal messaging had also been "we work with HSI, not ERO, and the lamestream media are too stupid and venal to know the difference and are out to get us anyway, don't listen to them."
So the directors organized some small, private, closed, unrecorded sessions to placate employee concerns. The takeaway was:
- Palantir wasn't consulted on that particular operation.
- It's not as if we can control what the software is used for, anyway.
- It is important to maintain ties with CBP regardless of what ERO does.
- There is no red line that ERO could cross that would make us stop work with them, but we're definitely constantly evaluating the situation and doing what's best for us and for the nation.
I thought it was breathtakingly tone-deaf, but a lot of hobbits found it persuasive.
It took Amazon 8 years to get to profitability, Netflix 6, Facebook 5, and Google 3. Palantir is old enough to see an R-rated film, get a pilot's license or (with parental consent) join the armed services. But at 17 years of age, and after raising $3 billion, the “start-up” has never made money. In 2019, Palantir lost $580 million on approximately $740 million in revenues. The idiot client they serve (U.S. government) lost 25 cents on the dollar ($1 trillion deficit vs. $3.5 trillion in revenues) in 2019 vs. 78 cents at Palantir. Shouldn’t Uncle Sam be advising Palantir?
The firm spent $911 million in marketing over the last 24 months, roughly half of what Tide detergent spent over the same period. The firm has 125 clients, 3 of them accounting for 28% of revenues. Palantir feels more like a services firm, with tech at its core (e.g., Accenture), but one that, unlike a services firm, is massively unprofitable.
Shopify hit a $140 billion valuation not long ago. The current incarnation of Shopify is 14 years old and has never generated an annual profit.
Workday is 15 years old; Splunk is 17 years old; Box is 15 years old; DocuSign is 17 years old; Proofpoint is 18 years old; FireEye is 16 years old; Spotify is 14 years old; Cloudflare is 11 years old; Palo Alto Networks is 15 years old; Zscaler is 13 years old; Airbnb is 12 years old; Quora is 11 years old; Uber is 11 years old; Okta is 11 years old; Pinterest is 10 years old; Crowdstrike is 9 years old; DigitalOcean is 9 years old; Snapchat is 9 years old; Elastic is 8 years old; Lyft is 8 years old.
None of them have ever generated an annual profit.
I think it took Salesforce 15 years to finally generate an annual operating profit. It took ServiceNow around 16 years to get to an annual operating profit.
The accumulated losses for all of these companies combined has to be quite staggering (and there are many, many more).
The capital markets (public or private) have generally been reluctant to punish these companies so long as there is meaningful top line growth (which, judging from Palantir's declining valuation, I'm guessing they do not have).
This is nuts. Some of this I can understand, but many of these are pure software companies. How can the C-levels _operate_ a company at a loss for so long and still have proper context?
It's entirely rational behavior. Once a business adopts a technology, they will almost never switch to a different vendor, because the product gets deeply integrated into their business processes. Think about how often you switch your bank -- an enterprise switching vendors for any software that touches their core systems is much more complex.
So, if you're in a rapidly growing market where there are a lot of competitors, it makes sense to spend as much money as you need to to capture market share, because if your competitors get there first, you'll almost never be able to win a customer away from them. It's not a network effect -- getting GM as a customer doesn't help you get Ford as a customer, but once you're the software that GM uses for end-of-year performance reviews, for example, you've got that revenue for 10+ years.
In consumer, the dynamic is the same, but instead of switching costs that are high, it's attention costs. A business looking for PDF generation software will find and evaluate 10 vendors -- a consumer looking to play The Doobie Brothers will use whatever music app they heard about from their friends, so there is a superlinear bonus to being at the top of the market.
Where did you get this list? I've known for a while that there sure seemed to be a lot of firms that never make money yet somehow never seem to fold. I think of them as zombie companies. They don't eat but somehow they don't die either. They just keep on shambling forwards, like the corporate undead. But seeing the list spelled out like that really rams it home, especially as it can't be complete.
"Make money" means making profits, not revenues. That's standard English. Nobody gets points for selling $1 for $0.50, nor do they get money for engaging in "custom acquisition" after a decade. Customers can leave again. You have to make a profit at some point.
In the limit yes but I think this idea of making profit is a fundamental attribution error. But it is a fine line. It is better to be profitable than not but if you can raise capital it allows you to trade money for time.
That's cute and all, but it's not about whether it makes a profit; it's effectively a government contractor or part thereof, and said government wouldn't let it go under (because strategic assets). Said government also pays for the most well-funded standing army and that one doesn't turn a profit, memes about oil in iraq aside.
One of the things I constantly see discussed (for good and bad) is whether or not to view Palantir as a way to make the military-industrial complex "attractive" to the startup world. It could be an interesting point as to whether Palantir is ever going to generate a profit, or if it's merely the government outsourcing some amount of software development, without making it seem as unattractive (to some) as working for Lockheed Martin and the like.
In terms of labor, it doesn't really matter, since the guest worker program can fill any shortages that occur either due to moral objection or the lack of benefits that one would get from an established MIC player.
I loved Vice for doing ridiculous fringe shit like that though. Nobody else would do it. It only went downhill when they suddenly started to pretend they’re serious now.
This is blatant misinformation. The article you linked says Murdoch bought a 5% share seven years ago, and Murdoch isn't News Corp, and 5% is not a buyout. According to Wikipedia[0], today his share is so small they don't even list a percentile, and Soros (the Right's bogeyman, to counterbalance yours) owns 10%, with the actual majority stake split between larger, uncontroversial owners. News Corp owns 0% of Vice Media. Fake news.
Because it looks like using poor logic as a hook to express a rewardable ingroup opinion, and not anything interesting about why the writing quality has declined.
Bringing in a virtuous point in irrelevant occasions is virtue signalling. By the way I can't stand people who litter, and I picked up 3 pieces of litter already today.
Edit to add: isn’t the “southern border problem” based on alternative facts? That was the President’s spokesperson’s response when challenged with the fact the immigrants commit less crime than Americans.
What exactly is this impending problem that requires me to give up privacy to the federal government?
I was talking with my friends about Palantir the other day. We all basically agreed that we could never work there unless we were truly desperate. The role they have played in surveillance capitalism is just too slimy for us.
Rarely is it someone diving into something questionable. It is typically either 1) a slow culture change, and one day find yourself sitting at your desk doing horrible things. 2) naivety and person is unaware going into the situation, but now they are in it. It is super easy to sit back from afar after the culture change, after the info is public, to say “I would never work there/do that”.
Certainly. To be clear, I'm not describing "how horrible" people are who originally joined it. I'm saying that today, with what we know and the problems we see growing around the world, especially the rise of authoritarianism, we have some reserves about working for a company like Palantir.
I think you're giving engineers too much credit. I know a people who work at Palantir despite fully knowing what they do, and I know a lot of other engineers who, in 2020, would love to work there.
Really? That's not the impression that I'm getting from observing developer discussions on social media, including here, on HN. The impression I am getting is that an overwhelming majority of developers who are vocal online share left democratic values and thus resent Palantir. (They've recently started to be resentful of Facebook as well, although I haven't heard of a mass exodus of developers from there.) Do you have a sample of developers who express diametrically opposite views?
I bet most HNers don't even know what Palantir is much less why it would be wrapped up in any controversy.
I'd be wary of extrapolating much from online bubbles.
Btw I don't think I speak for a minority of HNers when I say that it's not that easy to find a "good" job, whatever that could mean. For example, simply wanting a fully remote job already damns you to a tiny minority of US jobs, especially pre-Covid. Even a so-called "bad" company doesn't need to check many boxes to be one of someone's few options, so it always seems quite premature to claim that nobody would want to work at said company. Hell, if you even particularly enjoy your job, you've hit jackpot as far as many of us are concerned.
Sometimes statements about what fellow developers will or won't do make us all sound like millionaires looking for our next hobby.
This is a sign you're living in a bubble. If you're a high performer on a FB/G ad team, you're earning half a million dollars a year. Morals don't usually survive that amount of bribery.
These teams have thousands of employees.
Palantir has 2,500 employees. Obviously they have no trouble hiring. Facebook and Google have ad teams with tens of thousands of people. Juul managed to hire swathes of people, etc.
The problem with looking only at people who are vocal online, is that you only see things from a small bubble of people, and only the things, that don't get downvoted/removed by moderators.
If you looked at e.g. reddits users and their comments, Bernie Sanders would be on his way to a second term.
Since the article is mentioning ICE, and i'm from a small eu country, really close to relatively shitty non-eu countries, I know that what people say or don't say online is different from what people think in their heads. Being a developer here, and trying to find work in USA is a big pain in the ass... if you're a good developer, but without a formal education, might be even impossible. Even if you have everything, have a good resume, big projects, get invited by facebook/google/whoever, going through the endless stream of bureaucracy takes a lot of time and a lot of money (which is understandable, because hiring local is good for local workers, and importing foreign workforce means lowering pay, due to more supply). When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit. They might not say it there, but they say it here.
>When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit. They might not say it there, but they say it here.
Surely you realize that the people who come to the US without documents aren't doing the same job or getting close to the same compensation as you? If you want to pay a smuggler a few thousand dollars so you can work in a meat packing plant and risk you and your kids being locked up at any time, you can also follow their path. The fact that this is the best option for these people should tell you something about the circumstances they are in and how they differ from yours.
Because they have no incentive to? Not sure what that question has to do with my response.
I'll try making my point in a different way. You seem to have some kind of resentment for undocumented immigrants because you went through a long immigration process and they didn't, and now you both work in the US. My point is that the facts that you're both immigrants and work in the US are the only similarities. They have to work hard jobs for little pay, and look over their shoulders for their whole lives knowing they could be locked up at any moment. They're not getting the same reward that you did for going through the immigration process. You don't have anything to be resentful towards them about.
Nah, I didn't, I stayed at home, I'm just telling the issue my friends and former coworkers had. They get paid well (we're talking coders/developers/engineers, not meat packers).
Why do americans have no incentive to work in meat packing plants? What you're advocating for is to offer (below) minimum/livable pay for every work possible, and then, if noone local applies (because the wage is too low), just get some foreign workers from some shitty country (legal or illegal), and exploit them. Wouldn't it be better to just stop immigration for shitty paid jobs (in situations like now, with relatively high unemployment), and passively force the employers to just pay more to get enough workers?
When a big company (eg. one with a logo of a famous mouse), fires whole teams of local workers, and replaces them with cheaper H1B workers ( https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-worke... ), whole HN/reddit/... is outraged, with "disney bad!". Why would you let meat packing plants do this? Why not just say "no, you wont get immigrant workers, when there are so many local ones unemployer, and you'll get punished if you hire illegals", and just work with that?
Otherwise, again, as someone living in a small EU country, i could never understand how a large company can employ illegal workers, and how illegals can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.), without the system noticing (because all of that is pretty much impossible anywhere else in the developed world.
I agree with you that the employers exploiting the workers is the core problem. My disagreement is that you can't blame undocumented immigrants for taking the job, they're just trying to survive.
>how [undocumented immigrants] can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.)
"Immigrants taking benefits" is a big misconception pushed by right wingers and others with anti-immigrant sentiments. Getting any kind of government benefit of significance in the US is hard even for citizens. If you don't have documents they'll laugh you out of the office.
I hope you're not suggesting banning the children of undocumented immigrants from attending school would somehow be more fair. Pretty clearly they didn't have a choice in the matter.
I just don't understand how you can send a kid to school without any papers/documents/etc.? Here (in slovenia), every citizen has a citizen ID (not really public, but not secret, and can be generated by hand), you have a permanent resident address, your kid belongs to that school district, your kid has a medical file, documents (medical card too), everything, and without all the papers and the kid being "in the system", there's no way for a kid to go to school here.
If I understand correctly, you can just bring a random kid to school, say "this here is bobby, he'll be going to school here", and they just take him? Without an ID, any checks, checks on parents, etc.?
Same with jobs.... i understand the "under the table" jobs, e.g. picking fruit and getting paid in cash at the end of the day.... this is theoretically possible here too.... but people working in large companies? How do you get paid? How do you even open a bank account? Here, again, you need an ID and a tax number, every bank account is tied to your personal tax number, and you get paid to that account. When you start your job, the company has to pay for benefits (pension, medical, etc.), and those are tied via your tax number and paid directly to the government. Just to start working, you need to pass a medical exam, where they also check your documents, and even check your medical records from your personal doctor.
As I said, i'm not advocating for anything, I just don't understand how you can do all that, without being a citizen, having your ID number, tax number, bank account, ID card, registered permanent residence, etc.
(yes, there are exceptions, foreign workers get temporary tax numbers, and use special documents, kids of diplomats get special documents again, etc., but in general, if you're not "in the system", there's no way to do anything).
In the US, that is how hard it is to get a government benefit like unemployment or food stamps, but public schools are one exception. There have been several states that have passed laws banning undocumented immigrant, but those laws were ruled to be unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1981 because to deny education to these children would ”deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation." More info here: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/plyler-v.... As you can imagine, people who hate immigrants also hate that court decision, but it's the law of the land and I think it is fair.
The case with employment is pretty different, I don't know much about it other than that the employers figure out how to pay people with cash in a way that they're able to not get caught very often.
But really my point is just that undocumented immigrants work incredibly hard at essential jobs and have very difficult lives, and hating them for not going through a long legal process that's usually not even open to them is unfair.
I lived in a former communist country ("former" in both ways... not communist anymore, and also, I haven't moved, the country just doesn't exist anymore).
Wanting to get cheaper labour is universal, capitalism has nothing to do with that.
> If you looked at e.g. reddits users and their comments, Bernie Sanders would be on his way to a second term.
And this despite reddit being generally considered more trolly and less left-leaning than, say, twitter, and possibly github.
> When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit.
I hear you. I find it fascinating to hear person after person admit that online spaces have become dominated by particular ideologies, where people holding dissenting views but knowing what's good for them are reluctant to share their opinions. Fifteen to twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it wasn't like that.
I think a lot of people are not against illegal immigration but against the subhuman treatment desperate people who have no other choice receive, it used to be more human. And the fact that the treatment is starting to be reminiscent of nazi concentration camps is a big reason to dissent.
I think comparing this to nazis is very bad.... if nazis let jews from outside germany, there illegaly, just go back home whenever they wanted, and at worse, send them back themselves, history would be a lot different.
Nobody in their right mind would publically express these views in today's Cancel Culture witch-hunting climate. You're probably in a bubble of like-minded people, and mistakingly extrapolating the views expressed in that bubble to the whole developer community.
If you think that James Damore had universal disagreement among his peers then you're in a bubble. Ask yourself why they would bother to speak up when hundreds of thousands of dollars and their career is on the line.
Since we already have read that it will be different. Imagine a world where we all have neural sims integrated with something like Palantir. So many criminals will be caught. Found a body dumped in a swamp, lets query who has been there. Don't we all love when criminals are caught from CCTV recordings.
Is it scary, yes. We will need to be more involved in the democratic process.
What is your obsession with catching criminals, and what makes you think that punishment reduces crime? Wouldn't it be a more efficient use of resources to target the socioeconomic factors that lead to crime?
I'm told by my blue friends that I'm naive. Reds call me a socialist.
This is by design. It is intentional. Billions of dollars are spent giving people these 'views'.
Sanders gave people an opportunity to vote for "those things", and he was the clear favorite to take out Trump - until Democrats pulled every dirty trick to scupper his campaign. Again.
So people really do want to vote for these things, but massive effort is put into not giving them the option. Sanders is the most popular politician in America, every year - and instead of helping him, instead of boosting him, the Blue team stabbed him in the front, in the back, in the eye balls, etc.
>until Democrats pulled every dirty trick to scupper his campaign
You mean it's the democrat's fault that 20 somethings didn't go vote?
I liked Bernie, I voted for him, but the demographic he targeted apparently preferred swiping through tik tok to improving their world so he learned a hard lesson a second time.
or one could spin this as they help prevent ms13 gang members from sneaking into the country under pretext of some kids they grabbed, and will probably traffick
Why don't they protest against the government that buys and uses Palantir stuff? There wouldn't be a maker without a buyer, and somehow protesting Palantir out of the country won't resolve the actual issue either.
This is a protest against a government contractor, not against surveillance state. It's misplaced, which is a pity. I don't see anything good coming out of protesting against Palantir, not even favorable PR.
Yeah, but it tells them wrong story about what the root cause is. That is wrong IMHO. This is not a rogue corporation that has to be stopped, this is a rogue government that has to be stopped.
Activists constantly hear people from the sidelines telling them they're protesting the "wrong" way. If you really want to make a difference, stop criticizing and start doing the work you think is more important yourself.
A great deal of that sideline protest is cynical anyway. One doesn't want to argue the basic point, so instead of doing so one talks about a "better" way of going about it. Some call this "concern trolling".
Please re-read what I wrote. What I want is to argue the basic point - that surveillance is wrong and the government is overstepping a boundary. None of these can be argued against a corporation that simply sold the government what it asked for.
Surveillance in USA, like every other authoritarian institution in USA, is inherently asymmetric. The NSA lizards hear our intimate conversations, but we don't know a thing about NSA lizards. We'd love to vote against NSA, but that isn't an option. (Even protesting them seems a dicey option: how far can the Ft Meade fence snipers shoot?) For some reason some of the lizards have emerged from cover in the guise of a mysteriously never-profitable parallel construction firm, so naturally they're going to receive some of the scrutiny we would otherwise apply to their inaccessible brethren.
You have repeated ITT that you object to this, but you haven't given us a reason why. That invites speculation as to personal motivations.
Oh, please, now you're saying I'm one of them? Wake up.
I simply want the problem fixed. The actual problem, not something that is not the problem and won't help, because the government will simply pick another contractor. The problem is the system and the government, not businesses, not corporations, and definitely not a specific firm.
You know, it's weird that so many so vocal people don't want protests against the actual issue and support senseless activism against a scapegoat. ;-)
Wake me up! Tell us something we could do to decrease surveillance by USA government personnel. Please don't suggest "voting", though. If the previous 15 elections hadn't already made clear how worthless that is, the current election is sure to do so.
Failing that, slight inconveniences for Palantir staff and investors may continue.
I am the last one to suggest voting. I would suggest protesting against the government, and against the system. If more people recognized that that is the problem, we could finally stop voting and get fixing.
Sadly, this kind of activism suggests that private sector is the problem, and thus more government is needed.
USA government has a number of unfortunate qualities. Of course we should oppose these qualities in many different ways (certainly not limited to protest). We're not disagreeing with that. But, we can't draw a bright line between a never-over-several-decades-profitable "company" and the secret agencies who are its only clients and whose personnel is separated from its own by an unseen revolving door. Palantir is not clearly separate from those agencies. Protesting Palantir takes nothing away from effective opposition to abusive government authority.
At this level of the thread, we know that you don't like protesting Palantir. Unfortunately you haven't given us any other reason to think such protests are problematic.
I did, but once again: IMHO this makes people think (a) private business is the problem, and leads them to believe more regulation and control is necessary, which is the opposite of what's needed to solve this problem of the state overreaching in control and regulation.
I think I am doing enough, but thank you for the suggestion. I don't think there is anything wrong with discussion,if that's what you were suggesting. Perhaps activists would hear less of stuff like what I say if they protested against the government instead of hopping on the populist anti-business bandwagon. Sadly many activists are trying to portray business in general as bad.
> Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir has responded that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times, the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. However, documents obtained by The Intercept show that this is not the case. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice, National Immigration Project, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Tech Workers Coalition and Mijente. In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of illegal migrant children.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controve...)