Palantir is built explicitly for surveillance, in a way the other companies you listed are not. There is no comparison here. It's like saying the City of Minneapolis is complicit because they maintain the roads ICE is driving on.
Not really. Palantir is data integration and analysis software that in some cases (like ICE) can be used for surveillance. There are also thousands of commercial clients who use Palantir for completely non surveillance workflows, as well as many other government teams who use Palantir for non surveillance things. This is all public information.
> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.
Is ICE using a general purpose app for surveillance or is Palantir making a deportation-centric app for ICE?
Adams claimed Black Americans were a hate group and that white people should "get the hell away".
As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.
That's not what he said, that's his take being presented through a media filter.
His comments were in response to a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked people if they agreed with the statement "It's OK to be white". Around 26% of Black respondents disagreed (with some unsure), which Adams interpreted as meaning nearly half of Black Americans were not OK with white people.
Is it reductive? Sure. Is it racist? Of course not. You're allowed to have opinions on the Internet as long as you treat others with respect.
What do you think deporting means? Kindly asking people to show up at the airport??? What the US is doing is exactly the same as it works in most other countries - the west's tolerance of illegal immigration in recent years is very very very far from the norm.
Was Obama’s use of ICE also kidnapping, in your eyes? For reference material, please read the ACLUs papers on their site.
No ICE agent has been indicted for kidnapping. Can you explain why? ( Remember, they have been doing this for many years, under presidents of both parties ).
They haven't been indicted for kidnapping because it's the government itself doing it with federally deputized agents. What, is Trump's DOJ going to prosecute its own law enforcement agents for executing Trump's policy? No, that's utterly laughable.
Additionally, Obama's use of ICE was far different from what's going on today in that Obama used targeted enforcement prioritizing criminals. ICE today in Minneapolis is just driving around grabbing anyone they think could, possibly, maybe be illegal. US citizens are being swept up by anonymous, violent and poorly trained agents with virtually no accountability. It's causing terror in the community in a way Obama never even came close to. To suggest these are similar is extremely disingenuous.
I think you are missing how ICE was used by Obama.
The ACLU calls it ‘monstrous’ and discusses Trump And Obama in the same paper. They cite Obama for lack of due process and write horrific stories about Obamas usage.
Read this paper and try to tell me Obama should not be condemned but Trump should. You really can’t do it.
The thesis of the article says "If it was bad under Obama, imagine how much worse it is now". It's literally in the headline. This is not the dunk you think it is.
Nobody disputes ICE was bad then. The difference is that Obama wasn't cheering them on, saying anybody who was abused or even murdered by ICE deserved it. Trump isn't just allowing this, he's given them a mandate to act this way.
They are absolutely different. They flagrantly deny the courts and are going door to door and harassing and detaining a higher percentage of people without criminal background. The scale and brazenness(and also the end game, this is 1 year into trump) of this administration is in no way comparable to Obamas and to claim otherwise is ridiculous
At no point did I excuse Obama. I said the scale and horror are not the same. Trump scaled up the budget and number of employees, lowered the requirements to enter and actively encouraged(and supported at the supreme court) to bring back racial profiling. These 2 administrations are in now way comparable
I don't necessarily agree with calling it "kidnapping" but the current administration is different in their use of profiling (racial and otherwise). That is new, previous court rulings had blocked that kind of behavior.
So your moral outrage begins somewhere in between Obamas use of ICE, but before Trumps. You are ok with the violations described by the ACLU by Obama, but cannot tolerate the ones committed by Trump?
I find that consistent. The ACLU calls both monstrous. Obama set the precedent for using ICE in the current way, Trump continued Obamas policies. The two are similar.
If someone says they condemn both, I respect that. The person has integrity.
If someone says they condemn neither ( as I do ), I also respect that. They are acknowledging what the ACLU and others say — the presidents have used ICE in similar ways.
If someone condemns only one and is silent about the other, to me that signals a lack of integrity. I don’t see a logical way to excuse only one. It doesn’t seem possible to tolerate the behavior of one while condemning the other. Read the ACLU articles if you need evidence of the similarities.
You say Trump is 10 times worse than Obama, I see nothing that even remotely suggests this is true. If you have any articles to show that back this up, please show them.
> You say Trump is 10 times worse than Obama, I see nothing that even remotely suggests this is true. If you have any articles to show that back this up, please show them.
This is hopeless. I don't think there's anything I could say or show that would change your opinion. If the Epstein affair, his $TRUMP coin, the Qatari plane, the failed Jan 6 coup, the multiple recent ICE shootings didn't make you think that Trump is a worse president than Obama, then I don't think anything will. Not to forget, the many people he sent to CECOT without any due process, his rampant warmongering that threatens even Europe, the complete erosion of America's goodwill on the international scene, his destruction of all public research, the trillions he added to the national debt just so he could give some tax cuts to his friends, and on and on and on it goes.
I'm sure you're aware of all these events. I'm sure you have rationalizations for all of them, even the pedophilia. Know that I am no fan of Obama, at all, but anyone still claiming that Trump is no worse than him has a serious issue. I hope you can work through it, in time.
Yes, placing your political views into the realm of moral views places them beyond contestation. For many people, most of their political views boil down to core moral views, including ideas about taxation and carbon.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
Or "if you take away my ability to hug women I will become a suicide bomber and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than I like killing, but I will kill." especially coupled with "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick into sleeping with women".
I knew he was a loonie, but thought that you're exaggerating.
Nope.
Quote [1]:
While I’m being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren’t complete. We don’t imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low.
So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
There's a lot to unpack here, starting with equating female companionship to sex, and ending with the dichotomy between having sex and murdering people.
I started looking for a source of his hypnosis quote, and stumbled into [2].
Umm. Not going to quote it.
[3] is a higher level overview of Scott Adams' hypnotism. It didn't make me any happier.
Ugh. I used to like Dilbert in the 90s as a kid. Wish I knew about Scott Adams now as much as I knew then.
That's to say, wish he wasn't such a horrible person.
I've wondered if capturing carbon emissions from industrial-scale compost facilities would be a net positive. It would have the added benefit of the carbon initially being captured by natural organic processes (i.e. growing food), so it avoids the problem of the energy requirements from trying to just pull carbon from the ambient atmosphere. I don't know if this is feasible but I haven't seen any research on it.
What we need to offset the last 3 centuries of coal use is to reverse the process. Plant large amounts of trees, cut them, burn the hydrogen part of them, producing char and reclaiming some energy, then bury the resulting coal back in the abandoned coal mines.
Yeah, that too. There's not going to be one single solution, the problem is just too big for that. The idea with compost is that growing plants for food and dealing with the waste and excess (which is substantial) is something we're already doing, so can we tack carbon sequestration on top of that
Did you ever do a barbecue? You first burn the light, hydrogen-rich substances of the firewood, with a large beautiful flame; that flame would burn down the meat, but it burns off quickly. What remains is charcoal, the source of most heat in the firewood; it does no produce a visible flame, but emits a lot of heat. It is mostly carbon.
I mean, Avatar is a pretty on-the-nose allegory for the decimation of American Indian tribes and western colonization. I don't think this is at all a controversial take.
My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
what's more important to me isn't the single person vote itself, the campaign and cause contributions would be influential and the behavior is different than what people think those with money and some power in their domain are doing, how they're navigating and choosing candidates
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.
To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
You're exactly right and thank you for carefully reading! I very explicitly said that there was a multi year round trip for information even in the best case (e.g. Alpha Centauri), to get out ahead of the well-actually's.
As you noted, some of the gains could be signal power, redundancy, the ability to maintain a quality signal over arbitrary distance; but most importantly, seeing the universe from the perspective of the lead probe in the relay, some arbitrary distance away.
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