Activists Are Protesting Against Palantir Across the Country This Week
vice.com
vice.com
> 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...)
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/15/ice-deport-witness-s...
- 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.
citation needed. danger, yes but poverty?
your third bullet also implies that all illegal immigrants are refugees seeking asylum.
> your third bullet also implies that all illegal immigrants are refugees seeking asylum.
I'm not following.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
For people in some places around the world a pair of shoes and 3 meals a day can be called a luxury.
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.
I guess literally it is "across the country", but not quite how that phrase is used imo.
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).
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.
I wonder where 25 other bigger US metros fit in.
Not sure if the tail is wagging the dog here or not.
"This story is over 5 years old."
I wonder when this infantile news outlet finally bites the dust.
> Die Idee kam uns, als meine Freundin Cecilia und ich die probiotischen Eigenschaften der Vagina diskutierten.
Meine Güte.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/17/rupert-murdoch....
Or unless you're just trying to crowbar in a signal of your virtue?
If this person thinks the writing was better in the past, they're unlikely to call the departing influence a "white supremicist".
What is the point of saying this?
White supremacists are bad, why do you take issue with someone saying that?
White supremacists are bad, and wrong.
Your reply reads the same as every reply from a far right peron. Calling everything "virtue signalling" as if people can't care about each other.
I think OP's point was that the writing was never great, I'm not sure what Mcinness's relation to Vice would be now.
How far things have come from when I used to spend part of my weekend hunting for a copy of their free magazine in the shops along Queen St West...
Is it scary, yes. We will need to be more involved in the democratic process.
I have watched many cases of child and elderly abuse which were not just due to lack of education.
People have different passions mine is a criminal free world.
Is this a joke, or just naivety to the point of comedy? Mind you "criminals" can be anyone if its politically convenient.
Nobody wants to vote for those things, you misunderstand what problem governments are trying to solve by being tough on 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.
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.
Young people voted in record numbers for Bernie.
And his demographic was everyone - the elderly had the most to gain in many ways.
I don't think I'm IN it; I am observing it from the outside, and would love to find an opposite bubble to observe too, but just can't.
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.
615 stories posted here, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Palantir
Pretty sure everyone on this startup tech discussion board has heard of them.
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.
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.
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.
Wanting to get cheaper labour is universal, capitalism has nothing to do with that.
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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. ;-)
Failing that, slight inconveniences for Palantir staff and investors may continue.
Sadly, this kind of activism suggests that private sector is the problem, and thus more government is needed.
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.