Palantir's Justification for Building ICE's Master Database
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Given any knowledge at all of the context, I don't see a way to read this other than "we know this will be used for atrocities but no matter how bad they get, we're into it."
Another one that kind of caught my attention but I'm not completely sure how to interpret:
> We provide the tools for our customers to enable fair treatment and legal protections for individuals across the spectrum of immigration status.
First off calling the government "our customers" seems weird. Does this system have other actual or intended customers? Do they just mean individual states or police departments or something else? Is this service available to private citizens with enough money to spend on it?
Secondly "naturalized citizen" is also one of the formal immigration statuses, if they're using this as a term of art. This is likely the same tool they'll be using to come after journalists, women seeking abortions, protestors, trans healthcare providers (or just trans people themselves), any of the other groups the administration clearly considers its enemies or thinks its base will respond well to the persecution of.
My read on palantir for years now has been that they were very intentionally positioning themselves to take a sort of IBM-in-1930s-europe role if an eliminationist party came to power. This is pretty close to them just saying that themselves.
I don't think they are merely amorally profit seeking, I believe this is an ideological goal they've been working towards for some time.
That was in 2008.
That place is bad news.
Google and Microsoft do the latter
The mistakes you make here:
1. You operate under the wrong assumption that there are no other ways to deal with unintended behavior than making ir unprofitable. There are ways. for example you can just make cerrain business practises illegal and jail those who earn money with them.
2. If others would do it that would make a more competitive market. A more competitive market does not stop a undesired practise it normalizes it.
3. Just because there is a demand doesn't make it ethically right. Demand is totally decoupled from whether a practise should be allowed or not.
4. The problem is that your overreaching government is asking for a thing that is likely against the spirit and the letter of your constitution. What Palantir is doing is wrong because the premise of the project is wrong.
But people are loathe to look at unintended consequences, I want to present one of them I find interesting. The mistake you are making so many presumptions about my pointing this out.
The point is you cannot stop this by discouraging the behavior, you only make it more profitable for the guy willing to do the dirty work and take the social shame or whatever comes down.
Therefore it has to be dealt with some other way.
> The point is you cannot stop this by discouraging the behavior [...] Therefore it has to be dealt with some other way.
The problem is that this thought does not get any truer by you just repeating it. I already pointed that out in my post which you probably overlooked out of boredom idk.
So lets try to adress this:
My analogous example with murder (asassination) was an example where societies don't have to fall back on insane "strategies" like expanding markets to keep asassinations down, instead they make the unwanted behavior illegal, punish it and shape society in a way the unwanted behavior (asassinations) are not needed — e.g. by having a working justice system were people can sue each other when they think someone else did them wrong. That won't stop every asassination, but it will be good enough as the very real numbers show. Societies that came down hard on things like "blood revenge" and showed competing clans the differences can be settled in court with the state as a neutral arbiter of power thst can't be influenced have less of it.
Now to your idea again:
You seem to think the issue is that Palantir gets a lot of money. That is not" the issue. The issue is that they are even able to offer that specific service to a public entity. Your argument was that if only more companies had the questionable ethics of Palantir and entered the market this would somehow* lead to less of that behavior? This would drive prices down and reduce the hurdle for public entities to contract them even further.
If I again made too many presumptions, maybe consider answering in a way that us mere mortals can follow your train of thought. You could start by sketching out what you imagined the "some other way" looked like how you thought this could be dealt with. Because as of now the only way I found of how to read your comment made no sense, but you hold thr keys..
But, this is still a good thing, it means they can't hire as many people with whatever their budget is.